Dialogue: It Was the Best of Problems, It was the Worst of Problems

A client of yours who is a literary agent has asked you to work with a client of hers on point of view, telling you the writer seems baffled by it.  Another, quite different agent, has remarked to you more than once that his biggest problem in dealing with his clients is getting them to understand the nature of "beats," those moments of activity in a story, the literary equivalent of notes on a musical score, expression volition and duration.  A client who is a writer finds difficulty in expressing motivation, and yet another has problems distinguishing voice from style.

You sympathize with all these difficulties to the extent that you had to work your way through them to the point where you felt confident with them, where they neither intimidated you nor caused you to either under- or overestimate their importance.

And yet.

You still believe the single most important aspect to the early and intermediate writer is dialogue, which is not what people say to one another so much as it is how characters advance story through its accelerated impact upon them.  It is in effect the energy created between one character saying "Good morning" to another, only to be met with the response, "Not that cheery-dearie business again."  Or, "I love you," provoking the response, "I'm supposed to issue a get-out-of-jail-free on the basis of that, right?"

It is true that some short story writers are able to express an entire narrative without using a word of dialogue while at the same time causing you to believe you have heard conversations among the characters.  It is also true that Harold Pinter could get "dialogue" out of two characters who didn't speak a work but instead rattled or otherwise got "dialogue" out of the sounds they produced by holding their portions of the daily newspaper and turning pages or otherwise creating sounds that evoked the nature of their feelings through the silence surrounding them.

Dialogue is not only the imaginary conversations within a single character or a pair of characters, it is in its way An American Gothic of drama in the evoked volley and return of feelings set against the deeper, truer feelings of the individuals; it is the seemingly magical effect of what is being said, set against what is being felt.  Of course it is not magic.  It is drama.  It is dialogue.

This early into the twenty-first century, the great dramatic dialogue seems to surround the issue of whether there is or is not a god.  You have close friends and some students on both sides of the debate.  Your own take is that there is none, although that only matters to you because you do not always address it directly in your stories.  You have not polled your characters on whether they believe or not, although you suspect a smaller percentage of them believe than those who do not.  The dialogue is, you recognize, a useful subtext, an argument your characters have had off stage with those about them, thus the residue of their differing attitudes as they engage one another.  How do such characters behave, speak to one another?  How do they speak of any basic matters?

There are a number of individuals in reality for whom you have measures of love along with regard.  You love some of them in spite of your regard for them because this, too, is part of human nature.  You feel love from a number of persons.  A number of persons you have loved have died, their loss particularly haunting because of you awareness that they loved you in ways that at one time defined your connection to the world and to reality.  It is feasible that the time will come when all those who love you in that particular way will be gone from you except in memory, revising your sense of connection to what you think of as reality and the universe.

The effect this will have on your conversations and dialogue cannot be forecast nor measured just as anticipated grief can only be spoken of aslant as opposed to straight on.  You can predict that in the process of aging, persons show a tendency to be haunted by past events and by the ghostly memories of significant individuals in their life who have died.  These individuals in some form or other of denial or displacement carry on dialogue with ghosts.  Your mother, for instance, frequently told you as a kind of ironic aside that if there is such a thing as an afterlife, your father will have a great deal to answer for.  This glimpse of her, this memory of her speaking to you, helps define her at once at her strongest and best and as an example of her own felt vulnerability.  This is the stuff of dialogue.  This is the stuff you need to remember.

Coming to Terms

How real is realism?  How impressionistic is impressionism?  Why would either of these issues matter to a writer constructing a story?

Realism can be defined by arguing that it attempts to portray the world and its inhabitants pretty much as it is, where the characters and writer are of more or less the same mind about the history of events that have taken place to the moment of writing.  There was, for instance, the Crusades, the succession of kings in England, and presidents in the U.S. William Shakespeare writes a play in which he demonstrates how the man who became the actual Richard III became the anointed King of England, tweaking actual events, inventing others. Along comes a writer such as Philip Roth, who takes a slight detour from realism when he writes a novel in which Charles Lindbergh defeats FDR and becomes President of the United States.  Roth also writes a novel in which a man becomes transmogrified into a female breast.  May we argue that both the playwright and novelist were merely tweaking realism to provide a dramatic and thematic effect?  

We may have assumed that impression somehow distorts or exaggerates reality or, if we wish to be argumentative, assert the impossibility of rendering reality as it is and regardless of approach add or subtract some element from it, offering merely our individual impression of a reality in which our particular story can gain traction.

Neither of these issues--reality and/or impression--has value to the writer until the story is at least in the first draft, possibly even as far in as third or fourth.  Tempting as it may be to assume a pose or an approach, such issues in the beginning add the presence of thought to the process of getting the work down in the first place.  Even if a writer wishes to tell tales in which magic or an extrapolation on known scientific discovery play active parts, it is more profitable for the writer to tell the tale in the form in which it appears, then discover the proper means for setting the jewel of medium into the setting of dramatic construction.  The real questions are the basic ones:  What is the story about?  Whose story is it?  What is the goal?  Why should we care?  Thus if these critical-related questions were reshuffled to something as basic as What is the one tool a writer should carry into the opening confrontations with a story?  the answer would be variations on the theme of care/concern/curiosity.  Then we reach into the tool kit for the wedges that propel the idea into being, the characters who will be the actors who demonstrate the story, and the narrative voice, which provides the emotional landscape.

Illusion

Many of the Eastern-based religions and philosophies use illusion as a rhetorical paring knife with which to strip away adornments and concepts not directly connected to the godhead.  Illusion is by most accounts a distortion, an appearance somewhat lacking or completely lacking in validity.  Optical illusions may, for one example, suggest--notice the verb there--the appearance of a thing advancing toward your point of vantage or retreating from it.

Illusion is some distortion of reality.  Many of the Hindu sects jump in on this point and adhere to the belief that there is only one reality--the godhead.  All else, they argue, is illusion or maya, even chuckling to themselves about a situation or circumstance that it is all maya.  The Taoists like to call illusion the Ten Thousand Things, of which they are at pains to remind you of the potentials they hold forth for duplicity and betrayal.  In other words, illusion becomes the object of suspicion.  You don't know any Hindu or Taoist agnostics or atheists although you do know a few adherents of Buddhist sects who claim the concept of godhead to be an illusion to be regarded with the same suspicion some Christians view Satan, working to distort the reality of the godhead.

