Surprise! or Surprise?

Surprise is the emotional response to an unplanned event. It may equally well be the reaction to an event that was planned in advance but did not play out as anticipated.  In either case the resident emotion balances on the fulcrum of a business-as-usual stasis which may accordingly tip either to disappointment and dismay or elation and enjoyment.

There is no middle ground in surprise; a person, thing, or event is either more than you'd hoped for or less.  Getting what you want may come as a surprise, particularly if you'd despaired of achieving the goal, in which case the result is better than you'd expected (because you'd either written it off or put it on hold.)

As long as you are dealing with absolutes, you might as well make the point again:  a narrative without some direct or implied goal is not yet a story; every character of significance has some relevant goal to justify her/his inclusion in the first place.  Dorothy Gale's goal in The Wizard of Oz is to get back to Kansas.  Think how frequently she was frustrated from this goal during the arc of the story.  Think also that the moment she was back in Kansas, the story was over.  Thus the use of surprise in story assumes accelerating importance; when a character believes she has the stated objective in sight, a diversionary event (surprise) adds frustration, disappointment, and longevity to the story.

Surprise may have nuance, even irony, witness the iconic Somerset Maugham story from the early 1930s:"The Appointment in Samarra"

The speaker is Death

There was a merchant in Bagdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the marketplace I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me.  She looked at me and made a threatening gesture,  now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate.  I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me.  The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went.  Then the merchant went down to the marketplace and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, Why did you make a threating getsture to my servant when you saw him this morning?  That was not a threatening gesture, I said, it was only a start of surprise.  I was astonished to see him in Bagdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.

Think about the emotional effect not only of the characters in the story but on yourself, having read it. Some readers will have articulated at least to themselves the role surprise plays in their approach to fiction, reckoning somewhere in their reading process the role surprise plays in a given story.  Writers understand that reversals and disappointments experienced by their characters help bridge the often impenetrable gap between character and reader.  How many persons do you know who have never experienced a reversal or setback?  Even though it is a part of the human genome to plan for such events, how many of us has gone through any significant span of time in which there were no disasters, disappointments, or need for Plan B?  It is not a moment too soon to recall Robert Burns' poem about the poor, unfortunate mouse whose nest he inadvertently uprooted while plowing a field.  "The best laid schemes o' mice and men/Gang aft agley..." or as some of the remarkable late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Yiddish writers have noted, "Tsouris beliden,"  Trouble aboundeth.

Happy surprises are best watched with caution lest they seem a deliberate convenience; they should not be allowed to lead the reader to the conclusion or outcome without some careful fore-planning to make the reader accept the plausibility.  Thus it is always better to conflate happy surprises with, say, a discovered open zipper on a man or a visible bra strap for a woman, some embarrassment however tiny, recognition that even good things come with hooks.

Gambits

The sooner a narrative or essay attacks a sensory defense or recognizes a sensory need such as curiosity, the more likely a reader will be tugged into the gambit. Make no mistake about it; getting the reader involved is a gambit.

If the language of the previous paragraph is redolent of chess and strategy, it signifies positive effect is being sent forth. Reader involvement--getting readers to care--is a chess game of a sort, with orchestrated opening moves, including the potential sacrifice--not of a pawn in an actual chess game but the revelation of a secret, the flash of surprise, the unanticipated discovery that changes everything. A hint of any of these is the equivalent of an opening gambit.

The defense is a sophisticated mixture of suspicion, negative interest (read lack of interest), not caring what happens to the players--after all, it is well known that they aren't real. But suppose that sensory defense is breached? Suppose the Reader forgets about plausibility long enough to form some kind of relationship with one or more of the characters.

Curiosity is a wedge to get the arms-locked-across the chest of suspicion out of the way. We want to find out more. Want to see how X behaves in Y situation which is coming up. Doesn't hurt that one or more characters can be vulnerable; once our watch out response kicks in for a particular character, we want to see if he or she can safely avoid the emotional trap awaiting, a trap we know is there because we are, after all, readers, which means we know something of consequence is going to spring forth on a character whom we either like or feel a certain arm's-length antipathy toward. Basically the good guy will be hit in the face with a wet squirrel, the sleazy guy will be invited inside for an iced tea.

Everything you could possibly want in a character to whom you give your heart is to be found in the protagonist of Daniel Woodrell's latest novel, Winter's Bone. Bree Dolly is a tough outer shell protecting a loving, caring interior. She wants to get out of her life in a remote corner of the Missouri Ozarks, where her father has gone missing, probably dead in one of his drug-dealing misadventures. Bree has her mother, who is in and out of dementia, to care for and two young siblings, who are close, by her reckoning, to fend for their mother and themselves, allowing her to fulfill her urgent desire to join the army, get a start on making a life of her own. But legalities step in, forcing her to set out in search of her father before she can break free of family ties. It is not enough to say that family ties dog her every step; Woodrell, an elegant and poetic writer, leads us shivering through the Ozark winter on a quest with some unexpected menace. She is remarkable and splendid, you think as you reread her exploits. Her humanity outshines her natural beauty. As she shows one of her siblings how to first hunt, then skin, then cook a squirrel, you are aware of never knowingly having eaten a squirrel. Dozens of them live in close enough proximity to you that you could, were you willing to take more matters into your own hands, experience eating a squirrel. You know that you would do so for her, a safe enough bargain given she is a character, but she is real enough a character that you fantasy her presence.

This fantasy element is key; all you characters must in fact be individuals you more than construct, you fantasy. Until you read other of Woodrell's books, you had never eaten a fried bologna sandwich although you have in your time eaten countless freshly sliced bologna sandwiches. Woodrell made the fried version sound interesting enough so that you bought the first bologna you have purchased in years, then fried it, then plunked the results between slices of bread, in one venture with sliced onion.

