Raising Your Voice

You grew up listening to, learning from, and being conditioned by voices. Not all these voices were in your head. More to your fortune, you were able to distinguish which of those voices were in your head and which weren't. The unfortunate elements of the equation appeared when you began to question those voices, internal and external.

You floundered for a time, swamped by the agenda and diversity of the internal and external voices, reaching temporary relief as you began to chose which of these to heed, which to ignore completely, and which to challenge.

One such voice you did heed spoke to the decision of what to do with your life, including suggestions for specific behavior and philosophical approaches. Like some of the ancient seafarers who in their crude craft pushed beyond the point where land was in sight, you were often out beyond your ability to navigate. In retrospect, you recognize how easy it was to listen to voices that sounded authoritative--and some of them probably were--rather than taking the time, risk, and energy to educate your own to serve as your pole star.

Raising your own voice is often a last-ditch effort, something embarked upon with a frustration undershot with anger and general helplessness, emerging long after you have considered the more basic elements of your craft such as plot, character, scene, and dialogue.

By its very nature, life presents us all with a clamor of voices, many of them from family and loved ones, many among these clamoring out of professed love and concern. Even among these, however, are voices that are best left unheeded; they are the existential equivalents of those Sirens who lured Odysseus's sailors to a distraction of doom. You often are forced to navigate through foggy terrain, relying on the sonar blips of your own voice calling out for a sounding in the existential night. Thus it pays to have a voice you recognize.

It is and will continue to be a great error in navigation were you to confuse the confidence and certainty of your own voice with the hubris of someone who believes he has nothing more to learn. I am out here at night, you seem to be saying, once again out of sight of landmark, much less landfall, calling forth "I am lost" in hopes your voice will be heard.

Notions

A plot is an elaborate schematic of events, leading to a conclusion that in infused with some resident emotion such as comfort, satisfaction, disappointment, redemption, dread, revenge achieved, justice done, justice waiting to be done. There are others, of course, including permutations just as in undergraduate courses there are the comparative studies disciplines and the compare-and-contrast essay questions on examinations. All these results produce one form of emotion or another in a degree sufficient to satisfy the reader who has read clear through to the end.

Plotted stories often cause characters to behave in ways that baffle their creators, the bafflement coming from the simple fact that the creator has lost touch with the simple causes why characters really do what they do or do not do what they ought and don't.

Many of us slide into plot-driven stories in our waking, non-writing lives, a term advisedly used in the plural because we so often each of us lead more than one life.

It is no easy thing, going about in a story, wanting something desperately to the point where we have been made a bit tetched in the head over it, wanting something or someone or some condition beyond what our reason tells us it is good to want a something or someone, or some condition. Part of the difficulty comes from the need to focus on being obsessive and at the same time compulsive/ The more forces in real life challenge and frustrate us, the more frustrating our goal or desire becomes, compounding frustration and irritation. We go about wearing our game face all the time, in waking hours, in sleep, and in the dreamless sleep where we are not permitted to see the causes, effects, and consequences.

The kid who is asked what he or she wants and who snaps in retort Nothing, or I don't know! has already been worked over by the system to the point of not daring to remain in touch with the desired goal, which essentially means not having any hope at all. The kid who is still full of hope is in danger of being mocked by chums or elders for such overt optimism. You'll see what your optimism will get you.

Well, here you are, whacking through the weeds of middle age, still optimistic that every story you begin will at some point be brought to a finish, that it will sooner or later find a home wherein it will be published, and from there a modest readership who will in some way or another be affected by it. You can't realistically ask for more than that, but you do; you don't so much want the story to change the world as you want it to change you. You have no tangible idea what you want to be changed, perhaps your temper, although without that you might become too serious and not be able to topple with laughter and ridicule the things that frustrate and enrage you.

You might somewhere harbor notions of changing how others see you, which presents the danger of you wanting to manipulate the outcomes with real persons as opposed to characters. This leaves you the heel of the loaf, metaphor for changing the way you see yourself. would you really want to do that, just as we were getting on so well?

You are left a character in life, following no scripted outcome. The horse you ride is no fine Arab, scarcely even a working quarter-horse. Ah, a hobby horse. Grown man riding the hobby horse of his urgent wish to tell stories. Not, perhaps, the classiest horse in the barn, but one that suits you. You'll take it. Giddyap.

Open Season

Two authors of the twenty-first century are deservedly well known for the compelling intricacy of their plots. Harlen Coben and Lee Child are synonymous for their ability to get a lead character into an enormous, complicated jam at the outset. Their recommendations alone are a guarantee of sales for the books of other authors, their by-lines on a title as good as a Triple-A bond rating. Nevertheless, the opening for each of them to beat, arguably the most charged and amazing opening chapter in the English language, came from the nineteenth century, 1886 to be precise. Although the author's intent was commercial, it was invariably literary and social as well. More than ten years earlier still, he'd produced a scene that gave us another technique commercial and literary writers have cherished ever since, the cliffhanger.