You have come to be more interested in the illusion of writers and writing which has helped you develop an illusion of your own, an illusion of what Noam Chomsky must feel when he thinks about the ramifications of language and the incredible things that have been said about it by behaviorists and others who seek to categorize human activity and construct into neat one-size-fits all categories.

You are filled with admiration for Chomsky for having, in a single review of a major project by the behavioral psychologist, B.F. Skinner, pulled the rug from under that aspect of psychology, which is the still evolving study of how and why humans behave as they do.  Part of your admiration comes from the fact of Chomsky having attacked Skinner's top-heavy reliance on reenforcement as a key to behavior, but even more of your admiration comes from the more basic fact of Chomsky having pulled a rug from under a concept you consider tyrannical.  In fact you enjoy the power writing can provide to topple any such tyrannical behavior, which is of itself an illusion.  Thus your equation of using the illusions you create through writing to topple other illusions which you suggest through the means--if you are successful--of writing.

It is certainly an illusion to create in a few paragraphs a man, woman, or child who seem to emerge as actual reality to the point where you believe in them and others like you believe in them.  It is a staggering illusion to read the illusions of men and women who have lived out their entire lifespan before you were born and yet find entry into their illusion, which in turn arms and readies you to lead your daily twenty-first century life and, wonder of wonders, write about it.

The joys of sharing your illusions with others is in direct proportion to and highly motivated by the joys you have had while you had an entry visa into the terrains of other writers.  Some of these joys of which you write were in fact rather dark joys, grim joys, by no means joys that exalted you or served as letters of commendation for individuals such as, say, the recommendations you wrote for students wishing to pursue graduate studies.  They were in fact illusions of critique, of earnest and measured criticism of behavior and consequence, such as Chomsky critiqued when he wrote about B. F. Skinner.
And the best illusion of all to begin with is the illusion that is you.

Whatever strengths you now have, you once exercised to achieve; you stumbled in the process and were not your best self.  Whatever weaknesses you had, the memory of them remains in your muscles if not your heart and mind.  You are a walking argument, a walking best effort, hoping the stronger illusion is the better illusion and that it will prevail.  Top performers have lackluster performances.  Star athletes have bad days.  All writers are susceptible to illusion, cliche, false pride, and bitterness at the lack of recognition their skills receive.  All of us are vanity of vanities writ large and leaky ego an ongoing possibility.

We step to the computer screen or the note pad, a hybrid of hope and idea, seeking that opening sentence and the illusion that it is the right one, the one that brings forth from within the next sentence and the next.

Where They're Coming from

No character however minor his or her ultimate role in a story, appears on stage without an attitude informed by some earlier event. We may actually see the event taking place without having the slightest notion of its effect on the particular character who happens to be present. If the character is truly minor, it is possible we will not see the event; we may not even know about the event, but the character in question does and performs accordingly--because of it.

Stage-trained actors and, to a lesser extent, film actors know it is not enough merely to appear for their moments in a scene. The immediate now is charged with colliding forces. We may have to deal with individuals in reality who are able to do their job in a workmanlike fashion, but that longtime favorite of yours, that Joe-the Plumber of your blog posts is the mythical pizza delivery person. He or she may have just come from an unfortunate customer during the last delivery, perhaps one who counted out payment for the pizza in pennies. The delivery person may also be an aspiring actor, either practicing various character types or, thinking the person to whom the pizza is being delivered is in some casting position, is showing off with voice, attitude, posture, whatever.

A matters stand now, you are procrastinating in the preparation of a book proposal with a particular revision suggested by your agent, doing so by doing a step beyond taking notes for a short story idea that came fluttering in. Your protagonist, still quite vague to you, has just been ordered away from his brother and sister-in-law's home, indirectly accused of at best being insensitive, at worst a sexual predator, thus you knew the territory in which the thematic arc was taking. You had no idea why you had him walking away, thinking to catch a latte and reconnoiter bus schedules, which baffled you even more because you had to stop and figure out why he does not have a car--everyone in southern California has a car.

This led you to the conclusion that he'd probably had his license revoked, which also brought you closer to the notion that he was in recovery from booze. Then the real gift arrived, the information that even though he was half in the bag when he gave his lectures, no one seemed aware of that fact. Bingo, you discovered he was a PhD. In a flash, you understood that his subject was the Classics because of another arrival of metaphor. By the time the character is out of the first scene, you also know you are going to mess with the time scheme, shifting into the indefinite past, where more of the problems on his plate are delivered. The more you know about where he is and where he was, the more you know about him and are thus able to throw impromptu exploding devices, dramatic style, in his path. You even know the name of the graduate student who was part of The Problem.

True enough, he is the principal narrator; it is his story to the point that it is tentatively named after him, as in "Uncle Charlie," a title that will not bear irony until after the story has been read through. Nevertheless, past, present, and future scenes begin to appear, each triggered by you're having scarcely written two scenes.

The real point is that until you know where a character is coming from--literally and figuratively--you are at a loss to be as specific with his behavior as you might be, losing opportunity for tension, that glucosamine of story. What kind of tension? Remember, Uncle Charlie was banished from his brother and sister-in-law's home because of their belief that he was paying too much and too close attention to their sixteen-year-old daughter, whom you will meet early on and find some assurance that she did not feel threatened by him or made the slightest bit uneasy in his presence. Of course this gives you the third scene in which Uncle Charlie will have picked the coffee shop to patronize in search of his latte, thereupon to be confronted by a barista who, although older, has similar enough features to his niece, that he becomes impressed with the similarity. But the matter can't stop there because you are just reminded of an incident a year or so back when you stopped in the very coffee shop Uncle Charlie is patronizing. A barista whom you found rather attractive but had no memory of ever having seen her before greeted you by asking you if by any chance you had the year before delivered a lecture on William Goldman in Salisbury Cathedral. As it happens, she was correct, prompting you to have the fictional barista at the North Star Coffee Shop ask Charlie if he is in fact Professor Hecht because either her friend or roommate had a class with him a few years back and has retained her class notes to that day. You're still not certain where this is all leading, but this is all material you did not have until Uncle Charlie was out on the street, looking for coffee.

