Letters to a Young, Middle-Aged, or Geezer Writer, XV

Secret, the noun, plays a major role in our everyday drama, enhanced by the delicious subtext of secret, the adjective.  We all carry secrets about with us, some of them so small and inconsequential as to make the rest of us wonder why you'd want to hide such a thing, other secrets so whopping large as to become secrets we don't allow ourselves to recognize.  Thus our mutual awe of and regard for the polarity we carry like some up-market backpack:  the things we keep secret from others, the things we cannot acknowledge in ourselves.

A common, satisfying approach to secret in either avatar, adverb or noun, is the trade.  I tell you one about me, you respond with one of your own, thus each of us has something on the other, an assurance, if you will, that this exchange had been a bonding experience wherein each gets to know the other.  Tell me your secrets and I will tell you who you are.  That sort of thing writers fall to arguing about when the splashes of Campari bitters have become too generous or too numerous or both.

If and as our relationship continues, the exchange rate will increase, each wanting to share secrets as an analog of handshakes to prove neither is carrying a concealed weapon, but also a kind of classification or scoping out process in which each seeks to out-secret the other, each party going for the brass ring of being the most complex or sophisticated or, dare I suggest, the most interesting.

Of a more injurious nature:  You know some secret about me that assures you the power of controlling my loyalty or at least a compliance to your agenda,  (And don't for a minute forget the adjectival secret being attached to the noun of agenda.  Secret fucking agenda.) lest you make my secret public.  Doesn't much matter what the secret is so long as you know I try to keep it as private as possible.  Okay, that's the lawyer's equivalent of billable hours to charge clients, which is to say it is blackmail, which is surely billable. but it is also illustrative of how secrets and secrecy work for and against us as power points.

This opens what I will call the Ex Door, where we have shared secrets almost as we have shared bodily fluids with ex-mates, ex-lovers, ex-friends, and not to forget ex-employers.  How many stories have you read where an amiable-sounding narrator is confronted by an Ex from the past, asking for help, pleading almost piteously that no one else but you could possibly believe the scrape he or she has gotten into?  And how many more are you likely to read in the future?

The delicate fulcrum on which your character's entire connection to the character from the past is based is on the secrets and intimacy of an historic relationship.  The reader will watch carefully to see how you respond.  If you are male and she a female and you refuse help in the present time, there is danger the reader will think you are, pardon the archaic words, a cad and a bounder.  And interestingly enough, if you are a male and you do agree to help, the reader will not only be rooting for you, the reader will be suspicious of your ex from the past.

This example was only one permutation.  The protagonist could well be a career woman whose ex happened to be a likable guy who never quite made it and thus the separation--until now.  You could just as well ring in the potential of same sex.  If you don't, I probably will because I think it might be interesting to see if the bond of a same sex relationship in that kind of secret set-up has more, less, or merely the same degree of connectivity.

My parting advice to you is to write from your own personal fear that your deepest held secrets might be laid bare, which will kick into high gear your own devious, manipulative nature, influence the characters you chose for the portrayal, and help you define the secrets in the lives of your characters.

I could also caution you to be careful of individuals who tell you how you can trust them to keep your secret, but that's something I'll leave just between us.

Letter to a Young, Middle-Aged, or Geezer Writer

Dear Young, Middle-Aged, or Geezer Writer;

You may think you know your characters because, after all, you reached your pointed finger across the Sistine Chapel of your own blank screen, giving life to them, but until you know what a specific character wants, you know only the prime coat, the shadows, the basic forms.

Some instruction formats--classes, books--will suggest things such as flaws in the psyche or perhaps in the bodily function, a list or nervous tic or fear of spiders or, if you are the David Foster Wallace type, even a goldfish.  These classes neglect to let you in on a secret well known to lawyers and doctors:  Your characters will lie to you.  They will reveal what passes for intimate secrets of the sort a fellow traveler on a transatlantic flight might confess, but how do you know they are telling the truth?  Because you are a complete stranger whom they will never see again and they just couldn't resist the chance to let off a little steam that had been building up?  Not the way it works, pal.  Stop to think about the reading you've done, then make a list of characters who told lies.  True enough, they may be a bit like Blanche Dubois, who lied somewhat to herself.  And think about all the times you've been lied to by perfectly respectable sorts of your own creation, individuals every bit as reliable and truthful as their creator.

Need I remind you, dear writer friend, of Charles Baudelaire and his Flowers of Evil:


And yet, among the beasts and creatures all—
Panther, snake, scorpion, jackal, ape, hound, hawk—
Monsters that crawl, and shriek, and grunt, and squawk,
In our vice-filled menagerie's caterwaul,
One worse is there, fit to heap scorn upon—
More ugly, rank! Though noiseless, calm and still,
yet would he turn the earth to scraps and swill,
swallow it whole in one great, gaping yawn:
Ennui! That monster frail!—With eye wherein
A chance tear gleams, he dreams of gibbets, while
Smoking his hookah, with a dainty smile. . .
—You know him, reader,—hypocrite,—my twin!

Let's say that you don't outright lie, rather, like me, you are a tad forgetful of events and their circumstances; let us say you are merely arranging things to give them a bit of a better dramatic edge, one with serrations.  So okay, it's not as bad as Baudelaire, it's more like Ernest Dowsen's "I have been faithful to thee, Cynarra, in my fashion.

