Gambits

The sooner a narrative or essay attacks a sensory defense or recognizes a sensory need such as curiosity, the more likely a reader will be tugged into the gambit. Make no mistake about it; getting the reader involved is a gambit.

If the language of the previous paragraph is redolent of chess and strategy, it signifies positive effect is being sent forth. Reader involvement--getting readers to care--is a chess game of a sort, with orchestrated opening moves, including the potential sacrifice--not of a pawn in an actual chess game but the revelation of a secret, the flash of surprise, the unanticipated discovery that changes everything. A hint of any of these is the equivalent of an opening gambit.

The defense is a sophisticated mixture of suspicion, negative interest (read lack of interest), not caring what happens to the players--after all, it is well known that they aren't real. But suppose that sensory defense is breached? Suppose the Reader forgets about plausibility long enough to form some kind of relationship with one or more of the characters.

Curiosity is a wedge to get the arms-locked-across the chest of suspicion out of the way. We want to find out more. Want to see how X behaves in Y situation which is coming up. Doesn't hurt that one or more characters can be vulnerable; once our watch out response kicks in for a particular character, we want to see if he or she can safely avoid the emotional trap awaiting, a trap we know is there because we are, after all, readers, which means we know something of consequence is going to spring forth on a character whom we either like or feel a certain arm's-length antipathy toward. Basically the good guy will be hit in the face with a wet squirrel, the sleazy guy will be invited inside for an iced tea.

Everything you could possibly want in a character to whom you give your heart is to be found in the protagonist of Daniel Woodrell's latest novel, Winter's Bone. Bree Dolly is a tough outer shell protecting a loving, caring interior. She wants to get out of her life in a remote corner of the Missouri Ozarks, where her father has gone missing, probably dead in one of his drug-dealing misadventures. Bree has her mother, who is in and out of dementia, to care for and two young siblings, who are close, by her reckoning, to fend for their mother and themselves, allowing her to fulfill her urgent desire to join the army, get a start on making a life of her own. But legalities step in, forcing her to set out in search of her father before she can break free of family ties. It is not enough to say that family ties dog her every step; Woodrell, an elegant and poetic writer, leads us shivering through the Ozark winter on a quest with some unexpected menace. She is remarkable and splendid, you think as you reread her exploits. Her humanity outshines her natural beauty. As she shows one of her siblings how to first hunt, then skin, then cook a squirrel, you are aware of never knowingly having eaten a squirrel. Dozens of them live in close enough proximity to you that you could, were you willing to take more matters into your own hands, experience eating a squirrel. You know that you would do so for her, a safe enough bargain given she is a character, but she is real enough a character that you fantasy her presence.

This fantasy element is key; all you characters must in fact be individuals you more than construct, you fantasy. Until you read other of Woodrell's books, you had never eaten a fried bologna sandwich although you have in your time eaten countless freshly sliced bologna sandwiches. Woodrell made the fried version sound interesting enough so that you bought the first bologna you have purchased in years, then fried it, then plunked the results between slices of bread, in one venture with sliced onion.

All right, here is the equation. You do the things you do because many of them are the acts you are willing to move out of fantasy and wonderment into actuality.

It's that time

chronology--an arrangement of events in time, beginning with the earliest; a sequence of activities set forth at the time of occurrence; tracking a person, place, or process by its age and subsequent growth.

Chronology is to time as alphabetizing is to the alphabet, leading to some urban mythology among writers that biography and story must be set before the reader in time sequence, beginning with early, then working its way toward the present. Perhaps because they have been bored by strict chronology, readers have come to expect a severe stirring of the pot. Abraham Lincoln may well have been born in a log cabin in Hodgenville, KY in 1809, but most of the multitude of his biographies begin elsewhere, say as a young lawyer or congressman or even as POTUS. Novels often begin in medias res (see), working their way forward and backward at the hand of dramatic whimsy.

It is probably a good idea to know when and where characters were born so that a plausible background can be constructed for them, but the entire subject of chronology raises the better issue of the information a writer needs to know about a character as opposed to the demonstrable and implicit facts the reader knows and deduces. Entire mythologies have been created around such iconic characters as Sherlock Holmes and Sam Spade, but the original venues in which these characters appeared--dramatic narratives--do not rely on the mythology, they depend on the story.

Begin with a character's birth or some other significant rite of passage, if you must, but do not expect the reader to be as interested as you are, perhaps because the reader has not yet seen the character under stress or in thrall to some agenda, but equally perhaps because the mere fact of a birth, bar/bat mitzvah, christening, graduation is not of itself dramatic. The character George Amberson Minafer illustrates this point.

