Waiting for the Right Story

Yesterday, as you were winding up your comments to a client who to date has written two novels (both of which you have had an editorial hand in), she said with casual grace, "I so wanted to tell both these stories that I had to learn how to write." Her admission clung to me like the foam on the sides of a pilsner glass. The fact is that both of the stories she wanted to tell changed considerably from the moments of their beginning to their more recent form. The first one still has a way to go. The most recent one, which more or less triggered what you wrote here yesterday about happy endings, has morphed by a factor of about seventy percent and when I reminded her of this effective sea change, she was equally casual. "I had to work at the way the story went to get it to my liking."

She is good, you might use the term naturally good because she is so willing to listen to her characters and get their essential reality down on the page rather than a conceptual or thematic reality that so often leads most readers --including you--to ask, "You mean that's it? That's all?"

All of which brings you to the rhetorical, perhaps retrospective questions "What is your story?" and "What has been your story?" Ah, relations, you say. Not quite close enough. Relations reflecting the awareness of the constant argument between free and connected. Free of what? Connected to what?

Your basic story is and often has been the way things turn out after some plateau was achieved. It is at once a cynical, romantic, hopeful, frustrated vision, reflecting the various stances individuals within your vision have aspired to achieve, have actually achieved, then met with the awareness that the story had undergone some changes along the way. Yours then is the story of quest, longing, pursuit, the achievement, then the awareness that the story has just begun. You might say yours is the story of realization or recovery, although that implies a connection you have yet to see to certain Twelve-Step Programs. For the moment, it comes down to a deeply felt awareness that some progress has been made and that it is neither enough nor the progress that was anticipated or that, even more to the point, there is always something more out there to be learned.

journey

journey, the novel of--a longform narrative in which one or more characters embark on a trip involving a quest; an extended story involving running away from or returning to a locale, or visiting a previously unknown terrain; a longed-for visit to a particular site; may also be a picaresque wander year.

In formulaic terms, the novel of journey represents a long travel that produces some form of resolution and, if not resolution, some discovery or awareness, thus you can see thematic and symbolic interpretations being drawn to the form like ornaments to a Christmas tree. One of the most venerable tales of journey focus on Odysseus, returning to his homeland of Ithaca after having fought in the Trojan War, a journey in which the protagonist encounters and deals with a full ensemble cast of gods, goddesses, monsters, mere mortals, and mortal temptations. Geoffrey Chaucer's reputation as a storyteller rests heavily on his framework tale of a group of pilgrims on their way to the Canterbury Cathedral, telling stories to pass the time. Jack Kerouac set out on a journey, a road journey, ostensibly to capture the warp and weft of the American experience, in the process finding the four-lane paved highway of his voice and crystallized sensitivity. In The Grapes of Wrath, the Joad family, over their heads in debt, their Oklahoma land awash in the dregs of the Dust Bowl storms and drought, set off on a journey to the land of milk and honey, or at least opportunity. Gus McRae and Woodrow Call, bored in their retirement as Texas Rangers, undertake a cattle drive from Texas to Montana, but first they have to steal the cattle in order to have the cattle drive, thus a brief venture south into Mexico to literally rustle up a herd, then Lonesome Dove can begin in earnest. John Haskell's 2005 novel, American Purgatorio, begins with a man whose wife inexplicably disappears while they have stopped at a gas station, then leads to a journey in which the husband tries to find the missing Annie.

Perhaps this quote will resonate with some recognition: "I am looking for the man who shot and killed my father, Frank Ross, in front of the Monarch boardinghouse. The man's name is Tom Chaney. They say he is over in the Indian Territory and I
need somebody to go after him." The speaker is fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross, the principal in Charles Portis's journey-within-a-novel, True Grit.

The journey novel is by its very nature a metaphor, the object of which is more or less in the hands of the writer. In 1494, Sebastian Brant published such a metaphor, called The Ship of Fools. Some five hundred years later, (1962)Katherine Anne Porter published her own version of The Ship of Fools, arguably less metaphoric in the overt sense, but nevertheless giving pause for reflection. Porter's Ship had an ensemble cast moving from Germany to Mexico at the outset of World War II. Anne Tyler's The Accidental Tourist is yet another of the potential ways for the novel of the journey to provide a means of transportation to a destination that by its very nature is electric with surprise and provocative aftertaste.

dramatic

dramatic--having the inherent suggestion and quality of story; implicit content of elements that produce conflict, interaction, goal search, revelation and reversal; a narrative that contains one or more characters in pursuit of an agenda or embarking on an internal or geographical journey; a quest which will involve reversal, frustration, and competitive exterior forces.