The point is, they aren't going to tell you everything.  They may in fact be playing you along, much as that remarkable young lady did to the victim in Saki's memorable short story, "The Open Window."  You are not, of course, going to be suspicious and skeptical of them all are you, because, well, you may have been burned once or twice, may even have believed the occasional politician when he or she promised you something that was more or less restructured after the election was history?

Instead of ranking them in the more classic folders of protagonist, antagonist, pivotal, messenger, and the like, you might instead try to rank them in terms of their hold on the truth in shall we say the Platonic sense.  And look at the fun you may have, pushing those with strong commitments to the truth to take a step or two beyond the self-imposed boundaries.  Think also of the delicious tension inherent in someone not well known for the truth being forced into a position where his or her reputation depends on it.  Ah, you say.  Story, you say.

Letters, iv

I'm writing this letter to you from the advantage point of having had more time to pursue the craft than you.  If this sounds as though more time on the job gives me some moral high ground, it intends no such thing.  On the contrary, it gives me a chance to warn you about advice from geezers in addition to talking about the subject I'd wanted to address in the first place, good guys in your stories and their adversaries.

It should be apparent to you if you've read my earlier letters--always the danger you haven't, because I do tend to go on--that the warning is more to me than to you, in the sense that I am likely to make assumptions based on my time on the job which, although indeed extensive, can be illogical, particularly when compared to the potential of you coming onto the job with more chops already than me.  This is not so much a matter of humility on my part as the awesome awareness of lost time, of my having frittered time and pool balls away in darkened parlors, of more than a casual interest in women as distractions as well as their considerable other presence, and of allowing times of indecision to have had too strong an influence on my writing practice sessions.  However wrong you may be, you always do better when writing decisively.  Indecision only creates one kind of learning situation, the could have or should have tropes.  Wrong is at least straightforward, honest, lacking in the props of adverb.

So far as the good guys and their opponents are concerned, let me put it to you this way:  Give the good lines to your antagonists.  Let the protagonists fend for themselves.  Part of being a young writer us the understandable desire to show off your talents, your energy, your bravado, your ability to make sentences and entire paragraphs sail about with the dazzle and grace of a ballerina/  I was going to use the analogy of a gun fighter in a Western film, but as I explained a bit earlier, I do become distracted by the images and actual presence of women.

Let showing off have its time on stage via the narrative in which your people observe things about life, about one another, about themselves. Protagonists who speak as though Cyrano de Bergerac were on hire as a dialogue writer tend to come off the page as pomposity writ large, as humbugs, as set-up for a takedown which, in point of argument, is the fulcrum on which humor rests until the pomposity takes that one, irresistible step forward, from what may be pathos into what is definitely bathos.  Do what Beethoven did, which was in fact writing and playing to the point where they had to build a different kind of keyboard instrument in order to keep up with him.  He literally and figuratively forced what we now think of as the piano into existence.  How many writers do you know who have pushed the craft so relentlessly where writing is concerned?

The adversaries and antagonists are the people your guys have to engage and live to tell the tale, so it cannot be just any tale.  Melville had to let Ishmael live merely to tell us what happened.  We think about him because he did manage to get through it all, but it is only later, after we have considered all the implications that we even remember, oh, yeah, that Ishmael guy who wanted us to call him, he survived.  We remember him for all those wonderful reasons of his own, down-at-the-ego personality, but imagine him trying to cadge drinks at a bar with such a fanciful story.  Then we'd see him as something entirely else, someone like Montressor, the narrator of Poe's "A Cask of Amontillado," who has been dining out on telling this story of revenge, probably the one real moment in his life.  Melville saves the good lines for the dead guys, and for Father Marple.  We don't remember Ishmael as we remember those two hulking mammals, Ahab and the Great White Whale; Melville gave them the good lines.

Remember, it is not about you, it is about your characters.  Remember that and you will be remembered.  At least, your work will.  I'll bet you never thought when you were screwing around in high school, frittering, your thoughts jumping between moments of clearing the table in a game of rotation or edging over to the body parts of girls you're programmed to notice, that you'd be given some distraction such as that short story by Hawthorne called "The Minister's Black Veil," thinking as you finished it, some day I'll be a writer and I'll do better than this.  I suppose it makes me a nut case to admit that I did in fact read that story, at the time wanting more than anything to impress the hell out of a girl named Pauline.  Mind you, there were some good reasons to want to impress her, but that took me about fifteen years and by then the balances of power and chemistry had shifted.  Now, however, I am thinking what fun it might be to take that same story and bring it up to the present, featuring one of the guys who comes to Peet's Coffee Shop on State Street, a minister in some evangelical local church who frequently meets his parishioners there to discuss such subjects as goals, service, and, yesterday, getting right with God.

The Bucking Bronco of Character

It takes one or more characters, interacting within a scene, to provide the energy and movement of the story.

Easily enough to say; to bring it off, you need to have an attitude toward a character before you can set the individual participants into the landscape of scene with any hope that they will take the bait and accordingly move from mere conversation or observation into the swampy terrain of story. Even more difficult to contemplate is the need for these individual characters to be associated with some subtext. Under those circumstances, what appears to be mere conversation or observation is spoken or observed in relation to some other circumstantial reality.

