Letter to a Young or Middle-Aged Writer vol. 2

Dear Young Writer,
Some day in the finite future, you will be writing one or more letters to one or more young writers, carrying forth a grand tradition.  This does not have as much to do with the proliferation of writers of all ages as you might think, nor will this state of events preclude you from writing letters to middle aged writers or, indeed, writers in Seniors centers.

The fact is, you will be on the cusp of learning an important truth known to all arrived writers, which is to say writers who have found a voice if not actual publication:  Every letter you write is a letter to yourself, which makes the action of letter writing less than the unselfish gesture you hoped and supposed and more a need on your part to figure out some vital aspect of craft that has been keeping you awake nights.  The inherent wisdom here is that everything you write is a letter to yourself, a fact that should, if you have any understanding of the situation, prevent you from lecturing others how to do things your way; the best you can do is demonstrate how you do a thing.  This is not a license to assume you know the only way to do a thing or necessarily the best way, rather the best way for you...so far.  This means you are willing to see yet another way to do the thing in question even though you think you do the thing in question pretty well now.

When I was a bit younger, marching with grim determination away from youth and into middle age, the more thoughtful among those opposed to war came forth with the meme Suppose they gave a war and nobody came.  I always liked that approach to thinking about things; it has led me directly to proposing to you the potential meme Suppose you wrote a letter and nobody read it.  There is a supposition, perhaps because so many of us wish to be writers, that all we have to do is write it and it--whatever it may be--will be read.  Sitting as the editor in a number of publishing houses wherein I was paid variously every week, twice a month, every month, and when there was enough money to pay the help, I had as a part of my job description reading enough of a number of manuscript submissions that I could reasonably describe why I quit reading or why I read the manuscript all the way through, and why I might chose to recommend this manuscript be published.  From these experiences I can say that the ratio of manuscripts I read to the number I read and wished to be a publishing principle thereof was significant in its balance away from fifty-fifty.  It is not all that much an extrapolation to carry that ratio to the present, wherein I speculate that about two or three percent of all that is written is worth reading. Moving forth as is my wont, I speculate that few letters, including emails, are worth reading closely.

I have tried to put my best intention into this letter to you; have tried to consider this letter not a condescension but rather a sincere form of greeting that would not, were you to have sent it to me, be offensive or off-putting. 

The Best Defense

Doctoral and masters degree candidates defend their thesis, politicians defend their voting records, defense attorneys defend their clients.

The matter should stop there. Okay, so homeboys defend their turf. For sure, that ought to do it, but many writers also want to get into the act, creating a good deal of mischief and, alas, nonsense. Not the least of the many writer defense gambits is the "but it really happened that way" trope. There are other defenses, to be sure, the vagrant adverb or tacked-on adjective, just to make sure. Make sure of what? Why, to make sure the reader "gets" the writer's intent, of course. As if the reader could not be trusted in the long run, could not pass a simple quiz, needed at all times to secure help from Cliff's Notes. Ah, another matter, this. Readers are not to be trusted--only to the cash register line, where they buy the writer's book, but from there a dizzying, downward spiral of not getting authorial intent. Accordingly, the writer--already well along the path of being a control freak--must step in to make sure.

Given a particular word length to which a writer must adhere, at least one hundred twenty-five thousand words, for example, the writer will invariably come up short. A hundred twenty-five thousand! What are you guys trying to do to me? But try telling the writer to chill, let the story tell itself, let the characters advance the story. Go ahead, try. If you are not a writer, you will not sympathize with the potential for anxiety here, the vast cosmos of differing interpretations orbiting around a single scene, an exchange of dialogue containing only a few sentences. Writers will be quick to tell you how, in any instance, the text and subtext of an entire scene might be taken apart by readers, reassembled into something the author might not even recognize, giving them the right to make the preemptive strike of defending the work through narration and dialogue, but more often yet by mere description.

The appropriate response from a writer whose meaning has been car jacked by an over-zealous reader is "Oh, I see." Perhaps even, "How interesting." We should expect to see attitude, bias, intelligence, humor, and yes, pathos, too, in a work of fiction without having to suffer through mini pamphlets justifying their appearance within the text. Res ipsa loquitir; the thing--story--speaks for itself. Or should. I had no interest in writing this originally but my friends, family, colleagues at work, fellow Boy Scouts of America, said I ought to get it down on paper. Well, you might have done just that, but if the work is to reverberate with its own independence of spirit, you need to remove the arguments you use to keep it moving before your inner eyes and let it go forth as the story it wants to be.