Opening velocity is a term used to describe the speed and intensity with which a novel or short story begins, using situations, moral and emotional pressures, and discoveries to connect the reader with the characters and to induce the reader to sign on for the entire trip. Readers of different sorts of fiction find themselves alerted in one way or another to the speed and intensity of opening velocity, sometimes with recommendations from other authors, occasionally with a double entendre or enigmatic title, and still other times with a skillfully executed blurb suggesting such enticements as sex, corpses, grinding suspense, amazing revelations, and perhaps a hash of all of them. Browsing through the titles at big box book chains, you begin to wonder why publishers don't establish a numerical index similar to the number of megapixels on a digital camera. This novel rated 9 opening velocity by the Indie Booksellers of America. Or indeed, why some reviewers, such as those who sell their blurbs for newly released movies, don't have a numerical system in their written commentary. Moby-Dick. A stunning 9!

Books did not always begin with such velocity, meandering rather than rushing along the narrative path, taking in the scenery narrative, describing the clothing and manners of the characters, forming a relationship with the reader, moving edgily toward the plot as though it were an attempt to collect a debt from a friend. Such a writer, indeed the writer of the two novels from the first paragraph, was Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), whose more famous novels, Tess of the Durbervilles and Jude, the Obscure, were also written and published before the twentieth century began, and were thought necessary elements of our high school education before we were allowed to move onward.

The cliffhanger novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes, from 1873, has the momentous scene in which Knight, a young architect and surveyor is out on the steep cliffs with a young lady he is most interested in. A gust of wind makes off with the young lady's hat, capriciously depositing it just a few feet down an escarpment. Ever the gentleman, Knight seeks to retrieve it, falls, and lands on a narrow ledge, holding a clump of deep-rooted sedge, where "he could see the vertical [cliff] face curving round on each side of him. He looked down the facade and realized more thoroughly how it threatened him." Unnerved, the young girl finally runs to get help, and later, we get someone else's view of Knight through a powerful telescope, hanging tenaciously, but for how long?

The novel with the memorable opening chapter is The Mayor of Casterbridge, which begins with a well-built young man of twenty-one, Michael Henchard, walking along a country road with his wife and young daughter in Wessex, a fictionalized rural England. Henchard sees a county fair in the distance and figures he can go there, pick up a job cutting and trussing hay. "But mind, Michael," Susan says, "don't be drinking."

"What do you take me for?" Michael says.

Susan is not the brightest kid on the block, but she knows Michael well enough. By the end of the chapter, Michael is loaded and has auctioned Susan and the daughter to Newsome, a sailor from whom we will hear more, for five guineas.

Nearly everyone in The Mayor of Casterbridge has a secret of one sort or another, a strong influence on my revisit; my work in progress even has the word secrets in its title.

Design

design--a structural plan for a story; a pattern of dramatic events; an attempt to determine order and significance to a set of motives and agendas; a unifying plan of behavior and response among characters in a story.

However episodic, picaresque, generational, or other loosely structured narratives, story is informed by design. Reading a given story is analogous to opening a surprise package, attempting to guess from the wrapping what the contents are.

True enough, many stories are begun with nothing more than a concept or incident which the writer follows just as the opener of the surprise packages tugs at the wrapping, sifts through the insulating material, then withdraws the prize. Through revision and rewriting, the writer begins to see the potential for design, then begins to grasp how the design leads to discovery, first the writer's and then the reader's.

F. Scott Fitzgerald did not see the final design for The Great Gatsby until the work had been set in type, then presented to him for proofing. Somewhere in the process of finding typos and making the AAs (author alterations) so typical of the writing personality and so abhorrent to the publisher personality, Fitzgerald was seized with the notion of elevating Mr. Nick Carraway to the position of principal narrator, thereby giving Fitzgerald the needed leeway to dramatize the closeness he felt with Gatsby and at the same time provide the nuanced perspective of what Gatsby's rise and fall meant on an even more epic scale.

The antic, satirical vision of Christopher Moore has on many occasions begun with a what-if concept, in which Moore invents a character he plunks into a well-known cultural event. His design moves like a glob of ketchup dripping from a tightly packed hamburger onto a clean white shirt, spreading, radiating outward. In Fool, he begins with the ensemble cast of King Lear, introduces a character of his own devising, and sets forth to design with and around the consequences.

Arguably outstanding amid a steady output of stunningly different novels, Joseph Wambaugh's The Secrets of Harry Bright begins with the after effects of an airline tragedy, presented with the intriguing and authenticity-on-steroids discovery that triggers a maze of events leading to the satisfying discovery.

