Formula for Safety

When it is working, you scarcely notice anything but a sense of smooth inevitability that takes you into an awareness well beyond thought.  The "it" is, of course, the conveyance known as story, involving, mysterious, primal.

When it is not working, you become aware of and fret about the fact of it being a rail bed of a narrow-gauge train, the dips and upthrusts of grade numerous and sudden.  The turns are not always banked with any subtlety or with attention to comfort.  Sometimes a cow or frightened deer panics, frozen on the tracks.

Sometimes it is altogether less like riding a train and more like being a flea a big dog is trying to shake from his back.  The more you think about it, try to make repairs, add mechanics of smoothness, the more the metaphor grows to the extent of you trying to give a large dog a bath in a small tub.  Both of you get wet.  Neither of you wishes to be wet.  Neither of you, in fact, wishes to be where you are, doing what you are doing.

At such times there are few certainties, one of them being that the metaphors for what you are attempting to do and are in fact not doing become more monstrous and disorienting.  If you have been in such situations often enough, you will recognize the feelings of uneasiness and dread spreading through your awareness.  If you persist, the worst that can happen is the result of some flat, stilted pages in which you attempt to explain too much, perhaps noting as you read these pages that you are explaining to yourself.  Also, if you persist, the feelings of dread and disorientation will begin to slide away and you will have ridden through the poorly banked turns and precipitous drops, experiencing once again the awareness of being, pure writer being.  For reasons still not entirely clear to you, risk is almost always involved in the sense of disconnection; you need to see how effective taking some risk or unexpected turn is as a companion on these ungainly moves through the landscape of process.

Formula breeds certainty of result and safety and boredom.  Risk causes the forehead to erupt with the tingle of fear and entrance to the unknown.  Boredom produces more of itself, predictable, correct, safe, too polite to say how boring boredom truly is.

Letter to a Young, Middle-Aged, or Geezer Writer IX

Your enthusiasm for a project in the works rather than plot or outline is the hybrid vehicle you will ride through to the final destination.  The main source of power for this hybrid vehicle is your enthusiasm, but when that switches off or its warning lights begin to flicker, your next remarkable fuel is curiosity.  Thus my advice to you:  Beware of Sisyphean sentences in the course of which you push stolid predicates to the top of a rhetorical hill, give them a shove, then hope they achieve in their downward descent some--you guessed it--momentum.  Remember Sisyphus as a metaphor representing meaningless, mind-numbing work; keep him in mind as an exemplar of the kind of sentence you do not wish to write, not under any circumstances.

Sisyphus was sentenced to an eternity of meaningless work for defying the god Zeus--well, actually, for hitting on a mortal woman Zeus had planned an adventure or two with.  If your sentences bear the aura of fearful duty--"I've got to explain my characters' motivation"--or the taint of relying on the need to satisfy everyone in your writing group, including that one person who is so particularly critical of everything you write, these burdens will weigh your sentences and, indeed, your story, bringing it to a standstill, leaving you with the uncomfortable awareness of being alone, stranded as it were on a desert island much as the young chaps in Lord of the Flies were stranded.  And you know what happened to them.

How, I hear you asking, do I achieve this mind-freeing enthusiasm of which I speak?  I can give you the mechanism.  The specifics work for me; perhaps they'll show you how to draw upon them to develop your own, as indeed I drew from my role model, a musician name of Franz Josef Haydn, not only an articulate composer but a prolific one.  He began his working day by sorting through his library of musical scores, finding a piano work written by Karl Philip Emanuel Bach, then spending half an hour playing the score on his own piano, whereupon he turned to his own composing.  Although a fan of Haydn, particularly his piano sonatas, I am not so much a fan of KPE Bach, whose music doesn't send me off the way Haydn's does, but to be sure, Haydn's approach gets me looking.  Look for ten things you can read, recite, listen to, taste, or merely look at.  These are to be selected with the notion that they will provide energy and momentum to you because they have in the past.  I can pretty much get going on nearly anything by Maurice Ravel.  Yo-Yo Ma's renditions of the six unaccompanied cello suites by KPE's father, Johann Sebastian Bach, get me moving.  I find it difficult not to be energized by the playing of nearly anything by Bill Evans going it alone, or accompanied by the wise, verbal bass playing of Eddie Gomez.  Reading Louise Erdrich gets me moving; reading almost anything by Jim Harrison can get the ideas hopping.

