Not all goal-oriented stories are about soccer, hockey, or basketball

When there is something you want, some goal you wish to achieve, some platform you think to attain, the usual action is to plan a strategy which, if effective, will bring your goal to hand or reveal some missing steps or considerations necessary for another try.

So far, so good. You are aware of It, the Thing, of wanting it in your life, indeed as a part of your life. At this point, the language becomes burdened with signs of your agenda. You are as aware of wanting It as Macbeth might be, wanting to up his social standing. You are effectively aware of scheming to bring It within range. Congratulations! You are now a mere step or two from taking action. If you have planned with care, schemed, as it were, you can see into the future where you understand the risks and that you may fail as well as you might succeed. Now you are at the point of no return where, depending on the goal you wish and the necessary efforts, you see either success or failure. It is either go or no-go and the willingness to persist until some outcome is reached, at which point you learn to live with--accommodate--the consequences of having gained or lost.

No real surprises here; this is more or less the standard approach to pursuing a goal, whether the goal is asking X to go out with you (as a step toward effecting a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship) of making a career decision. A number of outside elements appear when the It, the something or someone you want will skateboard over lines drawn in the sands of your own conscience, the contemporary canon of moral and social standards, your own appraisal of the risks and consequences involved.

A basic play of human behavior attends the decisions you might make as the goal of the It originates in what some psychologists might call the id; let us here call it the Inner Child. Make no mistake from the nomenclature, the Inner Child can also want things of a sexual nature, complex or, if you will, simplistic enough to transcend social lines, as in the TNW syndrome, better known as Thy Neighbor's Wife.

Having allowed yourself the awareness of the signals sent forth by your id or Inner Child and spent some brief or protracted moments assessing the goals and consequences, you are likely to nod knowingly at yourself before doing what those athletic young men on aircraft carriers do when a plane is coming in for a landing and their angle of approach or ground speed or some other factor is amiss; they wave the plane off.

The matter of having wanted does not necessarily end with the wave-off; it has attached itself to you and influences your behavior in multifarious ways, not the least of which is the score you keep on the things you have wanted and for some reason or another can't have. There was a suit offered on sale in the latest Paul Stewart catalog, and yet another in the Ben Silver catalog. Elegant in their simplicity and comfortable drape, they struck you immediately with a pang of regret for not having, even though the last time you wore a suit was in July of 2008, even though there are two suits already hanging unworn in your wardrobe and when, oh when would you wear yet others? Do you go forth to rue the lack of occasions in your life where it would be appropriate to wear suits? Do you stubbornly wear suits at inappropriate times? Do you tell yourself that should an occasion for wearing a suit arise, you would already be prepared? Do you rather tell yourself, okay, time to move along to something of more consequence inasmuch as life is measurable by other things and standards.

This is the long way around the block of the goals and achievements made during a chunk of one's lifetime and the absolute likelihood of the greater number of disappointments, the need to hone and nourish the two or three things you set your heart and mind upon, then pursue with purpose and enthusiasm and, if possible, even a smile. It is about the way it is virtually impossible to walk about with neutrality or lack of interest but at the same time to see one's self as a person who samples the opportunities of life rather than one who sees losses and missed opportunities as a consequence of being a victim.

Share, share the fame

 On those days where you have early classes or meetings with clients, or some household transaction of necessity, you may easily find yourself arriving at ten-thirty or eleven o'clock as though on automatic pilot.  True enough, you are likely to be coping with your own moods and the moods of others, making eye contact, ingesting information (and coffee), processing relevant information; you are in your behavior anything but an automaton.  And yet, there is a part of you missing.

The missing element makes itself known in a manner similar to a cat wanting to come in, then go out, or a cat wanting to go out, then come in.  The missing element is the more gradual awakening to such gradual steps as Sally requiring a shot at the back yard, putting on water and milk for coffee, discovering where it was you last had contact with your trousers, considering your list of priorities for the day ahead, even toying with vagrant ideas that may be related to work you have undertaken or are in fact contemplating.

You read somewhere--Natural History, perhaps,or The New York Times, or Scientific America, or even The London Times Literary Supplement--that the individual is coping with hundreds of millions of sensations and bits of information per hour, minute observations related to the senses and to memory and anticipation, the aggregate of which has a strong influence on the mood and behavior of the individual at any given moment, even such seemingly automatic moments where the individual is preparing emotionally and physically for a morning class, meeting with a client, or need to greet the technician from the cable TV/Internet service provider.