All right, here is the equation. You do the things you do because many of them are the acts you are willing to move out of fantasy and wonderment into actuality.

Surprise

A surprise may be an unanticipated discovery. Or not. It may also be an accidental revelation, or the result of a computation that equals an enhanced result. Surprise may be pleasant or not; it may be the advance guard of a reversal of fortune or the light at the end of the tunnel flickering, then going out.

Life is filled with surprises, but story has as much to do with surprise as transfat has to do with donuts; without surprise, story seems blah, unpromising, quotidian, much like real life. Surprise is the fuse that ignites, producing an explosion. The results of the explosion produce an emotional residue, often shock or amazement or fear. Surprise sometimes produces the shudder of apprehension, the realization of horror or terror. Surprise produces the ante needed to get into the poker game of love; it may be as complex as discovering you can't do without something or someone you thought you could get along quite nicely with out, thank you for asking.

Surprise in story arrives like an unbidden guest who thought the party was tonight, not tomorrow; it produces the tension and suspense of wondering what they--the characters--are going to do now, now that the surprise has arrived.

In some exquisite, final analysis, surprise must wait at the outer limits of plausibility, successful in its attempts to remain inconspicuous. One classic example of surprise in action at its most nuanced is to be found in Somerset Maugham's flash fiction, "The Appointment in Samarra."

There was a merchant in Baghdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the marketplace I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture, now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me. The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went. Then the merchant went down to the marketplace and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, Why did you make a threating getsture to my servant when you saw him this morning? That was not a threatening gesture, I said, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Bagdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.

You particularly cannot get away from surprise in your writing for a number of reasons so you may as well hunker down and get familiar with it. One not so pleasant surprise comes from rereading something you wrote a day or two earlier and left it in, thinking it was brilliant. Another surprise may come after someone has read a passage of yours you thought to be particularly poignant but which caused the reader to laugh outrageously. Yet another surprise may lurk when someone reads something of yours you were not quite satisfied with, then went on to tell you how moving and perfectly emblematic of a particular feeling it was.

Surprise is every joke you thought funny as a teenager; it is the discovery that someone in whom you had no romantic interest at all is smitten with you; it is being mistaken for the likes of a writer, say Norman Mailer or Margaret Atwood, in whom you can find no possible resemblance to your work or appearance; it is cruel, notional, considerate, loving, tender, inspirational; it is the awareness that you are not as dumb as you thought yourself to be nor as smart as you wished yourself to be. Surprise is a little kid on her first bicycle, waving thanks at you for waiting patiently for her to cross in front of you, it is your dog waiting up for you when you have been out late, it is a cat not throwing up a hairball on a clean shirt you have laid out to wear when you are out of the shower; it is the sudden sting of attraction that draws you to someone, it is the sense of being able to do better when you reread a draft of your new story, then going forth to do just that.

Surprise, you will come to realize, is as volatile as nitroglycerine; it must be handled cautiously, a trait you are not particularly noted for. From time to time in your life, you have come forth with laundry lists of things you believed you'd be better off without. One of these may turn out to be surprise, meaning for a moment or two in your own story arc, you have opted for the predictable and planned, wanting to foreswear surprise. A day or two later, you feel quirky and on edge, aware something is missing. Another day or so later, you realize it is surprise.

Trying to give up surprise is like trying to give up coffee. It was nothing to quit smoking, to give all your beloved smoking pipes to a private detective named Philip, to give away your stash of Cuban cigars, to wean yourself from unfiltered Camel cigarettes. It is not likely you will give up coffee, nor surprise. You could no more give up surprise than you could stop writing. There were times when you did not write, you mostly read or listened to music or brooded about the fact that writing had packed up and left home like some rebellious kid. But you put up Lost Writer posters on trees and phone poles. You offered rewards for the return of writing, and knew without having to be surprised about it that the way back was to read something dreadful in its awfulness.

You would think other persons, places, things, and books or stories or poems could surprise you but that you could not surprise yourself. This would be your one sure toe hold on sanity. But, surprise, you were wrong and the joke was on you, a condition that comes as no surprise at all; the joke is always on you.

Surprise

You frequently use the concept of discovery as an index to inform you when you have completed early drafts of a work, then proceeded through the revision process to the point where you are feeling not merely comfortable about the work but bordering on confident. Conversely, when the index of confidence begins to bubble too noisily, you reckon it time to go back one more time for a search and destroy mission; your specific target in this pass is the distracting detail, the factor or memory or other response that pulls you and, presumably, the reader away from the trail of cookie crumbs leading to the witch's house.

So far, so good; but what kind of discovery impresses you, and why should discovery be so uppermost in your revision mind? First answer is the more general one of any connection or awareness you had not noticed going into the project, any connection that came to you in the heat of the first few drafts. Perhaps a similarity, perhaps a new path of understanding opening for you, perhaps the Archimedes moment of finding out something you believe you are late in coming to, a connection that must be seen, you imagine, by your peers. The second answer goes, you believe, to the heart of why you enjoy writing work: You write to discover how you feel about a thing or concept, you write to see how you would likely respond were the problems and issues of your stories presented to you in real life. You also discover how it would feel to experience things you have not experienced in your waking hours or to trespass in the landscape of fantasy where, by writing of others, you may experience the forbidden or the impossible.