"No River Wide," the first story in Robert Boswell's collection, The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards, is a chronicle of the friendship between two women, but only a writer of Boswell's expansive vision and technique could have designed such a complex design. Reading the story, we cannot help ratifying Boswell's choice of design as being the most effective, just as Fitzgerald's choice of Nick Carraway to narrate Gatsby was the most effective.

Hint: The ultimate design for a novel or short story is often discovered in the revision process, one small part of which is the question the writer must answer: Is this story told in the most effective way?

I need, you need, he, she, or it needs

needs--the personal, professional, intellectual, artistic, spiritual, and financial items a character requires or believes he requires; motivating forces that drive a character to attempt to acquire attitudes, information, relationships, goods, or a combination of these things; perceived powers, understanding, or techniques a character assesses as being necessary.

As a consequence of extraordinary needs, a character's ego and or conscience may be impacted. The simple, unalterable point is that a character without needs is not likely to produce viable story elements. Another unalterable point: a character enters any given scene with expectations, with intent, and with needs. Any time a particular character in a particular scene is not pulling his or her weight, the writer is well advised to examine the consequences of any or all these traits for vital clues leading to the discovery of what that character will do next, and to whom.

Even in plot-driven stories, this examination merits consideration because it helps provide plausible reasons for the character's behavior because the knowledgeable reader will have come to expect that the interaction of characters with intent and purpose is a better fuel for story than mere plot points.

Orbituary

elliptical orbit--a story path veering off from the circular orbit of the conventional narrative; the oval-shaped path of a story, implying a movement away from tight plotting while still appearing to revolve about a recognizable theme.

Conventional short stories and novels tend to follow the structure of the domino theory.  Events are arranged in close enough proximity to cause one dramatic event (a robbery, for example)to trigger another (unanticipated complication for the robber: get-away car stalls, flat tire, traffic jam).  Any one or all of which triggers the arrival of an investigative agency responding not to the robbery but the stalled car, which triggers the appearance of the investigative agency responding to the robbery, which triggers a bureaucratic confusion in which the robbers escape, etc.

As stories and novels evolve beyond the conventional plot formation, the behavior of the characters involved becomes more notional, producing surprise and variations on reader expectations. 

 The writer's role in such stories is to provoke questions rather than to insist upon or even suggest answers. Thus do those frequent passengers, ambiguity and subtext, hitch rides on the traveling sphere, pulling the circular orbit slightly off course and into an ellipse.

Let Poe's "A Cask of Amontillado" represent the uniformly circular orbit or domino theory short story, with James Thurber's more recent trope on the same kind of revenge theme represent the tendency to veer off slightly, and Tobias Wolff's "Bullet in the Brain" represent the elliptical nature of the latest evolutionary step in the decidedly elliptical orbit of the short story.

With this in mind, the question to the writer becomes: What new thing can you do for story while still keeping it a story?

A Pound of Life, Sliced Thin, Please

slice of life--a relatively plotless stream of incident from a segment of a character's daily routine; a term used with varying degrees of sarcasm to describe a collection of scenes that may or may not be a short story; a dramatic narrative of any length.

Earth and ocean scientists frequently take core samplings of terrain under, variously, polar caps, oceans, and soil strata to examine the processes of sedimentation, weather, pollen/seed density, etc. Similarly, some writers, perhaps in the process of building a background on a character, take a sampling of a day or year in the life of that character. You could pursue an argument with some weight that The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is a slice of life; to be sure, it is a purposeful if highly romanticized one, said purpose substituting for a plot. It is beyond argument that the sequel, involving Sawyer's great chum, Huckleberry Finn, is not a slice of life but rather a plotted adventure, thus slice of life can be defined as a core sampling of life, being examined.

Instead of a denouement or negotiated settlement investigated in much twenty-first century narrative, slice of life depends on a single, evoked feeling, whether that feeling produces laughter, sadness, remorse, or nostalgia. Under close investigation, James Joyce's monumental core sampling, Ulysses, is slice of life writ large, its scrupulously close following of The Odyssey in no way a tie-in to a conventional plot. Another case for argument: Alexander McCall Smith's The Ladies Number 1 Detective Agency treads closely along the verges between slice of life and an actual plot. True enough, Mma Ramatsowe is given something to solve, but is it really a problem or more of an enigma?

Thus the resident enigma of the slice of life narrative: is it a story--or not? Writers aiming their narrative sights on a readership with more specific genre tastes will do well to consider McCall Smith's approach to narrative rather than the sometimes bewildering visions of Donald Barthelme or the short fiction of Raymond Carver as edited by Gordon Lish.

In slice of life as in the tightly plotted works of Harlan Coben and Lee Child, the ball is always in the writer's court, which is to say the senses of satisfaction and completion reside within the author and let the reader rather than the devil take the hindmost.