George is a principal character, you might even say a spoiler, in Booth Tarkington's novel, The Magnificent Ambersons. Named after his maternal grandfather, thus his first and middle name,

"At the age of nine, George Amberson Minafer, the Major's one
grandchild, was a princely terror, dreaded not only in [the]Amberson
[mansion] but in many other quarters through which he galloped on his
white pony. "By golly, I guess you think you own this town!" an
embittered laborer complained, one day, as Georgie rode the pony
straight through a pile of sand the man was sieving. "I will when I
grow up," the undisturbed child replied. "I guess my grandpa owns it
now, you bet!" And the baffled workman, having no means to controvert
what seemed a mere exaggeration of the facts could only mutter "Oh,
pull down your vest!"

"Don't haf to! Doctor says it ain't healthy!" the boy returned
promptly. "But I'll tell you what I'll do: I'll pull down my vest if
you'll wipe off your chin!"

That is George's introduction to us, from which point we move well back in time to the point where George's mother was engaged to a man much other than the one who became George's father.

A chronology is most useful for the writer when the work at hand involves the activities of a number of front-rank characters, some of whom may or may not know one another. In such cases, it is a useful guide for planning the order of scenes and, thus, the possibility of a particular character being able to appear in two successive scenes. Chronologies often provide alibis for suspects in mystery novels and, indeed, for stories in which sexual jealousy is a motivating factor.

Readers' Expectations

reader's first expectations, the-- reasons provided the reader by the writer of a story as well as the characters, incidents, and settings depicted within the story that will cause the reader to suspend disbelief; the primary state of the reader's mind when approaching a work of fiction.

Readers know in advance that a story is invented. On some basic level of awareness, the reader enters the transaction with the writer and the text with a conflict of interest in which he wants the text to become a rendition of reality while openly seeking any possible detail that prevents the story from appearing real. 

The invention must seem real in every detail; the characters must be plausible, their goals and plans to achieve these goals must resonate the sanity of conventional logic. Thus the reader notices anomalies, the green-eyed protagonist on page six who suddenly blinks her gray eyes on page nineteen; the subway stop in midtown Manhattan where in fact there is no such subway stop, a rifle or pistol of a particular caliber being afforded a range well beyond its real capacity, the winner of the baseball World Series of a particular year being rendered incorrectly. 

The reader does not object to the green-eyed protagonist on page six installing a pair of shaded contact lenses prior to blinking her now gray eyes on page nineteen, nor does the reader object to a wrongly placed subway stop in an alternate universe novel, possibly even thinking a subway stop at that particular location would be a good idea. Anomalies must be rendered to have a home in plausibility.

Thus the reader's first expectation is to be given sufficient dramatic, emotional, and physical information necessary to overcome the gap between actuality and projected potential. This story could be happening, this story is happening, these characters are real. The more skilled writers in our midst begin by nurturing a firm belief in their vision; if they do not have a vision, they add details in support of one, adding here, removing there until the vision clarifies. 

 They do not try to argue the characters, situations, and locales into being. Least of all do they rely on the sad old tropes: "But it really happened that way," and "But this character is based on a real person." The reader expects the writer to be right enough to dispel any doubt.

It is instructive to consider our individual lie detector, which usually becomes activated when we see attributes piled on a description of an event or quality, or when materials presented as facts cannot be attributed to reliable sources. Readers have lie detectors, but readers are fighting to believe. Their first expectation is to be able to do so.

The more convinced the writer is of the characters and circumstances in his story, the less likely he is to pile on attributes and stage directions and in fact the more likely he is to be taken at face value, right from the start.

A good place to begin engaging this reader expectation is with individuals who are in the midst of doing something that will lead to confrontation or, having already met the confrontation, started to cope with it. For convenient reference, think of Tom Sawyer's "solution" to having to white wash the fence, then set your own characters to work.

You Can't Exect Me to Believe That

speed bumps--events, descriptions, and reflections that impede the flow of story; a sense of stylistic devices waving their hands for attention during the otherwise orderly progression of a dramatic narrative; the jerky disconnect experienced by readers when writers are not careful about adding backstory, description, and the existential wondering of characters.

The thing to remember at some point in the telling of a story is that the narrative art is evocative, not descriptive; description has its place, usually in small doses, an occasional adjective or adverb, even a clause or entire sentence. There are specific times when the make and caliber of a gun, for example, or the year, model, and color of a car bring clarification to the narrative. A character's height or lack thereof, even some descriptive facial tic become not only necessities but tools in the greater process of evoking that individual's presence. Arrogant? Shy? Assured? Lazy? The overarching intent is to suggest. Ironically enough, some writers who should know better, fail to see the mischievous potential in verbs, relying instead on the adjective and the adverb.

One last pass in revision to "cure" adverbial abuse is a sure way to remove speed bumps.


revelation--a dramatic discovery, experience, or realization that has the power to change the vector of a story.