You often bring gasps of recognition to classes or writing groups by pursuing the line that writers are control freaks, compulsive, and obsessive--all of which you believe to be true. The recognition of these aspects of the craft is a continuous discovery, bringing energy, satisfaction, and a deeper sense of connection to all the outliers of your persona. Through this calculus,which seems simple and obvious to you now that you have discovered it, you are able to tell yourself in so many words that you write to discover things which, by their essential nature, give you the rush of energy. You begin a particular piece or take up work on one underway in a manner similar to the musician practicing the coordination of improvisation; you start out on a theme, become immersed in it, then "accept" the new element or detail, or what "seems" to be the new element or detail, following it, trying to blend it with what you have begun, continuing until the connection appears, presents itself in a clear enough way for you to put it into words. It is important to note than you do not so much try to describe it as to evoke with words and images the emotional presence it brings you.

It nearly embarrasses you to think of what your work must have been like before you began looking for and receiving discovery in it, embarrasses you in the same way rereading certain favorites and being surprised at their previously unnoticed depths surprises you.

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.

Supplies!

There are any number of acceptable and plausible answers to the query, Why do people read, particularly if we throw in the qualifier Nonfiction, as in why do people read it?  Most logical of the available answers is To acquire information.  What's playing at which of the local theaters, What are the starting times.  That sort of thing.  By posing questions on Google, you might get along with the parameters of the information you seek an interesting Haiku or Haiku-type locution, mysterious, ambiguous, intriguing.  Sometimes even questions addressed to Google Maps provides a poetic trope, heavy with existential meaning:  The best way to get to Houston.  The most direct way to San Felipe.  But it is safe to say we--at least YOU--read nonfiction to get reliable, useful information.  How to make Quiche Lorraine?  Cornmeal before the buttermilk when making corn bread?

Fiction opens additional portals.  We read--at least YOU read--for emotional information, to see how others have coped with conflicts and conundrums, to be able to identify with individuals from other cultures, to see what it is like to be someone we nourish dreams of being.  Your own favorite answer is: To see how others deal with surprise.

To be sure, nonfiction can and does present us with surprise information, with unexpected outcome, with the surprising awareness that there are other ways to do some of the things we do, to discover that the things we've been doing in the presumption of correctness and/or moral authority are in fact wrong and/or immoral, to discover that we are not so original as we might have supposed, to discover that we may have grabbed a sleeping tiger by the tail.

Surprise, you believe, must join grief as the most dramatic, complex, motivating emotions we humans are able to experience.  Under the mantle of grief, characters do strange, explosive things which are not always predictable.  Grief is, after all, a response or set of responses to loss.  Ah, the things we are in danger of losing; the things we lose, the on-going fear of what person, place, or thing will be lost to us next.  The fear of loss will on occasion draw one of us to acquire a substitute of some sort for a noun that has been lost, triggering the potential for surprise in the realization that this substitute person, place, or thing is not a suitable replacement for the person, place, or thing lost, and now we are encumbered with this person, place, or thing.

We sometimes experience surprise when we discover the next thing in a succession of things we will lose, driving us to want to make some kind of transaction with Fate,bargaining.  Take This instead of That.  Of course Fate holds the control wand, causing some of us to turn variously to such nouns as religion, the supernatural, and fantasy.  It often turns the rest of us to writing stories because here we can, by one means or another, undo the depredations of grief and loss; as in dreams, we can for moments on end re-experience the happiness we'd known before a particular noun was taken from us.

Some fiction and, indeed, some philosophical writing attempt to help us cope with the things we have lost, either by helping us come to acceptance of the loss or some vision in which we see the risky business we signed on for when we beat all those other swimmers to the egg.  Some fiction and, indeed some philosophical writing propose such concepts to us as Hereafter or Afterlife, offering them as something we might find comfortable in the multifarious complexities of Life as We know It.  It warmed and amused you when your late mother would on occasion speculate that if there is such a thing as an Afterlife, your late father will have a good deal to answer for, such as why he went first, why he went three years before she did, and what he has been doing in the interim.  You could see them in such circumstances, catching up, and for them you find yourself wishing it could have worked that way.

It is another matter for you, even warmed by the thought of them meeting again that way--it is all a part of a story they left for you.  At one level, the writer is known to be self-serving and to exploit, arranging and rearranging the cosmic furniture to produce a result.  Even though you hold no such beliefs of Afterlife or Hereafter, you are not at all adverse to those two worthies indulging their story, their belief.

Thus do stories transmit across cultures and time the information we seek to make sense of the Cosmos in which we find ourselves at wander.  Your youngest niece has married a native of Japan who, enjoying the reefs and shoals of pronunciation in Japanese and English, has for some time wanted the family job of providing the supplies because, when he makes the offer, it is difficult to know if he is emphasizing supplies or surprise; he has used language to the ambiguous extent where no matter what he provides, it will be a surprise.  A writer does well to note such ambiguity and use it as the tool it wants to be.

The Ticking Clock: Your Imaginary Friend.

The ticking clock, presaging the arrival of the deadline, is a splendid inducement, the agar agar or other nourishing medium on which story begins to munch, then outright feed.  If you procrastinate much longer, try to think things through for just a few moments more, surely the idea will come, a gift from the indulgent uncle who has been so tolerant of you all these years.  Procrastination is your individual way of hastening the process, creating the atmosphere for the work to come forth, identify itself, then begin the process of revelation.

No matter that the indulgent uncle's gifts are never quite the things you'd wished for, they are nevertheless tangible manifestations of a process in place.  You notice, sometimes in your procrastinating clean-up and desk tidying, other times as you stumble about your rooms in search of a particular thing that has no relationship to your writing life, a clutter, a graveyard of gifts that seemed pleasing enough at the time but now cause you to wonder about your sense of taste.

Add another element to the recipe; add the atmosphere of surrender, of recognition that this time, it has finally caught up with you; you can't do it.  You have exhausted all your ideas and strategies, your jokes instead of stories, your technique masquerading as story.