It rarely takes me more than three or four things to get me going.  Sometimes I am drawn back again to the wonder and whimsy of the Krazy Kat comic strips that so enchanted me as a young person and made me wonder if I would ever be able to project such a magisterial vision as George Herriman's on the walls of my mind.

So okay, you pick among these ten things of yours and have at them.  If they don't help you to tuck into your day's writing session, I'm sorry to say you're fucked, which is a different kind of destination than the one I have in mind for both of us.  I have in mind a destination that is informed by The Three Princes of Serendip, a Persian folk tale which has come to us through a number of languages, leaving us with an uncanny sort of dramatic road map and the word serendipity.

You can, dear writer friends, follow the well-worn paths of tradition, plotting everything in advance, then arriving at your destination in mechanical fashion that promptly bites its thumbnail at any sense of realism.  You can, of course, follow the path of the three princes, arriving at your destination by happy chance, your destination coming as a complete and pleasing surprise for you, or perhaps not--perhaps not so pleasing as to seem mechanical, but pleasing enough to seem lifelike.  Besides, you've arrived at anticipated destinations before in your earlier works, you've been through the juggling, rearranging of plausibility as though it were cheap motel furniture.  That didn't make you feel as pleased at it might had you agreed to let the unthinkable come striding forward, inviting it in to accompany you on your way.

I leave it to you, dear friends:  We can cause our conclusions to have the heavy hands of event managers or we can follow those remarkable three princes who were actually from Sri Lanka and somehow, through the serendipity of translation and writers looking for destinations that will leave us with something of substance, found us.

You want me to hold the chicken

When a given stream of narrative begins to come to life for you, it is usually because some plan or pattern has edged its way to the front of a crowd of competing elements, taking over as it were, and supervising the arrangement of the furniture, possibly even surprising you by requiring more than one venue in which the arrangement is to be made.

In anticipation of the arrival of this plan that will set things in motion, you occasionally will get a sentence or paragraph, possibly as much as a page, set forth as though it knows what it wants. As you are forming these tentative arrangements, you're waiting to hear the sound of shifting gears, a sound that means you've achieved take-off speed and are beginning to get momentum.

If there are no such sounds of shifting gears by the end of the second page, and you find yourself in a position similar to Wile E. Coyote, over the boundary of the butte or mesa, with nothing below you except the view of a long way down, the energy stops and you take the downward plummet, kerboom, the next step being to hit the delete key if you happen to be at your computer or to draw a diagonal line through the material on your note pad. The results are the same: back to a relaunch.

At times, the need for this take-off velocity requires five or six such Wile E. Coyote plunges. They are worth the fall, although at the time the interior critic is beginning to remind you of the stereotypical back-seat driver, with such questioning tropes as And you call yourself a writer, or worse, And you walk into the class room and presume to tell others how to get started, or even worse yet as in, Sid doesn't have to go through all this rigamarole because Sid has an outline. (The Sid brought up to you by your inner back-seat driver is S.L. "Sid" Stebel, a faculty mate of yours at the Santa Barbara Writers' Conference and as well at the Masters in Professional Writing Program at USC.)

The fact of securing an opening scene in which you hear the gears shifting and feel the rush of story in the works does not mean you are at all home free or that any of the material thus secured will be kept or that it will be kept in the order you first intended. Case in point, what now stands at the opening scene of The Secrets of Casa Jocosa was actually chapter two until, some weeks back, you read through the day's catch and made one of your famous decisions about where the story starts. This also gave you the format and, in a significant way, the voice or attitude in which the material was presented.

When you attend the party where story is being served, the usual rules of politeness, manners, and etiquette don't apply. You can ask for second and third helpings, dawdle over your vegetables, and take an early shot at desert. You can send things back to the kitchen and as well tell your host that you are not all that fond of chicken. You can--mirable dictu--use catsup, an image of particular meaning to you because, oh these many years ago, an author whom you'd admired on your way up through the ranks was now your writer; you'd published two of his novels and were dining at his home to discuss his next work. The evening was made memorable because there was a bottle of catsup on the table and the author's wife split an infinitive and a gut in her Southern belle way. You do not, she insisted, embarrass me before your editor by allowing a bottle of catsup on my table. (You have wanted to use that line of dialogue ever since and now, you have used it.)