In a metaphorical way, a story is like a string of fire-crackers, each explosion adding to the collective effect, the individual pop of explosion being a surprise, the final one, the loud, enduring one being the revelation. Often expressed indirectly, through the medium of a front-rank character doing something that becomes a symbolic response, the revelation shows the reader the equivalent of a film or TV close-up reaction shot. In the novels of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, revelations were frequently spelled out in what writer Barnaby Conrad has titled "came-to-realize" moments, "and in that moment, she came to realize that he had been deceiving her all along." From about the 1980s onward, came-to-realize moments were replaced with a more outward display of a character having been struck by the lightning bolt of revelation, imparting less a sense of certainty and resolve, more of a sense of ambiguity tempered with probability. We readers would be certain that Character A knew Character B was wildly attracted to her and had been for some time, at the very least giving her a dramatic power over Character B, but we would not be sure by story's end if Character A were going to do anything about the revelation.

The payoff to Dashiell Hammett's much anthologized short story, "Two Sharp Knives," is an excellent example of how revelation can be used by one character to exploit another and how that exploitation can be used for dramatic effect on the reader.

In the motion picture, The Third Man, directed by Sir Carol Reed, the illusive and amoral Harry Lime has a surprise encounter with his chum, Holly Martens. They meet in the Riessenrad, the large Ferris wheel in the Vienna amusement park, the Prater. Looking down upon people beneath his high vantage point, Lime compares them to dots, then makes the wry, cynical observation that defines him and causes in Martens a revelation that has the effect of a line drawn in the sand between him and Lime, a line of morality over which Martens will not cross. "In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed — they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

One of the many revelations to be had from reading the stories of Anton Chekhov is his own understanding and portrayal of how revelation affects characters, and how their movements rather than their interior monologue suggest the outcome.


plausibility--the dramatic sense of a character, deed, or event being believable to the reader; a depiction of a character's agenda, motivation, or desire being an appropriate, life-like expression; a quality of realism and trust in a narrative and its denizens that helps the reader maintain a sense of belief.

Just because an event portrayed in a narrative actually happened in reality, that does not automatically grant it a license for plausibility; the writer must naturally believe the event and the characters, he must write about them in a way that renders them as dramatic forces, considering what they want and what they are willing to do to get what they want. A good portion of plausibility is found in vulnerability; when a reader sees a defect or longing in a character, it becomes easier to forget that the character is only a smudge of someone else's imagination.

Defensiveness

defensiveness--a state of being or quality of personality often found in fiction writers who read their work aloud at workshops, writers conferences, and public readings emblematic of an author's need to explain or justify, particularly in the face of misinterpretation, misunderstanding, or the inability of the reader/hearer to accept material as plausible or, indeed, to understand the material at all. An often unnecessary footnote-as-text or explanation used to justify a behavioral or moral position of the author and/or one or more of the characters.

Defensiveness has its etiology with the author's response to criticism, is often introduced with the assurance that "It really happened that way," which becomes a preface to a longer explanation. Defensiveness may be seen as the literary equivalent of a youngster, caught in a fib or lie, extending the trope with even more extensive and impassioned justification; it is The dog ate my homework, writ large to the point where the dog morphs from a Chihuahua to a St. Bernard and the homework was the first draft of a novel.

The presence of defensiveness in an author or in text is of itself a good argument for the position that less is more. The best approach for explaining or inserting behavior attributions: Let the characters do it. Let Bill tell us that Fred is unreliable. Doing so is a twofer in that the reader learns Bill's opinion instead of the author's opinion, and in the bargain, the reader learns that Bill is judgmental (and to what degree he is so).

Being assured by an author that an implausible trait or event happened in real life and the author was there to witness/overhear it carries about as much weight as a politician's campaign promise. The author's defensiveness on this point opens the door for the mischievous reader to ask the author, "Are you willing to put that in writing?" Fictional events are accepted by readers in direct proportion to the author's ability to write about them with conviction as opposed to with descriptive panache. In his remarkable novel, Wonder Boys, Michael Chabon asks the reader to believe among other things a protagonist driving about with the dead dog of is employer in the trunk of his car, of the protagonist being the only Caucasian present at a Passover Seder, rendered in flawless Hebrew by a group of Koreans.

Beginning writers and sometimes intermediate-level writers are so defensive about having included all the elements they believe to be necessary to float an effective story that they resort to enumerating all the things they did well, as though that behavior did not go without saying.

An effective approach to removing defensiveness from one's posture is to believe at all times what the characters are saying and doing, even if the characters are not at the moment telling the truth. Keep in mind the image of Falstaff being teased by Prince Hal, of young boys being challenged by their parents or supervisors. A story is not a court of law or a debate; you cannot argue your way to a favorable reception, but you can evoke your way. And the beginning of the path to evocation is through the strategic use of details--the very ones that impress you.