The writer at some point must arrive at an individual template for what a story is, then compose to the integrity of that template. To encourage the writer to think this point through, this question: Is Tobias Wolff's "A Bullet in the Brain" a short story or a slice of life?

A Modest Proposal

proposal--a presentation for a book-length project; a first chapter, outline, story map, and marketing materials for fiction projects; a thesis or operating statement plus table of contents, one or more developed chapters plus a marketing guide for works of non-fiction.

A cynical-but-practical approach for book-length works of fiction is the straightforward one in which "The completed manuscript is the best proposal." This is so because, should the writer find a publisher willing to contract a work from an outline or proposal, the publisher is most likely to insist on the finished product being closely allied to the proposal. This means that any changes or developments that occur to the writer after the project has been formalized will be regarded as something other than what was agreed upon in the first place.

The fiction proposal introduces in actual text one or more lead characters who forge a bond of appeal for a targeted audience. The character or characters then become involved in a situation involving accelerated vulnerability or a looming deadline with dire consequences for failure (which the author now proposes to resolve with dramatic flair).

In addition to actual text pages, the fiction proposal contains as detailed an outline as possible to show the story arc. Even though the outlines for the individual episodes of the TV series, The Wire, were not intended to serve as an outline for a book, they do convey the tone and theme of the overall design and serve as a guideline for the writers of individual episodes.

The purpose of the proposal is to show interested literary agents and publishers that the writer is capable of telling a story, has a viable one at hand and some sense of how it will play out. Unspoken in the transaction is the need to overcome the publisher's suspicion that the writer will not be able to complete the work, a suspicion allayed by presentation of the completed manuscript.

Writers who have produced one or more previous works may be granted greater leniency in presenting a proposal for a work of fiction. A larger number of nonfiction books reach contract stage on the basis of a proposal than those submitted as a completed manuscript.

An ideal fiction proposal would have at least one completed chapter, preferably the first, in which one or more of the major characters is introduced. This would be followed by a list of characters with a brief description of their roles. Then either a chapter-by-chapter gloss or a detailed enough outline to define the main plot points. This would be followed by the author's estimate of the demographics of potential readers followed by a brief statement comparing the instant work with one or more published works. Although thematic material will likely shine through, an accompanying statement about the writer's attitude and intent toward some relevant social, ethical, or political issue is a useful adjunct. Such books as Cliff's Notes, Monkey Notes, and Spark Notes provide useful approaches to the plot outline.

Successful proposals rarely if ever cite best-seller lists or predict sales figures.

The Politics of Concept, the Concept of Politics

concept-driven story, the--a dramatic narrative focused on theme; a novel or story whose plot appears to emphasize a particular subject such as revenge, redemption, or poverty while still providing dramatic structure.

Novels such as Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men, and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle may be seen as examples of the concept-driven story, and although equally at home in the categories of speculative fiction and cautionary fiction, so too are Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, George Orwell's 1984, and Philip Roth's The Plot Against America. Each of these deals with burning political and/or social issues to the point where they have become more than snapshots of a particular era but rather have assumed the status of museum-quality prints, hung in galleries.

Unless a concept-driven story has more to it than the potent dramatization of theme, it runs great risk (as many fictional protagonists do) of being caught in the bog of disaster, which is to say it forgets its debt to story. Alissa Rosenbaum, she who became Ayn Rand, is an unfortunate example of this forgetfulness, beginning her career with The Fountainhead, which took on the theme of art for art's sake to great popularity and, to many critics, to great extreme. Her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, a thirteen-hundred-page-plus novel, articulated her Objectivist philosophy in extraordinary detail, allowing her to express anti-communism, anti-fascism, and anti-welfare-state views in unbridled gallop, reaching a full, Libertarian crescendo in which she deplored any kind of state at all.

In this regard, Rand may be regarded as the right of Upton Sinclair's left. Although they were roughly contemporaries, Rand is probably the better--and more favorably--known, but the reputation comes from her philosophy and argumentative skills rather than her dramatic skills.

The point here is that story is the freighting device for the message. For the concept-driven story to have an audience in the first place, it must eventually have characters who become memorable not because of the smirks they produce but because of the heart tugs. Compare, for instance, George and Lenny with Howard and Domenique or, for that matter, John Gault.


See plot-driven story
See Character-driven story

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.

Outlines, Outliers, Messengers, Massagers

outline--a template or design for a dramatic narrative; a scene-by-scene breakdown of an intended story; a thematic riff intended to lead the writer through the development and orchestration of a concept through its conceptual stage into viable story; the first step in a process that is completed with revision.

