Ritual

A ritual is patterned, coded behavior performed in expectation of producing a desired result,say rain or a bountiful hunt.  It may also be an offering to a deity.  Ritual may also be performed as an educational venture, its purpose to impart and maintain cultural values.

The most significant ritual associated with writing is the application of words to a medium such as paper, or digitally on a screen, or verbally in some voice-recognition program that stores the results.  From this ritualistic behavior, all fiction, nonfiction, and poetry come into life, carrying with them the associated mystery and magic implicit and explicit in their creation.

Those who write on a regular basis--at least six times a week--are apt to attach ritual of some behavioral sort to the process, notwithstanding the transfer of the process to muscle memory, where indeed no thought is required.  They simply write.  Your own rituals for engaging the activity include a variety of ventures frequently involving coffee and reading of periodicals; on other occasions music of idiosyncratic choice.  These and undoubtedly more occult behavior patterns not readily apparent to you are more or less regular launching pads but do not require the rigorous attention to detail needed by someone more compulsive or obsessive as you.  The very presence of all the qualifiers in your observations of this paragraph serve to reassure you that you could and do begin working where ever you happen to be, at any time after you have had some measure of coffee, and that you adhere to no particular device to get started.  

The true portal to putting words on a page is an emotion or combination of emotions, producing an image somewhere within your psychic frame.  You enter that door, bursting in on a rush of feeling, hoping to either describe or dramatize the array of feelings.  It is much of a piece with the first kiss of someone you would not mind becoming a lover to, inviting, promising, evoking an intense wish for detail and familiarity.  This is an apt but dangerous metaphor; how many times in either situation have you gone beyond that first kiss, then quickly reached the What-have-I-got-my-self-into? stage.

Discoveries, if they are to retain any significance, are fraught with consequence; thus do you require some part of the ritual to get you in for at least a page worth of words and directions; thus do the rituals that get you writing require your entry cue to be some form of vulnerability to some form of awareness or consequence.

When first we practice to discuss

When individual characters in a story converse, does their dialogue have to give the effect of an argument between them?

The simple, direct answer to that rhetorical and simplistic question is yes.

Even when characters are in accord, there is an ever present sense of a word or two being misunderstood, overly emphasized, felt or construed in some ironic or cynical way you know will ultimately lead to explosion.  Yeah, right; you're doing it because you love me.

When Character A makes unblinking eye contact with Character B, then says, "I see what you mean." a portion of our reader sensitivity is already leaping ahead to wonder if Character A does in fact see what Character B means.  Thus the seeds of anticipation and ambiguity are broadcast, the former setting in our minds a scene in which Character A will come to some kind of accounting for having with such emphasis seen what B means.  As well, we are drawn to the reality of our own communications with those about us and the comparatively low rate of satisfaction we have.  Some of us writers are even more likely to wince, having experienced editorial queries on our own works, notations asking us if A really intended that observation.  Truth to tell, it is a world of anticipations being driven off cliffs and of ambiguous fates out there.

Look at it this way:  when two or more characters converse it is indeed not mere conversation of the sort you are likely to have among a group of civilian (non-writer) friends; it is instead an enquiry board or an arbitration panel or a grand jury, trying variously to effect a cause, an agreement, or the extent of guilty participation.

Magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Colliers, and Liberty, from the heyday of short fiction would tend to view the simple phrase, "Honey, I'm home" as a simple announcement from the head of the family, in from an energetic, productive day at work, ready for some quality time with the kids before supper, a Kool-Aid metaphor for the Great American Dream being firmly in place.  Later in the same century, along comes Playboy in cynical riposte to the point where "Honey, I'm home," produces another reaction altogether, "Geez, I thought you said he never left the office before six," and the even more cynical "Will you please shut up and remember why you're here!"  Some might argue about the use of the exclamation point there; it was included to indicate the speaker's ardent wish to business at hand to be concluded rather than interrupted, thus occupying even more time before a potential confrontation might emerge.

Among the words you use to describe the resident emotions of scenes is edge.  You have seen plays written by Harold Pinter in which even though there was no dialogue being exchanged between the persons on stage, the mere rattling of a newspaper became dialogue, implying impatience, anger, irritation.

Dialogue is the unseen mosquito buzzing about in the room, the static electricity that sparks from the characters' clothing as they sit or stand; it is sexual tension and/or suspense or suspicion or resentment repressed at some degree of effort.  In David Lodge's remarkable novel, Deaf Sentences, it is a man losing his hearing, constantly misreading homophones, getting progressively more muddled as individuals close at hand increasingly shout at him.  However it sounds in appearance--"Did you sleep well?"--it is a world of implication in its own right, a reference to something in the past or some ongoing symptom that if not treated will become, that does become epidemic. Dialogue is the unthinkable, come to stay for a nice, long visit.

Letters to a Young, Middle-Aged, or Geezer Writer, XXI

Unless someone close to you has specifically pointed it out, chances are you have not fully articulated to yourself the connection between voices heard in rooms and voices emerging from reading material.

It is a truth universally recognized that in any large room filled with people, there is at least one person whose speaking voice will cause you in some way to come unglued.

You may have first recognized this potential in faculty meetings, or while merely trying to slurp down enough coffee and croissant to secure your waking state.  The phenomenon is also likely to emerge in rest rooms, doctors' office waiting rooms, or ticket lines for motion pictures or sporting events.