It is your own sense of things that the individual is quite literally sorting out the universe, coping with it, explaining it to himself, much as the quantum physicist is, on a grander scale, trying to explain and articulate for him- or herself the structure and origin of the universe.  It is also your sense that you have ventured upon writing as your own personal means for understanding and explaining the behavior of the universe to yourself, setting up trial balances and problems that will help you.  One such enigma that presented itself this morning was wondering if post traumatic stress disorder translated with equal, superior, or inferior intensity to those individuals the United States once considered enemy combatants.  We will not investigate here the trail of thought that led you to wondering thusly; it is amusing in its own way and may perhaps provide a platform for another essay.  You did extend the wonderment to the point of empathy, bringing to your imagination a sous chef in the Viet Nam restaurant on State and Victoria Streets here in Santa Barbara, formerly a Viet Cong, now living and working in apparent comfort in his adopted country but haunted by the wartime memories of things he did to American soldiers in combat and to innocent Viet Nam citizens.

Although you appeared to be turning over elements of a story in the lathe of your mind, you were primarily trying to explain aspects of human behavior to yourself.  A number of prompts throughout the years have reminded you of this intent, but the intent seems at times to suffer the same fate as the loose change and pen knives you carry in your pockets, slipping into the cushions of the chair or sofa where you often perch to read or sift through a meal, investigating it as though it had some other hidden information it could reveal to you.  There is nothing, absolutely nothing wrong with reading for pleasure or eating for pleasure or listening to music for companionship rather than the potential spectrum of emotion and understanding it may offer.  You do, on occasion, read, eat, listen for pleasure, nevertheless gaining more than mere physical nourishment.  But you have also trained yourself, for good or ill, to read, eat, listen for understanding.

Writing, particularly in fiction, is a way of dramatizing the conditions for understanding in the kind of dialectic that brings sense to you, a quality of having considered varied, often opposing, forces to the table.  The times you most regret are the times when you struck off into the unknown with only one map or guide, meaning in effect that you had no other awareness available to you.  When you made choices, even blundering choices, you were more likely to have stored comfortable memories in your toolkit, memories that were not mere clutter but, indeed, tools to help you in future transactions.

For some time, you shied away from processing materials such as this in the defensive position of not wanting to appear to yourself as being selfish in your desire to publish your discoveries.  You were haunted in some ways by individuals you admired, whose strengths you aspired to, but in whose lives you saw flaws or missteps you were hesitant to duplicate.  As matters now stand with you, publication is neither issue nor problem; you particularly wish to publish the nonfiction work that is now ready to go out into the world, this as a gesture of sharing.  There is enormous ego in it, just as there is enormous ego in you, but the enormity is leavened by the awareness that the information, the candied fruits and nuts in that confection, may well be ignored or yawned at.  You have the satisfaction before hand of having written and revised in ways that allowed you to enjoy each morsel.

Here you are, then, explaining the universe to yourself, doing so by writing it in one form--nonfiction--or another--fiction--then moving on to the next explanation.  In many ways, through a great series of accidents, you have become the teacher you wished to have had for yourself.  In this role, you incorporate the positive characteristics of your dreams but you also embody the things in other teachers that enraged, outraged, and bored you.  You are all of these as well as all the positive.  You do try to edit out the negative, but you are by the very nature of things embarked on a course that leads to disappointment.

From which you arise, dust yourself literally and figuratively, then set forth with a new work, paraphrasing Sam Beckett's "Fail again, only next time fail better," with "Explain again, only this time, explain better."

A Hall Pass

Not all that long ago,you were thinking about a landscape in which everything was at rest, or to put it another, more dramatic way, in a waiting state of stasis, that is, in a state where things are happening that may not yet be evident. A huge boulder, say, is in the process of becoming a driveway path of small pebbles. The boulder does not know this yet. For one thing, boulders don't even know about the pathetic fallacy; they remain what and where they are, benign, inanimate, awaiting such fates as the elements will provide.

Bring a person into that landscape, with a boulder or two awaiting their fate, perhaps a few trees expressing volition to become newspapers, even a stream, on its way to overflowing its banks, working up a little erosion damage. The character who wanders into such a setting may want nothing more complex than a good rest or a night's sleep, perhaps even a drink of water. The moment a character enters a scene, we have a pretty good sense in general of what's going to happen. Something will actually go wrong or appear wrong enough to cause the character concern. That is, of course, if we're talking story.