Finding out where your characters are coming from, where they're going, and what their plans are give you the very things you were after when you started thinking about Charlie in the first place, which is story. And the real truth is that you'd had no thought of Charlie as a character in the first place; you were merely doing some background on Ella, his niece, for whom you have plans in yet another venture.

Let's Face It

Reality often imitates art, particularly when it imposes subtext, the dialectic of simultaneous engagement upon us, just as it confronts characters with the need to say one thing while feeling its opposite. Writers join their brother and sister artists in the frequent minefield the creative workplace has become, meeting head on a dialectic rarely spoken about, one that presents itself as a noun and a verb.

Face.

The writer faces a work session having come from life outside, which is to say Reality; now comes the need to put on the dramatic faces associated with characters--what they want and feel as opposed to what they say and do.

It is no wonder the creator is by degrees seen as a lonely, beset, cranky, notional individual; you sometimes think of the writer as a psychotherapist or analyst, spending hours listening with attention and understanding if not sympathy to individuals who are conceived in stress and problem and unfulfilled desire, with raging needs, ambition as rampant as kudzu in a Southern hillside. It is no wonder that when writers of advanced technique gather socially, there is at first empathy, then sympathy, then the flare of frustration as each moves toward his own vision of what Reality means. Thus the concept of the artistic creator as control freak. No wonder it sometimes becomes a shock or disappointment to meet one's artistic heroes. Even less wonder you find yourself at times, in a midst of roistering, cheerful writers, sensing the potential for disconnect. No wonder writers often feud.

Face as the noun represents the attitude you put forth in order to get into the activity--reading, writing, feeling, even some thinking--you need to perform in order to get something down on your Moleskine and/or your computer screen, while you face as the verb and try to come to terms with the conditions and feelings that make up your reality. It is not by any means that individuals other than writers have any less a need to engage this conversation with The Cosmic Forces, or that they are any more daunting for you because of the choices you have made, rather it is that you have to cope--face--with your own faces and those of the individuals you would bring somehow into the world.

Metaphor

Metaphor is a mischievous but useful way of connecting two or more things in a relationship they might not have had otherwise. Not only that, metaphor brings us a step or more away from language that is merely descriptive, linear, instructional; closer to the way things appear to us in reality. And how is that accomplished? Metaphor, the marriage broker or eHarmony of language, causes us to consider ideas and concepts in context with the life about it, blurring the world of Reality to the point where it becomes a constant shimmer of ambiguity, mystery, and intrigue.

No wonder we inject metaphor and digression into our stories. If they were meant to be pure reportage, metaphor and digression would be the first two things the metaphorical editor with the metaphorical green eye shade would strike out of the copy, and the third ambiguity would be the true nature of the human being which is at least a duality. No, not the duality of God and Man, rather the duality in which each of us is also its double or reverse, the one who wants for a thing to be so that he or she appears to dither but is instead measuring the potential outcome against the ideal goal.

There is an entire dimension of metaphor in the waking life of Reality and in the dream life of reality, but you have had such awareness in you made suspect by years of teachers, jobs, and instruction books that warn you off, holding forth the simple clarity of the declarative sentence, achieved without unnecessary adjective or adverb as a paradigm to be observed. While it is possible to visualize such a world and write of it, you find yourself not using all the tools in the writer's toolkit, rendering your world dependent on event that proceeds step by ponderous step in the present tense, the present moment, with little or no possibility of association or comparison. You would be apt to get the same meaning from a text each time you reread it. There could be no possibility for ambiguity or metaphor in a text that was essentially recipe instead of evocation.

The anarchists in your life were the teachers who injected poetry into your life, the middle school teacher who sent you scurrying to read the poetry of Gabriella Mistral, and the apologetic man who knew of your eagerness to get on with "real" writing allowed that you might find more to relish in Geoffrey Chaucer than in Ernest Hemingway, but asked you at least to compare and contrast the music in the styles of each. The same mild man once suggested there was more to be had in evocation than description. You were not even one and twenty at the time, no use to talk to you. It was the experience that counted, to the point where you saw yourself as wanting to be the rodeo rider of language, tossing a lariat over it, hog-tieing it, wrenching it to the ground, free of any sense of the interior of your own self or of the reader.

Now it is, of course, different to the point where you can see the process beginning to emerge before you; you are more of a kite flyer than a bull rider, the ambiguity more descriptive than the clarity, the metaphor poking its head above ground like a curious gopher, seeking a midnight snack, waiting for its opportunity.

Expect

Every time you pick up a novel, whether it is from an old literary friend, a young writer whose face and voice have not been completely weathered yet, or a writer previously unknown, you also lift up a series of expectations.

One such expectation is that you will be seized by the collar, lifted, then transported to a landscape where everything in it and all things within its purview will dispense meaning, insight, and nuance as the syrup dispensers do at International House of Pancakes. Another expectation of this novel calls for your immediate care and concern for the individuals who populate it, the stratagems by which they will conduct their lives in pursuit of the solutions to the obstacles Reality has placed in their way, and the meanings they will extract from the problems that beset them.

Perhaps most demanding of all expectations, you expect from this novel transformative energy and insight of sufficient magnitude to change your life in ways that will cause you to feel, think, and behave with more focus.

If this were not significant enough a burden, you extend the power you afford these expectations to those you associate with love, looking for the signs of transportation and transformation you associate with novels to apply there as well. Thus in your relationship with friends, colleagues, students, lovers, animal friends, you seek and to a large measure find in them an entity you can identify as a transformative force, one you can carry with you in your own times of woe and weal.

The nature of expectations is to outweigh their consequences, to distract us in our step-by-step process by which we seek to excel at the things we do, certainly not for pride but rather for the enhanced satisfaction of pursuing selfhood as though it were a draft of our best novel or short story to date. Being thus engaged and focused, you reckon will not make dying any easier than it ought to be but will make life more a continuous feast to be shared with any who are in the vicinity.