The irritating quality of the voice may be various, a rasping nasality, a locution characterized by a tendency to honk, or that most common culprit, the disagreeable timbre reminiscent of hardwood being sawed.  Squeaks and repetitions of some phrase such as you know, you know what I mean?, like, and drill, baby, drill are also contestants.  The overwhelming fact is:  you know an irritating voice when you hear it, to the point that the mere mention here of irritating voice evokes in your inner iPod sufficient response to set your jaw on clench mode, perhaps even your brow to furl in abject disapproval.

Some writers may already have a similar effect on you, explaining why the very mention of them and their work sends you into default negativity.  Thus do I introduce for your consideration the need to transfer the voice you hear as you compose into the material that lands on the page.  If you have no idea what I'm talking about, you haven't read enough or, worse, you haven't read with that investigative focus it is easy to confuse with plagiarism.

I expect to hear from some of you that you are not a hearing person; when you compose you are describing pictures you see of your characters and scenery and emotional landscape doing a ballet before your eyes.  No problem if this is the case.  What you do next is read your work aloud after you believe it is completed.  What you get is your voice--the attitude and effect your work is likely to have on readers fortunate enough to have the opportunity to read your work.

What's that you say; you don't like the way your voice sounds?  Okay, back to the reading gig, searching your search for voices that please you, reach you on some emotional level to the point where you can even venture an opinion why you like the voice.  Notice how that writer mixes sentence length for effect.  Notice how that writer will use short, clipped sentences in tense, action-heavy moments as opposed to thinking things through in leisurely form the way remarkable Jack Benny did when, being accosted by a mugger with a gun who demanded "Your money or your life," responded with an agonizing pause to the point where the mugger said, "Well? (intending the meaning to be What shall it be?), followed by Jack Benny's classic, "I'm thinking, I'm thinking."  Nor is it any accident that Mr. Benny's personal Achilles' Heel was another comedian with a reputation for splendid timing, George Burns.  Voice is timing, pacing, the orchestration of your text to the emotion you wish your text to convey.

And don't tell me you had no idea you were supposed to imbue every scene you write with a dominant emotion.  I don't write letters to young, middle-aged, or geezer writers who have no awareness of that.  I mean seriously, if you wonder why your manuscripts come back unread or with some ominous mark and the notation "I stopped reading here," it is because the reader had struggled to that point feeling nothing but relief at having reached it in order to bail out.

But I digress.  This is about voice, about you sounding like you.  I know it is tempting to want to sound like writers whose names you find on bestseller lists, but stop and think about it for a moment:  They got onto those lists because they not only had a story to tell, they had a particular voice in which to tell it.

I've got a feeling

Start with any event from your past and you will have a story for the future. Most events you are likely to remember are in effect given the same kind of protective wrapping you find on packages at the supermarket except that these events are not shrink-wrapped in plastic but rather in one or more emotions. With the collaboration of time, these emotions are less likely to resonate, but many of them do not settle down for a long nap; instead they are shouted down by the clamor of new emotions arriving with the onset of new events.

Early in the day of your approach to the mechanics of writing stories, you were given the conventional wisdom from so-called and self-styled experts who observed that all stories contain a measure of suspense and where actual suspense was impossible then, at the very least, there should be tension. Suspense, you discovered from within and without, is anticipation, perhaps even dread, of outcome. Tension is more a matter of which person within a cast of characters will first become so taut and pressured as to be driven to some precipitous activity that produces an emotional and logistics landslide. Story, you read in available texts from such experts, was driven by suspense and tension. Not a problem, so far as the advice goes--but it did not go far enough.

It took you to discover for yourself that emotions drive story and in fact create the suspense and tensions of which the advice spoke, which is by no means to say that you were the first to become aware of this or, indeed, that you recognized it as a fact earlier than you did. The emotions from past events have half lives. A half-life in this case is the arc of time an emotion requires to reduce itself by half. We do not ordinarily measure emotions the way we measure the likes of earthquake or wind velocity or even hardness nor temperature. We do know that some events from our past still haunt us and we wish we could undo them or at least the lingering effect they have on us. Often when we write, it is to undo such events entirely or to revise our individual performance in them to the end that our past feelings are assuaged or entirely discharged. There are times when we engage our emotions experimentally, even tentatively, curious to have the invented experience of them as dramatized in a story. A number of these provisional scenarios deliberately cross over lines of convention, wherein we are able to appoint agents of self into forbidden situations we may enjoy by proxy.

Nor is this to say that all emotions are embarked on a half-life course. No matter how old they are and how occult, the moment their recall brings them crashing into the present, we are as angry or sad or happy now at reliving them as we were experiencing them for the first time.

Emotions are the planets and asteroids in orbit about an event, they are the major players in the stories that are you and us. They influence the characters, edging them toward the actions that provide the outcomes we can live with or brood upon for as long as we shall live.

Exit pursued by a cliche

The effective translation of emotion into written language often loads more demands than mere description can bear. Writers have memorably conscripted adjectives, adverbs, and metaphor into service with uneven results. In the irony of unintentional pathos, writers have also attempted to Shanghai poetry as a means of conveying in more exquisite detail the heights and depths the human awareness can reach. Same results: some poetry soars, other gets on the Daedalus list for trying to fly, and yet other poetry sinks like a hastily defrosted chicken pot pie in a hungry tummy.

Exit description pursued by a cliche.

Enter story and its adjuncts, the daydream (from which many stories emerge) and the sleeping dream in which symbols, fears, and uncensored ambitions play dress-up adult behavior while the adults are out. Each of us has at least one dream or recurrent fear or fantasy, a genie as it were in a bottle, waiting to escape. The beginning writer has already come to expect more than one story, nurse more than one dream, learn to live with more than one fear. You could begin to argue that the measure of progress and success in an intermediate writer is not only the acceptance of the resource but an ongoing welcoming party on its behalf.

