Expect

Every time you pick up a novel, whether it is from an old literary friend, a young writer whose face and voice have not been completely weathered yet, or a writer previously unknown, you also lift up a series of expectations.

One such expectation is that you will be seized by the collar, lifted, then transported to a landscape where everything in it and all things within its purview will dispense meaning, insight, and nuance as the syrup dispensers do at International House of Pancakes. Another expectation of this novel calls for your immediate care and concern for the individuals who populate it, the stratagems by which they will conduct their lives in pursuit of the solutions to the obstacles Reality has placed in their way, and the meanings they will extract from the problems that beset them.

Perhaps most demanding of all expectations, you expect from this novel transformative energy and insight of sufficient magnitude to change your life in ways that will cause you to feel, think, and behave with more focus.

If this were not significant enough a burden, you extend the power you afford these expectations to those you associate with love, looking for the signs of transportation and transformation you associate with novels to apply there as well. Thus in your relationship with friends, colleagues, students, lovers, animal friends, you seek and to a large measure find in them an entity you can identify as a transformative force, one you can carry with you in your own times of woe and weal.

The nature of expectations is to outweigh their consequences, to distract us in our step-by-step process by which we seek to excel at the things we do, certainly not for pride but rather for the enhanced satisfaction of pursuing selfhood as though it were a draft of our best novel or short story to date. Being thus engaged and focused, you reckon will not make dying any easier than it ought to be but will make life more a continuous feast to be shared with any who are in the vicinity.

It is arguable that expectations invariably lead to disappointment, just as the idea in one's forge of process can never be equaled by its execution. Some musicians you know of may have achieved this goal: Mozart comes to mind; so does Ravel. Gershwin? Yep. Bach? Of course. But writers? Well, read on, and write on.

Also arguable is the notion that removal of expectation makes us, somewhat the samurai of old, and the likes of the Buddhist monks more open to something more valuable even than expectations, which is to say opportunity. You admire the prospect of opportunity, at this stage in your life being at the point of having expectations of encountering them. Through work, which is another occasion for a definition: Work is the engagement of listening to the senses, hearing them, seeing them, tasting them, rearranging the furniture if they do not all fit comfortably in the room we have, which is the body we were born into and the edifice it has become. Work is living and loving. And writing about them.

Loss Leader

loss--the quality of having experienced or possessed something at one time, but no longer; a sense of something or someone being valued then wrested away by circumstance; an ability, a position or talent once enjoyed and used, no longer accessible either through neglect or a deliberate disassociation; a relationship such as a friendship, mentorship, or romantic connection abrogated by death, neglect,or lack of interest; a prized possession lost or stolen; sums of money or other trade-based media subjected to risk then forfeited through rules of the risk; the after-the-fact realization of something or someone of value being appreciated in retrospect.

Loss, an important coeval to experience, is a significant means by which a writer can convey to the reader a sense of who a particular character is; a simple laundry list of things lost begins to supply background, but dramatic focus on such internals as Innocence, Face (thus dignity), Ambition, Power, Youth, Confidence begins to sketch in an inferential picture of how the character will respond under specific circumstances. The focus on such dramatic externals as Agility, Hair, Teeth, Eyesight, Hearing, and particular abilities associated with performance that do not result in pain or stiffness further define a character and that individual's attitude.

Imagine a particular character, then, engaging the loss of a loved one, a special professional position, or some treasured relic or memento. Imagine as well a particular character becoming aware of lapses of memory. In such awareness and recognition or, conversely, by lack of awareness, a dimension of the character emerges, propelled by loss, by grief, or by the stoic presence of denial stalking the battlements instead of a ghost with an agenda. Think about Beethoven, who revolutionized the music of his day, writing some of the most sublime music of his life after his hearing had departed from him.

As in real life, characters will do things with greater purpose in their attempts to regain what has been lost or to attempt to protect what might next be lost, in so doing revealing even greater depths of themselves, embarking perhaps on an ever widening path of vulnerability.

We can learn more from a character once we discover what that character has lost.