Some writers will not consider beginning work on the text of a story without some form of road map which guides them in varying degree of detail through the development and enhancement of a story. Other writers will argue that such an approach precludes surprise, an essential ingredient not only to the reader but as well to the writer. The late, prolific suspense and thriller writer, Dennis Lynds (aka John Crowe, Michael Collins, Carl Dekker) developed a mid-range outline in which he sketched a situation in which a character became engaged in a fast-growing complication, "wrote" his character to the edge of the complication, then stopped writing to expand the outline to cover the next forty or fifty pages before returning to text. Lynds did this until the final resolution, at which point he began revision, looking first for anomalies in the plot/motivation structure.

The jury is expected to be out for some indeterminate time on the outline or no outline question. There is no evidence to show that working with an outline makes the work easier or if, indeed, writers who outline are more prolific than those who do not.

Hint: How many of your last five stories (of any length) were written from outline? What does your answer to this question tell you?

Added hint: Try outlining in some detail your next novel, keeping opinionated notes about your progress as you proceed with writing text. What does this tell you?

Yet another hint: Try outlining a novel by using three x five index cards, one for each proposed scene, using as few as one or two sentences to describe the intended scene.

The major points to be made here: (1) an outline is not a sine qua non of a story or novel (2) there is nothing "wrong" with you if you chose to outline (3) there is nothing "wrong" with you if you do not chose to outline, and (4) the decision to outline or not is one of the choices you will have to make on your journey toward becoming a writer.


messenger--a character who physically brings news on stage (into the narrative); an individual who by example becomes a recognizable symptom that could befall a front-rank character.

Ever since the days in which authors not only could but were expected to directly address the reader, a persistent opposition to the practice has evolved. Henry Fielding's picaresque romp,Tom Jones (1749), and Laurence Sterne's rollicking Tristram Shandy (1759) led the way toward the authorial aside, a technique that may be yet employed today, provided it is done with an inventive purpose--otherwise editors will thank you for thinking of them and wish you good luck elsewhere. Enter the messenger, appropriately dressed for work in your story, bearing some message, intent, or example of behavior thought to be of contextual interest to the reader.

Messengers are of primary importance in contemporary fiction because the reader may still have his doubts about the author, but if the reader has gone beyond the first five or six paragraphs of a short story or the first chapter of a novel, the reader arguably believes the characters more than he believes the author.

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.

A Little Fear, a Little Plot, a Good Deal of Chemistry

fear--an essential presence needed to effect the needed vision in writing, acting, music, and visual renditions. Fear comes after the idea begins to emerge, precisely when the executor is poised and ready to execute the words or performance or visions; it is the fear of having overreached this time, not having suitable technique to accomplish the vision. Without fear, the resulting performance would be variously rote, boring, and deadly safe. Without fear there can be no discovery. Without discovery, writing becomes reportage, acting becomes mimicry, music becomes mechanical, visual renditions become parody.

In Pat Conroy's remarkable novel, The Great Santini, the young protagonist asks his Marine Corps fighter pilot father,"Are you ever afraid of anything when you fly?" The father, Lt. Col. Bull Meecham, replies, "Yeah. I'm always a little afraid when I fly. That's what makes me so damn good. I've seen pilots who weren't afraid of anything, who would forget about checking their instruments, who flew by instinct as though they were immortal. I've pissed on the graves of those poor bastards too. The pilot who isn't afraid always screws up..."

Be afraid. Fear is a good thing; it encourages writing about unsafe things.

plot--a design or floor plan for the placement of dramatic furniture; a feng shui of emotional obstacles, arranged to produce stress, action, and either some degree of solution or recovery. In order to qualify as story, the most opaque and elliptical of narrative arcs requires some plot design to give the reader the sense of having entered at one point and being transported to another. Equally, the narrative arc must draw two or more characters into a situation where such events as choice, humiliation, understanding, exultation, frustration, or successful achievement are within sight. Plot means someone is vulnerable to something, whether the ticking clock of time elapsing, romantic or artistic rejection, or the awareness of failure looming like the marine layers of mist and fog off the California and Oregon coastlines. For a writer to use plot as a verb means to arrange a plausible set of obstacles for one or more characters, then track them as they attempt to work themselves free. For characters to feel that others are plotting against them, they must be aware of an intent to frustrate their stated goals. Not all antagonistic plotting has malicious intent; it may be merely a doctrinal or philosophical placement of obstacle. When a character senses that the plotting against him is malicious, the reader senses an enhanced dramatic presence.