A successful dramatic narrative reflects the goals and intent of characters set against the counterpoint of the writer's personal goals at the time of writing. Thus stories may reflect an attitude of cynicism, pragmatism, sadness, bitterness, expansive optimism, and transcendental anticipation. Differing readerships will be particularly drawn to one of these qualities or perhaps even a combination of them. You might liken the physics concept of water, seeking to find its original level, to the literary concept of story: readers seek to find their target level. One thing all stories have in common is a voice or governing personality. It properly should be the goal of the writer to seek its own level, which becomes the pressures informing the voice, timbre, and intensity of its persona.

On a basic level, to say of a work that it is dramatic is to say of it that it is act-able, performable, readable. On a more nuanced level, to say of a work that it is dramatic implies that the work has skillfully designed ventures of men and women engaged in dealings with the enormous varieties present in life. If these dealings appear piled on or contrived, the landscape in which they appear may be spoken of as melodramatic, exaggerated, even operatic. Thus does balance come into the equation of which dramatic is an integral part.

Questward Bound

quest--an agenda or goal pursued by a character in a novel or short story; a reach for artistic, emotional,financial, philosophical, or romantic reward; an end of which the character may be aware but choses to keep hidden.

The quest or desire may change during the arc of a longer narrative, as in Nelson Algren's The Man with the Golden Arm, in which the protagonist, Frankie, is a returned veteran of World War II, addicted to morphine. His main quest is the dream of being a jazz drummer, on a par with Gene Krupa or Dave Tough. He is bound by conscience and love to caring for his invalid wife, who may or not be truly crippled, and whose invalid condition Frankie may or may not be directly responsible. Frankie's main talent appears to be his dexterity with a deck of playing cards, leading to his only steady source of employment--dealer in illegal poker games. Frankie's quests revolve around staying free of drugs, pursuing his career as a drummer, and the romantic pull toward an old girl friend, Molly.

Walter Tevis' novel, The Hustler, dramatizes the quest of its protagonist, Fast Eddie Felson, to become the best pool hustler in America. Readers may bring value judgments to Frankie's or Fast Eddie's choices of profession, but these judgments are left at the door in the wake of the characters' yearning to achieve the goal of their quest. Becky Sharp was also on a quest in Vanity Fair; so was Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz; so too was Nora Helmer in A Doll's House.

The 1927 motion picture, The Jazz Singer, adapted from a stage lay by Samson Raphaelson, features a protagonist who longs to forge a show business career as a singer, in defiance of the wishes of his father to use his voice as a cantor. Joe Bonaparte, protagonist of Clifford Odets' play, Golden Boy, wanted to become a concert-level violinist but in order to secure funding for his education, became a prize fighter, risking the ruining of his hands. Both protagonists had goals; in their quest to achieve these goals, they encountered opposition.

The reader not only empathizes with the quest-oriented character, the reader is not satisfied with a dramatic individual whose agenda does not radiate from quest.

Hunting for Your Inner Ahab, or Toast at the Actors' Studio

Although my motivation for wanting to do so is lost in the dimness of time, suffice it to say that the Dramatics class burned brightly within my middle school mentality.

Even though I was well launched on my hopeful path as a writer, Dramatics seemed to me the most wonderful, splendid goal, an achievement that I would remember the way others would remember first sexual encounter, and others still would remember such academic distinctions as The Dean's List, and yet additional legions would install some artistic triumph.

Mildred Cline stood in my way. She was the teacher of Public Speaking, the gateway through which all who wished to take Dramatics must emerge. To be given anything lower than a grade of B+ in Public Speaking condemned you to a purgatory in you were eternally audience. Mildred Cline and perhaps the added burden of my changing voice emerging more often than not as a squawk, and the burgeoning of my Adam's apple proved a severe firewall, resolved with what seemed like a good deal at the time.
I was guaranteed the grade of B+ in Public Speaking and a chance to appear in a kind of infomercial drama, written, I might add, by a girl on whom I had the vague-but-persistent designs of a thirteen-year-old boy on a fourteen-year-old girl. But no recommendation for Dramatics.