Attitude toward characters is essential if this subtext is to take effect. Harold Pinter is a writer who often uses this approach to his scenes. Two characters appear to be going through their usual routines, talking about nothing of particular note, yet there is a hovering tension that alerts us to a dynamic between the characters, a resident relationship that combines the need most individuals have to categorize social station and group relations.

The attitude the writer brings to characters may be as seemingly neutral as curiosity or as biased as antipathy. In either case, the writer becomes a participant rather than a mere commentator who, like attendees at political rallies, carry placards announcing their feelings. The writer must ride the horse of attitude but be willing to be bucked off in the process. We must not allow our attitudes to become the equivalent of an expert rider, using riding skills to hold on. To put it more bluntly, we must not allow our original regard for the character, whether it is admiration or distaste, to become the rider struggling to remain on the horse. If we are not careful, we will remain on the horse and the character will not have an opportunity to change: The good guy will continue to do admirable things and attract attention because of his goodness, the bad guy will ride the bronco of despicable behavior right back into the corral, as bad at the end as he was in the beginning.

It is difficult bordering on impossible to be convincing in the short span of a short story when it comes to demonstrating change within a character, but we can approximate the human condition we hope to unleash within characters by allowing the good guys to screw up and the bad guys to do something remarkably empathetic. Novels afford us a bit more latitude: We can allow a few characters the luxury of change in a longer work. These observations are not engraved on any stone plates as laws or commandments, rather they reflect technical considerations. The thing we need to encourage is the capacity inherent in a character to be pulled off course in a deed, observation, or tug of curiosity. If they can break free from the preconceived notion of them, however briefly--just to the point of alarming the writer--they will be observing the potential to do the very thing that makes everyone a winner, and that very thing is to cause surprise.

You think you know, but you're still on first draft

Perhaps because of your own experiences with your own attempts to learn effective techniques, but also in some considerable measure from your experiences as an editor, you have arrived at a significant dictum: Don't think. You are able with some confidence to tell students about this approach and it is appropriate to note here that you remind yourself from time to time of the discovery. Thinking has caused many stories to lose any sense of immediacy, with as little fizz as a bottle of Wal-Mart champagne. Thinking comes later, after the early drafts have been set forth and must now be held up to the light of your vision, which more often than not comes only after all the available material has been written.

This is another such time, a time to hold up the hand, open palm perpendicular to the floor, that classic gesture of stop--nothing beyond this point. You have begun to think in relationship to the novel in progress. You have even allowed yourself to reach the point of asking yourself questions, the most notable ones relating to the number of characters in the story and of the continuing appearance of points of view away from your protagonist. Each time you begin a work session on the novel, you have the thought of your protagonist scurrying about, trying to keep up with the proliferation of additional points of view, a distraction that cuts into your work time because, having let that genie out of the bottle, you struggle to get your protagonist back on stage. You become the editor for the project before the project is finished.

You already know the answer to the question, Whose story is it? If your protagonist were not in the story at all, the texture of the story would change measurably, possibly devolving entirely to the character who has hired your protagonist to find answers to her major question. In that scenario, she would still need help and the likelihood is that she could only get it from you as intrusive author.

Because this is the week in your review schedule to be working on a Golden Oldie, you have returned to a tale from your distant past, the chivalry and knights in armor landscape of Ivanhoe and your favored representative of antagonistic forces, Sir Reginald Front-de-Boeuf, that quintessential, sneering Norman. You are also painfully aware of the way Scott stops the story with long sketches of detail and observation, addressed to the reader as though the characters were not there or could not hear the intervention. Thus are you loaded against authorial intervention.

Additional thus: You are reminded that the key to this narrative is the universality of secrets inherent in every character. You are reminded that you have, with this story, set out to break a mold, not because you thought that would be all that great an idea at the onset but because of your growing reality that the thing that will hold the story together is the picture of secrecy the story radiates. You are to be reminded that you are on a journey of dramatizing and further that this is not the time for thinking. Not now. Not yet.

High-Class Problems with a High Class Novel

It comes upon you from all angles, the most recent during the middle of the night, where you are presented with a disembodied voice, telling you "He has a brother."  Heart just short of pounding, certainly at an elevated rate, you arise from the restorative comforts of sleep with an immediate understanding of what this means:  The protagonist of WIP (work in progress) has a brother.  Okay for that, but while your heartbeat is returning to its normal wont, the dynamic of the brothers has manifested itself, a ghostly counterpoint to the way the seeming antagonist has been haunted since the pivotal event driving the novel.  The protagonist's brother and his wife live in rather comfortable state at Casa Jocosa, a fact that was instrumental in drawing the protagonist to live there.  There was a rift between the two.  Henry, the older brother to Lew, was Herschel at birth, but changed it to Henry to accommodate his wife and, so Lew charged in an earlier bout of anger, to de-emphasize his Jewish birth, as in Henry?  Gimme a break, Hersch.  All of which now addresses my concern that Lew, the protagonist, was of the story but not sufficiently in the story.  Well. Henry and his wife, Lois, invite him to tea, which has added implications because the maid who is present, helping prepare the tea and serve it, has not that long ago hired Lew to pursue the significant mission of the story, and Henry, noticing the maid's obvious attention to Lew, is outraged because, with you she makes eye contact and offers you seconds and we can't even get her to offer us firsts, meaning the brothers are at it...again, just as your late father and his big brother went at it from wonderful time to time.