Boundary: Where No Good Character Fears to Tread

A boundary is a demarcation of limit or extent; it is the edge of a terrain, landscape, attitude, or principal. In dramatic narrative, boundary is a limit of behavior a character sets for himself or which is imposed either by other characters, conventions, ethics, legal principals, or a combination of these. Significantly, boundary in story represents the terrain beyond which a character resolves not to venture, but of course there would be no story if he or she remained true to his/her word.

Boundary represents the grown-up version of a child being limited to a specific yard or block or neighborhood which must not be transgressed without parental approval or guidance of some sort. Boundary may be physical, moral/ethical; it is often the place where story begins, with a character having just defied boundary limitations in action that represents breech of authority, faith, convention, or ethic. In such cases, a significant layer of the story is the dramatic consequences the character faces, particularly as pangs of conscience or lack of such pangs have influential effect on the subsequent behavior of the character.

Some of the more basic instances of boundaries being ignored would involve a young girl of a particular religious faith sneaking off to date a boy of another, proscribed, faith, a sort of Romeo-Juliet situation in the making; perhaps of an individual resorting to shoplifting or some behavior coming under the general heading of white-collar crime. A more sophisticated violation of boundary would be an occasion in which an individual of either gender required a form of heart surgery in which one or more valves needed replacement. Make the patient an orthodox practitioner of Judaism or the Muslim faith and factor in the replaced valve coming from a pig, thus transgressing boundaries in a significant way. What are the consequences? Would the individual be banished from synagogue or mosque? How would the individual self-esteem hold up? What would such a person then do that the same person would never consider before the scientific intervention?

The mere mention of the word boundary opens wide the portals of story potential: an individual who is seen beyond his or her boundary may be seen variously as an adventurer, a fool, or someone who is hopelessly lost; an individual who strays from the boundaries of convention in which he was raised may be seen as a rebel or a lost sheep. A boundary in fiction is set up or already exists to be trespassed upon or stepped over or completely obliterated; it is a challenge of culture, type, convention--anything that restricts behavior, knowledge/understanding.

If we begin with two characters--your personal argument for openers--then add conflicting agendas and social or moral boundaries, story is bound to happen; the twenty-first century equivalent of the free-range chicken.

Speak the speech, I pray you

The spoken word in a dramatic narrative is a welcomed respite from the conversation of the workplace, school, home, and all those places in between where we attempt to convey our needs and dreams to others. Although these spoken words have subtext and make some attempt at nuance, they are not dialogue and they are precisely not dialogue because no matter how we yearn or try to be characters, we are merely ourselves. As ourselves, we speak conversational English, trying to enhance the result with wit, possibly even humor. We go about our daily routine approaching moments when we wish we had dialogue to offer but at the same time mindful that dialogue does not work in the quotidian any more than conversation works to any effect at all in fiction.

The secret is to understand that dialogue in fiction may be given the sound of conversation, but it and trees falling in the forest have in common the need for a hearer. You might say each, the tree and the dialogue, needs a listener or a reader. If conversation between two or more individuals becomes too focused, the participants become self-conscious or distracted.

We have in common with our characters the trait that causes us to say one thing while meaning either its very opposite or an understatement of our true intent. In conversations, we have devices to defuse the sentiments and bits of information put forth. In dialogue, we speak at these elephants in the living room, their appearance beginning to appear before the reader as though intent had sprung a leak and was spilling slowly forth.

None of this means we cannot have an enjoyable time with friends or that dialogue needs to be confrontational; in either case we should be understood and the motives of our characters begin find places through which to leak. If, in a conversation, we allow that today wasn't particularly eventful, in fact even a bit boring, this can be an excuse for another round, a commiseration, or some attempt at raising the level of conversation to something more substantial. If in a story nothing happened that was particularly eventful, the reader should have the option to think one of the characters was lying or perhaps failing to notice something momentous, which the reader has already seen.

There is a thin line between writing for yourself and writing for others. If you are sincere about writing for yourself, there is a sense of urgency straining to get the concept down in enough detail so that the material lives as a vibrant set of notes for you to reconsider at a later time. If you are writing for others there is more likely to be some rhetorical device such as irony or question, beckoning you and a potential reader into the labyrinth created by the collision of ideas. Worst of all, if you are writing to show off, there will be name dropping and stunning flights of vocabulary, each a testament to acquaintances. Thus this warning to yourself: You do not have to convince anyone how many persons or words you know, merely an eagerness to listen, to engage in conversation or argument. Or more briefly, ideas--not fustian.