A character goes to a landscape to meditate or walk the dog or go fishing or watch the aurora borealis. Not a story. Event. Even intent. But no story. Story doesn't arrive in the scene until at least one other event occurs. Someone is already there. A huge bear appears, looking for food. An unanticipated event that produces an emotional response such as suspicion, disappointment, fear, frustration. Sure, the responses may be more positive in nature, but sooner or later, something has to go wrong in the sense that the things seeming so positive now have huge red tags of consequence tied to their big toe.

So you look at the landscape, wondering what it is about it that will give you the slight hitch necessary to move you from the real world, which has its own set of troubles, to the place of story, which has more sophisticated troubles that date back to the times when we barely had a language, traveled in small groups, and hoped to hell we were following herds of animals who knew a thing or two about how to locate food. The writer likes to think of himself/herself as a tour guide under such circumstances, but it often works out that the writer is the last to know, reinforcing your own belief that you have to listen to the characters and how they read the instructions emitted by the landscape.

Least of all does the writer know, which is the advantage of being a writer in the first place. If you knew, you'd not be all that much of a storyteller. Or to put it another way, whatever you are now as a storyteller, you'd be less than that if you went into a new story knowing what the answers were and what the best route to follow is. You want to be misled, to make wrong turns, to have your preconceived notions stood up on end.

In the long run, it is even better for you if your characters don't all think you have such great people skills, instead telling you egregious lies or saying things to one another behind your back. Your characters remind you of yourself when you were a kid, eager to move away from parental oversight so that you could go forth to screw up big time, then come back to write about it.

Watch yourself, kid; it's a story out there.

dramatic

dramatic--having the inherent suggestion and quality of story; implicit content of elements that produce conflict, interaction, goal search, revelation and reversal; a narrative that contains one or more characters in pursuit of an agenda or embarking on an internal or geographical journey; a quest which will involve reversal, frustration, and competitive exterior forces.

A successful dramatic narrative reflects the goals and intent of characters set against the counterpoint of the writer's personal goals at the time of writing. Thus stories may reflect an attitude of cynicism, pragmatism, sadness, bitterness, expansive optimism, and transcendental anticipation. Differing readerships will be particularly drawn to one of these qualities or perhaps even a combination of them. You might liken the physics concept of water, seeking to find its original level, to the literary concept of story: readers seek to find their target level. One thing all stories have in common is a voice or governing personality. It properly should be the goal of the writer to seek its own level, which becomes the pressures informing the voice, timbre, and intensity of its persona.

On a basic level, to say of a work that it is dramatic is to say of it that it is act-able, performable, readable. On a more nuanced level, to say of a work that it is dramatic implies that the work has skillfully designed ventures of men and women engaged in dealings with the enormous varieties present in life. If these dealings appear piled on or contrived, the landscape in which they appear may be spoken of as melodramatic, exaggerated, even operatic. Thus does balance come into the equation of which dramatic is an integral part.

Ambiguity: The definite maybe

ambiguity--a vagueness of meaning or outcome; uncertain attributions of meaning and/or quality; dramatic conditions in which the intent of characters and consequential resolutions are uncertain.

Ambiguity hovers over much twenty-first century short fiction and, to a slightly lesser extent, the novel in much the same way the June marine layer visits the California Coast of an evening. Everyone in the neighborhood is aware of a presence, often a thick, gloomy presence, other times merely dense enough to obfuscate immediate details. Truth is, things--details--can and do gt lost in there, leaving the reader to speculate. Thus one of the unspoken goals of modern fiction--keeping the reader closely enough involved to speculate on the ways things could turn out and, later, on the way things actually did turn out.

One recurrent theme in short and longform fiction is the possibility of mischief in the interpretation of one character of the intent or behavior of another. Another recurrent theme is the fact that long-term relationships are just as vulnerable to this mischief as the exchanges of information among recently introduced characters.

A significant existential question of the human condition has always been: "But what does it mean?" The modern writer asks that question with some frequency, invariably in italics to emphasize the implied intensity. This is not a carte blanche for the writer to steer away from definitions or from resolutions, but rather a nudge to remind the writer of the irony inherent in overemphasis; the more characters insist on openness and clarity, the more suspicious they become. A useful trope to help the twenty-first-century writer grasp the importance of ambiguity in a story is found in the character who asks, possibly of the Fates, possibly of him or herself, "But what do I mean?"