What this means is that, like it or not, you are officially in.  It has been a long time since you have had a novel so absolutely wound about the armature of theme with strands of event; a long time since the dialogue crackled like the lightning of a summer storm.  You cannot fucking hide from this in a welter of notes to be returned to later; you are on the horse, which has a mind of where it wants to go.

What this realization means is that you have already begun to see it published, published in a world of publishing gone particularly mad.  Not only that, you have come face to face with one of the dualities you've been scribbling notes about lately, this duality being the one between doing it for publication and doing it simply because it is.  You would like to do it because it is and because of the chemistry of what it is doing to you now, including the joyous awareness that any given moment, a particular scene or relationship or both are presented to you, spreading out like a leaky ballpoint pen on the pocket of a white shirt.  True dat, you do not own one single white shirt, but the message is clear, and the answer is that you have made yourself what you are and it has come back to remind you of it again.

There are, you realize, thousands of persons out there, wanting to write novels, more in fact than persons who buy or read novels.  You quite understand why they would want to do such a thing, even though their approaches may vary by 180 degrees from your own, thinking of it as work or difficult or some form of apprenticeship wherein the apprentice is beaten or teased or humiliated.  Even as you broadcast pleasure and joy like a dog who has begun to shake off the water from a bath, you are aware of yet another stunning duality.  Will you ever again in your life be presented with a thematic core so particularly perfect as this opportunity?

Tick off

Lionel Essrog--the protagonist of Jonathan Lethem's 1999 novel, Motherless Brooklyn; a private investigator, a character with a fatal flaw--Tourette's Syndrome.

What a brilliant flash of imagination it was for Jonathan Lethem to have anointed his lead character with Tourette's Syndrome, an affliction that could be triggered at any moment, sending his cerebral circuitry off into a Karaoke of the mind, his tics and associations gathering momentum like the boulder of Sisyphus on its downhill course, gathering momentum until he was forced to give over to it. Lethem could have chosen other afflictions for Essrog, not the least of which could have been petite or grand mal seizures; he could have chosen autism or perhaps even bipolar shifts from the manic high to the depressive low. Lionel Essrog, in the moment of his creator's big bang of creation, became an icon. It is not that there were no afflicted characters before him; Willie Ashenden walked with a limp as, indeed, Somerset Maugham, his creator, did; Quasimodo was a hunchback, the eponymous phantom of the opera had a badly scarred face, Johnny Tremaine had his thumb fused to the palm of his hand when a pot of molten silver spilled. Pre-Essrogian literature is filled with men, women, and children who bore their fatal flaw and were transformed by it to the point where they made of it a valuable commodity.

In his way, Lionel Essrog took the fatal flaw to a new height; Tourette's Syndrom begins interiorally, then extends outward. Lionel Essrog opened the door for Mark Haddon's Christopher John Francis Boone of The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night Time, allowing Boone, an autistic, to do a detective job of his own, recording his adventures in a book that at first blush seemed to have had a mechanical defect of missing pages until we realize that his adventure is chaptered in prime numbers.

Jonathan Lethem did for affliction what Hammett and Chandler did for the mystery. Since the appearance of Lionel Essrog, it is no longer merely democratizing to bring the afflicted and unusual out of the closet and into the full light of inquiry, it is a dramatic enhancement by which the character displays his or her transactions with the flaw into a transformative story.

In the early days of pulp magazine mystery and suspense, Frank Gruber's Oliver Quade used his preternatural memory for fact to solve crimes. Quade was known as The Human Encyclopedia, his erudition the cause of the solution. Lionel Essrog succeeds not because of his Tourette's but in spite of it. Read of Essrog in Motherless Brooklyn and take notes.

My heart's not in it

internal conflict--a battle between two or more opposing forces within an individual, a culture, or a society; choices a character makes that impact his behavior in a story; the agony of moral choice written large as dramatic issue.

The key word in an internal conflict is but, which translates as "except for the fact;" but is the tin can tied as a prank to the rear bumper of a car, it is the conditional divide between the two warring forces that tug at the character. But is the fulcrum, the contingency with which the afflicted character lives. Sound dramatic principle dictates an internal conflict step forth in front rank characters, Mark Anthony the soldier and Mark Anthony the lover. Similarly there is Cleopatra struggling through the emotions of the lover and the duties and responsibility of the queen.

A protagonist may be a natural leader, except that he freezes in arguments; a scientist may be devoted to the pursuit of her research but feels compromised for once having managed the outcome of one of her more significant studies. Huckleberry Finn may admire and respect the runaway slave, Jim, but feels his conscience being conflicted because, after all, Jim was his master's property and Huck has effectively helped Jim escape from his rightful owner.

The conflict may be essentially internal,particularly in the short story, but it will have an effect on the way significant characters behave and in the way the reader feels.

Under no circumstances...

circumstances--conditions motivating or surrounding persons, places, things, and events in story; the status of behavior related to a character, that character's agenda and/or vulnerability, and the likelihood of a predictable behavior manifest in the actions or failure to act in a particular character.

Mysterious or ambiguous circumstances surrounding a character impart an atmosphere of menace and uncertainty. The suspense grows as the circumstances become volatile, leading to the growing apprehension that such a mysterious or ambiguous character will be driven to the point of combustion, whereupon he or she will reveal a true self of incredible awfulness.

Familiar, even predictable circumstances advertise a growing sense that a surprise explosion is building, some unanticipated demonstration that will ruin the stasis, nudge it unceremoniously over the edge into chaos and discomfort.