The intermediate and veteran writers are as tolerant of the presence of stories and dreams as a dog is to fleas: they come, bring itches, crawl about for a time, then they move on. Intermediates and veterans even have strategies for dealing with their arrivals, their itches, and their departures, strategies which are multifarious and pestering enough to deserve their own specific interview.

At focus here is the story itself. Simplistic to say, story is a shared human trait. The more advanced and devoted to technique the individual, the greater likelihood of a greater and more nuanced number of them in the toolkit and the greater the dramatic technique available for conveying them to others in ways that will, indeed, interest others.

If you were to chance upon the individual who was Ernest Miller Hemingway, you would probably want to place as much distance between him and you as possible. If you were to encounter even one of his more overtly male-bonding-type short stories, you'd be likely hauled in by your collar due to his use of language, nuance, ability at inference, his way of evoking feelings you may in fact disagree with but who you would nevertheless endorse as accurate, authentic renditions of emotion.

Ernest Miller Hemingway can get most of us to listen to his stories, in some cases even as we simultaneously reject the intent and posture of the story. He found a way to get us to listen by doing things with the language and with story that had not been done before. The way of his technique is yet another potential for a substantive digression of its own, "How Hemingway Got Us to Listen."

On the other side of that coin is a mythical storyteller, let's call him Ishmael. No; let's not. Mr. Melville's Ishmael is not only mythical, he is iconic. Even though he may have told us more in the long run about whales than we wanted to know. Let's instead call this fictional person Fred, imparting to him advanced middle age, perhaps even a noticeable paunch, male pattern hair loss, a retirement income adequate if not extravagant to his survival needs, a few children who have long since flown the coop and now live in other states at enough of a distance that Fred does not have the close connection he might have had if his grandchildren lived nearby. Fred is a widower; he has few friends. Much of his day is spent tidying up his condo apartment, then strolling forth variously to a coffee chop, a park, or a seniors' recreation center where his goal, although he could not convey it in so many words to you, is to get others to listen to his story.

What result does Fred want from telling you this story? Ah, he wants the magic of transforming things back to the magic of his dreams when the events were taking place for him in reality. He wants to dazzle you and work magic with his story.

Fred's story is one note in a bottle, tossed into the swirling ocean tide or perhaps the downstream rush of a massive river. He wants you to find it and read it and think, oh, fuck, what a story, what a remarkable, wonderful, memorable story. He must have been something, that Fred, that fucking remarkable Fred.

Protective Covering

In recent years security measures have become an accepted price to pay for living in a multifarious society.  We have become inured to the point of thinking nothing about having to peel stubborn plastic covers or wrapping from books, bottles of aspirin, electronic appliances, even flea-control ampules for our pets.  If we stop to think about the reasons why some of these are necessary, our collective memory will take us back to such antisocial pathology as individuals embedding razor blade shards into apples given as treats for Halloween or of poison being injected into foodstuffs and over-the-counter medicines.  There are also statistics published by retail outlets reminding us that a constant percentage of humanity is given to shop lifting, which is in itself a euphemism for stealing.

Meeting such security measures head-on causes in each of us a particular response which could range from rage to a cynical nod of recognition and awareness to the prayer that the transgressor will mend his or her ways, not to forget the re-enforced resolve to be more careful of our own properties and actions that might make us vulnerable, actions such as trusting our brother and sister human beings.

Two disparate things today cause you to equate these idiosyncratic responses with the microthin vinyl covering that protects the faces of new products, faces such as dials of clocks and watches, computer screens, viewing screens of digital cameras, and the like.  These peel-off membranes are meant to protect a product that will ordinarily be scratched or dented, the theory behind such protection being that you would not accept such a scratched or dented product before you bought it.  When you do buy it and remove the covering, it becomes yours, a projection of you.  Each metaphoric ding or scratch becomes an assault on you.

One such assault comes when an individual of roughly peer equality disagrees with your taste in a matter that is of serious and considerable moment to you.  This is not a question of a friend or lover ordering a dish at a restaurant that contrasts markedly from what you have ordered because you after all want to chose friend and or lover for their individuality, not their complete, unflagging regard for your taste as THE standard for ALL taste.  This is a matter of someone having a differing view of a basic construct of story, of literature, of the men and women who write it, and of the men and women who edit it, and of the men and women who speak critically about it.  For example, in most areas, the views of your coffee chum, Ernest Sturm, who professes French literature, prizes the critical theory of Rene Welleck over that of Leslie Fiedler whereas you feel passionately that Fiedler is leaps and bounds ahead of Welleck in his visions of American literature.  Thus whenever THAT subject comes bubbling up, so too comes your attitude, which has infinitely less to do with defensiveness than it does a sense with a sense of trespass, which you allow under the wraps of civility to flare then pass without acting on the energy.  You give Ernest his opinion and respect him for having it, but you also give you the approval for your outrage before settling into the civility of dialogue and difference.

Another example:  a student gives you to read, evaluate, and make suggestions, a story, which becomes an occasion of outrage for you which you cover under that equivalent of a vinyl screen protector, focusing instead on trying to find ways to show that student keys to get deeper into the story, whereby it may be taken to a dimension of depth and originality and significance, all portions of your role as a teacher.