The point you distracted yourself away from is that you are in charge of stirring up the energy and the attack; you have to take the risk of extending yourself beyond your reach, and not doing so will put the brakes on your growth as a writer and certainly make the present work, whatever it is, at considerable risk of being set down in any form at all.

In the beginning, you are as Bobby DuPre, stopping in at a roadside restaurant in search of a breakfast that may break all the rules of the house, but which is nevertheless your dream of a breakfast. You want me to hold the chicken.

Formula

Before his death in 1999, you managed two or three pleasant times a year of hanging out with Bob Easton, sometimes to talk about writing in general, sometimes to talk about his writing, and other times still about his late, remarkable father-in-law, Frederick Schiller Faust, aka Max Brand.

Although Max Brand had been killed in 1945 as a war correspondent in Italy, he was prolific enough that two novels per year were published until 2001, at which point the publishers had to rely on reprints. Before moving off to "cover the war" as a reporter, Faust-Brand also had a prolific career in films, writing the scripts for his own Dr. Kildaire novels and other assigned features. His formula for story telling, you learned from Bob, was The Good become Bad and the Bad Become Good. You put this to the test any number of times, rereading the Max Brand Westerns and watching his movies.

Over the years, you have more or less strode into your own formula, if you may call it that. It first came upon you as you wrote mysteries, stumbling badly when it came to motive, as in Why would Character A kill Character B in the first place. As your writing moved you a step or two beyond pulp determinism and single-dimension texture, it came to you that a plausible motive could be to prevent someone from revealing information your character did not want made public. It took years for you to work through that calculus to the closest thing you have today, which is: Someone has something that one or more others want for themselves. Although you are still fond of mysteries, are indeed working on one at this very moment, you do not need motivation for murder because, with one or two notable exceptions, no one of interest has died in your stories, even those of a more mystery bent.

Someone has something another person wants. To get into your stories with the equivalent of an A-Pass, a character has to want something. What does she want? What does he, even the he who delivers your pizza, want.

From Iris Murdoch, you learned to string things out a bit, your last mention of the pizza delivery person Fed-Ex-ing you the image of the stringy strands of cheese that afflict pizza in the way ants afflict picnics or, indeed, that the sand from a beach afflicts egg salad sandwiches brought to the beach. Your stringing out, learned from Murdoch, is that Mike loves Mary, but although Mary is fond enough of John to have on occasion been intimate with him, Mary wants Phil, and of course Phil is not quite sure if he wants Mike or perhaps Estelle, or possibly both. Into that particular calculus, you might have Estelle wanting John, but when John starts talking about exclusivity as a parameter of their relationship, Estelle begins to think that Phil looks pretty good. Naturally all these people know one another to some degree. Let's say that John, tiring of the incestuous atmosphere within the group, breaks from the group for a time during which he becomes involved with Phyllis, with whom he more or less returns to the group, only to have all of them discover that Phyllis is either a threat, an object of intense desire, or a combination of the two. There, that ought to give you enough for a novel.

The one time you met Orson Welles in person, he sized up your early twenties swagger, and said, "A writer, eh? Well then, as a writer you should know that you can tall who a character is by the way that person walks. I studied the way old persons walk in order to present myself as a convincing Kane in his later years. You remember that."

You remember.

A Bubble or Two off Plumb

elliptical--an oval orbit rather than a circular one; a lengthening of or deviation from a conventional path taken by a formulaic novel or short story; behavior of one or more characters that is plausibly off orbit.

A character, scene, situation, or story may vary from the predictable. So far as endings are concerned, the adjective named after the renowned Russian short story writer and dramatist, Anton Chekhov, tells it all: Chekhov enjoyed and used elliptical endings in which the terms of the resolution were neither certain nor spelled out. It wasn't so much a matter of the good causes losing out to the bad ones as it was a blurring of the lines between good and bad, between happy and unhappy, fulfilled and unfulfilled.