Most memorable plots are wound about the armature of a single basic emotion such as revenge, fear, love, ambition,and jealousy. These emotions are widely recognized across cultures and time, powerful enough, each in its way, to hold the most determined character in a stubborn grip.

plot-driven story--a narrative experience in which the intricacy and persistence of plot appears to take charge of the behavior exhibited by characters; a story in which the domino theory of scene and event holds priority over behavior by individuals. In plot-driven stories, characters are more likely to respond to the placement and removal of obstacles than they are to respond to their feelings about another character or their reactions to events. Some plot-driven stories approach high levels of character revelation and investigation; yet other plot-driven stories are so artful as to make the reader overlook the plot-driven nature of events. One such example is Richard Powers' unsettling novel, The Echo Maker. On close examination, Richard Price's novel, Lush Life, fits the definition of plot-driven, both examples being offered as refutation of the belief that plot-driven stories and longer works are necessarily inferior to stories in which characters and their responses seem to dictate behavior.

The plot-driven story serves as a challenge to the mature writer who is able to moderate between the mechanics of goals and obstacles and the inventive discovery of dimensional characters.

chemistry--a symbiotic, often unplanned relationship between characters in a story; a force or attraction that draws a writer to a dramatic situation or concept. By allowing characters full rein to interact and respond to one another, unintended relationships may flourish as the story progresses. To be open to such thunderstorms of chemistry, the writer must scrupulously avoid cliche or any other convenient shorthand, allow characters to respond with honesty to one another, whether they act on that honesty or not. If a writer is attracted to a dramatic situation where the conclusion appears already forgone, rather than rely on plot, the writer needs to investigate the characters involved, looking for the chemistry that provokes the creative energy necessary for closure.

A Test of Character

What do we most remember from reading a story or hearing a story read or, for that matter, of seeing and hearing a story performed?

Possible answers are:
plot
authorial voice
characters
a particular scene
setting
descriptive qualities
metaphor/simile
surprise turn/reversal of fortune.

Although I did not always do so, I chose characters as the answer. My choice is not based on my observation that most readers make this selection; my choice is grounded in my own recognition of my own sense/feeling that characters are the things I am most likely to recall over time from stories and novels I have read. 

 Indeed, I cannot always remember the plots of some of the novels and stories I have written, but I can remember the characters, because of their very names--I once had a Germanic film director named Bert Schadenfreude, and I had as a pseudonym Craig Barstow and assumed his persona in order to write Westerns--or because of some tic of personality.

To defend my thesis that readers are more likely to remember characters than they are likely to remember plots, I cite the train of thought that characters embody the message, the theme and goals of the stories. 

 I don't remember many of the details in Vanity Fair, but I do know that Miss Becky Sharp was one opportunistic cookie, a personification of self-aggrandizement, a forerunner of contemporary novelist Candace Bushnell's Trading Up, in which wives are on the look out for a promotion to a better provider. I also argue that the choice of characters informs the theme of the story, confessing in the process that this recognition is my means of bringing some plot into my stories.

Characters, my argument continues, are by necessity bigger than life; no one wants to read about a character who is smaller. In his own wonderful way, Melville's Bartelby, for all his seeming passivity, was passively larger than passive-in-life; he became through his commitment to life a stronger force than his opponent; he was the protagonist; he and his vigorous choosing not to became the driving force of the story.

When we create such individuals, we put premium on what they want and what they are willing to do in order to achieve their goal. In some cases, we even show the effects on them of having got what they wanted then having experienced buyer's remorse.

Such individuals certainly have some point of origin in persons we see about us, as archetypes as well as actual individuals. They become armatures about which we wrap the details of our own imagination, allowing for the things they will say, think, do, and feel. They are prisms in that they refract the results of qualities with which we endow them, casting forth a spectrum of feelings and responses that speak directly to us and in the coded colors of the emotions.

We must treat these individuals with respect regardless of their origins or their place in our sensitivities, certainly in recognition of their places in our stories. We must not kick them when they are down nor heap adulation on them for all their accomplishments. They are, after all, born of our fantasies, which are, in fact, spectra of our own feelings. In a lovely calculus, writing about all our characters with respect, even the most despicable of them, sends the message to our own sense of self that the component parts of ourselves are worthy of respect.

For some time, I have made the additional argument that the writer is best served by respecting and adopting the techniques many of the so-called method actors employ, exercises by which we learn to be a particular individual on a moment-to-moment basis (see the Meisner Technique) as opposed to merely memorizing a script and giving it various attitudinal colors. 

There is a connection between how you would, for instance, portray Ahab, or The Wife of Bath and the way you would pull all your characters out of the shadows of cliche and derivativness and into the spectacular light of your own creation.

In summary: characters are your doorway to the kinds of discovery resident within memorable fiction, the qualities you most remember about your own favorite characters.

The Devil Is in the Difference

Seated in a panel discussion among whom were my "boss" at the SB Writers' Conference, Marcia Meier, and the preternaturally observant short story writer and former student, Jean Harfenist, I was reminded of a remark Jean had made some years back as a guest in one of my creative writing classes. "I write literary stories," Jean said. "They don't have plots."