There is by now a built-in detector of such things that catches you on the second or third pass, surely the fourth. One by one, names of friends are set aside unless their inclusion is a part of some joke, naming, for instance, a grammar school in a short story the James D. Wolfe Elementary school, which sounds sincere and real enough; after all, you attended the john Hancock grammar school in Los Angeles and the John Howland grammar school in Providence, RI; your junior high schools were named after an educator, Ida M. Fisher, in Miami Beach, and a naturalist, John Burroughs, in Los Angeles. Why wouldn't James D. Wolfe hold up, even if he is in real life the creator and head writer of Laugh-In? But naming a grammar school after a friend brings the school to life, just as naming a seller of Chinese replica wrist watches Conrad Burnaby amuses you no end because in real life Barnaby Conrad knowingly wears a Rolex replica he bought for five dollars on a trip to China.

It is difficult to tell for sure how some of your friends get into your stories; perhaps the guiding principal is mischief and fun. The momentum does not stop with this definition. Mischief and fun quickly translate into attitude and voice, which are essential ingredients so far as you are concerned. You are fairly certain to use USC as the venue for a novel you are toying with after the current one has had its way with you, and the only invention will be the name of the department in which the main action takes place, a name that will be influenced by your attitudes and experiences. It seems appropriate to you somehow to have the department quartered in the Doheney Library, which is real enough, and which was funded in some measure from profits realized from The 1922-23 Teapot Dome oil scandal. This fact and your awareness of it prompted you to be invited to meet with a dean at the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences to defend you thesis that all the buildings at USC are named for crooks. The Dean quite properly named at least two that are not, but you were able to counter with two more that are.

Names, attitude, and voice impart nuances the writer wishes to convey. Plots matter, story matters, but the voice behind the intent matters even more. Even were you to research a topic so thoroughly that you could be said to know it, another writer could use the same incidents from real life to convey an entirely opposite attitude and yet another writer could use them to provide a yet more apposite vision.

If location is everything, voice and attitude are trump cards.

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.

So Predictable

predictable--a narrative condition in which the reader correctly guess the intent of a character and the outcome of that intent; dramatic circumstances in which there is little or no nuance, where the reader is neither surprised nor challenged.

If a reader is truly caught up in a story, he will have taken sides, begun to root for the success of some and the failure or worse (humiliation) for others, indulged in the trope of reader as matchmaker, seeing potential romantic entanglements. Additionally, the reader will be able to take cues from the text much as a dog about to be taken for a walk will take cues from the master putting on a jacket, clanking house keys, or reaching for a leash. Certain situations in story provoke the speculation that something--a disaster, a reversal, a surprise--is forthcoming. The shrewd writer, which is to say the writer who understands the dynamics of story, will be aware of these anticipations, then prepare for them in a way that will provoke surprise and keep the reader off guard and guessing to the point of not being able to take time away from the reading.

Never take the reader where the reader wants to go. Readers do not wish to be left standing still, which they may easily feel themselves to be if they are presented with laundry lists of details, forced to listen to long, philosophical discussions, subjected to weather reports or travel-writing descriptions of scenery. At the extreme least, readers want to feel as though they were eavesdropping on some form of intimacy; better still they wish to feel compellingly caught up with the execution of a particular character's agenda.

It is the task of the writer to make the reader feel the intensity of the characters and their involvements with the issues of the story. Anything else is predictable.

Even if you are not a fan or fancier of the suspense-based thriller, it is worth critically reading at least one novel by Harlan Coben, comparing it will one by Lee Child and Nelson Demille. Couldn't hurt to read Annie Proulx's The Shipping News, which presents yet other variations on the theme of surprise and unpredictability, then consider Louise Erdrich's A Plague of Doves.

Dealing with predictability in story provides another set of reasons to consider and absorb acting techniques from the likes of such actor coaches as Stella Adler, Sanford Meizner, and Uta Hagen, wherein actors learn where to find within themselves the emotions, gestures, and visions of surprise. In this sense, surprise is the discovery the character makes about himself/herself in times of weal and woe--discovery that before our eyes transforms the predictable into the truly remarkable.