Some helpful guidelines may be found on a first-come--first-served basis in the stories of William Trevor, Alice Munro, Charles d'Ambrosio, Tobias Wolff, Francine Prose, Lorrie Moore. As much as it is possible for characters to know who they are and what they want, the characters of these writers have some answers. Not to forget that the reasons for liking characters have become increasingly more--well, ambiguous.

Risk

risk--the potential for and probability of an unwanted outcome from a venture; the chances a character takes when acting or purposefully not acting on a decision; the possibility of a character having enhanced vulnerability as a consequence of a prior act.

The major defining trait of a character in story is agenda (See also goal, purpose); close on the heels of agenda comes the risk the character will endure in order to accomplish the goal. Faintness of heart may hang over a character, posing a threat not only of failure but of shutting the story down. A character who acts in spite of the faintness of heart is keeping the story and his hopes alive. Readers want to root for a character who has been pushed by circumstances to risk all in favor of the stated or implied goal. Think Gatsby for a few moments. Think Ishmael, signing on the Pequod if he'd known in advance of Ahab's agenda. Think of Dorothy Gale taking on the chores assigned her by the Wizard if she'd known his humbug status in advance.

An integral element of story is the epidemic sense of things going wrong to the point where the characters are often waiting for the next round of things that do go wrong, followed by the existential question, What next? Equally integral to story is the drive and willingness of characters to take risks in such story atmosphere.

If the risks in a given story are not of sufficient weight or consequence, the reader will come to realize soon enough that the story is in essence a matter of shooting fish in a barrel.

A little less fish, a lot bigger barrel, please

fish in a barrel--a metaphor for removing the need for skill in a contest or competition; tilting the conditions of a confrontation to a degree that insures easy solution; purging the doubt of final outcome from a dramatic narrative, thus an easy outcome from an endeavor.

This trope is an important one for the writer to remember. Readers do not want--cannot abide--results that come too easily. Even now, in the twenty-first century, there are those who think David got off too easily in his "contest" with Goliath, whom they try, in their revisionist history of the legendary sling-shot event, to represent as overly given to hubris. While it is true that readers respect and admire skill and cunning, they want these qualities to bring results after some pattern of trial and error. The scientist should not be allowed to come forth with a cure for cancer after spending only a week or two in the lab; she should have some added burden or incentive as a goal or as part of an emotional partnership approaching that of Capt. Ahab and Moby-Dick or Santiago and the great marlin.

The actual phrase "shooting fish in a barrel" has many possible meanings, beginning with the obvious question, is there any water in the barrel? Fish in a waterless barrel would likely be dead, making them a stationary target for the shooter. If there is indeed water in the barrel, discharging a gun into it would probably kill all the fish, thanks to the reverberation of sound. The common denominator in the concept is the absolute ease of outcome. The applicable dramatic denominator here is: Never take the reader where the reader wants to go, which is to say make things such as risk, misunderstanding, reversal, and surprise exponentially more likely to join the party as the story progresses.

A fish-in-a-barrel narrative is one in which the goal was not exquisite enough or was achieved too quickly and/or too easily, leaving some doubt in the reader's mind whether it was actually a "real" story or merely a shaggy-dog story. When a reader comes upon a story where some stated goal is achieved early on, the reader intuits the sinister hand of consequences, reaching metaphorically out to bring big time complication raining down on the protagonist. The reader waits for these complicating consequences.

Thomas Hardy rode into the twentieth century with a number of notable anti-fish-in-a-barrel novels, notable among them Jude, the Obscure, in which the protagonist had a specific goal for which he was emotionally and intellectually qualified and which, had Horatio Alger been the author, Jude would have at last achieved. But Hardy was Hardy, and Jude's seemingly reasonable goal met some fatal complications.

Bottom line: Something has to be given up, lost, or at least tempered before the goal is achieved, an observation that can lead to the ironic ending comparison between what has been gained and the price paid to achieve it. Not all endings are or need be ironic, yet it is nice to know that irony is there, waiting to be invited in.

I'll pass

passivity--not in motion or operation; grounded in the inertial state of rest; a condition of lack of will; inert; lacking agenda or goal,thus reliant on outside energy or influence; having little or no motivation.