Thus the mysterious and the familiar combine to frame events and the persons who participate in them, raising suspicions wherever possible. These suspicions translate to tension which, lacking actual suspense, is an excellent glue for holding story together. Readers wonder what new circumstances will bring to the equation of characters, bent on pursuing an agenda, meeting frustration and reversal.

All a protagonist or antagonist needs in order to set a story in motion is to hear the repetition of the familiar mantra "Under no circumstances..."

P is for Partner

partner--a co-worker or confidante with whom a protagonist can exchange ideas and background; a relationship between protagonist and antagonist suggestive of a dramatic symbiosis if not an actual partnership; a love-hate relationship between two characters.

One of the earlier partnerships, the master and the slave in Aristophanes The Frogs, sets the potential for dramatic symbiosis in motion. The lead player is Dionysus, accompanied by his slave, Xanthias, who is clearly the more pragmatic and gritty of the two. The major goal of the story is to repair the state of tragedy in drama. As Dorothy Gale would do some time later when she traveled to Oz for information from the wizard, Dionysus must travel to Hades to bring the great tragedian Euripides back from the dead. In discussing how to best begin their task, Dionysus and Xanthias engage in what has become known as the buddy system, reminiscent of the comedy teams who followed them over the milenia: Abbott and Costello, Martin and Lewis, Rowan and Martin, the Smothers Brothers, Burns and Allen.

Partnership of some sort in story is too much a convention to be considered merely an interesting coincidence; it was absolutely essential for Sherlock Holmes who, had he been allowed by Conan Doyle to go it alone, would not have got far, thanks to his attitude and tone. Captain Ahab could have ruminated to Starbuck about the way his life had been shattered by the great whale, but the story would have not achieved its stature without the actual presence of Moby-Dick, a partnership made in the hell of Ahab's psyche. Nor would Santiago, the protagonist of Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, been complete with only the presence of Manolin, the young boy apprentice, or Santiago's friends who are mentioned but who do not appear in person. Santiago needed the huge marlin, arguably the biggest catch of his life, as a partner, just as Ahab needed the whale.

To extend the metaphor of partnership in yet another direction, imagine Macbeth as unmarried, a middle-aged soldier who'd focused entirely on his military career. With no Lady Macbeth in the story, several dimensions fall away, leaving the mere carcass of a powerful drama.

In the more modern setting of Boston, private investigator Patrick Kenzie and his girlfriend-partner Angie Gennaro provide a moving thematic thread to the investigation of an abducted four-year-old girl, moving Dennis Lehane's Gone Baby Gone from being merely an intriguing puzzle, and into the landscape of deep moral inquiry.

The danger of not having a partner takes the writer directly into the murky landscape of one character on stage alone, having nowhere to go with dramatic information but the interior monologue, which often drags forth such weary tropes as How had it all begun? and What would she do now?

Such remarkable fiction as Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn (in which the protagonist has Tourette's Syndrome), or Mark Haddon's The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night-Time (where the fifteen-year-old protagonist suffers from severe autism and in a sense "communicates" with his favorite character, Sherlock Holmes) are notable exceptions, using the first-person point of view to move them beyond the need for a partner.

But here we are again, with Mark Schluter, the twenty-seven-year-old protagonist of Richard Powers' The Echo Maker, involved in a near-fatal accident that causes severe brain trauma, inducing the Capgrass Syndrome. Victims of this affliction tend to question the authenticity of those closest to him. Accordingly, a perfect partner for Schluter is his older sister, Karin, who gives up a good job to care for him, all the while aware that her brother does not believe she is really the person she claims to be.

A Whale of a Story

whale, the great (aka Moby-Dick)--a tangible, forceful adversary; a dramatic partner to the protagonist in story landscape; a presence eventually discernible as having an agenda opposing the protagonist.

Cruising along at mid-level in the sea of dramatic convention, surfacing on occasion for a gulp of air much as the whale does in real life, there is the convention of the worthy opponent, the man, woman, or child who not only believes utterly in the rightness of his or her position but who radiates the embodiment of that stand. It is the very strength of conviction within this opponent that drives the story toward its eventual combustion. Therefore it must be respected rather than demonized. In creating such a dramatic presence, the writer is clearly investigating opposing forces within his or her own sense of conviction and justice. It would be foolish to suggest that the great whale had a personal vendetta against Ahab or any crew member of the Pequod, but it is not so foolish to ask the reader-who-wants-to write, the writer within, as it were, to imagine the preparation need to prepare for portraying the role of the whale in a dramatized version of Moby-Dick. What does the whale want? The very question suggests parody, but that absurdity is mitigated by the further question: What does the whale represent? The whale represents forces of Nature, which is a start to the answer. The whale wants to survive, another answer. The whale has been witness to and present at events counter to its desire to survive.

In similar fashion that borders on risk of absurdity, it is instructive to think through the agendas and goals of the adversary, whether they be forces of Nature or teen-agers wanting to borrow the family car. This introspection is not for the purpose of finding the irrational in the dramatic partner. Rational partners don't make for drama, they make for moot court proceedings. Rational as he was, Sherlock Holmes could not have stood up dramatically without Dr. Watson. Although not an adversary in terms of plot goals, Watson represents a behavioral and social force antithetical to Holmes, just as Dr. Wilson represents antithetical behavior to the fictional Dr. Gregory House.