Simple Solutions to Big Problems

newly wed housewife, the--a fitting trope for the insecure writer; an attitude in which the writer is overly concerned at the paucity of motivational and physical detail for dramatic action.

Think of the newly wed preparing her first meal for company, then try to superimpose the image on the vision of a writer wondering if the intent and details of a story are clear enough in definition. Likely result: a control-freak attitude toward description. The exact moment an activity or intent begins. A Vogue Magazine description of what the characters are wearing. A laundry list of adjectives and adverbs. Perhaps even an instance or two or six of authorial intrusion.

None of these tactics are fatal; F. Scott Fitzgerald employs them with great regularity (Tender Is the Night and The Great Gatsby), the difference being he gives them a dramatic context that has meaning beyond mere description. These tactics give a better sense of the world into which Fitzgerald has invited us to eavesdrop. Look also at the way his dialogue and narrative work, moving you at a comfortable pace from action to action, weighing each scene down with the tang of such emotions as apprehension, suspicion, jealousy, despair, need.

There is no problem with over-describing each action between characters, each setting, each nuance of each exchange of dialogue. This approach helps articulate the inevitability and authenticity of a story. The problem comes with allowing the prompts and attributions to remain when there is sufficient activity and attitude to reflect the drama that is under way.

Hint: cast your narrative and scenes toward the goal of an emotional presence, using verbs chosen for their personality, hinting at implied meanings, picking adverbs with great deliberation, avoiding the temptation to double up on adjectives, eschewing simile and metaphor that distract from the work at hand rather than illustrate it.

How do I love thee? Let ME count the ways.

don't tell the reader what the reader already knows--a needless repetition of dramatic events already seen; repetition of dialogue exchanges; belaboring motivation, character flaws, and implications.

At some point in the equation, the reader has to be let beyond the red rope barrier to the entrance to the story, allowed to find a preferred seat, and participate in the story being told, in other words, allowed to infer. This comes at a price to the writer, who is likely to have been stung in other dramatic venues by readers who completely misinterpret, then go forth to make erroneous assumptions about the motivations of the characters and the intent of the author. Writers are enough control freaks as it is to take this challenge lightly, but the fact is that writers who over manage to make absolutely sure the reader "gets" his intention is in fact dumbing the story down and not taking necessary risks.

Hint: Always risk the possibility that the reader will understand. Information exchanged between two or more characters in dialogue may be summed up tersely in narrative later on. Example, "He told her the details of his conversation with Fred and Willie. She had no questions, seemingly understanding why he'd acted as he had."

Similarly, don't remind the reader with stage directions that Fred had a furious temper and was likely to fly into murderous rages. Let the reader see theme, intent, and dramatic inevitability the way, for instance, John Steinbeck did in his depiction of the character Lennie in Of Mice and Men, reminding us through incident of Lennie's unintentional potential for inflicting painful consequences on the very things he found attractive and comforting.

Monday-morning quarterbacking, instant replay, and perspective

retrospect--looking back at a moment or era in time; a point of view containing information or knowledge of the consequences of past action; a narrative or personal attitude arrived at after the fact; Monday-morning quarterbacking.

A significant use of retrospect comes when the details of a novel or story are filtered through one or more characters giving historical versions of a story, allowing them to reflect attitudes or subtexts of regret, pleasure, or moral superiority over past events. This use of retrospect becomes one of the writer's first major decisions, coming right after who or whom the narrator(s) will be. The issue now becomes at what rate of awareness to set the story; is it meant to seem as though it is taking place in the immediate present or at some remove, after all the issues and permutations have been sorted out. Thus the necessary decision, was the narrator naive, reliable, or unreliable then? And,indeed, is the point of view is retrospective, has the narrator remained naive, reliable, or unreliable?

Huckleberry Finn was told from the narrative eye of a young boy. One of the few anomalies is the likelihood of his being literate enough to have composed any narrative in the first place. His honesty and pragmatism quickly override any tendency to suspend belief. His approach to all matters seems appropriate for a street- and country-wise person of his age, a pragmatism that makes him all the more likable and seemingly truthful. Certainly he is in touch with his emotions. Would Huck have been more convincing in his depiction if events if he'd picked up the Conklin fountain pen ( the one with which Mr. Twain began the first draft) in his forties or fifties to reflect back on the events? Most likely not--even more likely, the story would not have been so resonant. It needed, in fact, to be told as it was, as though it were happening to a twelve-year-old boy in the immediate now. As readers, we "forgive" him his literary abilities as we jump directly into his explanation of the device by which he came into being in the first place, "You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer..."