Ticking clock and admission of surrender usually do the trick, a one-two punch that admittedly has to be sincerely felt before it can work.  But it does work, just as the process of giving up on trying to recall a name, a lyric from a song, some splash of memory hastily filed in your already crowded mind produces the answer you sought.  Many products forged in this particular fire of ticking clock and surrender are things you are more likely to want to save:  they are gifts from the process, not from the indulgent uncle.

Thus you arrive at an awareness:  if you are driven to begin setting it down somewhere, your notebook, a legal pad, the backs of the interminable index cards about your desk and work areas, there is no need for the ticking clock, no need for the surrender notion that you have written yourself cold, out of enthusiasm.  The awareness has to do directly with thought.  Thought in the beginning is a distraction.  Stories should not be thought about until they are in a completed draft form.

The awareness continues:  many of your things are begun in the forge of despair, arriving in some kind of focus only after you have despaired of ever having another impulse to begin.  An equal number, however, are begun with enthusiasm or a sense of mischief, or a desire for revenge or a wish to rewrite your own history.  All those stimuli are, of course, feelings.  Beginnings come from the crucible of feelings as opposed to the textbooks of thought.

Story comes rushing forth like a tube of toothpaste too tightly squeezed at the outset.  Trying to think a story out is like trying to get a cat to come when you call it.

So Predictable

predictable--a narrative condition in which the reader correctly guess the intent of a character and the outcome of that intent; dramatic circumstances in which there is little or no nuance, where the reader is neither surprised nor challenged.

If a reader is truly caught up in a story, he will have taken sides, begun to root for the success of some and the failure or worse (humiliation) for others, indulged in the trope of reader as matchmaker, seeing potential romantic entanglements. Additionally, the reader will be able to take cues from the text much as a dog about to be taken for a walk will take cues from the master putting on a jacket, clanking house keys, or reaching for a leash. Certain situations in story provoke the speculation that something--a disaster, a reversal, a surprise--is forthcoming. The shrewd writer, which is to say the writer who understands the dynamics of story, will be aware of these anticipations, then prepare for them in a way that will provoke surprise and keep the reader off guard and guessing to the point of not being able to take time away from the reading.

Never take the reader where the reader wants to go. Readers do not wish to be left standing still, which they may easily feel themselves to be if they are presented with laundry lists of details, forced to listen to long, philosophical discussions, subjected to weather reports or travel-writing descriptions of scenery. At the extreme least, readers want to feel as though they were eavesdropping on some form of intimacy; better still they wish to feel compellingly caught up with the execution of a particular character's agenda.

It is the task of the writer to make the reader feel the intensity of the characters and their involvements with the issues of the story. Anything else is predictable.

Even if you are not a fan or fancier of the suspense-based thriller, it is worth critically reading at least one novel by Harlan Coben, comparing it will one by Lee Child and Nelson Demille. Couldn't hurt to read Annie Proulx's The Shipping News, which presents yet other variations on the theme of surprise and unpredictability, then consider Louise Erdrich's A Plague of Doves.

Dealing with predictability in story provides another set of reasons to consider and absorb acting techniques from the likes of such actor coaches as Stella Adler, Sanford Meizner, and Uta Hagen, wherein actors learn where to find within themselves the emotions, gestures, and visions of surprise. In this sense, surprise is the discovery the character makes about himself/herself in times of weal and woe--discovery that before our eyes transforms the predictable into the truly remarkable.

Moving Volition

volition--a character facing a decision and making a choice; the acts performed or not performed by a character in service of an agenda; a necessary quality of determination and purpose resident in a character; the inertial guidance system of a front rank character.

Integral to any understanding of character and the subsequent empathy for or antagonism to that character, volition is the analog of the purring engine, already converting fuel to energy, ready to move forth with elan. Volition is the engine of personality for a character, the defining set of impressions that determine how the character will behave in a given situation. Will that character elect, as Melville's iconic Bartleby did, to prefer not to? Perhaps the character is more of a mindset with Shakespeare's version of Henry V, invoking his troops to follow him into battle against the French at Agincourt, "...cry 'God for Harry, England and St. George!'" Of course girl and women characters bring an equally nuanced set of volition to the text. Look at Scout,the six-year-old narrator of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, who had to make some tough choices about the small Alabama town in which she was raised. Not to forget Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter. It is highly probable that her early independence and strong-willed nature led her to the rebellious affair that resulted in Pearl, a child born out of wedlock. Although the narrator appears to disapprove of her behavior, his increasing sense of admiration becomes apparent as she, subject to the humiliation and alienation inflicted on her, becomes contemplative as she develops into a more dimensional character than any other in the novel.

For the writer, learning who the character is becomes the first step in a triad of priority. Now the writer must intuit what the character wants, at which point the character is ready to leap from no or a single dimension into the realm of nuance. Will the character make that leap? Now comes volition: What is the character willing to do to accomplish the goal? With that awareness radiating within the character and suspected all along by the reader, what explosive results will come forth? With persistence and honesty, the writer is drawn into the equation with the discovery of the depths to which the character will go. Did, for instance, Melville know how far Bartleby was willing to go to make his statement? Did Melville have any sense that Bartleby's position of preferring not to do what was asked of him become the instrument of his death? Perhaps it was the added element that often attaches itself to the accelerated atoms of volition--perhaps it was surprise.

According to

attribution--identification of who is saying, thinking, feeling something relevant to the story at hand; also a quality possessed by an animal, a person, place, or thing in a story; most common use, a direct distinction of who is saying what, perhaps even with the adverb or adverbial clause attachment of how the thing being said was spoken.