Let the great hulking whale represent a literary totem, representing the duality of partnership and adversary. A partner represents someone with whom the protagonist can confide, share, explore survival strategy. An adversary represents a threat to the protagonist's agenda in significant enough measure to cause the reader concern for the outcome of the story. Remember as well: the protagonist has caused some level of threat to the adversary--otherwise the adversary would not behave in such a gradually accelerating pattern of opposition.

The collision between protagonist and adversary can come suddenly, with no warning, in spite of preparations; the consequences may be highly physical as in plot-driven narrative or of more internal, morality-sensitive issues as in the character-driven story. Although a significant dramatic convention exists to turn the protagonist into a Cassandra, who is fated to see the future exactly but no one believes her, the consequences of a protagonist alone with no confidantes triggers the risky business of the protagonist having no place to go but interior monologue.

Think whale. Think partner. Think confidante. Then, without even having to think about it, you will be introducing layer upon layer of dramatic intensity.

Revision.3

character--individuals in stories who want things, cause things to happen, have things happen to them, have expectations and attitudes. A character's passport into a story is issued on the basis of the things wanted and expected as well as that character's special abilities. A thorough baggage search is indicated against the possibility that the character may be passive.

Characters may be classified into four major groups, protagonist, antagonist, messenger and examples, and pivotal. Protagonists have agendas which they attempt to realize; antagonists attempt to stop protagonists from realizing their goals. These are the front-rank characters. Messenger characters bring news from other characters onto the page, while exemplary characters demonstrate to the other characters and readers conditions and circumstances that might befall front-rank characters. Pivotal characters are those whose allegiances may shift from one side or group to another because of events within the story.

Things to remember about characters during the revision process:

1. They want to act and react.
2. They do not appear in a scene in order to emote.
3. They may lie to themselves.
4. They may lie to each other.
5. They may lie to the reader. (Notable example: Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen. "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." It is no such thing.)
6. A character in a story is to a real person as dialogue is to real speech. A character acts and then thinks; a person thinks ad then acts.
7. Characters are the causal instruments by which events take place.
8. Character represents a critical mass of:
a--guilt
b--grief
c--ambition
d--doubt
e--hormones
9. Characters are defined by the ways in which they respond to and cope with obstacles.
10. Characters enter every scene with some expectation
11. Characters enter every scene having come from doing something else.
12. Even reflective characters such as Hamlet are essentially persons of action.

Questions to ask of your dramatis personae during revision:

1. Are there any duplications? Could two similar-sounding individuals be combined into one
2. Do they truly advance or complicate the story?
3. Do they earn their keep in other ways such as providing obstacles or temptations or even opportunities for the protagonist or antagonist to discuss plot issues with?
4. Do they have dimension?
5. Do they have a weak spot?
6. Might they be tempted to change loyalties?
7. Do the front-rank characters undergo change and/or an awareness of a previously unrecognized moral choice or issue?
8. Do you, the writer, beat up on the antagonists with adjectives and adverbs; do other characters treat them as though they were lepers? Any chance they have become evil for evil's sake?

Four Play

protagonist--a front-rank character in a novel or short story whose agenda propels the narrative toward conclusion, an individual whose actions provoke the actual point of conclusion. A protagonist is often the character with whom the reader most empathizes and accordingly for whom the reader roots.

Most dramatic narrative begins with someone wanting something. (Ishmael wants to get away from it all. Ahab wants to get the whale.) This desire becomes the catalyst for a series of subsequent events in which the protagonist strives for the goal, achieves it or is frustrated in his attempts, or achieves a negotiated settlement with the Fates and/or other characters. It has become a conventional standard for critical readers to ask of the protagonist, What does this person want? Depending of the length and complexity of the narrative, the goals and outcome of the protagonist's agenda are set forth in some detail. Simply put, Ahab wanted revenge on the whale, Gatsby wanted to fulfill a romantic connection with Daisy, and Huck Finn wanted to be free to live the life he chose. In all three examples, extraordinary interventions complicated the expressed agenda of the front-rank character.

It falls entirely within the realm of dramatic possibility that a protagonist may wish for nothing more passionately than to be left alone, but the vital thing for the storyteller to understand is that passivity in a front-rank character has a fatal effect on story. Thus the protagonist's wish to be left alone requires the connective tissue of being left alone in order to do some thing that has exquisite meaning for him. The protagonist must have an agenda that is strong enough to provide forward momentum in spite of and indeed because of opposition from life forces or antagonists.




Stories in which protagonists achieve their goals too easily are not good candidates for holding the reader's interest. This is not so much a matter of reader schadenfreude as it is a matter of the reader wanting to share the moments of insight, determination, and ingenuity that propel the propel the protagonist to have one more try. Given their choice, most readers could accept their protagonist fail miserably after a noble try rather than have the protagonist achieve the goal by accident.

Answers to the following questions can help the writer bring a credible and pliant protagonist forth from the drawing board:

1. Who is he/she?
2. What does he/she want?
3. What is he/she willing to do to effect the goal?
4. How does he/she handle reversal?
5. How is he/she likely to behave after having achieved the target goal?

The answers to the first question are often simple,"a young person in search of a life's occupation," or "a person looking for a mate," of "a person trying to live down a past mistake."