In an elliptical story, a reader can come to the ending, there to experience feelings of dissatisfaction or frustration, but these feelings would be reflective of what the characters were feeling at the moment of conclusion. See the ending of James Joyce's short story, "Araby." See also "A Painful Case" and "A Little Cloud." None of the fifteen stories in the collection, Dubliners, is particularly circular in orbit nor, like many of the Chekhov stories, do they push a reader to a conclusion but rather let the events speak to the individual reader.

William Sidney Porter, writing as O. Henry, is one of the least elliptical of storytellers, relying on a formulaic ending framed on some reversal of logic or morality for its payoff. Such stories of his as "The Gift of the Magii," charming and warming in their intent, contain no hint of the ambiguity resident in the elliptical story or in the elliptical motive of a character such as, say, Bartleby in Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener."

A twenty-first century writer interested in a more uniform orbit and less ambiguity in his or her work would do well to compare stories of Joyce, and that other iconic Irish writer, William Trevor,with such commercially oriented short stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald as "Bernice Bobs Her Hair." Modern readers are less forgiving of being led by the author toward a conclusion than readers of genre magazines. Even then, modern readers expect an eliptical approach such as found in the works of Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, and Raymond Carver.

Right of Way: Behaving with Intent

being right-- an existential sense of certainty of decision and goals expressed by a character in a story; a belief supported by relevant actions exercised by an individual or group; a conviction of moral certainty.

One of the few exceptions to the rule of all characters believing in the moral high ground their actions occupy is the absolute sense of their inability to restrain themselves from acting toward a particular goal they know to be wrong. Example: "I knew it was wrong to compromise my position, but I was desperate for the money." Another example: "I knew it was wrong not to tell her the truth about my past, but I so much wanted the relationship with her that I remained silent."

For writers who claim to have trouble with plot, the formula of each character arriving on stage with an absolute sense of being right is formula enough; it insures a clash of agendas. Characters in stories want in addition to their dramatic goals to inhabit the moral high ground of being right, especially in matters related to the arc of the story; they will go to great lengths to support their decisions and the rightness of their cause, using imaginative stratagems to avoid awareness of any responsibility for wrong-headedness, much less wrongful behavior. The great rallying cry of the tyrant, whether a household, organizational, or national tyrant is, "I did what I did for your own good."

Even though most serial killers tend to see themselves somehow as victims, they nevertheless justify taking lives by an elaborately argued sense of being right, a position one hundred eighty degrees away from the course of the heroic man or woman who uses a refined version of The Social Contract as a pole star.

Hint to the writer: Major characters want major things, are defined by them, wanting the objects of their desire to the point of initiating rituals such as homa fires, novenas, fasts, charms, and spells to enlist supernatural agencies in the rightness of their cause; they also invent rules or bend already invented ones. Macbeth was blown off course a few times, troubled by his conscience, but the mood passed, and Macbeth reasserted his rightness at the expense of Malcolm and, of course, his own conscience.


intent--one of three things a character comes onto the page with, a desire to cause something to happen or not to happen; the most important tool in the a character's toolkit, the others being backstory, and what the character was doing immediately preceding entry into the scene; a character's action relative to bringing to fruition his goal; an implicit sense of what the character will do to achieve his goal.

Equally important in the character- and plot-driven story, more likely to be overt in the latter.

According to

attribution--identification of who is saying, thinking, feeling something relevant to the story at hand; also a quality possessed by an animal, a person, place, or thing in a story; most common use, a direct distinction of who is saying what, perhaps even with the adverb or adverbial clause attachment of how the thing being said was spoken.

Even at the risk of repetition, the identity of the speaker or performer is uppermost, beginning with the reader knowing for a certainty who the narrator of a given scene is and at all times who the speaker is, who the listener is, who the one who acts is, who the one being acted upon is. This important standard prevents such awkward, difficult-to-unravel locutions as "She knew she would go with her no matter what she did or when she did it because it was her basic instinct to help her whenever she felt she needed help." The reader is literally so grateful as to forgive repetition of names, although this gratefulness does not extend across the board to careless, unintended repetitions, which do nothing but make the reader cringe (if the offense gets past the editor in the first place).