As a quality or characteristic, passivity is an attitude a character can least afford. Except for brief moments when a character may be stung by defeat or grief or fear,passivity precludes the energy and directed motivation toward goal that a character needs to sustain story. Dramatic narrative cannot proceed without a tangible vector of goal or a plan set in place to implement a goal. Characters have to want something; they need to want something with enough passion to be driven toward achieving that goal--either that or they need to be shown as they respond to the frustrations preventing them working toward that goal.

A frustrated housewife is one kind of story, finding significant numbers of readers. Add to the housewife-as-Sisyphus (See) the element of that housewife being a musical genius, capable of extraordinary composition and concert-level performance ability on an instrument, and the inherent story takes on yet added dimension and significance.

The Golem of Prague represents an example of a mythical character who was created from mud, given a mission, which it achieved, then was deactivated or rendered passive. Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus (appx. 520 BC--=/- 430) is best known for the episode in his life where he was yanked by circumstances from relative passivity to the surpervisory operation of maximum leadership to accomplish one goal, whereupon he retired from his leadership position, returning to a passive, contemplative life.

Characters are best identified by their goals. Those who seem to lack ambition or drive do not inspire empathy from the reader--unless the reader experiences the revelation that a seemingly passive character has shifted inertia for a particular reason, a reason that immediately is seen as an obstacle to be overcome.

One of the best obstacles to set before a character is frustration (another is guilt); the unquestionably worst obstacle to confront a character is passivity.

Compare and contrast: Oblomov (1859)by Ivan Ganchorov, and Ragged Dick (1867) by Horatio Alger. The eponymous Oblomov was an affluent member of the Russian landed gentry, a nice enough fellow who was given over to sloth and procrastination to the point where he remains in bed for the first hundred fifty pages of the novel. Author Ganchorov was clearly using him to make a statement about nineteenth century Russian nobility. The protagonist of Alger's novel is also a metaphor. Dick is a poor shoe-shine boy who, through unceasing hard work, clean living, optimism, and determination, rises from the ranks of poverty into the middle class status held forth as The American Dream. An immediate point of difference: Oblomov was passive, Ragged Dick was the very opposite.

Your Place or Mine

decisions-- the outcome of choices of narrative voice, characterization, setting and other dramatic considerations an author must make when composing a story; the courses of action a character in a story must take after being boxed in an emotional corner or when planning a strategy to achieve a goal.

The writer is faced with decisions related to where to put things in, when to leave them out, how to render them, and at what length. Characters are--or should be--driven to the wall in developing and implementing strategies that will lead to achieving some goal, even the survival-oriented goal of seeking a minimum-wage job as a stepping stone to something other. 

The operant word here is other; characters who are comfortable or fulfilled are not Petri dishes for the growth culture of story. Indeed, story only begins when such a character comes face to face with a situation that proves the opposite.

Writers are sometimes overwhelmed with decisions, causing their literary agents and/or publishers no end of concerns. It might be argued with some measure of success that writers who are comfortable with their characters are less likely to get maximum performance from them.  But writers who are uncomfortable with their characters and reach within themselves for extra measures of empathy and restraint are more apt to produce iconic characters (See) who remain in the reader's memory, long after the very details of their particular story are forgotten.

The decisions writer and character must make represent the common denominator between the two.

Hint: Both writer and characters have secrets. Since both are linked by decisions they must make, why not have them exchange secrets. Writers are often accused of betraying the secrets of family, friends, and professional associations. 

 Why not make an even four by having the writer accused of betraying the secrets of his or her characters? And just to play fair, think of ways characters can rat out their creators.

Character Traits

iconic characters--memorable individuals in dramatic narratives; presences in stories whose attitudes and bearing outweigh the plot of the narrative.

A significant test by which to assess the memorability of a character is to determine what that character wants--really wants, then decide what that character will to to achieve the goal. Why is Hedda Gabler so memorable and what did she want. Why is Lady Macbeth so memorable? Perhaps for her insistent urge for power, but just as likely because of the first words out of her mouth when Macbeth returns to her, having already had one change of heart before screwing up the courage to murder Malcolm. "My husband!" she affirms.