Even at the risk of repetition, the identity of the speaker or performer is uppermost, beginning with the reader knowing for a certainty who the narrator of a given scene is and at all times who the speaker is, who the listener is, who the one who acts is, who the one being acted upon is. This important standard prevents such awkward, difficult-to-unravel locutions as "She knew she would go with her no matter what she did or when she did it because it was her basic instinct to help her whenever she felt she needed help." The reader is literally so grateful as to forgive repetition of names, although this gratefulness does not extend across the board to careless, unintended repetitions, which do nothing but make the reader cringe (if the offense gets past the editor in the first place).

In the matter of attribution in dialogue, the verb "said" has demonstrated over a long history its neutrality, thus Jim said, John said, Fred said will not raise any reader hackles that might have been raised if Jim said but John remonstrated, and Fred averred. Thus do not keep at hand a list of synonyms for said, particularly avoiding expostulated, admonished, and uttered. Verbs that convey feeling are welcome in all other places than synonyms for said, accordingly do not let characters bark or growl; ululate is also a no-no, the main reason being that the word may appear to be an authorial judgment rather than from a character.

Unless the string of dialogue between two characters goes on for some time, it is not necessary to continue with the "said." If there are more than two characters on stage, the writer might consider burying the "said" in mid action or mid sentence: "This is not going to work," Fred said, standing, stretching. "We need another approach." In such scenarios, the writer will do well to pick a dramatic (suspense producing) place to break up the sentence. "This," Fred said, standing and stretching, "is not going to work. We need--" he looked about him as though tracking a fly unseen by the others, "--another approach." Yet another way to tack an attribution to a line of dialogue is with a sentence immediately following that contains action. "This is not going to work." Fred stood, spotted a roving waiter, and motioned him over to them.


formula--a recipe or pattern for a story; a means of linking reader expectations with a plausible outcome; a narrative device for producing accelerated risk and subsequent resolution.

Some examples of formula in story:

1. A sympathetic character struggles against great odds to achieve a worthwhile goal.

2. Sin, suffer, and repent.

3. Something happens and someone changes.

4. A journey and/or quest that produce unexpected results.

Often conflated with plot, formula is theme based, frequently traceable from culture to culture throughout human history, thus Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces but also the trickster, recurring in such diverse cultures as Native American and in the persona of Captain Spaulding (Groucho Marx). Other widespread themes: Man against Nature, Man against machinery, Man against convention. The operating factor in formula is predictability; if you add element A, the reader will expect element B as a consequence, thus formula makes the reader vulnerable to the possibility of surprise.

A narrative spoken of as formulaic is likely to be predictable, suggesting the need somewhere in the process for the writer and characters to collude against the expectations of the reader; narratives that are considered non-formulaic are often those that end with a resolving force that veers sharply from expectations, as in Thomas Berger's Little Big Man.

You Can't Exect Me to Believe That

speed bumps--events, descriptions, and reflections that impede the flow of story; a sense of stylistic devices waving their hands for attention during the otherwise orderly progression of a dramatic narrative; the jerky disconnect experienced by readers when writers are not careful about adding backstory, description, and the existential wondering of characters.

The thing to remember at some point in the telling of a story is that the narrative art is evocative, not descriptive; description has its place, usually in small doses, an occasional adjective or adverb, even a clause or entire sentence. There are specific times when the make and caliber of a gun, for example, or the year, model, and color of a car bring clarification to the narrative. A character's height or lack thereof, even some descriptive facial tic become not only necessities but tools in the greater process of evoking that individual's presence. Arrogant? Shy? Assured? Lazy? The overarching intent is to suggest. Ironically enough, some writers who should know better, fail to see the mischievous potential in verbs, relying instead on the adjective and the adverb.

One last pass in revision to "cure" adverbial abuse is a sure way to remove speed bumps.


revelation--a dramatic discovery, experience, or realization that has the power to change the vector of a story.

In a metaphorical way, a story is like a string of fire-crackers, each explosion adding to the collective effect, the individual pop of explosion being a surprise, the final one, the loud, enduring one being the revelation. Often expressed indirectly, through the medium of a front-rank character doing something that becomes a symbolic response, the revelation shows the reader the equivalent of a film or TV close-up reaction shot. In the novels of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, revelations were frequently spelled out in what writer Barnaby Conrad has titled "came-to-realize" moments, "and in that moment, she came to realize that he had been deceiving her all along." From about the 1980s onward, came-to-realize moments were replaced with a more outward display of a character having been struck by the lightning bolt of revelation, imparting less a sense of certainty and resolve, more of a sense of ambiguity tempered with probability. We readers would be certain that Character A knew Character B was wildly attracted to her and had been for some time, at the very least giving her a dramatic power over Character B, but we would not be sure by story's end if Character A were going to do anything about the revelation.

The payoff to Dashiell Hammett's much anthologized short story, "Two Sharp Knives," is an excellent example of how revelation can be used by one character to exploit another and how that exploitation can be used for dramatic effect on the reader.

In the motion picture, The Third Man, directed by Sir Carol Reed, the illusive and amoral Harry Lime has a surprise encounter with his chum, Holly Martens. They meet in the Riessenrad, the large Ferris wheel in the Vienna amusement park, the Prater. Looking down upon people beneath his high vantage point, Lime compares them to dots, then makes the wry, cynical observation that defines him and causes in Martens a revelation that has the effect of a line drawn in the sand between him and Lime, a line of morality over which Martens will not cross. "In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed — they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

One of the many revelations to be had from reading the stories of Anton Chekhov is his own understanding and portrayal of how revelation affects characters, and how their movements rather than their interior monologue suggest the outcome.


plausibility--the dramatic sense of a character, deed, or event being believable to the reader; a depiction of a character's agenda, motivation, or desire being an appropriate, life-like expression; a quality of realism and trust in a narrative and its denizens that helps the reader maintain a sense of belief.