Today, in the upper village neighborhood of the quirky neighborhood in which you find yourself living, you encountered a display featuring two photographs of the President of the United States, the 44th president to be precise, each featuring a Photo-Shopped Hitler mustache.  You were not able to contain as much of your outrage as you wished.  "I suppose,"  you told the displayers of the photos, "this is your revenge for what so many of us said about the last President of the United States."  That did not set well at all, because their response, although you were alone, referred to you as "You people," rendered to suggest that "we people" need to learn what it is to be American.  Thus do arguments and differences of opinion escalate, fracture, Balkanize; thus do differing groups, points of view, and factions ramp up the rhetoric and the emotion of encounter, of turf, of outrage at the trespass of one's own view with the jackboot of moral certainty on the part of the trespasser.  Works both ways if you happen to be on the trespassing side.  One man's trespass is another man's side trip.

Although you are indeed political, convinced for instance that Democracy as experienced in present day America needs a shot of Darwinism, needs a tick or two of evolution.  Your own belief is that the evolution is toward socialism as opposed to what is being branded, packaged today as conservatism.  One of your arguments in that direction is that the conservatives inherited a remarkably large surplus from the administration of the 42nd President of the US, which they promptly gorged upon; now they caution us about fiscal responsibility.  But this belief and this observation are not the closing arguments here; the closing arguments relate to the need of the writer person to walk these mean streets without contributing to the meanness, to remove the protective covering from the viewing screen and walk about making notes, taking it all in, recognizing the flare-ups of the sense of being trespassed upon, then getting back to the job at hand which is not writing as rant but writing as discovery.

The Writer: Flasher or Flash-drive

For the longest time, your own familiarity with tools was focused on jumper cables, those long pairs of wires that end with color-coded claws which allow you to connect the positive and negative aspects of your car battery to similarly polar claws on someone else's battery.  You became aware of this only last week when a forlorn young woman in the Loreto Square parking lot asked if you happened to have a pair.  You did, but they were miles away, in your garage, there because your year-and-a-half-old car has been mercifully free of need.  The jumper cables were a gift from someone who similarly felt the relative age and maintenance history of her car precluded the need for such primitive tools. You have been of a mind to carry the jumper cables about with you, but there is a kind of snobbery that comes with the faith of newness and coherence related to a young car.

Somewhere close-to-hand is a twenty-five-cent piece which works wonders at opening the access to the battery on your MacBook, the battery tube on your wireless keyboard, and the soft underbelly of your wireless mouse.  A Phillips head screw driver, which came with a pack of AA batteries for said keyboard and mouse, also waits service, and although you don't really think of it as a tool, a small, two-blade penknife with wooden side panels accompanies you When some mechanical matter demands its attention with the insistence of a cat wanting to come in or perhaps go out or perhaps both at the same time, most of us have some immediate sense of which tool or combination of tools will help set things right--back to working condition.  

The most important tools for the writer are often ignored, not thought of as tools because of the notion that tools are mechanical, a notion that means all persons who use tools are thus doing mechanical things.

Fact is, writers have tools, entire kits filled with them.  Unlike plumbers who love to brandish wrenches or electricians who are mindful about wearing protective gloves, ours are such things as pace or suspense or even that one tools that seems so foreign to beginners, dialogue.  But most important of all, the ones we keep closest to hand of all, emotions.

With these tools we are able to portray individuals in the various states the reader will have been in at one time or another or in situations the reader fears as imminently forthcoming, things such as death or lack of bravery or purpose under fire or of being alone or of misunderstanding or of causing others to misunderstand.  These tools are hard come by, well beyond the tools we can purchase at Sears, well beyond the ones usually displayed on shelves at Home Improvement or, worse, Wal-Mart.  As many of the masters of the various crafts have had to do, we have served an apprenticeship in which we have taught ourselves how to use these particular tools.  We have watched patiently as students and dedicated beginners have learned how to use these tools, so that their characters no longer recoil in horror or say "Oh, God," every other paragraph, no longer feel the sweat of fear erupt on their forehead or drip down shirt and blouse, who no longer shiver involuntarily nor gasp, but rather act as men, women, and children do when they are in emotion-laden circumstances.

Like any craftsperson with a decent set of tools, we keep them honed and oiled and ready to evoke for the reader what forces may be tugging at a character, not with the notion of describing to the reader how he or she should feel but more importantly how so many mammalian feelings are shared, and thus of the common humanity of which we are all a part.

The Distraction of Images

You know all about the other shoe dropping, not so much from living in apartment complexes as having been resident in a hotel or motel from time to time.  The person in the room directly above you removes one shoe and lets it fall to the floor with a thunk, waking you and keeping you awake as you anticipate the resolution, the thunk of the other shoe dropping.

On occasion in a classroom, you've even milked the analogy by extending the individual in the room above you to be a centipede, thus the dropping of more than two shoes.

In real life, as opposed to metaphorical life, story life, composition life, it can take time for the other shoe--whatever it might be--to drop, adding to the sense of suspense, anticipation, and general chaos in real-time life, where either so much is going on or nothing is going on, thus another distraction among the many.  (Story sorts out the chaos, much in the manner of a conspiracy theorist selectively discarding facts that might mitigate the conspiracy theory.)

In real-time life, you frequently scan books on acting technique and philosophy, in search of yet another form of circumstance by which you may bring some measure of authenticity and theme to your growing vision of How Things Work.  Even if your vision is of a genteel absurdity, nevertheless there has to be ways of demonstrating this absurdity without the need to lecture the characters or, even worse, the readers, while still maintaining a balance of plausibility.  This aspect of events seems the most consistent in the things you've written since you were about eighteen, at which point you'd decided that the formula-based story was beyond your means (you later refined that to being beyond your interest).  Although you are not as devoted a fan of Raymond Carver as many of your writer friends and, increasingly, your students are, the thing you admire most about him is his ability to convey that sense of plausible absurdity, of things having stretched as tightly as a pair of wrong-sized shoes bought in desperation at a thrift store.  You loved the shoes but size was an issue.