Consider this list of characters culled from the ages:

Antigone: she was willing to put her life on the line for insisting on doing what she believed to be right.
Anton Chigurh: not just an enforcer or a hired killer but as well a control freak of epic proportions.
Becky Sharp: known for her bigger-than-life opportunism.
Captain Ahab: at the very least, he was so bent on revenge that he overrode his religious tradition and risked damnation to achieve it.
Captain Spaulding: with more than his greasepaint eyebrows to call him to our attention, his every act flies in the face of comfortable tradition and convention, and wouldn't we just like to get away with that?
Florentino Ariza: from Love in a Time of Cholera, his aching, unrequited love for Fermina Daza sends him through intimate encounters with over six hundred substitute lovers.
Fleur: this haunting presence of many a Louise Erdrich short story and some novels is incarnate a stunningly attractive Native American woman who years for a return to the old ways; she has the will and, seemingly, the magic to back up her presence.
Lewis and Clark: two military men who set forth on an assignment and in the process discovered a continent.
Jane Eyre: she rode plainness and intelligence and love into an archetype who spoke to Rochester across the Moors and to us across the eras.
Joan of Arc: a teen-age girl who hears voices and leads armies.
Omar Little: an impressive presence from the recent TV series The Wire, he made his living by robbing drug dealers. He had a code of honor, an ethos. The mere thought of him evokes memories of the sounds when he took to the Baltimore streets: "Yo! Omar commin! Here come Omar."
Sisyphus; from the Greek myths, a man who drew as punishment an eternity of the frustration of performing a meaningless task.
The Wife of Bath: an epitome of womanly force, spirit, and earthy intelligence. She would not be denied. Compare her to Erdrich's Fleur.
Wile E. Coyote: character write huge. Armed with Acme Products, Coyote is the patron saint of characters with established goals.

We must not forget the specific things these estimable icons want. To want something as abstract as freedom, independence, even love is to miss the point entirely and to miss the thrust of the true Valhalla of Characters: a specific something or someone; none had the time nor patience for abstractions.

Politics as Usual

politics--approaches to the use of power; systematic applications of problem solving; means by which divergent groups or individuals attend ethical, moral, and social issues; points of view regarding group and individual governance.

All characters have politics, whether they know it or not. A basic approach to determine a character's political views comes from investigating that character's family background, both in terms of the character's general political views but also from an assessment of that character's gender, the number of siblings, and when that character arrived in the family. Individuals who are adopted may have yet other political dynamics including a curiosity to learn the identities of their biological parents. Orphans or characters who have broken relations with family have yet another political as well as psychological dynamic.

For the writer, knowing the political Petri dish of the character's psyche is vital, providing information about the character's attitudes, responses, and readiness to form alliances and enmities. Of equal significance, a writer needs to consider his or her politics or lack of interest in the broader sense of politics, then investigate personal senses of awareness within family, friend groups, workplace associates, and ties with former classmates.

Of all the many influences likely to emerge in the themes of a particular writer's work, the writer's personal and broadband politics rank close to the top of the pyramid, influencing choice of characters and the types of conflicts in which those characters engage. As examples of writers whose politics or political interests seem to shine through their pages, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, John P. Marquand, and Margaret Atwood inspire close study.



quest--a major goal for any character; an intensified apprenticeship undertaken in hopes of achieving virtuoso ability; a search, study. or other organized pursuit with a goal in mind; a systematic and insistent research; an attempt to find a meaning, relic, or understanding.

Sometimes a quest is for a tangible, physical place, other times it is the means by which a point of view or personal commitment is achieved. Everyone in fiction is on a quest. Often, relationships in fiction are abrogated because of conflicting quests, thus the importance of knowing what each character in a story wants, how seriously, and to what lengths the character will go to achieve the end results of the quest. Murder? Perhaps. Betrayal of principal? Perhaps. Treason? A likely possibility.

A popular add-on to the quest being achieved or realized can be found in the irony of B. Traven's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Was Charles Rider's quest in Brideshead Revisited any the less ironic? And what about the payoff of The Maltese Falcon? For a writer, knowing what a character wants is a major step toward realizing a memorable story; it is no less important for the writer to know how the character might behave having seen the quest through to completion. Would Gatsby have been truly happy with Daisy? For that matter, would Daisy have remained content to be with Gatsby? And while we're on the subject, Miss Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy each appeared at the conclusion of Pride and Prejudice to have arrived at a goal of a companionable, partnership-type marriage, but would they remain so ten years down the line?

Thus quest, the dramatic boulder of Sisyphus, poised at the peak of a hill.