Just because an event portrayed in a narrative actually happened in reality, that does not automatically grant it a license for plausibility; the writer must naturally believe the event and the characters, he must write about them in a way that renders them as dramatic forces, considering what they want and what they are willing to do to get what they want. A good portion of plausibility is found in vulnerability; when a reader sees a defect or longing in a character, it becomes easier to forget that the character is only a smudge of someone else's imagination.

The Comedy of Eros

comedy--a more physical adjunct of humor, characterized by exaggeration, deliberate management of events, pratfalls; circumstances which seem to snowball before the reader's eyes, gaining a momentum which leads to combustion as in the stateroom scene in the Marx Brothers film, A Night at the Opera; a set of circumstances building to a conclusive payoff. Comedy, by its very nature, seems bigger than life, consequently producing the laughter of relief that it is not us to whom the physicality is happening; humor, by its own nature, is just the right size for life, ordered out of a J. Crewe catalog, provoking in us the sad laughter of recognition. Humor is dramatic; comedy is situational and episodic; once the laugh is out, it needs to be wound up again. Comedy is like the cup in which Dunkin' Donuts coffee is served. After one use, it is thrown away. Humor is the growing awareness that we have been holding on to this old paper cup out of sentimentality.

In some of the old Restoration comedies, mistaken identities and lovers hiding under beds or in closets were staples, exaggerated by there being numerous mistakes of identity or so many hiding lovers that they could not all fit in one closet or under one bed. In humor the payoff becomes the sad awareness that one character does not recognize or remember another, that there was a need in the first place for a lover.

Comedy is the antic surprise of the pie in the face, followed by the victim's revenge of returning the favor with another pie and another; it is the anarchy at forced politeness in the convention of rules, the backyard dog digging an escape hole under the gate. Laurel and Hardy are piano movers, lugging a large piano over a narrow rope-and-vine bridge spanning a steep chasm. Midway across, they meet a gorilla coming the other way.

In fiction it becomes the revenge fantasy, acted out, its target humiliated by the forces of destiny as represented by slapstick.


Antigone--a young woman character in a play by Sophocles (442 BC), later by the French Jean Anouilh (1942),and later still by the German dramatist Berthold Brecht (1947);the sister of two brothers who fought on opposing sides in the civil war of Thebes; niece of Creon, new ruler of Thebes.

Antigone as a character bears comparison with Wile E. Coyote because of the way her embodiment of moral choice leads her to become an unrelenting force, triggering behavior in every direction throughout her family, her fiance, and friends. Antigone's opposition to a contemporary convention of respect and honor put her in danger of losing her life, indeed directly provoke an unintended death, which further provokes a sad but valuable understanding. Sophocles, actually a general who fought in the Thebean civil war, eschewed propaganda as did Anouilh, from his position in German-occupied France, and as well Brecht who, although a German, held no brief for German militarism, much less fascism. In any of these versions of the drama, the character of Antigone would do what a character should do--represent a believable individual visited with a conviction and mission that led her forth regardless of consequence. As Hamlet typifies one form of young male character driven by a goal, Antigone is archetypal in her representation of a young woman of dramatic stature.

Either of the three versions of Antigone's story could be successfully presented today; a fourth version, focusing on the recurrent issue of torture and enhanced interrogation techniques, could stand shoulder-to-shoulder with them.


consequences--the results of a prior event, thought, deed, decision, or accident; the price that must be paid or the fine assessed for a previous act; the guiding principal of storytelling--things happening because of things that happened, were responded to or not responded. As a consequence of A, B came into being; this is the force that holds episodes together as story, that ties characters to tethers of relationship or commitment. Characters believe they are right, behaving as they do. As a consequence, they perform or do not perform acts, becoming the causal force in story. A narrative without causality is the literary equivalent of a body without blood; neither supports life.


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You Really Mean It

second person narrative--a dramatic vision of narrative that addresses the reader directly as you, putting the reader in the position of assuming the role of the protagonist; story in which the protagonist is you, a narrative device that gives the appearance of intensifying focus on the principal character by making events seem as though they are happening in the immediate present. One of the most prevalent criticisms of the second person narrative is its seeming inability to maintain plausibility beyond the length of a short story. (Try telling that to Jay McInerney, author of Bright Lights, Big City, or William Faulkner in re his Absalom, Absalom, or Richard Powers for Ploughing the Dark, to name a few. ) Short story uses abound, notably Dennis Lehane's "Until Sylvia," and Lorrie Moore's collection, Self-Help, in which six of the nine short stories were second person renditions.

One of the reasons second person narrative is thought not to be as substantial as first or third or multiple points of view has to do with its restricted use for fear of editorial reprisal (a rejection slip); another reason for its relative lack of popularity has its roots in tradition--writers of fiction did not take to expansive use until well into the twentieth century. So what? As with the other pronouns, you is perfectly able to freight a story; while you are doing so with the second person form, you will discover the small but valuable secret that you can pack in more reader feeder information than you could have done with the first or third or multiple point of view. Example: You are not the kind of person to be bound by conventions; it was only natural that you experimented with second person.

copyedit--a process of checking a manuscript for consistency in usage conventions; a mechanical intervention made on a manuscript, usually by a person other than the author or content editor, to insure standardized use in matters of abbreviations, use of numbers, acronyms, punctuation, etc. The avowed intent of copyediting is consistency of use, the ultimate goal of which is to suggest authorial and publisher accuracy and reliability. Most trade book publishers in the U.S. follow the conventions set forth in The Chicago Manual of Style (latest edition), published by the University of Chicago Press; magazines, journals, and newspapers are more eclectic in their usage or style guides, The New York Times Style Guide and The Associated Press Style Guide being basic models on which most in-house guides are based.