So you come across an acting book exercise in which the student is conveying a sense of being cold.  How, you wonder, would Philip Seymour Hoffman demonstrate cold?  And the very act of visualizing an actor you admire performing such a task brings images to you.  The images are so intense that you need to stop because of the distraction of images; you don't want to lose the insight here, which is that although the dramatic situation has to convey an emotion, the place where the situation occurs has to convey at least a sense--sight, sound, touch, temperature--if not an emotion.  Thus do you have a character in a situation, which is to say a focused, confrontational encounter with opposition, simultaneously responding to the setting.  Bingo!  Counterpoint.  I don't have time to be hungry now; I've got to cope with this!  Screw being too hot in here, I've got to make a decision.  It is literally a double bind, which has to create tension.  Hamlet, driven by his need to extract revenge from his uncle, sees his uncle in a vulnerable position and now becomes aware that he might exact the ultimate revenge by killing his uncle, thus settling the score.  But the uncle is saying his prayers, and if Hamlet were to kill his uncle while he is at prayer, the uncle will take an all-expenses-paid trip to Heaven, which is the farthest thing from Hamlet's intent.

True enough, were you to turn this musing in for an essay on the SAT, it would be returned to you with a stern note about topic sentences.  But what do they know about story?

Design for Living

design--a dramatic plan or structure; a deliberate manipulation of dramatic elements with the intent of producing a story; a plot or story arc intended to generate a lasting and memorable effect on the reader.

Design is, in this sense, a noun; it may also be used as a verb in which case it becomes the act of producing a plot line or arrangement of significant dramatic elements that lead to a satisfying conclusion. Plot-driven stories are those in which the design may become predictable, even though the emotional effects such as suspense, tension, horror, anticipation, dread, longing, etc may vary. The better of the plot-driven stories, say those of Harlan Coben or Lee Child, implicitly offer a design of sufficient complexity and issues at stake to lure the reader's attention away from the design while producing one or more of the previously listed emotions. In many ways, such stories are the equivalent of Navajo rugs, intricate, colorfully patterned, pleasing to experience. Character-driven stories are designed to provide emotional responses as well as moral, intellectual, and aesthetic challenges. Richard Powers's The Echo Maker, while superbly plotted, brings characters on stage with issues that actually call their very sense of self into question, luring the reader well past the notion of mere formula or suspense and into self-examination that could produce uncomfortable feelings.

A conventional approach for producing both types of pattern, the more geometrically structured as well as the more open-ended design begins with confronting a single character with a choice of behavior or the need to make some choice within a narrow time frame. On a more plot-oriented design, a character may be given a choice between serving out a long prison term or accepting a life-threatening assignment as a ticket to forgiveness for the crime that landed the character in prison. As well, a character may be confronted head-on with the need to chose allegiance between two feuding factions. One possible approach for beginning a character-driven story is to present the lead character with the need to find out some highly relevant information from his own past or from the past of family, a quest that will lead to the discovery of some unspeakable information. Jay Gatz, later to become Jay Gatsby, began a quest to find his former love, Daisy Buchannan, a quest that brought Gatsby into the midst of a complex pattern or love, betrayal, and social collision.

Particularly in a longer short story, a novella, or a novel, changing points of view in rendering the narrative will have a measurable effect on the dramatic design.

Description: Rhetorical Strategy or Cock-and-Bull Story

description--the salient qualities of a character, place, or thing; the briefest gloss without distracting from story on how an organization or tradition works; relevant details in a story; a series of adjectives, adverbs and evocations that convey personality, sense of place or sense of atmosphere.

When you choose words to describe a character, a locale, an institution, even a room at a Motel 6, they should come from a menu of emotion-friendly words, words that help transport the feeling of being in Character A's presence, the patience needed to overcome the ambient awfulness of Locale B, the fussy bureaucratic wrangling within Institution C, the no-holds-barred torture to the back and neck experienced while sleeping or otherwise on a Motel 6 bed.

And yet.

Words of description are not like the words of political conventions, intent on mobilizing crowds to cut back on thought and open up the spending of rabid emotion. Words of description are like the evocations of champagne, rascally pinot noirs, single malt whiskey, the hoppy promise of a pale ale, the piquancy of a homemade pesto; they lead us to the experience then turn us loose to experience it rather than lock us in the closet with it. If it is important enough to the story to include the breakfast menu at a particular meeting, we should be able to have our impression of each character enhanced by what he or she orders, and how it is eaten.

The best descriptions of a character come from the way he or she does things; a locale has a particular personality that is conveyed by the way things within it appear and behave; organizations reflect the personality of a leader or of individuals trying to imitate said leader; rooms in any given Motel 6 smell like mass-produced disinfectant, cheap furniture, and indifferent pizzas delivered by indifferent drivers who despair of reasonable tips. To inhale the atmosphere of a Motel 6 is to breathe in the pathology of the American dream and perhaps be numbed by the experience.

We should be using description to convey personality; at all costs we should not use description to display our ability as a writer.


cock-and-bull story, a--any narrative or story which on its face becomes of doubtful provenance; a narrative suspected of being contrived, embellished, or a deliberate fabrication; thus a deliberate attempt at deception.

Talking animals have held a significant place in the literature of the ages, seemingly well suited to illustrate fables, satires, and tales. Grendel comes quickly to mind, she of Beowulf and the eponymous novel by John Gardener. Aesop put words into the mouths of animals; so did George Orwell, and Geoffrey Chaucer. Dragons, wolves, unicorns all have had their say, some prescient and others hysterical (see Henny-Penny).

