Loss

During the life you have lived this far, you have lost enough people and things to know that there is no way to cope with grief, much less any way to go about avoiding the effects it will have on you. Given your experience to date in dealing with what you have left before you while attending to the things you wish to accomplish and experience, the reminders of what has been lost could overwhelm your enthusiasm for the present and your strategy for the future. Thus you are left vulnerable, a not uncommon place to be nor one where you are by any account alone.

You are used to the shelf life of persons, animal friends, and things are running on time lines, causing you to accept intellectually the notion of lifespan, but even in such cases, the heart has its own ways of dealing with what the intellect knows, transcending time, space, and causality.

You are less likely these days to be on the Hollywood Freeway, but whether you are traveling in that area alone or with others, when you pass the Woodman-Avenue turnoff, your thoughts and an occasional comment are drawn to Sam, the cat who visited you and stayed with you as your writing career grew, then, because you were home most days, opted to be your cat, who is buried on the hillside area adjacent the swimming pool that once belonged to George and Patsy Bishop, who invited you to inter Sam there, not far from their own friend, Black, as a gesture of solidarity and connectivity among human friends that developed as you became first George's editor, then friend.

Sometimes, when you are in Santa Monica, you will drive past the house your parents brought you to after you were born, and only the other day, in a writing workshop, when a student read a portion of her novel, set in Santa Monica at a particular locale, you were able to instruct her to have her character walk across the street to 516 Santa Monica, which you know is now a Chinese restaurant, but which was not always so because it was a remarkable place in which your father attempted for so many years various means of making a livelihood, not the least of which was inviting speculation on the outcome of various contests of speed among thoroughbred horses, but was also given over to the refurbishment and resale of luggage and trunks owned by some of the first-generation greats of the film industry.

Sometimes, when you see pictures of yourself at earlier ages, you blink at the preponderance of hair, curly, abundant, expansive in its cowlick abandon. On other occasions, seeing a runner plying one of your former routes, you are transported to the sixty-to-seventy-mile weeks of your own with your then dog companion, Molly. The male pattern hair hair loss is of little grief; you are fairly comfortable with the you of today, but thanks to the titanium replacements for the hips you were issued at birth, the best you could hope for would be half-hours on the treadmill at the Y, half-hours better spent in the pool.

As though it were a lathe, grief has in its way turned and formed your life, allowing you some voice in shaping outcomes and choices made after some loss, reminding you at all costs to cherish the immediacy about you and the manners in which you embrace it and those about you.

One of the great things a close and dear friend once said about you as he drive you to one of your destiny points of having your first hip-replacement surgery. "Because I've had the operation on my knee, I can appreciate how you'll come out of this, absolutely pain free. But

I'll always remember the way you walk now, as though you were trying to navigate through a pack of friendly dogs without stepping on one."

Loss Leader

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

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

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

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

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

Sorry for Your Loss

Many characters are built around a single, compelling need or desire such as Dorothy Gale's The Wizard of Oz desire to be back home or Jay Gatz's The Great Gatsby desire for Daisy Buchanan. Your own characters are wrapped around the armature of someone having just achieved what he or she yearned for and now dealing with the consequences. You are also pleased to note that some of your characters are built on the construct of individuals who do in fact yearn for someone or something they know in advance to be running well behind the short odds of many gambles within reality.

This pleasure in noting such a trend comes from the more global observation that most persons on a daily basis are brought to grips with the notion of things, or at least some things, being unavailable for a considerable time, possibly even forever. Reminds you of the moments some five years back when the anaesthesiologist had his thumb on the valve that would cause to circulate a numbing and sleep-inducing substance into your blood stream prior to having some malignancy removed from your otherwise thriving body. You turned to Dr. Koper to ask, "Will I be able to play the cello when this is over?" and to hear the surprised Dr. Koper respond, "I don't see why not," then deliver the punch line, "Funny, I couldn't play the cello before."

After the Great Hormonal Attack of the teens has run its course, most of us wake up at an hour just short of what we'd consider a sensible hour, portions of the mind already allotting time to chores, necessities, surprises, and leisure activity. In direct proportion to ABT (age beyond teens), the definition of sensible hour is revised. You have long since begun to consider "sleeping in" to mean seven, even having revised sleeping in to mean six thirty, with sensible being six. Hail and farewell to all that, even though you would not mind an occasional sleep in. And if there is a writing project in the water, launching bottles of champagne having been smashed over the bow, five or five thirty are luxuries. All this is recognition of the increasing number of things plopped on our plates by the hands of Fate, which have come to resemble those resilient cynics, the grizzled ladies who were servers at the cafeterias of our high schools and undergrad years. We did not realize it at the time, perhaps because the hormones of the Great Hormonal Attack shielded us from the slightest hint of metaphor; we did not realize that each scoop of scrambled egg or mashed potato or macaroni and cheese was anything more than what it was, that in time hands of Fate would in deed plunk things on our plate we might want to refuse but could not.

And so we are trying to find ways to get our characters launched into action again, making actual and mental excuses to actual individuals in reality who have expectations of us, friends, for instance, or mates, or students, or employers. There is one dean to whom you can--often to your regret--refuse nothing, which opens another can of worms, as in the why of this being so. To be sure, she is enormously attractive, but to write this lack of ability to refuse down to mere lust is to miss an enormous range of response. There was one producer for whom you also had no ability to say no, I'm busy with other things, but there were other factors such as our having been school mates.

Snow-shoeing across the drifts of logic, you come back to the original concept, knowing you will be disappointed, refused, lost in some logistics shuffle, not likely to achieve your goal today or tomorrow or perhaps at all, perhaps on the cusp of success but then surprisingly interrupted. Do your people carry such weight in their fanny packs? Do they have some sort of batting average where, as in yet another metaphor, baseball, one for three is an A? Do the persons you create show any effects of unrequited love, any frustration at not being able to play the cello, any sense of living with the consequences of an error or mistake or simply bad judgment? Are they being stalked by a neurotic creep such as yourself? Do they ever find themselves drawn along as though a VW Beetle, caught in the slipstream of an eighteen-wheeler on the freeway, unable to cope with the pull? Do they recognize such weaknesses and walk around the block to avoid contact with the temptation? Have they ever amassed more than twenty-two rejection slips on a particular story or been told, thanks for coming out but you're not what we're looking for? Have they ever been turned down by the love of their life, driven across town to get the early diner discount only to be told that the early diner dinner has sold out, taken the photo of a lifetime only to discover the cap was still on the lens?

If they have not set out on these ventures, you must ask yourself what they're doing in your story in the first place? But you probably already know the answer to that one: these things have surely befallen then; you simply have not taken the time to listen.