Twain uses in the opening sentences a stunning device that actually paved the way for Primo Levi and his frequent trespasses into postmodernism. "...but that aint no matter," Huck assures us, and indeed it isn't, thanks directly to that street-smarts honesty. In the second sentence, Huck tells us, "That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly-- Tom's Aunt Polly, she is -- and Mary, and the Widow Douglas is all told about in that book, which is mostly a true book, with some stretchers, as I said before." By the first paragraph, we're in, willing at that early point to trust Huck's retrospective account of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Shortly after the retrospective account begins, Huck tells of Aunt Polly's sister, Miss Watson, "took a set at me now with a spelling-book." Thus between Miss Watson and the soon-to-appear Tom Sawyer is Huck put on a collision course with literature. Mostly Huck's street smarts win out and mostly we are left with the precious relic of him at the age where he lit out for the territory ahead because Aunt Polly and Miss Watson wanted to civilize him, and he couldn't stand it.

The focus from immediate present to retrospective shifts one hundred eighty degrees as the unnamed narrator of Daphne DuMaurier's unforgettable Rebecca addresses us as directly as Huck did: "Last I dreamt I went to Manderly again. It seemed to me I stood by the iron gatge leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter, for the way was barred to me." We now know exactly where we stand in regard to the framework of time, and we have as yet no reason (nor will we have any) to doubt the reliability of the narrator. True enough, she is in at the payoff, telling us, "...it was my lack of poise that made such a bad impression on people like Mrs. Danvers. What must I have seemed like [to Mrs. Danvers] after Rebecca...?" This retrospective assessment makes her all the more believable a narrator. Unlike Huck, who wants to light out for the territory ahead, this individual is sitting on the veranda with her loved one. "I fix my dark glasses, reach for my bag of knitting. And before us, long as the skein of wool I wind, stretches the vista of our afternoon."

In law and in writing, the perspective of timing and intent are everything. Scenario One: Bill goes to the neighborhood pub to collect a bet from Fred, who denies having made the bet in the first place. The two get into a scuffle in which Fred, alas, does not emerge alive. Scenario Two: Bill takes his gun with him as he goes to the neighborhood pub, intending to teach Fred a lesson if Fred decides once again to renege on a bet.

Worst case in Scenario One would be justifiable homicide. In Scenario Two, worst case is murder.

The differences between retrospective and present time perspectives are significant, just as significant, as Mark Twain reminds us, as "The difference between the almost right word & the right word is really a large matter--it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning."

I Only Meant to Warn You

intent--a purpose for performing or not performing an action; a governing motive or reason for a character doing something in a novel or short story; the desire to do or become; the planning and performance of an act or the planning and performance of an opposition to an act or behavior.

A character may step forth in a story without intent, only to be drawn into a crisis point is reached and a decision--you're either with us or against us--is required.

A character may step forth in a story with intent, only to have that intent abruptly and directionally changed.

A character may intend to remain neutral through some crisis point, only to find the position of neutrality beyond his grasp.

Each of the previous three examples places a character in stress, which may evolve into jeopardy. Each example also places the character well within the landscape of story.




jeopardy--a danger, risk, or peril existing as potential for a character; the state of vulnerability a character experiences before, after, and during the making of a decision; enhanced possibility of complication or danger a character lives through while navigating toward solution of the problem that landed him in the story in the first place.

The jeopardy may be the internal one of losing faith in a person, discipline, plan, even a philosophy; it may also be the risk of falling in love, getting into further complications, causing more damage or being caused more damage; it is the consequence of trying to move through the literary equivalent of a mine field while wearing snow shoes.

Many stories begin with the spirit-of-the-stairway comment of the narrator to self--I should have known better. The more productive characters never know better, rarely know enough beyond maintaining the status quo before being mired further in some activity or attitude where they become even more firmly stuck without traction.

In ways, jeopardy is cousin to risk, a state where additional things, worse things, can arise as a consequence of a character having taken some step, whether to avoid a problem, cope with it, or entirely flee from it. A narrative without some front rank character being in jeopardy of some consequence or in some risk-free circumstance is yet to be a story.

Jeopardy becomes the return of the pigeons, the consequences of the thing that should not have been done in the first place. Now it is worse; the character could have opted out (but there would have been no story). Now there is a price to be paid.