It is arguable that expectations invariably lead to disappointment, just as the idea in one's forge of process can never be equaled by its execution. Some musicians you know of may have achieved this goal: Mozart comes to mind; so does Ravel. Gershwin? Yep. Bach? Of course. But writers? Well, read on, and write on.

Also arguable is the notion that removal of expectation makes us, somewhat the samurai of old, and the likes of the Buddhist monks more open to something more valuable even than expectations, which is to say opportunity. You admire the prospect of opportunity, at this stage in your life being at the point of having expectations of encountering them. Through work, which is another occasion for a definition: Work is the engagement of listening to the senses, hearing them, seeing them, tasting them, rearranging the furniture if they do not all fit comfortably in the room we have, which is the body we were born into and the edifice it has become. Work is living and loving. And writing about them.

I Confront, You Confront, He, She, or It Confronts

Confrontation may well be the head-on meeting of two or more opposing forces but it is also the spine of story and in the ironic bargain the navigation system by which most of us maneuver the reefs and shoals of our daily reality.

A sophisticated balancing act begins when we set forth to tell a story, putting onto a collision course the same forces we claim to observe in fiction while at the same time pursuing any kind of civil citizenry. We manipulate characters into irresistible situations of stress, moral confusion, and the just-beyond-arm's-reach realization of heartfelt agenda at the same time monitoring, controlling, and restraining our own behavior in the names of consideration and social restraint.

To the extent that we inject our own sense of tension and temptation into the story at hand, we invite the reader inside the raging dialectic between teller and reality, between observer and actual participant, between character and temptation.

Conventional wisdom whispers into our ear the encouragement to focus on conflict as the engine of story, an encouragement we fall upon with the eagerness and recognition of fleas discovering a long-haired dog. But our results of following such a course are fraught with the misplaced energy of thin, one- or two-dimensional characters who barely hint at the conversation to be had between writer and character, between characters and readers.

If the reader is led to feel the tension the writer experiences between story and reality, then and only then has the story succeeded in becoming more of a portal to interior conflict than a mere traffic report of conflicting agendas.

Confrontation is the meeting within each and every character, however front rank or humble walk-on, of the character's core agenda and what the appropriate behavioral dictates of that particular character--what is felt internally and desired as opposed to what is said and done in consequence. Accordingly, confrontation is present in every stave of dialogue, a simmering, bubbling catalyst that may explode into a force that causes the character to say and/or do something that betrays the protective covering, the Kevlar vest of reality worn by the character. Most characters will not willingly betray secrets of agenda until the collision with the stress of urgent confrontation, knocking at the gate like the porter in Macbeth, demanding to be let in.

Illusions

How is it that you remind so many individuals--including complete strangers--of someone else? Last week, as you awaited a student in a coffee shop, a man approached you. You're probably used to hearing this, he said, but you're a dead ringer for that actor, what's his name? There is a long pause wherein you realize he has momentarily forgotten the name of the actor you remind him of and because he has momentarily blocked on the name, now expects you to know immediately who it is you should be reminding him of. Any hesitation on your part would speak to your dereliction. The sobering (for you) fact is that you have been mistaken for a variety of actors, not so much because of your physical configurations as due to your expansive tendencies in gestures. Your accuser/approacher is moments away from being embarrassed for not being able to complete the equation he initiated. You know, he says. What's his name? Sorry, you say. Ah, he says. Ah. Got it. Whitmore. James Whitmore. Flattering, you say. Very flattering, but he seemed so much more nuanced. The best you can do is assure the man that you and the late actor had a vague resemblance factor in eyebrows. The man shakes his head. Dead ringer, he says, showing no sign of leaving. You begin wishing the student would show up, which would allow you to ask her in the man's presence the name of her father-in-law. Her answer closely embodies one of your theories about human connections, associations, and relationships. Her answer would somehow convince the man you and she were making fun of him, conspiring against him as indeed authors do from time to time when they share information a particular character does not know.

Mercifully for the man who is positive you are a dead ringer for the late actor, James Whitmore, he leaves before your student arrives. When she does appear, you ask her, Do you see any resemblance between me and your father-in-law? From her response, it is made clear to you that the possibility never crossed her mind. Grandpa Jimmy? she says. You? How interesting. Her diplomacy is impeccable. She has graciously avoided saying yes when she had no thought to do so nor no, when doing so might have seemed somehow indecorous or judgmental.

Days later, you are leaving your favorite venue for coffee and a woman radiant in middle-aged coif and stature takes your arm and smiles. I just had to tell you, she says, how much you remind me of my father. She turns to the man sitting next to her, likely her husband, with whom she'd noted the similarity. Doesn't he? she says. The man nods. The woman's eyes mist. I just lost him this year, she says. I still look for him. The misting is more profound. You say, Thank you. I'm please to remind you of someone you care for. Her hand squeezes my arm, then let's go; she has reached the point of being embarrassed for speaking of grief to a stranger. You thank her and move on, touched, a parade of events moving before you like suspects in a police line-up, incidents of seeing missing friends and family in the gestures and faces of strangers.

We move through our daily routine as ourselves and reminders of others of varying possible identity to others. From time to time, when you are shaving, you see your father smiling at you, you see traces of your mother's father, that remarkable, relatively short man whom you rarely had the vision to see as he was before the synapses and brain chemistry began removing him from recognition. At your father's funeral, a longtime friend of your sister saw you and gripped her husband's arm. He's just like Jack, she said, and the knowledge that you reminded someone of your father was such a relief that you felt like dancing. In the same, favored coffee shop, you occasionally see your mother until she turns at some angle where it becomes apparent that the similarity has departed like a willful parrot fleeing its cage. You do not always look like you to yourself, sometimes haunted, pestered, abstracted. Sometimes you say or do things you had not anticipated saying or doing

At a writers' conference last year, you were approached by a man who wanted to shake your hand for the pleasures afforded him from reading your work. You thanked him profusely, even when he said how deeply disappointed he was that you saw fit to kill off Jacques in your last book. You have no idea who he had mistaken you for; you have never had a character named Jacques much less have you killed off such a character.