A cock-and-bull story is built in the first place to deceive, divert, or delay. A cock-and-bull story is the dog ate my homework writ large. If the deception has as its purpose an amusing payoff and/or a moral purpose, such as those told by Mark Twain, we are often the better for it, refreshed, our critical senses laundered and hung out to dry in the sunshine of reason and self-examination. If the deception is to tighten the grip of fear and control, the believer becomes in time as much at fault as the perpetrator.

For those of us who are book oriented, it becomes pleasing to think of an anthology, perhaps even a lofty Oxford Companion to the Cock and Bull Story. Imagine the fun and clamor. The anthology is to be divided into two parts; no not Cock and Bull, but rather For Fun and For Real.

The aforementioned Mr. Twain would be a welcomed addition to the fun side, as well as one of his modern embodiments, Kurt Vonnegut.

Imagine the mischief and consternation and competition for inclusion in the For Real side, those men and women who promulgate C & B as though they had come down from the mountain top, bearing an engraved slab of granite:

Phyllis Schlaffly
The Rev. Falwell
The Rev. Robertson
Number Forty-three and his Vice-president
Charles Krauthammer
Ann Coulter
William Krystol
Jean Schmidt (the GOP wingnut rep from Ohio)

and, as the late, lamented Mr. Vonnegut would have said, so it goes.


The cock-and-bull story can be a lovely learning experience, or a one-way ticket to the worst kind of convention of all. My personal belief of it is that it is the forerunner of the tall tale in the grand tradition of the American West. One place to look for its origins is in that remarkable novel about origins and reality, Tristram Shandy,
in which a character says, "It is a story about a Cock and a Bull--and the best of its kind that I have ever heard."

Stand and Deliver

emotion--a feeling or combination of sensations which lead to a mood or an attitude; the result of events, stimuli, and interactions; possible results of memory, thought, or association which may be pleasing, distasteful, or ominous.

Emotions are triggered by experience, whether the result of direct action, contemplation, or analogy. These sensory and perhaps sensual results are among the principal goals to be achieved in story; a story that does not evoke emotion is placing itself in the metaphorical third balcony, some distance away from the performance.

The fact of a reader seeing or understanding the intended emotional content is not sufficient; the reader is entitled by having read the story to feel the resident emotional tones.


rejection--an arbitrary condition arising when a publisher declines an offered work; a situation wherein a writer loses enthusiasm for a project and either shelves or discards it; a work that has been denied entry for idiosyncratic, judgmental, or technical reasons. The experiential sense achieved by an author that certain publications, publishing individuals, and random other individuals are not moved by his work. An author, editor, or publisher in a state of denial.

It is the rare writer who has no experience with having a work refused, either in terms of representation by a literary agent or publication from an editorial representative of a publishing venture; rarer yet is the writer who has had no work returned with a memo of notes for revision. Rarest of all is the writer who has not of his or her own accord set a manuscript aside as being unworkable or uninteresting. All these are examples of rejection. Similarly, a note from a publisher's representative expressing great admiration for a work but nevertheless returning it because of its thematic resemblance to a recently published work is still rejection. A note from a publisher accompanying a rejected manuscript and as well inviting the writer to submit more work is--rejection.

An author, standing in a book store while watching a prospective reader pick up his or her book, thumb through several pages, then set the book back on the shelf, is witnessing rejection of yet another sort.

"There are fifteen types of rejection in connection with writing," Santa Barbara Writers' Conference Director, Barnaby Conrad said, addressing an auditorium filled with attendees. From the voluminous depths of his blazer pocket, he produced an index card from which he was about to read examples, but before he was able to begin, a voice from the rear boomed, "Sixteen."

Ever the polite one, Conrad smiled, nodded. "As I was saying, there are fifteen specific types of rejection." Squinting at the index card for a moment, he continued. "The first instance of rejection is when a writer submits a manuscript electronically or by postal mail and it is subsequently rejected."

Once again the voice from the rear of the auditorium blared forth. "Seventeen!"

Rejection is a living presence in every writer's calculus; even if the writer were to forswear submissions, it could be successfully argued that the writer was rejecting himself. Responses to rejection vary from anger to mild annoyance to conspiracy theory; all of these conditions may or may not be justified but they may all produce the side effect of listening to and agreeing with the Inner Critic, the symptoms of which prevent the writer from writing.

There probably are successful writers who believe their abilities have evolved enough; they accordingly do not worry about becoming better at their craft. The greater number of writers burn off considerable calories with concern about their developmental progress. This is as it should be.

Some letters or notes of rejection address flaws as seen by the rejector. Unless you, the writer, see some way to enhance the effectiveness of the work, or unless a particular editor offers publication of your work if a specific change is effected, a four-letter Latin word, common to publishing, obtains. Stet. Let it stand.

Aristotle Sent Me

emotion--the mood, temperament, attitude, or disposition exhibited singularly or in combination by one or more characters in a narrative drama; a major force propelling the actions of a particular character; a resident setting or mood of a scene in a story; a dramatic catalyst that causes characters to behave as they do.

Characters are walking tool kits of emotion, using them or being driven by them to behave as they do. As a contrast between characters and real-life individuals, the individual is guided in behavior by emotions and/or their absence, occasionally becoming preoccupied, then driven, thus making the necessary transition from real-life individual to character. Being in some way driven, obsessed, or compulsive is the transformative energy needed by a character to earn his keep in a story.