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.

Goal-oriented Charactrers, Loitering with Intent

goal--a desired achievement or destination for a character; an ability, excellence of performance, or arrival at status desired and striven for by a participant in a story; recognition or reward for performance.

Goals cover a wide variety of targets, a reminder that their very existence imparts attitudes and judgments about those who strive; in story, they are particularly visible in their absence. Characters need goals to gain admission into the terrain of story; a character who wants nothing or who says he has everything he wants needs to either reconsider or get used to an undramatic life. In Walter Tevis' The Hustler, Fast Eddie Felson set for his goal being acknowledged as the best pool hustler in America. Eric Stoner wants to be the best draw poker player in Richard Jessup's novel, The Cincinnati Kid. Becky Sharp wanted to rise up the social ranks in William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair; Dorothy Gale wants to get home in L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz. All of these goals completely recognizable, primal in their nature.

A character with a goal is a character that readers can root for or against, either option being a method for drawing the reader into the story and its outcome. The reader may be overwhelmed by Ahab's goal of revenge upon the whale, but certainly the implications of Ahab's vendetta propel the reader deeper into the murky consequences of Moby-Dick. Similarly, the reader of Les Miserable is drawn along by Inspector Jaivert's obsessive goal of returning Jean Valjean to prison, while Caspar Gutman's goal of securing the alleged riches of the statue in The Maltese Falcon sets a swirl and eddy of consequences that cause murder, duplicity, and betrayal.

Goal is the capstone of story. What do the characters want? What are they willing to do to get what they want?


intent--dramatic inertia; a character's plan to perform or not perform a specific act; the desire or need to do or not do a specific thing.

All characters come on stage with some form of intent, which is either abetted, challenged, ignored, misunderstood, shunted/deflected, producing a spectrum of possible responses which will either become apparent or submerged in subtext. Without intent, the character's dramatic purpose is left undefined. One character may intend staying at a party only for a few moments, another may come with the intent of seeing another character, yet another may intend to ask a particular favor of a particular person known to be attending the party.

What happens if the character's intentions are blunted or overcome or perhaps shift because of some surprise or reversal? For the writer, knowing a character's intent in a particular scene or situation is similar to broadcasting an aura about that individual, an aura that contacts and collides with the intentions of other characters.

See agenda.

Characters with Intent

Whether or not you're working from outline or the sense of being so immersed in your story that your characters are talking to you, sending you sensory messages about where they want to be and what they want to be doing, there is a moment between the ending of the last scene and the beginning of the next when you might with good reason stumble.

The moment of stumble may arrive when the new scene begins, not with a dramatic sweep of intensity but rather a confused moment or two when the characters seem dazed, as though having eaten a too large meal, suffered through a boring lecture, or worse, entered the wrong story (See Mario Vargas Llosa's remarkable Aunt Julia and the Script Writer.)

To prevent this beginning-of-the-scene stumble, you need some preparation. A simple laundry list will do it, a list for each character:

1. What is the character just coming from--what had he/she just done?

2. What is the character doing right now?

3. What is the character's immediate goal? (What does he/she want right now?)

I am particularly reminded of my mentor the actor telling me her experience on opening night when a fellow actor, appearing in his first Broadway play and having been lackluster in rehearsals, seemed not to be waiting in the wings for his cue to go on, then was reported to have been seen out in the alleyway, chinning himself on a fire escape. At length the actor appeared, sweaty and breathless from his exertions, gasping for breath as he delivered his first lines. Thus did Marlon Brando "prepare" himself for his portrayal of a character who was nervous and excited. Here was a character who felt his nervous excitement, then behaved accordingly.

The character moves into the scene with at least the subtext of having recently been doing something else, possibly not wanting to be here.

The character is here with intent in place.

Some of us may have our characters scoot about like the bump cars in an amusement zone, exchanging meaningless dialogue, more or less warming themselves up for the essential movements and behavior of the scene; others in our midst may have made a story board or, as I do, rely on a few scribbled notes on a three-by-five index card. All these and other similar roads lead to the payoff of fully informed characters starting in fully engaged presence.

It might illustrate the point for our writing self to stop for a moment before we enter a new scene--any new scene--in our world of reality, then take note of what we are bringing to it in terms of past history, attitude, agenda, hoped-for action, perhaps even a sense of what we will do after that.

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.