The infomercial play was a bust; I had two lines, for which my only conviction had to do with my inchoate designs on the playwright. In the actual performance,in which I thought to alert all those connected that I was deserving of entry in the Dramatics class, I delivered the last line first. Middle school actors are not as sophisticated as you might hope. In response to my gaffe, one lad, who went on to become student body president, socked me on the arm, one girl began crying, and after the performance, Mildred Cline shook her head.

All of which is lead-up to my being fired from my first job with the Foley & Burke Shows, a large scattering of carnival attractions on the California and Nevada County and State Fair Circuit. The job was being a shill, which is to say I was given a roll of coins from which I was to place bets at a booth in which a large, numbered wheel--think of a roulette wheel mounted sideways--was spun. Bettors were able to bet on numbers and colors. Depending on the number or color on which the wheel stopped--stopped being a euphemism; the wheel was stopped by the croupier, who leaned against or kicked a small lever--the player could win a ham, a pound can of coffee, a six-pack of Coke, a pound of bacon. My job as shill was to win the main prize, which as I indicated was heavily controlled by the croupier. The big prize was a five-pound ham. "You mean I won that ham for a quarter?" "That's right, sir. Try your luck again. See what you win next."

How, you ask, could someone be fired from such a job?

As the owner of the booth informed me, it was due to an apparent lack of conviction. "You can't win ham for shit," she told me, and to this day, when I am thinking of characters in stories, wanting something or being afraid of something, or disagreeing with something, I think of that boss, and inevitably, I think of Mildred Cline.

"I get winos and street bums and fruit pickers can win ham better than you. What the hell they teach you at that UCLA of yours?"

"I can scan poems," I ventured, but, alas, without too much conviction. "I can write compare-and-contrast essays. I can recite The Eve of St. Agnes."

"But you can't--" she began.

I nodded. She didn't have to finish. While she paid me--for half a shift--I noticed two youngish women watching the transaction. I didn't know either one, but knew enough about my environment to know that they were both "with it," which is to say with the show; they were what I longed to be, a recognizable carney, someone who was obviously with the show.

The taller of the two approached, sizing me up with, I thought, the practiced eye of a casting director. "If you're interested," she said, "I might have a spot for you."

"What do I have to win?"

"No, no. You have to lose. You can never win."

"Hey, Joyce," my ex-boss chimed in, "you may have got yourself a candidate here. College boy. Well meaning, but--" with an extended palm, she pantomimed a flip-flopping motion.

And so my new career was born. Joyce and her friend Lynne ran a Guess Your booth, in which the G or gimmick was to not be able to guess the customer's age, weight, profession, place of birth, and the like. You guess a fifty-year-old man's age for, say, thirty-five, and he says, "Hell now, I'm fifty." And you shake your head and say, "Well, you beat me, fair and square. You can chose any prize from the bottom shelf. Of course, you got to give me a chance to get even. Play again and if I don't guess, we move your prize option to the second shelf (where there were bigger plaster dolls and do-dads)." You had a good thing going because, frankly, you were that wonderful combination of a naive narrator and a dumb one. Well meaning, but--

Your next "challenge" was to guess this fifty-year-old, two-hundred-fifty-pound beer belly's weight. "Hmm, let's see. One eighty-five. Now if you'll just step over on this scale, specially calibrated by the good people at Sears--Why, I'll be darned, sir. You weigh an amazing two sixty-eight."

You work this right and you end up "losing" a lamp you could buy at a garage sale for a buck for the better part of twenty-five dollars.

After my first full day, Joyce signed me up. Reno, then Bakersfield, then Modesto. The full tour. Joyce knew vulnerable--and profit--when she saw it. I was a carney. Welcome to the world of marks.

It is no easy thing to move from the world of the carnival and being with it to the real life and not being with it, not, for that matter, being with much of anything except the great white whale all writers seek.

The trick is to recognize that quest and become quite like Ahab or, what the hell, like Melville, in the pursuit of it. Ahab probably couldn't win ham for shit, either, and Melville's later life was a kind of parody of Ishmael, a survivor with memories and impressions no one wanted to believe.

The carnival is surely a metaphor, the great white whale is a metaphor, and Ahab, too, is a metaphor, although the incumbent President of the United States has privatized him, at least for a time.

We must each of us find the mocha dick, the Moby-Dick to pursue and if we catch sight of him, send up a flare.

Quand' arrive, scrive, my father often said, exhausting his knowledge of Italian (no, I think he also understood pepperoni); when you get there, write.