As a writer and an editor and a teacher, you manipulate reality,in large measure through the effective tool of illusion. It is only fair that in someone else's reality, you become illusion from time to time. It is a mystery that you often remind others of others, but it is a gift all the same.

Altered States of Reality: Your Own Vision of It

Even at its best, reality is a massive, hulking from, perhaps even a troglodyte, plodding along in lumbering pace, it's very shape often defying description. All living things deal with it in one way or another, the writer, artist, actor, and musician content to focus on a small area of it at a time, all too aware how easy it is to lumber beyond the reach of definition.

The moment you attempt to deal with reality, even as a mere report or recording of events or details from a slab of it, you are in a real sense distorting it, perhaps even personalizing it, certainly betraying a bias from the very things about it you fail to note. You also stand the risk of rendering it boring or mechanistic or impersonal, depending on the agendas and tools you bring to play in your decision to convey a sense of it.

The writer, artist, musician, actor, et al bring to the task at hand of recreating a simulacrum of reality a force however unintended related to altering reality. That force is the individual vision--the way reality seems. The moment we describe is the moment we limit. Accordingly, some of us learn to exercise great care in what we describe and how we describe it, fumbling through out tool kit not so much for the adjective or the adverb or the poetic trope as for the tool of ambiguity by which we can render a thing so that a number of persons will experience it as his or her own. We are careful about modifiers in the same way we are careful with matches when near liquid or gaseous fuels; we demonstrate stories and responses in ways that allow our characters to betray or exhibit some response which, upon checking and rechecking, we believe will allow most readers to draw similar seeming results.

In order to portray reality, we have to change it, shave away some of its distractions, maintain a plausible focus on the task at hand.

For all the times you have pondered the essentials of reality, you have come to view it much as the renditions of the wooly mammoth, huge, tusked, overgrown with dread locks. In order to make this simulacrum work in a story, you believe it is necessary to present reality not as a wooly mammoth, which is among other things extinct, rather as a sleek panther or cheetah, perhaps even as a mountain goat. One of your favorite phrases to use as an editor or critic is "mountain-goat leap of logic," thus do you wish your renditions of reality to be agile on the steep escarpments of event and purpose. You have only to see a mountain goat in operation to imbed the imagery. Story and other events of emotion have great need of mountain goat ability to climb or leap because of the rarity of logic in emotion, especially emotion driving characters over the edge, to the point where they are trapped by their feelings.

Story is the wooly mammoth, dramatically honed to the body of a cheetah or leopard or the scraggly, survival-oriented frame of the coyote, particularly Wile E. Coyote, who knows a thing or two about survival in the face of the failure of his best- and worst-laid schemes.

You spent some considerable time this afternoon discussing craft with the person you suspect will become your representative. You particularly felt drawn to her because of your connections with the same publishers, with the fact that she has been and understands what the editor does and how she does it. One of her stories that got to you had to do with how she chose which manuscripts she chose to take home to read. The first line was always the decider, and you both said in unison "It was love at first sight," because that was Catch-22, even more chemistry than "Call me Ishmael." Going back even farther, your favorite of all. Hamlet. "Who's there?" That points the finger directly at reality. Who, indeed?

Maps to Buried Treasure's Homes

At an earlier time in your reading history, nothing could interest you as much as a treasure map. The merest hint of one had you gripping the pages as though the prize might sneak past you. When such luxuries as Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island brought a map directly into the foreground, where you could already visualize the site where the treasure was buried, you were impatient to get on with the digging. This love of treasure maps, buried treasure, and the quest for some cache, hidden away for later use, had less to do with money than with curiosity for what was to come next. Young as you were, you had already learned that treasures, particularly buried ones, were likely to contain surprises, often pleasing ones but just as likely some reminder that what needs to be hidden often contains some artifact which has information you would rather not know.

Treasure maps are thus not content with the role they have been assigned; they have ambitions of becoming a metaphor. just as a comedian nurtures ambitions of portraying such tragedies as Hamlet or Macbeth and the tragedian in turn wishes to portray the comic. Dig here, the map and the metaphor proclaim. Dig far enough down and you will likely discover riches that others before you wanted to preserve beyond discovery. These riches were often ill-gotten, embodying a theoretical if not actual curse on anyone who finds it, said curse being delivered on behalf of those from whom the treasure was wrested.

Treasure stands not only for wealth but power and of course power is the next best thing to knowledge and understanding. With power seductions may be set under way, which often have consequences of betrayal, revenge, and outright deception. With enough treasure, so the logic goes, one can purchase knowledge, even understanding.

Some psychologists and philosophers liken a boy's interest in buried treasure to the growing awareness of sexuality, particularly as exemplified by the ability to achieve and maintain an erection, generally thought to be one of the ingredients necessary to partake of sexual activity. Such theories go some way toward demonstrating how a young boy would see that metaphoric connection as, indeed, many a young girl would arrive at an awareness that she was a metaphoric site of a buried treasure, one she might cheerfully assist some explorer in discovering.

Discovery is the goal of the treasure map; with some particular end in mind, many a searcher for treasure has no further thought of the consequences. Continuing with the sexual metaphor, one consequence of having discovered the buried treasure and, so to speak, unearthed it, is the so-called post-coital sadness the sense of sadness-bordering-on-loneliness after the experience. The sense of having been away from, even separated from one's self for a time. This opens the door to questions about sexual activity as a vacation from reality and/or one's self. Another possible discovery is that with the proper person, there was no post-coital sadness, on the contrary an enhanced sense of participation in something larger.

Even though sex has irrevocably reared its head, butted its way into your life, crashed the party as it were,indeed been a frat-boy catalyst to some of your behavior, it has not removed your fondness for the treasure map nor the discoveries and revelations that might appear when the treasure is located and then opened. The surprise that awaits is for your taste the driving force behind fiction, even the kinds of fiction in which the treasure is either a man or a woman for a male or female protagonist or the reverse.
Discovery awaits us at every turn, discovery that an anticipated thing is unspeakably better than what was anticipated or unspeakably more dreadful than could have possibly been imagined.