Much is made of a fictional character's reliability to the point where unreliable narrators are regularly exposed by critics and in classes. It is not a great leap to consider poorly copyedited manuscripts as unreliable narrators because of the reflection such a manuscript casts on the author.

In the usual procession of publishing events, an accepted manuscript is subjected first to content editing, which relates to meaning and clarity of authorial intent. After author approval and revision (if any), the manuscript is sent to the copyeditor who may have queries which are fact-related but not content-related. Even though many publishers employ in house or freelance copyeditors, the process still conventionally assumes the primary responsibility is with the author.

The Modern Language Association Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing is a key copyediting information source for schools, academic publications, and universities.

Simply put, copyediting, which has to do with the manner in which content is set in electronic or paper format, is a major step toward publication; you might even call it a trampoline.

surprise--unanticipated dramatic behavior or circumstances in a story; events that cause characters to do things they would not normally do; unplanned turns of events within a drama that nevertheless have feet firmly planted in plausibility. Impulsive behavior erupting within a least likely to rebel character, surprise is a contrived device, intended to catch the reader unaware, but it is also a means by which a writer may learn surprising, unintended things about himself. More often than not, surprise comes from character-driven stories, but it is neither unheard of or unwelcome in plot oriented narratives.

The best foundation for surprise is a deep understanding and knowledge of the front-rank characters, by which means the characters will appear to behave in an unanticipated-but-plausible way that may push the story in an entirely original and yet satisfying manner, neither seeming contrived nor accidental. An unanticipated consequence of surprise is the fact of it causing tension or suspense, two of the major elements of story. After one or two surprises, the reader becomes aware of the potential, then begins to wonder where and to whom it will appear next.

It's Eleven O'clock--Do You Know Where Your Characters Are?

A significant and often disappointing problem arising from using real people as characters is the discovery that they don't go far enough, are not as perfervid in their goals and attitudes as you want to generate dramatic traction with some tension to it.

This realization does not speak well for many about us; in constructing a character, we need to borrow from a number of sources in order to get the critical mass of an individual we can use in a story. Some time back, when I was still taking assignments to write in the old Nick Carter series, I though for the sake of fun to introduce a character modeled after my then department chairman. After a few scenes with this individual, it came to me that his fictional dealings with the fictional Nick Carter were pretty much of a piece with his real dealings with me. There was no way around it. If he were to become a worthy adversary for Nick Carter, I'd have to toughen him up a bit, invest him with stronger, clearer goals and the determination to accomplish them. In real life this individual was heard to say, No one gets his master's degree without publishing at least one poem. To a graduate student, particularly one with a specialty in film or drama or nonfiction, that might sound a bit daunting, but it is difficult to imagine most Nick Carter readers feeling anything like an unearthly trickle coursing up (if it were fear related) or down (if it were sexually inspired) his spine and so accordingly, in anticipation of future royalty payments, my character sneered openly at the lack of poetic discourse and language, used the sprung rhythm of Gerard Manley Hopkins as a vehicle for delivering his espionage information at poetry readings, not caring a fig should innocent lives be lost as a result of poetry.

Even a recurring character I strongly relate to as me has needed certain twitching and the occasional short circuit in moral wiring, this done in recognition that even as writers, we all of us want characters who are the literary equivalents of weight-bearing walls.

This opens two doors for investigation and absorption into the writerly psyche:

1) Characters should at all times have the capacity to surprise the reader, the writer, and some if not all the characters in a particular venture. When we are able to predict outcomes, we tend to skip ahead--I believe--to the parts where outcome is not so certain. One of the reasons we stay on is to see if we'd been correct, yet another reason is due to the suspicion that we were not. The name for this condition has been called suspense.

2) Writers need the strengthening exercise of being as much like characters as they can, which is not to say one-dimensional and certainly not derivative, both of which are neither genuine nor growth oriented. There, indeed, is the answer: a writer needs to keep pushing at as many of the available boundaries as possible, at all times. To put it another way, a character needs to be larger than life; so does a writer, taking sustenance from the surprise factor resident within but just as certainly taking nourishment from without.

In thanks, I've gratefully taken sustenance from Marta, who signs her blog Writing in the Water, and from Matt Cahill, each of whom you'll find listed in the Friendly Neighborhoods column. From Marta the reminder of the need to surprise myself and all I write about. From Matt, after a chat about the nature of satire, the decision to drop a satiric bomb framed on Rev. Smith's A Modest Proposal in which I suggest with professorial solemnity that the world is in such delicate states now in so many ways that we need more time to cope with them. Accordingly, I'm suggesting a world-wide cutback in holidays. If each major religion gave up one holiday, we'd have the time to devote to solutions rather than indulging ritual celebrations. I will propose that Christianity give up Easter, which makes it seem natural for Judaism to toss Passover into the pot; the Muslims could scratch Ramadan, the Hindus could easily spare Durga Puja, and on one day a year, secular humanists could give up either soccer or baseball. I could not hope to duplicate the uproar over The New Yorker cover of recent infamy, and the Rev. Swift has not been with us for a long time, giving him as it were opportunities to pick up readers. But what the hell, shoot high; aim for the stars. Aim for the characters you dare to create.

Having A Say in the Matter

You've gone through the literary equivalent of a line-up, identifying from a supply of potentials the ensemble who will populate your story. There were some moments of indecision as you looked at the possibilities, scanning the menu of suspects to see which were real characters and which were only real persons you know in real life. You've made your choice and now you have a sense of their alibis, their connective links, their background, their strengths, their weaknesses. You may even have a line into their secrets, those juicy tidbits they withhold from all, possibly even from themselves.