Useful answers to the second question could be "another chance" or the more direct "revenge," or "to set the record straight;" they could also include "justification," "fame/recognition," or "to discover the truth behind an event or individuals involved in an event."

Answers to the third question are rich in story potential: "give up something important," or "assume a new identity," or "step over some moral boundary," which could easily include "commit some previously unthinkable act."

The fourth answer provides the opportunity to demonstrate the resolve and resiliency of the character, while the fifth answer introduces the possibility of a primary ingredient in fiction, irony, which may add layers of meaning and texture to the story. In many ways, the nature of characters is best revealed when there is an abrupt reversal of fortune. A character who suddenly gains power may behave in surprising and revealing ways.

Stories--particularly novels--may have more than one protagonist, but NB, the reader should be able to tell them apart. (See Lonesome Dove, for instance.)


antagonist--a front-rank character in a novel or short story who opposes the agenda of the protagonist. Sometimes a force of nature (See Jack London's story "To Build a Fire) becomes an antagonist, working against the protagonist; similarly a condition can work against a front-rank character (See Jack Schaeffer's Monte Walsh) but more often than not such antagonistic traits reside in one or more characters, who accordingly become Messengers or Representatives (Arthur Miller's The Crucible, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.) The antagonist deserves as much attention and complexity as the protagonist.


orbit--the path taken by a story as it moves about a set of characters. Just as a story has an arc instead of mere linear progression of episodes, it also moves through its dramatic universe like a satellite moving about a planet. Some story orbits, particularly those of a plot-driven nature, are circular, seemingly well-balanced between action and intent. Other story orbits are more elliptical in their paths, giving no hint where they will go next, seeming to end on a note of as ambiguous as reality often is.

Once the story is in provisional draft, the writer will have a better sense of the shape of its orbit, making it easier to enhance a particular flavor of the story. For example, the myth of Sisyphus, a mortal who made the mistake of hitting on a woman favored by the god Zeus. As punishment, Sisyphus was bound up by Zeus to an eternal sentence of performing meaningless work; he must push a large rock up a steep hill, knowing that the moment the rock reached the crest of the hill, it would tumble down the other side. When the rock finally came to rest, Sisyphus was to begin pushing it toward the summit once more. That's a pretty simple orbit. Up the hill, over the top, down the other side, and up the hill again. By approaching that orbit at almost any point, we can construct the circumstances for a different dramatic take. 1) Begin halfway up the hill. As Sisyphus pushes toward the top, his wife is trotting alongside him, complaining that he is never at home, doesn't send any money, the kids are asking questions, the neighbors are gossiping. 2) Begin with Sisyphus just short of reaching the top of the hill. People on the other side begin to sound the alarm about the impending disaster when the rock gains momentum then begins to careen down the other side. 3) Start at the bottom where, just before he is about to begin another circuit with the rock, Sisyphus is met by a group of neighbors, all of whom have signed a petition requesting him to push his large rock elsewhere. 4) Also starts at the bottom of the hill. Sisyphus has just approached the boulder, now at rest. Frustrated by the endless and meaningless natures of his task, Sisyphus rebels, storms into Zeus' office, refuses to have anything more to do with the rock. Zeus takes this in, nods his understanding, then directs two of his assistants to transfer Sisyphus to the Prometheus treatment. When Sisyphus asks about the Prometheus treatment he is about to receive, he is told that he will be tied to a mountain side every day, whereupon an eagle will rip out his liver, then eat it, giving Sisyphus the rest of the afternoon and night off, while a new liver grows for tomorrow's lunch. It does not take Sisyphus long to make his excuses before getting back to his rock.

Most stories have orbits of dramatic action that allow for a beginning at any of a number of places. The task of the writer is to chose the existing place in an orbit to produce a desired result or to extend the orbit so that another beginning will work better. The Iliad is only one example of a story that does not begin according to strict chronology; stories may begin at any point of the orbit. The ideal place is a moment where there is enough relevant action to preclude lengthy physical descriptions or extensive backstory.


power--a capacity a character frequently enjoys at the expense of others. The power may be anything from political to financial to sexual; it may also be manifest in terms of social standing, high esteem within a family or organization, or even in terms of talent/ability. It is useful to observe the power dynamic between or among the characters in any given scene; allotting equal power to characters tends to reduce dramatic tension and since life is notably unfair in the way of power distribution, why start making it so within the confines of a story?

Power is often a key element in motivating characters to rebel, escape, seek revenge, or make peremptory moves.

Reversal of power is a delicious story element; it often helps dramatize nuances and the not-so-subtle behavior patterns resident in characters who have been affected by turns of fate. One of the many joys available to a reader is to be present at a scene where a bully or tyrant, still acting under the belief of continuing power, discovers the plug has been pulled. And think how noble a character must feel to have caused a switch from being oppressed to being the one who can walk away from a dramatic reversal without having to exact revenge.

Ante Up

As George Orwell notes in his comprehensive essay on Charles Dickens, this author was a serious muckraker, a class and social critic, a fierce gadfly of The Industrial Revolution, and yet he attracted considerably more readers than he did political enemies or detractors. Orwell didn't make this comparison, I did: John Steinbeck went after many of the same targets as Dickens, digging, I believe, deeper and wider, certainly adding such subjects as race, migration, immigration,women's rights, scientific investigation, and politics into his examinations. Further, he, more so than Dickens, portrayed the middle classes. For his efforts, he was branded as overly sentimental and naive, a brand that at first blush I naively thought was the result of anti-intellectualism and academic jealousies, but have more recently come to believe is the more insidious effect of a concentrated Conservative (note capital C) effort at discrediting him because of his alleged left-leaning sympathies. This last observation is a distraction from my intent in raising the issue; it will be dealt with later as I begin to pursue the evidence of a smear against Steinbeck for the unwanted vision of behavior he excavated in his major works.