Discovery, you see, is like reality; it exists on its own terms, regardless of what you think or feel. You may have been programmed in some way to anticipate a certain consequence from a trail of digging for a particular treasure, but reality has its own notions about whether you should even find it. Discovery belongs in every story. Reality belongs to some extent in every story.

You, in your own way, have chosen to go forth, a step or two up in class from the good Mr. Chaucer's Pardoner, attempting to sell or otherwise barter treasure maps to a segment of the public. You have come a long way in six hundred years, but you still have steps you can take. There is this map burning a hole in your metaphorical pocket.

The Care and Feeding of "in"

You've been at some pains in your attempts to describe how to get "in" a particular narrative, experiencing greater degrees of the narrative's reality than you do the settings of the reality you just left. Most probably, you will never get the exact coordinates to your satisfaction; for one thing, when you're in, you're never sure quite how you got there, and for another, when you're out, you aren't entirely sure how or why it was you were evicted.

Although you frequently gain access to "in" where your computer and large-screen monitor are set up, you also get "in" at another favored venue, Peet's Coffee, using no computer at all but rather your favored implement, the fountain pen.

There are yet other places, some of them benign and innocent, such as La Luna, a coffee house on the main drag of the village of Summerland, scant miles away. Also, there are dangerous places such as your Yaris when it is on Highway 101 or perhaps the Pacific Coast Highway, or perhaps even the 280 you use to traverse the Bay Area north of San Jose.

The ease of visiting "in" is problematic. There is increasing probability you will ultimately gain admission upon brief effort. Only rarely are you to be confronted with "Closed" or "No Admittance" or the more quixotic"Already Filled to Capacity" signs. With increasing regularity, you discover, with a jolt similar to the awareness of lapsing from being awake to full-on sleep, that you have been "in" somewhere, in some narrative-related venue, with no clue how you got there. The problem with problematic in this case is that the more you think about the care and feeding of "it," or "How You Can Achieve IT," the more likely events, possibilities, and consequences occur of a piece with Sally, being over at the Cudahy's, hooraying the guests of a bridge party to their absolute distraction, with you wondering how she got over there in the first place as opposed to you taking the most reliable step to secure her return, which is to turn on the engine of your car, a gambit that brings her on the run, hopeful of an adventure of greater magnitude than barking at the participants of a bridge party.

It is best, you believe, merely to observe the process of gaining entry, perhaps even considering writing a history of it, better than forcing your way at the process with an academic paper, fraught with conditional and subjunctive tenses. Besides, being "in" changes from time to time and place to place to the point where, were you not careful, you'd have forced your way into a now empty building where a monumental party took place only last week.

This place gives me the...choose one: creeps, satisfaction, apprehension, secrets, expectations...

Although you had not thought to do so in today's weekly writing workshop, you spoke with more conviction than you thought you had about the need of a place to have a resident personality.  It began when one person, her story set in Los Angeles, wondered aloud about ways to infuse a sense of how people behaved in Los Angeles.  If, you observed, Beckett were still alive and writing, he'd set stories in Los Angeles, which led this writer to imagine what it would be like directing Waiting for Godot in the specific locale of Los Angeles as opposed to, say, Boston or Indianapolis.  Persons in differing cities want different things.  Having a lovely relationship of duality with Los Angeles, it was easy to observe that even though it has many amenities not found anywhere else, the thing that makes it what it is has to do with the fact that nearly everyone who is a resident of Los Angeles knows that the most bent commodity of all is reality.  Angelenos know they are there for the bent reality, not for the motion picture and television industries, not for the politics or weather but for the kinship of altered expectation and reality.

Residents of Santa Barbara are here for a different reason, the atmosphere of secrecy so inherent.  There are stunning views and weather.  But these are not the draw, although we will tell you that they are, hopeful of diverting you from the fact that we exist on a sense of having arrived here with a secret agenda, with a history of having done something or having come from an unusual family or perhaps the sense that such places as New York and Boston and Los Angeles and yes, even Seattle make for splendid visitation but somehow we could not survive in such places on an extended basis.

True enough, there are individuals who live in places such as Albuquerque or Portland or Santa Fe, or Dallas who do not wish to be there; they wish to be nearly anywhere else.  They fantasize about Toronto or Vancouver, trying to make do with what they have but not sure how.

There is a hidden sense of defining characteristic inherent in individuals who live where they do in some uneasy awareness that goes beyond the mere trope of anywhere but here, settling in on the notion that they are here as a way of taking their medicine or, to make it more chemical, taking their meds.

What is the unspoken connection between a real person or a character and the place where they go about the warp and weft of their routine, watching story unfold about them and coping with their own sense of story.

There should be a dotted line or dash or two-line space break here, a walkway into the questions you have been asking about your protagonist, the one who has taken up residence in a managed community, one you sense as being undershot with two seemingly antithetical qualities, affluence and secrets.  The secrets of Casa Jocasta, you want to write, are spread through the prime acreage of the facility like the blue, marbled mold in a wheel of aged Stilton cheese.

Some individuals have voluntarily moved to such places, individuals of differing demographic than those in your fictional place.  Some have nevertheless gone voluntarily while others still have been more or less left off for storage there.  

And, regardless of age, social status, and background, they have secrets.

Revising Reality

Reality, through no fault of its own, is being revised to a fault.  Much of the revision comes from those who need and/or want to be told what reality represents.  A lesser quantity of the revision comes from artists, who define themselves by the act of defining reality.

The more the artist has defined an individual reality, the closer that artist comes to being a true individual.  From the moment the artist has begun this definition, vision begins to bud and ultimately blossom, and faith is pushed away from center stage.  Vision is informed by characters and their inherent ideas, bringing on stage (or easel or page) contrary visions, the better to confront, challenge, and inspire revision.

We all of us exist in some stage of revision, be it an upward or downward path.  The former induces growth to the point where ideas and visions emerge freshly into the reality, colliding in much the same manner as particles in a nuclear accelerator, producing in the wake of the collision new elements--fresh connections--that invite pursuit.  The latter induces entropy and/or surrender to orthodoxy of some faith, -ism, or conventional vision.

