Great Expectations

If you've ever been back stage waiting to go on for a play or musical, or perhaps been waiting in a green room, awaiting your turn for a TV appearance on an interview show, or if your life has been less dramatic, if you can recall waiting to be interviewed for a job you really wanted, you'll relate to the feelings of expectations and apprehension. What, for instance, if I blow my lines? Or, what if I'm not convincing enough in conveying how much I really want this job?

Your characters are like that, wanting the part, wanting the job. They have expectations. A character who walks into the paragraphs of a story without expectation is going to be chewed up, a bug meeting an oncoming windshield. A character in a scene without expectations has not been prepped.

Let's look at Fred, who's got a Zen thing going. I have no expectations, Fred says. I am not bound up in attachment to expectations. I'm in the now.

Will says I want the job at stake in this story. Of all the characters in competition for the job, I'm best qualified, have the most experience, and have a five-year plan for productivity.

Ed says I want recognition for what I've done. I want to be recognized as someone shrewd, loyal, and inventive, a team player.

Max says I'm ready for the big time, no more minor league ball for me, man. I can hit breaking stuff, have less than one error per thousand innings, and have a strong throwing arm.

All these are reasonable expectations, particularly if they are met, so the vector of story and what they will do while on stage if their expectations are met, blunted, or have some codicil attached to them. What volcanic forces will begin to seethe and roil within the character whose expectations are not met.

I should have known better, the ultimate nipping of hope, expectation, enthusiasm in the bud. I should have known better because I'm not worthy. I should have known that there were politics at play here. What we have then is the larger message, I should have known better than to expect fairness or justice.

Such rich subtext we have when some of our characters do not speak or act in consequence with their expectations. Such lovely moments of tension or suspense or drama or revelation or all of these when a character expresses his or her expectations and is told he/she cannot expect them to be met. Well, that's very nice but I was thinking we could be friends. Oh, I thought you knew, I don't date boys. I date girls. Thing is, we were thinking of bringing in someone from outside for that job.


When you are pulled into a particularly enticing jumble of dramatic events, your first expectation is that you will finish it, perhaps even finish it well, without the slightest moment of hand wringing or thoughts that this work is no magic carpet, it does not fly. When you get beyond that point, you have hopes, expectations that someone you care about will get the emotional chorus you built into the work. Then your expectations climb to the ledge of publication, perhaps even a splendid review or two, to the point where you will be invited back for at least one more work. And then you will expect--don't tell me you won't--that the published work will have some effect on the world.

We have numerous ways for coping with our expectations, ranging from rationalizations, denial, transference, delusion, despair. For every expectation there is an outcome. Are expectations like quarters fed into a casino slot? And what if we hit the jackpot?

Allowing characters to step into a scene without expectations or some relevant chore is like letting them go off to school with out-of-fashion clothing; they are sure to be met by playground bullies, greeted with jeers, sent off to consider their shortcomings where we don't have to look at them

Great Expectations

Characters enter a scene with expectations.

Readers pick up a book with expectations.

Writers write with expectations stories that have expectations expressed and implied residing within.

Without expectation, there can be no story.

Peoples once referred to as Hunters and Gatherers, now regarded as Foragers, position themselves in strategic places, anticipating the arrival of a herd of some sort or other, or possibly one huge woolly mammoth.

Humans evolved to have expectations. The sophistication of a particular culture or society may be measured by the complexity (or naivete) of expectations.

Expectation is the dramatic equivalent of tinder, which is useful to light a fire under the crucible of story, piling on more expectation until the crucible boils over.

Another high-burning dramatic tinder is misunderstanding. Throw some misunderstanding on the fire, then step back. Characters do not like to be misunderstood they like to think they are making themselves perfectly clear. When readers begin to discern that characters, wanting to be understood--Am I making myself clear?--are in fact muddying the waters, making in fact cowboy coffee of the waters, they begin to have expectations.

The expectations are that there will be conflict.

All you have to do now is make the conflict interesting.

Readers have expectations that conflict will be interesting.

In real life, conflict, even conflict based on misunderstanding, is often boring. Think of how many persons who disagree with you seem boring.

In real life, when you were an editor on the rise, an author announced himself to the receptionist as having a manuscript you would surely want to publish. When you learned his name, you understood that this was no idle boast here was an author with some name recognition, hoping to get an out-of-print title back into print. He had reasonable expectations that you would want to publish this book, giving it new life and no doubt giving him a few months worth of trouble-free living where rent was concerned. The moment you heard the man's name, you had expectations of what the title would be. You also had every expectation that you would not want to publish this book.