When, toward the end of what can easily be considered to be the travails of Jane Eyre, the eponymous narrator says of Mr. Rochester, "Reader, I married him." and Rudyard Kipling says in his Just-So Stories, "Dearly beloved," each was breaking a rule set in place with some firmness from about the Nineteenth Century onward. For different reasons, each was addressing the reader, breaking the so-called wall between author and reader in which the author did not recognize the presence of the reader.

In each of the cited cases, the lapse served to enhance my already intense pleasure in the material, my place within it as eavesdropper. Even now, as I write this, there is a distinct pleasure rampant within me at the thought of eavesdropping because it--that process--is so vital to the sense of how I read and write fiction. A conversation between two characters may well advance the story and reveal things about the participants, but it also provides me with the delicious sense of having overheard something that passed between two individuals who have life and agenda and secrets and fantasies and ambitions and--what else? I am in on some one's secret or some one's life; I may, if I persist, get more--

In real life, there is more of a gray no-person's land between eavesdropping and mere overhearing. Standing in line at the supermarket check-out stand , I hear bits of conversation which I may take in or block out as suits my whim. Waiting in line at a theater affords similar opportunities, cruising the aisles of a gallery provide even more. People talk, and who is to say when or where the best and most intriguing snippets of conversation emerge. My note pads and Moleskines are filled with actual conversations that went somewhere before they ebbed back into going nowhere, which is where conversations in real life ultimately go, the refuse heap of undramatic intent. Fact still remains, I ran the best 10-K of my career eavesdropping on two young ladies who were discussing various adventures on various dates. Fact also remains that Nancy Simon, Neil's remarkable daughter, once brought such a story into Saturday workshop, based on something she'd overheard at the Russian Tea Room, wherein a girl at a nearby table was telling her date, "So, this is the place where guys bring girls to break up with them," and the guy responded, "By the way, I think we should consider the possibility of, you know, seeing other people." Nancy's date had heard the same conversation and responded to her, "Yeah, I guess it's a tradition, taking them somewhere nice so maybe they'll think twice about crying." A conversation that quickly moved toward, "You know, you're the kind that would cry in a situation like that." I thought The Threpenny Review, which turned out to be just right.

There are numerous ways for and reasons to break that wall between reader and characters. I was more than fascinated by a production of Jack Gelber's play, The Connection, in San Francisco, when during the break between acts, the actors mingled among the audience, trying to hustle money from them, giving credence to the belief that these characters were actual users with big time Joneses. Some years later, as the co-producer and writer and actor of mystery dinner plays, I'd do in character to audiences what I'd hesitate to do in real life, including lifting shrimp from their hors d'oeurves plate and getting away with it, and in another instance trying to borrow a twenty from someone in the audience because the producer was a cheapskate.

Rules and conventions.

At the time of the Globe Theater, women characters were played by boys. Twelfth Night is a splendid example of a boy portraying a girl, Viola, who portrays a boy,Cesario. That convention was a given in the day. Look how Larry Gelbart used that very convention to the same kind of advantage with Dustin Hoffman portraying Tootsie.

Some rules and conventions to be looked upon with rousing suspicion:

Show, don't tell.

Only write from your own experience.

If there is a shotgun on the wall, it must go off during the arc of the story.

Don't use flashbacks.

If a character is left-handed, we should be shown some reason for it.

Plant your clues early so that they may be dug up at the right time.

Every story must have a theme.

Short stories should only have one point of view.

Shoot the sheriff in the first paragraph.

Don't have a story in which characters have the same or similar-sounding names.

Don't tell jokes in novels or short stories.

There are more to be sure and each one can and should be taken down from its perch on the roost of Convention, defeathered, and eaten for a snack. Every one of these rules has been broken with panache and professional eclat by Joe Wambaugh among others they will be broken again.

Read Mark Twain's informative How to Tell a Story, not only for his wit and instruction but for the answer to whom among the others will break the rules next.

Rule of Writer's Thumb: If it sounds logical, don't do it.