Convention, if not the overt enemy of the artistic inquiry, is the ballast, helping to keep inquiry from raising too high. Convention is the manner by which we attempt to bring reality under control.  The moment we presume to control reality, the more we give up our individuality.  Convention is to be abandoned with a what if? purpose in mind.  If this convention is abandoned, then this product or result will be the product.  If convention is overly maintained, protected, seen as an end, it will repeat itself into parody which means a good many unsuspecting victims will be harmed by the seemingly insurmountable forces of stasis and status quo.

Tempting as it may be, repetition leads to the self-parody of us making fun of ourselves by determining, as some of the Romans who aspired to godhood did, that more of the same is not only acceptable, it is desirable.  Because we can guarantee the outcome of heating water to 212 Fahrenheit degrees as sea level, it is not a license to be content with other guaranteed outcomes.

Will the Real Reality Please Stand Up?

reality--a place and condition writers attempt to replicate in their work; a representative fabric of plausible setting, physical, moral, and social conditions of a particular time in a circumstance intended to be conflated with the physical, moral, and social conditions of a specific place or in an imaginary place which is intended nevertheless to be taken by the reader as a plausible, real place.

Reality is a condition that surrounds events, living things, institutions, traditions, and conventions. The Salem Witch Trials of 1692 were surrounded by a reality that still affects individuals and institutions of the twenty-first century, the attitudes prevalent at that time have evolved just as some aspects of civilized society have evolved since then, but there still exists Taliban and other forms of evangelical extremism that inform our contemporary choices and have an impact on our ability to chose.

Reality effects characters in stories in direct proportion to the attitudes of writers writing at a given time about their own time or previous times and as well their individual projections of future realities. No matter where a story is set, it is in effect an alternate universe story because it is filtered through a specific writer's prism of reality, even that writer's vision of an imaginary reality. In some universes there are planets and physical conditions that do not obtain in stories set in this universe or on planet Earth.

It is the writer's job to visualize and then convey a plausible reality with conventions and physical properties most readers will accept as valid, perhaps even as rational. It is also the writer's job to present individual characters with individual attitudes toward the reality in which they live, all the better to convey these characters as being plausible individuals whose behavior is taken as a given, not as a philosophical tenet. Robert Heinlein is excellent at presenting such alternate realities and plausible characters within these realities (The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Have Space Suit--Will Travel, A Stranger in a Strange Land). So too is Theodore Sturgeon (See More Than Human) and Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles). But so too was Anthony Trollope (The Way We Live Now) and so too is William Faulkner (As I Lay Dying and A Light in August.)

Story is vital, but it needs the steady plinth of reality on which to perch.

How to convey reality: Believe in the characters and their goals, believe in the effectiveness of the constraints placed upon these believable characters by their cultures, their families, and their own abilities. Believe in the notion of the need for a character to reach beyond the constraints of his or her reality, by which action he or she brings us into sympathy with the reality of the story.

Frequent Reader Miles

transportation--the process of being taken to a mental, physical, and/or emotional state by means of reading a story or hearing it read; a condition of being caused as an observer of a staged drama, motion picture narrative, or televised presentation to identify with characters and cultures both in and out of your own personal background; a means of accepting and being convinced by the reality of a fanciful or realistic narrative.

The goal of the writer is to provide immediate, first-class transportation to the reader, with no hassle about lost luggage or chintzy in-flight meals; transportation recognizes the reader's passport immediately, does not insist on security checks. There are a good many competing conveyances out there in the world of conventional and electronic publication for the reader to have to experience any inconveniences. Frequent-flier miles are welcomed. Any successful story offers this seemingly ineffable quality of transporting the reader from his present, grounded reality into another reality in which the rules, conventions, and traditions of story exist to be broken, the ultimate goals being such destinations as disturbance, entertainment, information, and plausible suggestions for dealing with the moral and social conflicts of the reader's immediate present.

Twenty-first century readers may be transported to the eighteenth century,where they will experience a socio-economic landscape of pellucid clarity simply by picking up any of the three novels completed by Jane Austen. Similarly, readers wishing an entirely different type of transportation may follow the career path of one Valentine Michael Smith in Robert Heinlein's epic science fiction novel--regarded by many as the science fiction novel--Stranger in a Strange Land. Valentine Michael Smith is the son of two of the eight astronauts of an ill-fated first human expedition to Mars. Smith is raised in the culture of the native inhabitants of the planet, beings whose minds live in another world. By signing on for the trip, we get a picture of differing cultures and their effect on one another. Each of these two novels, written a tad over a hundred years apart, have influenced generations of readers, the one from a satirical observation point of view, the other from an imaginative gloss on differing views of human behavior.

In order for any work of the imagination to offer transportation, the characters involved must be caught up in some recognizable cultural and social clashes, enhanced by some form of deadline or emotional imperative.

Thus the question: How does a writer transport readers? The answers are various and simultaneous. The writer's first duty is self-transportation. Develop the vision of a place, a time, and the individuals who inhabit it, then write with the unfettered energy of enthusiasm for the vision, regardless of whether the vision is dark and gloomy or light and inspirational. Write with the detail and certainty it takes you to believe. The more imaginative the landscape, which is to say the more it appears to vary from convention, the more real it needs to seem, thus the characters must behave as though the terrain were absolutely, convincingly real.

Not easy to do, but not impossible: Your favorite writers do it for you most of the time.

Tear Down This Wall? Okay; Here Goes

fourth wall, the--the boundary between reader and characters; a conceptual enhancement of the illusion of the audience eavesdropping on characters in the midst of story; a convention observed by authors for the purpose of implying that their activity is happening now, in real time.

A character in a novel or stage play who addresses the audience is said to be breaking the fourth wall, which by implication extends the three sides of a stage setting to the remaining dimension, the space between players and audience. The convention of the fourth wall is as old as storytelling, a given that has produced memorable breaches.

As far back in time as Greek drama, characters were breaking the fourth wall by addressing the audience. Even before poems, plays, and stories were set in movable type and printed on a press, Geoffrey Chaucer was imaginatively breaking the fourth wall in a poem, Adam Scrivendi, by telling his scribe to copy his lines with care, avoiding the skewing of Chaucer's intended meter by using regional spelling and accent marks. 