Characters are commonly identified according to their goals and needs; the thoughtful writer has taken this calculus one step farther by identifying the goals and needs as the comet, the attendant emotions as trails of the comet.


short story--a dramatic narrative, conventionally (but not necessarily) advanced in scenes, taking an individual from a point of awareness of a goal or problem through some attempt at striving for the goal or engaging the problem to the point of awareness of the consequences of the success or failure of the venture; may be rendered in first, second,third, and omniscient points of view.

By its name, the short story intends a word length less than a novel, which is by convention thought to be at least 50,000 words. Short stories under 1000 words are usually given some designation such as short-short, flash fiction, or sudden fiction,delineating them further from the short story, sometimes, as in the case of under 100 words, making them more a whim or affectation. Conventional short stories run from about 2500 words to about 10000, some of these parameters determined by the availability of space in magazines and journals.

Thanks to a review written by Edgar Allen Poe on the occasion of the publication of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice Told Tales, (which Poe quite admired), the short story was accepted as a single-narrator vehicle, its focus on a single issue or situation. The ending was almost invariably a thematic equivalent of the recapitulation of a concerto. Then came Chekhov (1860-1904), who bade farewell to the elbow-in-the-ribs nudge of moral and philosophical resolution, and Joyce (1882-1941)who used the epiphany or relevant emerging awareness of a character to further the short story along into the twentieth century, where such significant voices as John Cheever, John Steinbeck, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Louise Erdrich, Tom Boyle,Alice Munro, Annie Proulx, and Joyce Carol Oates rushed the short story into its more elastic and plastic incarnation.

Because of these and other worthies, it is now possible to devise a short story that has more than one featured narrator, that moves about in chronology, refuses to be pinned down in terms of its did-they-or-didn't-they ending, and takes place over a large span of time. Still these standards have to obtain: The reader must care in some way about the narrator or have a stake in what happens or does not happen to the narrator; the characters in a short story should each be distinguishable from the others; someone has to have a goal; if there is no actual prize, nevertheless the reader should be able to conceive of an appropriate one; the element of surprise ought to be found somewhere in the calculus--not merely a trick or surprise ending but rather someone doing or not doing something that becomes a surprise or, perhaps, some surprise rendition of format.


unities--a set of three classical conditions for drama, derived from Aristotle's Poetics: a play should have one significant action; it should represent only one place; it should take place in the time span of a day.

A few critics have tried to tie the can of actual time to the play, intending that the events portrayed on stage be equal to elapsed time in reality.

Aristotle, who has made some significant contributions to such diverse things as scientific classification, logic, and the physics of the dramatic experience, has nevertheless been gone since 322 BCE, allowing room for the growth and development of story constructs. Even as far back--form our point of view--as Shakespeare's time, the unities were being disregarded, played with fast and loose. One of the delights of story is its ability to include vast shifts of time, some even generational.

Hint: the unities are good things to know about, particularly when reading or considering works from the distant past, but they cannot and should not hinder a writer's experiments with time, place, theme, or any other aspect of telling a story.

The Unseen in the Scene, or Once More with Feeling

The main reason for an editor sending the writer back to revisit a scene in a story or novel has more to do with what has been left unsaid than what has actually been said. The scene in question--to use a baseball metaphor--touches all the bases, touches them in the proper order. Nevertheless, something seems missing the scene reads flat or, worse, reads as though it were some TV Guide two-sentence description. A moody Danish prince sets out to avenge his father's murder and his mother's remarrying the murderer. High concept, low interest. To continue the metaphor, the runner touches home plate, scores. But the score does not change the dynamic or outcome of the game. Ho hum.

Our goal is simplicity defined: No more boring scenes.

The way to make this revision come flying off the page is to give the characters an edge that relates first and foremost to the writer's feelings, which are now followed through, played out in the author's imagination, then set forth on the screen or down on the note pad. By now the writer will know the characters well enough to be able to identify with them. By now the writer will also know quite well the personal feelings resident in the story. Time now to make a dance card, a list of how each character feels about each of the others, a list that could lead to an unanticipated confrontation between two characters not scheduled to be on stage together.

It may be the writer's intention, as an example, that John and Mary intend to marry, but being each involved in an art or profession, marriage is not the priority their art or profession is. At the moment, the glue holding them together beyond the friendship and attraction and, of course, lust, is the glue of comfort. Okay, along comes the writer now to light a fire under that comfort. Let's even stipulate that John and Mary would eventually marry and be even more comfortable together, but for whatever reason the writer devises, one of the two feels constrained to make an issue of getting married, perhaps out of some fear or losing the other. Immediately another emotion is introduced, causing the kettle of comfort to boil over. John, for example, resents having to propose marriage now. His resentment shows in his behavior, leading Mary to think for example, that she is losing John. Suddenly a circumstance (marriage) which is of itself complex, becomes exponentially more complex, imparting a kind of psychological density and authenticity to a fairly common situation. The emphasis shifts from the relative ordinariness of the story into the mounting irony and complexity of the situation, which reminds the readers of the complexity of life, which leads the reader to a deeper sense of the reality of the characters.

It is not the complexity of the plot or indeed even of the conflict between the characters; it is the complexity of the characters and their own backstories, influencing their behavior.

Another way to look at the equation: action is required and recognized, which in turn produces emotion, which in its turn provokes or drives the characters to further action.

How, you ask, do I begin? Make a list of all the characters. Starting with the major characters, compile a list of how each feels about all the others, right down to the guys who deliver the pizza or Chinese takeout. Then start down at the very bottom, with the guys who deliver the pizza or Kung Pao Chicken, the maids who clean the rooms at the motels. You are holding now a template for irony, resentment, misunderstanding, and conflicting agendas, not to mention hidden agendas.