The Installment Plan

Most stories have within their movement from the Point A of beginning to the Point B of ending a buried prize. This prize is in large part the thrust of the story, the thing the main character seeks, attempts to earn. Some stories allow the main character to gain the prize, others, especially in the short form, have a kind of close-but-no cigar Point B, others still arrange for the principal character to reject or miss the prize and in so doing achieve an even greater payoff.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the longer the story the more articulated the prize becomes, primarily because there's more room to describe it but also because we have a greater chance to see what the prize means to all concerned. Churl that I sometimes am, I like The Maltese Falcon-type ending because there is always less of it than meets the eye. The characters have inflated the prize beyond measure, in the bargain making us wonder if it is as good as has been represented. My own philosophy is that nothing is exactly as advertised; it is either much better or much worse. Accordingly I tend to respond well to endings happier than expected or worse than anticipated; better still I like those in which the principal character strives for a goal, fails, strives again, achieves the result, then discovers it is not all that much of a prize and in the bargain gains some insight, some wisdom, some connection that is the more enduring prize.

In modern times, the short story holds forth a prize that is often not tangible, has some overarching destiny that will take place off the page and into the reaches of the reader's imagination. Because the story is in fact short, there is less room or time to dwell on the exactitude and complexity of Point B. This quality of opacity is necessary because of the very nature of the short story--nevertheless the story must deliver an emotion that feels like some kind of pause if not an actual finality. They all lived happily ever after is so eighteenth and nineteenth century. It is not that we readers are cynics, denying characters in short stories happiness, rather it is that we are more aware of the lurching, tidal quality of life, of events, of the enormous interconnectedness of the basic social groups we deal with, the family, the work force, institutions, races, genders, professions. Nor are we readers cynics when we look at a happy ending only to wonder how long it will last before these same individuals are beset with another set of problems, options, and choices.

The modern novel is more like the installment plan, payments made before the debt is retired and the prize is fully owned and thus subject to admiration, buyer's remorse, or buyer's ingenuity. How much interest was paid and how did that effect the view of the prize once it was owned free and clear?

Major themes of the human condition have as their fulcrum the inevitability of loss, which is a tangible offset to gain. Weights ad balances, losses, gains. What is the prize of any story? A temporary shelter in the form of a relationship, a friendship, an accomplishment involving people, a sense of having given, having learned, having withstood some test. Weighing against all this is the ultimate loss and how we approach it, how much of our posture and stature we are able to pass along to those we care about and, as writers, to those we will meet only through the medium of our words and stature.

For every prize we strive for and achieve there is the price of its eventual loss,which pales in comparison to the price of never having striven, never having reached whether by hand or mind toward the hand or mind of another.

Goal Tending

Antigone's goal is to bury her brother.

Her uncle (King Creon) has as his goal the very opposite; the body of Antigone's brother shall remain unburied as a payment for the young lad's disloyalty, a crude but effective reminder that nobody messes with Creon.

But as you have every reason to suspect because the story is named after her, the eponymous heroine's goal is the key to the story and its outcome.

Even though it may seem patently apparent to you from the outset, do not hesitate to ask yourself what is the goal, the prize, the payoff that awaits the person whose story it is. Even so extreme an ending as Jack London's short story, A Loss of Face, pays off with the events the protagonist set in motion, events that begin with the protagonist's death, then increase in intensity to the full, uproarious hoot of triumphant laughter.

All right then; it goes without saying that the first thing you have to know is Whose story is being told? Everyone is running about in the early drafts, wanting the rights to the story, and yes, you might have actually begun thinking it belonged to one or more of the combatants. But you you know better. You know who is the driving force, the one whose behavior (or conspicuous lack thereof) drives the payoff. You know what that person had to do to set the ending in motion. (Hint: Antigone tried to bury her brother again.)

You may be helped enormously in your deliberations, machinations, and dramatic deviousness by knowing what that individual wants, why that individual caused the events of the story in the first place. Dorothy Gale wanted to get home. That was her prize. Paris wanted the most beautiful woman in the world. Forget the fact that she was already married. Paris wanted his prize. the rest was, as they say, The Iliad. What does your character want that he or she should go through the intricacies and potential risks set in the way?

Revenge?

A tangible prize?

Status?

Justice?

Satisfaction?

Understanding.

All these have the potential for being effective prizes the protagonist seeks.

Of course there is no guarantee that having completed The Trials of Hercules or the trials of Perry Mason or any other trials, that the protagonist will continue to feel like a prize winner.

But that is another story, perhaps even the very next one.

Hint: Once you have a clear picture of the prize the protagonist seeks, you have the equivalent of a ten megapixel photo of that character, worth more to you than, say, The Picture of Dorian Gray.