Knowing them as well as you now do, you also know how they sound, how they talk, how even though they may have grown up in the same neighborhood, they sound enough unlike their 'hoodies that they stand out, as identifiable to your readers as they were to you way back there when you were cruising the line-ups, scoping them out.

What they say has nothing to do with conversation because they don't make conversation, they either put up a foreboding wall or a protective wall; they do not engage in small talk but instead are working out some problem or screwing up enough courage to do something, or are trying to convey the sense of being at ease and conversational.

They don't always talk directly to issues, either, fearful of revealing an unpopular or unpolitical attitude.

There is always something else going on when these characters are speaking, some fear that they will betray a guarded emotion, or perhaps give over someone ,a suspicion or wariness hanging over their head. Even among friends, there is a fear that these individuals, these dramatic, involved individuals, will say something that will give them away. You know how it is because of the times your IM comments or a congratulatory sentence left on a friend's blog has been taken completely out of context you know why some individuals are always limiting their comments to LOL or using emoticons to prove they were only kidding or that they meant something as a joke and please, don't take it seriously.

In other words, dialog is in fact in other words, a reflection of some kind of tension within a character and simultaneously between characters. If you stop to deconstruct, people in stories don't talk the way people in real situations talk, one reason being because drama is heightened awareness, another reason being because there is no time for such leisure. Dialog is the petri dish of story; tension, suspense, and subtext thrive in it, breed excruciating surprises and heartbreaking revelation. If it is anything less, it is an albatross.

Ranking of story elements

Order of Importance in Story

1. voice
2. point of view
3. characters' agendas
4. subtext
5. humor
6. style
7. dialog
8. surprise
9. discovery
10. reversal
11.conflict
12. suspense
13.landscape/setting
14. outcome
15. opening velocity

Surprise

1. It's 3 in the a.m., or so the narrator tells us.

2. Do you know where your dog is?

3. Who would you rather have protecting your ass, your dog or Hillary?

4. My dog has more experience.

5. I'm used to my dog sounding alarms at 3 in the a.m.

6. Now that you mention it, Hillary has been sounding alarms at all hours of the day. Help, she says, I'm being invaded. She is being invaded by voters, all tangible, all viable.

7. My dog, sees/scents/hears raccoons, coyotes, and possums not to mention dragons, all tangible, all viable. Well, maybe she invents the dragons a little. And toward sunrise, there are squirrels coming out for breakfast.

8. My dog does not whine.

9. My dog has some mood swings ,but even then, she is tangibly Sally.

10. If Sally does not like something, a bone, for instance, or a morsel of food, she searches for a convenient spot whereupon she buries the offending object.

11. Hillary carries grudges.

12. Okay, let's move on to something else, the dichotomy between dramatic forces.

13. There are principal characters who want something and search for it, strive for it, sacrifice for it, keeping it always close at hand in the form of daydream, practice, decision making, dealings with other individuals. They are in the most direct sense of the word driven by what they want. Thus it can be said that they are defined in large measure by what they want; they are also defined to a noticeable extent by the things they will do and the things they will not to to achieve their goal.

14. There are principal characters who, after seeking or longing for something, have achieved it and are aware that their satisfaction in the attainment of that something is trumped by an awareness of consequences previously unrealized by them.

15. These two forces drive story, nudging it into a series of scenes and narrative that display the characters in active quest or response, pushing them over edges or into quagmires. Sometimes rescue is available--the dramatic equivalent of those monster AAA tow trucks with winches, flashing lights, jumper cables, and containers of spare fuel. Thus rescued, the characters get a few more miles before the goal --or the consequence catches up with them.

16. Individuals portrayed as comfortable in stories are targets for surprise. Comfort is a warning sign unless it is accompanied by an awareness of good fortune, grace, random chance, or careful planning.

17. Comfort in characters can be tolerated right up to the point where the comfort produces hubris.

18. Surprise is the sound made by the meshing of the gears as the universe is drawn along its path.

19. Surprise is what even individuals who are expecting a surprise come to experience.

20. No surprise? No story.

21. No kidding.

Making a Scene

1. The scene is the basic unit of drama.
2. Most short stories and novels are compilations of scenes strategically arranged for the most effective dramatic result (which is an emotional impact of some sort).
3. Scenes in novels and short stories are often--but not necessarily--connected by narrative, which is in effect stage directions writ large, including but not limited to a particular point of view, an indication of intent, a benchmark of story development, and/or a summary adduced or deduced from things characters have said, done, or not done in earlier scenes.
4. Scenes contain but are not limited to:
A. Landscape/setting
B. Characters
C. Dialogue
E. Tempo
F. Conflict
G. Suspense
H. Tension
I. Beats (events)
J. An awareness of power being exerted or exchanged
K. Reversals
L. Surprises
M. Point of view
5. Characters enter scenes with expectations of some outcome, a hot slot machine in a casino, an argument, approval, being ranked on, being ignored
6. Characters enter scenes believing they are right and/or entitled or...
7. Characters enter scenes wanting to restore some status or balance
8. Successful scenes may lack two or three of 1-7 supra, but fall into the category of endangered species if they lack four or more
9. Epistolary stories do not necessarily have scenes
10. Postmodern stories may have formats (emails, IMs, recorded messages) that do not contain scenes but which nevertheless suggest the presence of past, present, and future scenes
11. Thus scenes have an awareness of time past, time present, and time future
12. Scenes have some relevance however tenuous or thematic to the story at hand
13. A story without scenes is of a piece with a body lacking in cells
14. The arrangement of scenes in a story does not demand a strict chronology or, indeed, any kind of chronology
15. If feng shui works for rooms, there is no reason why it cannot be a useful concept for placement of the scenes in a story.