At the time, pre-Moleskine time, I wrote that observation in a notebook that came gratis with one of the few American-brand fountain pens I own. There are some pages of funny- or fanciful-sounding English place names I encountered in a romp across London and through the reaches of Devon, a few pages of grades assigned long ago to students who have long since graduated. Mostly I keep the booklet to remind me of Jean's quote.

Her short stories (many published in hardcover as A Brief History of the Flood) are to be sure not propelled by characters following a plot line as though it were some To Get list for a scavenger hunt. They are about gritty, determined or deluded persons, wanting something but not necessarily wanting what they think they want, waiting for some opportunity that will allow them to dash toward what they think they want, leaving us as readers to think through the possible outcomes after the characters scurry forth like an impatient or impossible Australian Cattle Dog, attempting to be first out the door. They have thematic resonance, which is to say they have a direction, which is to say they proceed like two cars approaching playing chicken at an intersection. They have beginnings which lead to the section I call the muddle instead of merely the middle, and some form of emotional payoff.

Thus have I described a literary short story, the saga of someone pursuing something, if only a dream (which, by the way, does not have to be realistic. In such stories, characters behave as they do because they can't seem to help it: they go out for a ficelle or a quart of milk and instead fall in love. They rush to get kids to school and then get to work on time but instead become side-tracked and buy a perfectly horrible bud vase. They grow suddenly restive and impatient during a PTA meeting and direct a stream of invective at the chairperson. They should know better; most of the time they do know better, but this time, because this has to be a story, they do not know better. And thus the story propels them into the Terra incognita where the usual boundaries have been erased or transduced, leaving them to discover things--things about themselves and the world they may have never even considered much less experienced. They are Sarah Palin forced to buy her clothing in thrift shops.

The plot-driven story has an articulated path from its point of beginning to its ending, establishing an intuitive fear within the reader that this is where things will go because the characters have no other operating instructions. There may be some surprise which, on further consideration, is less a surprise than a contrivance, an ironic variation on a theme.

Even though as writers we are fueled on obsession and compulsion, we nevertheless loathe to accept the world of fiction being thus manipulated. True, we want our fiction to be orderly, but we want the order to be rational, affirming our belief in the interrelatedness of all things including faith, superstition, science, Fate, and luck.

So look at it this way: Literary = a random universe, with opportunities for magic, unrelated surprises, sad wisdom, and the wrong persons winning the wrong contests.

Plot-driven = deterministic results, safety, justice triumphing, happy wisdom achieved, luck, approval of the gods.

ISO a Character w/hang-ups, Prefer Willing Work Nights

Since it has long been established that plotting is not one of your strengths, it has become necessary for yo to resort to other methods to come at characters, getting a sense of the thing it is they need in order to make them not only in a story but of a story. There is a list of questions you can ask them, hopeful of insightful information from them, questions such as What is it you want? This is often asked as though you could expect a reliable answer from the individual, as though you could have any kind of luck asking a person in real life what that person wants. As though they would consider you some Studs Terkel surrogate, confessing their innermost secrets to you.

No way around it, you goal is to get something on that character, something you can and will use, opening you to the charge of exploitation. Shelly is exploiting his characters. Too true, he is. and he will exploit more if he gets the opportunity. So why then should they give him the opportunity?

This is a salient reason for his enjoyment of the crime novel and the police procedural. He identifies with the private eye particularly, because the PI has to detect, to find things about his clients and their opponents, things that can be used to construct cases.

Early in his career, when writing crossed tracks with editing and he had already experienced the benefits of having a mentor, another came his way, a mystery and crime writer he'd greatly admired, an now she was talking to him about ways to make mystery pay off even though he could not plot. You look, she told him, for the missing part of every character, she told him. For some time, he went about looking for missing parts and sure enough that caused him to realize characters were not going to give up their secrets without a struggle. Dorothy took him one step beyond, to the inner meetings of The Mystery Writers of America, where he quickly discovered that one way to get characters to tell him what they wanted was by having snitches.

At about this time, one of his oldest friends, a chum from undergraduate days, had grown tired of near misses with his writing fiction, had talked his way into work as a technical writer, spent just enough time at that to grow terminally bored, then fling himself into law school, where upon Shelly ultimately found three additional friends who'd made the discovery many lawyers make My clients lie to me.