Shakespeare would later have his characters break the wall with asides to the audience, including preludes in which a chorus would directly address the audience. In his film version of Shakespeare's Richard III, Laurence Olivier had Richard directly tell the audience what he had in mind. In eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century novels, numerous authors spoke directly to the audience in some manner, examples being Henry Fielding's frequent asides to the reader in Tom Jones, Rudyard Kipling actually addressing his daughter in the Just So Stories, and James Michener addressing the reader in the opening chapter of Hawaii.

The major objection to fourth wall violations is the argument of broken reality; a broken wall is thought to be an advertisement that the story is illusory, distanced from any connection with reality, to which it may be argued that the nature of the story, the manner in which the characters interact and respond to the dramatic situations are all factors contributing to the verisimilitude or sense of reality the writer strives to achieve.

It may be argued that use of the intrusive authorial point of view is a constant shattering of the fourth wall and indeed, some of the modernists (Donald Barthelme and Italo Calvino come to mind) may evoke the amusing conflation of Ronald Reagan's exhortation to Mr. Gorbachev, "Tear down this [the Berlin] Wall with the ghost of the elder Hamlet, haunting the battlements to enlist his son in his desire for revenge. Shall the fourth wall come down? Only if it has to.

It is a truth universally recognized that literary conventions arose in the first place in response to some technical impasse but now await artful trespass. If breaking the fourth wall in a novel or short story serves a purpose which will make the narrative more effective, then break away with clear conscience. 

The only valid reason for not breaking the fourth wall or, for that matter, any convention is when doing so will seem more an act of anarchy or pretentiousness than a contribution to the artistic, emotional, and intellectual payoff of the narrative.

See suspension of disbelief
See also plausibility
See also conventions

The Shaggy-dog Story: A Metaphor for Life

The term shaggy-dog story has come to be associated with a long, meandering narrative, replete with irrelevant or distracting details, ending with an outrageous, groan-producing play on words--my homework ate the dog--or on a totally irrelevant note. In either case, the dramatic point of the shaggy-dog story resides in the unexpected, leading the reader or hearer--because shaggy-dog stories may be oral--in the lurch, at the mercy of the teller.

One of the great glosses on the shaggy-dog story comes from one of the great written and oral story tellers, the man known as Mark Twain. Check out "The Grandfather's Ram" story in Twain's splendid, autobiographical tour of Nevada and California, Roughing It, one of at least four Twain must reads (the others including Life on the Mississippi, The Innocents Abroad, and Huckleberry Finn.

Ernest Hemingway said all of American literature began with Huck Finn; I'll trump that by saying most of what one needs to know about story telling can be found in these five books.

In "The Grandfather's Ram," Twain writes of his days as a reporter for the Territorial-Enterprise,the free-wheeling Virginia City, Nevada newspaper for which Twain wrote during the early bonanza years of the Comstock Lode. A group of locals had sold Twain on the remarkable tale a certain old gent who loved to tipple was wont to tell of a ram once owned by his grandfather. Trouble was, the locals assured Twain, the teller of the tale had to have reached just the right, reflective state of tipsiness before he would begin to reminisce.

After a number of false starts, the boys assured Twain that the time was now; if he wanted to hear the story, he'd best drop everything and hurry on over to where the teller was holding forth, before a growing audience.

"My grandfather's ram," the old boy recalled with a smile at the memory. "I don't reckon them times will ever come again." And he is off, his brain cells, lubricated with spiritus fermenti, firmly focused. And Twain was hooked.

Trouble was, the old man never referred to the ram again, ranging from gossip in his home town to politics, religious preferences, and a remarkable story of a rug weaver who'd fallen into a machine-driven weaving machine and was woven into a six-ply broadloom carpet, making it necessary to bury him rolled up in long, narrow bundle. The story went on from there until the teller began to nod, then drop off to an early nap. Twain realized this was always the scenario, that the details of the grandfather's ram were largely unknowable, and that he'd been "had" by his friends.

This is not to propose that Twain invented the shaggy-dog story, but he expertly demonstrated it in all its living potential. By this time in his career, he already had an instinctive if not well articulated sense of story, which he later set down in another keeper, "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses," a critical diatribe against a writer who was the Tom Clancy of his day, embedded in a useful re-embodiment of Aristotle's Poetics.

Life is a shaggy-dog story, a series of often contradictory events or events competing for our attention, ending with some awful howler of a conclusion, or worse, ending with no proper conclusive inertia.

When we turn to memoir or biography or fiction, we look for travel writing--writing that takes us somewhere, a place where the laws of causality and determinism have greater effect than they do in real life. This is a place where justice is done, virtue is often rewarded, patience pays off, the good people get laid on occasion, and women are not reduced to having to marry just to get away from home (only to find themselves transported from one dreadful situation to another).

The message here is not that there is more satisfaction in literature than in everyday life but that the two can and should engage in a dialog, exchange notes, develop a rapport.

One good place to bring this metaphorical pairing of Israel and Palestine together is in the expectations we bring to our lives and to our reading.

All too often when discussing a particular story,we hear the disclaimer: That could never happen in real life. Just as often, when discussing the effect of a story and hearing an observation of disbelief about an element, the author will fiercely defend with the observation, "But it really happened that way." And increasingly, looking at the advertisements for films and TV shows, we see the inducement, "Based on a real story."

One of the Oscars--Wilde or Levant--once observed that in order for history to be effective, it must be rewritten. This observation sets the worm of cynicism into the apple of reality, leaving us with another potent observation. What is worse than finding a worm in an apple? Answer: Finding half a worm in half an apple.

Particularly since 2000 and the advent of the Bush administration (if it can be called an administrative function) we have lived in the midst of a shaggy-dog story, with distractions, myths, and ignorant armies clashing by night. We have found a half-eaten worm in our apple.

We must hasten to rewrite the more egregious histories we have allowed to befall us, using our understanding of story and the need to transport ourselves to a kinder, more civil place.