When characters are driven by their feelings (which are extensions of your feelings about the situations and circumstances), their clashes can be splendid and even their apparent agreements are seasoned with the spice of tension.

Making a Scene

The scene is the basic unit of story. To see this unit properly, visualize a pellucid container, a laboratory retort, a British ale glass, a water glass. Into it are poured such elements as character, landscape, ambition, suspense, reversal, surprise. Others, to be sure. Depends on you and, of course, the story. Depending on the length and intent of the story, a number of containers will be required to accomplish the emotional and intellectual dramatic ambition. The material--if any--between these containers in short stories and novels is a particular form of narrative we'll look at later. This same between-the-containers information in stage plays is called stage directions; in the teleplay and screenplay, this narrative information is director's notes and actor cues.

Starting with the first empty container, we have the introduction of certain dramatic and narrative information. Individuals appear on stage, at the very least bearing some form of expectation or anticipation. They expect something to happen, they are warned of an impending event of consequence, they are already awaiting a particular event--or they are expecting things to go on as they have in the past.

In the opening scene of Waiting for Godot, Estragon and Vladimir are already present, doing something. Through their conversation, which features the line, "Nothing to be done," we are introduced to one of the major themes of the story, the added fact that they are where they are because they are waiting for a character named Godot, supplemented with visual and verbal information about the personality of each of the two men. We also begin to harbor the suspicion that Godot, whomever he may be, will never arrive, causing us to speculate on our own about who or what Godot really is and what the significance of his non arrival may be.

Speculation is a necessary quality in opening scenes because the moment the reader/viewer begins to speculate, at that moment the reader/viewer is invested in the story, has some stake in its outcome, perhaps even begins to root for the agenda of one character over the agenda of another.

We are pulled immediately into the opening of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations with the information that the first person narrator as a youngster, couldn't pronounce his name, Phillip Pirrip, and so called himself Pip. This confession reminds many of us of our own early difficulties with language and the resulting linguistic train wrecks. In short order, Pip tells us he is an orphan, living with his sister, an overbearing nag. Pip is given to visiting the graves of his parents. Nice kid, we think, starting to feel sorry for him, already imagining a life of humdrum tedium for him. On one particular visit to his parents' tombstones, a growling, horrific man, his leg in a prisoner's chains, grabs him, threatens him, makes demands of him.

Whether it is the play, Waiting for Godot, or the novel Great Expectations, we have been given dramatic information that remains with us in each subsequent scene, information that directly influences our emotional response and reception of the scenes to come. The aggregate effect of the dramatic information is called throughline or story arc.

Beginning and subsequent scenes contain at least the following elements:

Characters
Setting, the locale or landscape in which a scene is set
Beats, or events
Tempo, the pacing with which characters say or perform the beats
Blocking, the positions characters occupy during the course of a scene
Dialogue, what the characters say to one another
Subtext, the result of what characters say as opposed to what they truly feel

Scenes may contain other information relevant to the story, conditions such as reversal of an agenda, the discovery of new information, shifts of allegiance, moral choices to be made, and surprise.

Scenes in short stories are more likely to run in chronological order, but such movement is not a convention to be strictly observed. In longer works, novels, stage or screenplays, the order of scenes may shift from present to past in order to provide backstory. In longer works with multiple points of view, a shift in time or chronology can be useful in provoking a sense of suspense. While shifting focus to another time, character, or both, a part of the reader's mind remains with an unresolved situation that took place earlier.

Wherever it is set, a scene is an arena, making the analogy between scene and lab retort apt. Compounds and substances are put into the retort which is then set on a flame. The elements of a scene are introduced in anticipation of the heat from internal and external circumstances raising the temperature to a combustion point. Scenes are accordingly heated by circumstances to the goal of producing combustion. Persons and circumstances respond to the heat of pressure or opposition or frustration or grief or seduction or some prize being offered. The ultimate goal of any scene is the presence of a recognizable emotion. The dramatic means of achieving the emotion is by applying enough pressure, heat, intensity, or frustration to cause there to be some eruption which disturbs or accelerates the growing momentum that passes from scene to scene.

In Macbeth, the audience gets an early taste of where things are going when, returning home, Macbeth is hailed by the three witches as the forthcoming Thane of Cawdor. Scene by scene, Macbeth buys into the scenario by which he will actually become Cawdor. One important point in the play comes when, seeing King Malcolm being delivered his dinner by a servant, Macbeth begins riffing on the theme of last supper, quickly equating what he is about to do to Malcolm with the martyrdom of Christ. Thus conscience is introduced into the crucible, the heat of conscience is applied, and before our eyes, Macbeth weakens, combusts, cannot go through with his planned murder.

The final scene in a story, novel, or drama is the ultimate combustion, the unthinkable come to pass, its result an emotion that becomes the key signature of the work. Scenes are microcosms of an orchestrated macrocosm, where the whole--the-result--becomes greater than the sum of its parts. The payoff of a scene is the awareness of a snowflake or two, landing on your head. The payoff of the short story, novel, or drama is being hit with a snowball.

To see this analogy come to brilliant life, read Robertson Davies' Fifth Business, where the narrator tells of ducking a snowball thrown at him by a schoolmate. The snowball hits a passing woman, well into pregnancy. As a consequence, she delivers prematurely, causing the narrator a life of guilt and recrimination. It is not merely that Davies was such an accomplished storyteller, his opening scene serves as a role model for scenes and snowballs everywhere.