This is all about the fiction he has to indulge in order to get his characters to let him in on what will drive the story forward. He is at this very moment interviewing a character who has presented herself to him in the most pleasant and interesting way. Atmosphere, attitude, and splendid relevant details are checking in in at the boarding gate. There are notes beginning to collect in Moleskines and on napkins and index cards. He knows she is a graduate student, he knows she has a daemon or familiar named Ed who is bi-polar ad needs his meds. He knows that the chairman of the department his graduate student is a teaching assistant for has a daemon named Captain Spaulding, who frequently affects greasepaint eyebrows. He even knows that this graduate student, he thinks her name is Nicole, has discovered that another person with her name has already published a thesis, the problem being she is living in an alternate universe. He already knows that his protagonist is way too nice, but he knows even more that there is no serious risk yet and thus no tangible plot, so here he is in a sense, doing what he has done many times in the past as a holdover from his days with The Mystery Writers of America, when he took trips to the line-up at The Parker Center in Los Angeles, even appeared in a few line-ups himself for other persons to muddle over.

He is looking for snitches, people who may reveal things about Nicole that he does not yet know. This leads to another problem. Snitches are not always reliable. Given the number of schools and institutions with writing programs, snitches would be the first to minimize the background or grittiness of a character, wanting to keep that character for their own private use.

This is what he has to go through whenever the details and intrigues of a story start to make themselves apparent to him, and what he has to do next in order to get the momentum established.

What Comes First, the Chicken or the Ego?

Such was the early nature of my vision that I naturally supposed plot came before anything else, giving way to individuals, characters, who would take on traits and abilities even as I was taking on the kinds of traits and abilities my teachers wrote about in less-than-friendly terms on my report cards.

Since all of the things I truly enjoyed, whether it be the rather unruly, Mississippi-like path of Huckleberry Finn, or the sclerotic excesses of Ivanhoe, had plots and I wished to apply for membership in the writers' club, I thought plot was an absolute necessity. I even thought that the men and women who wrote stories had some remarkable gene that allowed them to pluck forth from the cosmos or ether a complete plot before they began writing. Not only young, foolish.

Some years, a great many reams of paper, and a number of typewriters later, I experienced what I thought was an epiphany but which was really only being thrown off the horse one time too many. Following the easier-to-assimilate course of epiphany, I reasoned that I would mosey up to plot via characters about whom I already had some sort of inkling. For the next years--relatively productive years, I might add-- this got me out of the slush pile and into the acceptance pile to the point where I actually had a bank account and assignments that openly admitted my tools were words and ideas. There was a minor setback the one and only night I actually dreamed a full-blown plot that, come the morning, did not seem ridiculous. I think I remember which novel that was, but I can't be sure.

Later still, I moved to the plateau of thinking it was neither plot nor character that provided the opening velocity but voice, which is to say the tone, attitude, and spirit of the contentions that would be played out in such narratives that I produced. Voice has been the big one for me over a long span, but earlier this evening, while pursuing Sally up the modest upthrust of Hale Park, toward a stone fence that reminds me of strolls in Devon, my mind wandered beyond the girding of loins for the fast-approaching writers' conference where I lead the late-night fiction workshop, wandered into the later reaches of this year, November, to be explicit, where for the same writers' conference, I am to lead one of the so-called intensive weekend workshops. My theme is to be point of view: who's telling the story, and why?

Whoops. I may have abandoned voice, which I dearly love, in favor of the more prosaic point of view, the one or ones through whose eyes the story is experienced. This may be genuine--dare I say it? evolution. It may also be that I've just come by a small, wonderful camera, which, given its size, has versatile and effective capabilities. It is a Lumix FX-30 with an ambitious Leica lens, reminding me as I heft it and pour through the instruction book of the focal-plane Leicas I used to be responsible for dusting and cleaning during my tenure after school and on Saturdays at The Brighton Way Camera Shop in Beverly Hills. Point of view is nothing less than who is holding the camera, and what that camera sees because of how and where it is pointed. A midget photographer in a room filled with professional basketball players would likely get lovely shots of knee caps. Similarly a tall photographer in a room of midgets would get some stunning and revelatory shots of male pattern baldness.

I am also mindful of Fathers and Sons, a memoir, and a rather loving one at that, of what it is like to have survived through the Waugh family, arguably one of the more dysfunctional, even more so than, say the Bushes.

Everyone in a family has a point of view, causing family gatherings and holidays to be remarkably cheerful or remarkably acrimonious, and sometimes these two polar opposites exist simultaneously. My late sister was a lifelong joy to me, an observation that could suggest she substituted for the things provided from parents, but no; they, too were great joys to me. My sister and I simply did not see eye to eye on my mother. Although we both adored (not too strong a verb here) my father, we saw Annie differently, my issues with Annie stemming, I think, from routine teen-boy/mother issues and ultimately rounding out quite nicely. My sister often joked that when I was out of the house, my mother was transformed into another person, another mother with another set of agendas. I countered by teasing my sister with having been traumatized by the witches in The Wizard of Oz and Snow White.

I see that this walk with Sally has at the very least given me some notes for November and a way of looking at story that could make it more yet of a crucible in which things are heated to the point of combustion, where they promptly run over the sides and cause merry hell to break loose.