Interest

What makes a story interesting?

You ask because of a recent brush with boredom, which caused you to define your awareness of the way the major feeling associated with that unfortunate state is the sense of being alarmingly disinterested while at the same time being trapped within a situation from which there is no immediate retreat.

At such times when you were finally freed of a bout of boredom, it seemed to you that everything about you, the merest hint of a flower or tree or dog or cloud carried sensual transportation to a happier state.

Disinterest and trapped are both conditions wanting some greater specificity as a means of conveying the helplessness and of unseen walls moving in on your living and breathing space.  Disinterest conveys a state where no persons or creatures or matter are close enough to hand for which to display some concern or connection.  Disinterest, a cousin once removed from boredom, is the awareness of being surrounded by facts, random information, persons, materials, utensils, and art of little or no consequence for you.  You utterly lack the conditions necessary to care about any of them.  Trapped means there is no apparent exit, no escape hatch through which you may flee, heaving sighs of relief, taking in gulps of celebratory air.  You are stuck where you are and in the situation you are in for a period of time that by its very nature will seem longer in the experience of it as it weighs in upon you that its actual duration.  Thus boredom begins to approximate being without agreeable sense stimuli for a period in which time is ductile, capable of being drawn out to its extreme limits.

So you have ventured toward definition of interest via the negative route by which you defined what it lacks.  Radiant stimuli, landing on your thirsty receptors, provide the beginnings of interest.  All persons, places, and things emit vibrations; those with whom you feel in some form of connection evoke a response in you of recognition, familiarity, intrigue, and perhaps even a touch of mystery.  These qualities urge you forth into that delightful state of being interested, of caring, of in ways you scarcely understand urge you to open your receptors further, taking in the powers about you to the point where you respond by sending out responses of your own, which have their effect or not on the persons, places, and things of interest to you.

Interest may be a wide avenue or a back alley.  It may be mutual or of no consequence, adding to the two qualities that so constantly reside in story--suspense and curiosity.  Take any two persons performing the same activity, say reading a book.  One interests you to the point where you begin creating a pearl in your imagination.  The other does not send forth body language or vibrations or aura or any kind of psychic radar that cause you to register that person's engaging details.

A day without interest of any sort is intolerable, an hour without it is boredom, the exit from which is the ingenuity of your imagination.

Follow that cab!

The opportunity for spicing up a narrative that has fallen like a souffle right out of the oven comes bursting forth in the nature of a character suddenly being aware he is being followed, this trope a frequent participant in a mystery or novel of suspense. With careful shepherding, a character being followed can produces five or six pages. In the hands of an old pro mystery writer, it can even become a running theme, involving the tailers--those who follow--being themselves tailed.

If your character is a woman, the awareness settles in that she is being stalked, which is more true to reality than the being followed trope, but nevertheless is to be approached with extreme caution; both approaches are signal flares that the narrative is in trouble, wanting some help to bail it out of its cliche-generating circumstances.

Causing a character to be followed or stalked becomes the writer's first-stage response that something is necessary to heat up the tension to the point where it might possibly qualify as suspense. In a story you did for The Eureka Review, you had a character being set upon by a mugger who was interested in what most muggers are after, actual cash or something that can be sold/pawned for the going street price. You knew there was a soft spot in the narrative and so the response set in. The person being mugged had been forced to attend a therapy group by his department chair at the university, which gave you the next step--the mugger was in the same therapy group. But this was not quite enough. The victim had been on his way to The Wine Cask to purchase a bottle to take to a first date with a lady who very much interested him. The mugger discovers the victim's purpose, then peels off a few twenties from his wad, gives it to the victim, suggests an appropriate pinot noir, then goes on his way. All of this ties in with the theme of the story because the object of the victim's passion is also in the same therapy group, having been given the probationary option of group therapy because of a previous conviction for shop lifting. Of course on the first date, she--the object of the victim's affection--leads him into a store, where she begins asking him his opinion of certain items. It began as a story you have begun a number of times, attempting to show the more absurd sides of university faculty life, but as the stakes and individual vulnerabilities grow higher, the story invariably moves away from campus and into more personalized and vulnerable territory yet.