In the matter of attribution in dialogue, the verb "said" has demonstrated over a long history its neutrality, thus Jim said, John said, Fred said will not raise any reader hackles that might have been raised if Jim said but John remonstrated, and Fred averred. Thus do not keep at hand a list of synonyms for said, particularly avoiding expostulated, admonished, and uttered. Verbs that convey feeling are welcome in all other places than synonyms for said, accordingly do not let characters bark or growl; ululate is also a no-no, the main reason being that the word may appear to be an authorial judgment rather than from a character.

Unless the string of dialogue between two characters goes on for some time, it is not necessary to continue with the "said." If there are more than two characters on stage, the writer might consider burying the "said" in mid action or mid sentence: "This is not going to work," Fred said, standing, stretching. "We need another approach." In such scenarios, the writer will do well to pick a dramatic (suspense producing) place to break up the sentence. "This," Fred said, standing and stretching, "is not going to work. We need--" he looked about him as though tracking a fly unseen by the others, "--another approach." Yet another way to tack an attribution to a line of dialogue is with a sentence immediately following that contains action. "This is not going to work." Fred stood, spotted a roving waiter, and motioned him over to them.


formula--a recipe or pattern for a story; a means of linking reader expectations with a plausible outcome; a narrative device for producing accelerated risk and subsequent resolution.

Some examples of formula in story:

1. A sympathetic character struggles against great odds to achieve a worthwhile goal.

2. Sin, suffer, and repent.

3. Something happens and someone changes.

4. A journey and/or quest that produce unexpected results.

Often conflated with plot, formula is theme based, frequently traceable from culture to culture throughout human history, thus Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces but also the trickster, recurring in such diverse cultures as Native American and in the persona of Captain Spaulding (Groucho Marx). Other widespread themes: Man against Nature, Man against machinery, Man against convention. The operating factor in formula is predictability; if you add element A, the reader will expect element B as a consequence, thus formula makes the reader vulnerable to the possibility of surprise.

A narrative spoken of as formulaic is likely to be predictable, suggesting the need somewhere in the process for the writer and characters to collude against the expectations of the reader; narratives that are considered non-formulaic are often those that end with a resolving force that veers sharply from expectations, as in Thomas Berger's Little Big Man.

Consequence

One of the basic laws of physical behavior, at least on this particular planet, avers that for every action, there is a reaction of equal force and opposite direction. This law, which I was enjoined to memorize back in tenth grade physics, was introduced by Sir Isaac Newton and is recognized accordingly as Newton's Third Law of motion. Moving into the spheres of Hinduism and its adjunct, Buddhism, the same principals may be expressed as karma or, if you will, karmic law.

From the former, we get an introduction to other Newtonian laws governing the behavior of motion as well as a chance to meet up close the concept of inertia, a tricky governing property that effects the velocity and direction of a particular body of matter. From the latter we get an introduction to payback or merit badges. From the two combined, we get a glimpse into the part of story DNA called consequence.

Even though some modern short stories are little more than what was once called vignette, having less visible connective tissue than a more substantial and nuanced narrative, the most gossamer of them is nevertheless more consequential than what we call everyday life. For those who have played and played with dominoes, the concept of domino theory comes to bear. Dominoes, when arranged on their vertical and arranged in close order, produce the effective spectacle whereby the first domino to fall topples or triggers the next. A fun thing to watch because the pattern of deployment can be so varied. When story comes to a seeming stop, we may look to the arrangement of dominoes or events, adjusting their closeness, perhaps rearranging the pattern. This is better than one size fits all, this is the domino theory: the first domino to fall triggers the rest.


In drama, we have an apt analogy for the domino; the beat becomes an activity that triggers something, a response, an emotion, a suspicion. Drama is measured in beats. Of course time comes into play. Hold that for a beat longer, the director will say, probably because the director wants to sustain the effect the beat produces.

The complex relationship between beats and falling dominoes can be used to keep the reader's inertia intact, reading along, looking for something, something special, something intimate, a whisper, a hint, a bar or two of a song, a scent of something long forgotten but cherished nonetheless. These things call forth evocations of past times with persons seemingly forgotten until they appear now, shimmering in the intensity of remembrance.


In story, it is not one thing and then another, which is episodic. Nor is it one thing after another, which is formulaic and, after a while, predictable. It is one thing because of another. One thing as a consequence of something else.