Some remarkable things happened in the lobby of that publishing company, which is no longer a publishing company and may well be seeing better days as a purveyor of automobile parts. Yet another adventure was enacted in that lobby when a psychiatrist questioned your sanity because you did not want to publish a book he assured you--correctly--that his book would sell a million copies in hardcover. Your answer for each author was the same. "It is a question of taste. I don't want to publish that book."

The author of the first book was Lajos Egri; the title of his book was and still is The Art of Dramatic Writing. The author of the second book was Arthur Janov, Ph.D.. His book was and is The Primal Scream.

This leads us to one kind of ending, the kind informed by another important element in human behavior and thus in dramatic behavior. The element is consequences. The consequences of my not contracting either book are multifarious, may lead you to have any of a number of opinions of me, for instance. Henceforth, years after the fact, you may well come to think of me as the man who could have published The Art of Dramatic Writing and The Primal Scream, but didn't. The consequences also involved the direction publishing either book would have on my employer.

Expectation. Misunderstanding. Consequences. What more could a narrative ask?

Required Reading

In the process of preparing materials for my summer school class, Writing Genre Fiction, I began two lists, the first a laundry list of genre expectations, which is to say what readers expect when they pick up a particular category. The second list is titled One Hundred Genre Novels, which intends to be an annotated list in no particular order or chronology. It is not only a list of genre novels I think will profit the students, it is a kind of unspoken warning that one cannot merely pick a genre, then write in it, write one's way to some kind of financial solvency if not fame and fortune.

The subtitle of my One Hundred Genre Novels list is How These Novels Gave Readers What They Wanted, a bit long for a subtitle, I know, but nevertheless a direct, descriptive one.

I could begin my list with a note, a reminder that in addition to such specifics as murder, puzzle, clues, suspects, motives, and the like readers of mystery novels expect, they also want story.

Readers want story in so-called literary novels, but they are more likely to settle for simple stories in the face of philosophy or moral conundrums, or political renditions. Some readers and some critics are even willing to lump--I used that verb with a sense of irony--literary novels with genre novels, saying in effect, What the hell, the literary novel is a type of novel, and readers come to them wanting to be transported to a place, a time, a situation that will then be cut up like a frog in a high school biology lab.

It takes some writers, myself included, several shots at novel-length narratives to get a sense of what story is and what it means, and how, if you are not careful, you will do the literary equivalent of brushing your teeth with someone else' 's toothbrush--you'll use their concept for story, their sense of pacing, all without understanding what you bring to the equation. Worse yet, you run the risk of being so taken with the notion of writing entirely for yourself that you will not factor in what the reader expects when the reader takes up your work.

Do not get me wrong: Writing to please one's self is a vital step to understanding not only what story is but what you bring to it, and perhaps even why you do so.

It is a complex problem, like trying, for instance to find an apartment in Manhattan at any price. Unless you're on the extreme ends of affluence, a roommate is not merely a necessity, it is a given. More likely, several roommates, using the bed and facilities on time shares.

You have these stories you want to tell; your potential reader doesn't know about you yet and has to be sensitized to your existence. In addition, your potential reader has expectations related to anything he reads. Thus your sense of what pleases you, what you can stick with through the revision and development, has to have factored into it your having read an infinitude of narratives that are good and bad, stories you love and stories that cause you to cringe away from as a vampire cringes away from a crucifix, thrust in his face.

Reading one hundred novels, although a bit time consuming, isn't much of a deal for a wannabe writer. In fact, a writer should read at least one hundred novels of the sort he or she wants to write before even starting out, not only to pick up technique and convention but to make sure one does not needlessly reinvent the wheel.

All this necessary reading is like having your writing self inhabited with roommates beyond number. You have to negotiate around them and through them in addition to coping with the characters, landscape, and tone of your own vision.

In the real life, roommates may leave dirty dishes in the sink or forget to take leaky things out of their pockets when they use the washer and drier, they may snore, use up your peanut butter, and as one old roommate of mine did, use a particularly splendid bottle of wine I'd been saving for something better than use in a stew. But these are nothing in comparison to the roommates you have to cope with to find out who and what you are, then get it down someplace where you can do something constructive about it.