The intended thrust is that Dickens and Steinbeck produced individual and aggregated identifiable works because of the characters they chose, how they allowed their characters to behave, and the results they achieved in helping others to see life as they did. Although each wrote in different times and of differing places, each had a particular filter over his work. Similarly, Mrs. Woolf wrote of a particular class of the social structure, some few years ahead of her more or less American counterpart, Mrs. Wharton. And to add a kind of thematic balance, Sarah Orne Jewett, Willa Cather, and William Faulkner established in their respective works a kind of regional calculus that reminded us how the very specifics of a place and the individuals within that regional specificity caused them to be transsubstantiated into universal truths.

All prologue to the question for the individual, what do you bring to the table? What's your ante to get into the game of being a writer? Do you prefer fictional locales that are, on their face unreal? Do you do so from fear that greater specifics will bring you trouble? Do you write novels set in the distant future so that individuals who read them will not be likely to recognize themselves and thus spare yourself the embarrassment of having them confront you? Was that me in your novel, I who bore you and endured you while you were learning how to tell these very stories that dare show me as who I am? Why, pray tell did you in your last novel or in an earlier short story name a junior high school after me?

Sometimes, if we read carefully, we can see authors at play, using friends names in one way or another. I have been a suspect, a protagonist, a corpse, a Marine Corps recruiting officer, and a Bronx detective in the works of friends and a number of less respectable personae in the works of shall we say less than friends. My dear friend Barnaby Conrad has found his way into a number of my stories as Conrad Burnaby, thought to be a purveyor of replica watches and automotive chop shops. Digby Wolfe appears often as himself, a bemused Englishman who at an early moment in is career had to go on stage to warm up the audience before the Beatles. Brian Fagan, a world-class archaeologist, appears as Major Fagan of the Salvation Army. When called upon to read a short story in Steve Cook's modern lit class, I chose a story in which he appeared in a mandatory group therapy session as the result of a bureaucratic mishap, and in more than one story, Duane Unkefer is referenced as living unhasseled by the police in his 1968 Pacer, thanks to his weekly classes for wannabe writer cops. So we know what I bring to my work, which is mischief at the very least, if not a kind of noirish romanticism.

These visions you have need not be humorous or dire or dreary or overly optimistic; they needn't be parody or satire or dark horror, but they must reflect or refract some semblance of your vision, all the while projecting a world, a universe, a solar system palpably real and plausible. It is said of some times, times such as the present in fact, that they trump in their quotidian display any attempt to parody them. It is said of some times that the unthinkable not only came to pass, it set up branch offices and is seeking an employable staff. Nevertheless we must look beyond the very incidents we create to see how, by exaggeration, we can evolve our drama into satire, mindful in an absurdity of its own that such drama will eventually come to pass.

Outrage and absurdity are every bit as Darwinian as the so-called deadly sins.

It remains for us to pick a target which we will weave into our work. But weave we must if we are to keep up with the unyielding tenacity of our human condition and render it in drama for all to see.

Edge

Edge is the line where two surfaces intersect, the cutting surface of a blade, a boundary. In a character, it is a penetrating, incisive quality. Characters, particularly lead characters, need an edge. Dorothy Gayle's edge was her desire to get back to Kansas. Samuel Spade, formerly of Archer and Spade, Investigations, had an edge as sharp as cynicism. Sir Galahad in the Arthurian legend had an edge of virtuous innocence. Lyra Belacqua has a number of edges, not the least of which is impudence

Whether the story is chicklit, YA, fantasy, or mystery, whether it is literature or genre, the story is driven by persons with edge, and so there should be about them a quality of edginess bordering on grittiness. In order to seem to be alive, characters of front rank, which is to say the protagonist or antagonist level, should be bigger than life, defined by a few select traits or qualities that add to the edge and which may be misinterpreted by other characters.

Primary characters, those who stand at the protagonist rank, are individuals who drive story by riding the vehicle of their desire or need. A protagonist is a character acting on a want of something or someone, then the causality of achieving the goal or working for it, exacerbated by the edge used in the acquisition and response.

Antagonists, who should appear at least as likable as the protagonists, possibly even more, should be edgy in their opposition to the goals and agendas of the protagonist. One of the many reasons why The Wire is such an important dramatic venture is because of the complexity of each character, protagonist and antagonist, the blur between them in terms of moral judgements we viewers make.

Remember when you used to fill paper sacks with huffs of breath to the point where they were fully extended. Then you twist the top, sealing in the breath. Then you sneak up behind someone, smash the bag between your hands to create a pop. Thus a comparison between the bag filled with your air, being a segment of story that has a loud sound that is a sudden surprise. This is what story should do. Each character is filled with breath that creates surprising pops.

Goal Tending

Antigone's goal is to bury her brother.

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

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

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

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

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

Revenge?

A tangible prize?

Status?

Justice?

Satisfaction?

Understanding.

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

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

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

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