A device to create tension and suspense must do more than create a frail atmosphere of tension, it must put the characters a step or two over some limit they have set for themselves, a limit the reader sees ultimately, but which you see first with the racing heart of excitement and mischief.

Street Cred: Reliability of Narrator, Character, and Story

Street cred is the passport to the reader's entry into narrative. Without it, writer, characters, and story are left stranded somewhere between the bookshelf and the remainder table. It is the necessary condition for a tale of any length and for the individual characters who appear in it.

Narrative and characters must impress the reader with the reasonableness of the circumstances and potential for the results inherent in them. If the characters do not strike that flinty spark of being plausible, no splints or crutches of story will hold them for long.

The reader must believe in Jean Valjean's desperation that drove him to steal the loaf of bread and as well in Javert's determination to see justice done according to his vision if it. When George tells Lenny of the life he might have led instead of the life he is leading because of his promise to care for Lenny, we must be convinced of the integrity of George's promise and the ticking time-bomb that is Lenny if we are to have any chance of a stake in the outcome of the Steinbeck novel, Of Mice and Men. We must partake of Ahab's rage at the whale and the inexorable force resident in the whale is Moby-Dick is to be for us anything more than a simple, ill-fated adventure.

What better place for this credibility to begin than within the heart of the writer, that metaphoric-rather-than-anatomical place where emotions and dreams reside alongside that remarkable muscle whose job it is to pump Life's blood through the body. Not enough to say the writer should feel the conviction and essence within a narrative and the issues it depicts, the writer must experience the story to the point where the choice of every word is affected. If a word--any word--is to survive the second draft, it must earn its keep in the writer's inner cache of awareness, where the human condition and the writer's personality conflate.

There is more yet at stake; the writer needs to put to work the awareness of rules of language and the love of words with an approach that transcends mere descriptiveness and decorative trope. Language must transport the reader and convey feeling and nuance rather than show off vocabulary, the verbs and nouns revealing the undersides of the text, like stones turned over and examined during an archaeological dig. From the artfully implanted implications of the events and responses to them, the reader is able to glimpse then construct the dark side of the relationships so carefully protected by each character from others.

When such nuance is not present, readers tend to think of the narrative as one-dimensional, which by any account is flat, uninteresting. The moment there is a hint of a character doing one thing and meaning another or reacting in a way that provides the reader with some hint of a rebellion taking place just below the surface, the dimensions of the narrative increase, heightening the potentials for those necessary ingredients, tension, suspense, and curiosity.

In its most remote, academic pose, Street Cred is spoken of as willing suspension of belief. To be willing is to have considered the options, then made a choice. Good enough, so far as logic goes, but to suspend without thinking about it is to begin by caring, them to become concerned, then invested.

I've got a feeling

Start with any event from your past and you will have a story for the future. Most events you are likely to remember are in effect given the same kind of protective wrapping you find on packages at the supermarket except that these events are not shrink-wrapped in plastic but rather in one or more emotions. With the collaboration of time, these emotions are less likely to resonate, but many of them do not settle down for a long nap; instead they are shouted down by the clamor of new emotions arriving with the onset of new events.

Early in the day of your approach to the mechanics of writing stories, you were given the conventional wisdom from so-called and self-styled experts who observed that all stories contain a measure of suspense and where actual suspense was impossible then, at the very least, there should be tension. Suspense, you discovered from within and without, is anticipation, perhaps even dread, of outcome. Tension is more a matter of which person within a cast of characters will first become so taut and pressured as to be driven to some precipitous activity that produces an emotional and logistics landslide. Story, you read in available texts from such experts, was driven by suspense and tension. Not a problem, so far as the advice goes--but it did not go far enough.

It took you to discover for yourself that emotions drive story and in fact create the suspense and tensions of which the advice spoke, which is by no means to say that you were the first to become aware of this or, indeed, that you recognized it as a fact earlier than you did. The emotions from past events have half lives. A half-life in this case is the arc of time an emotion requires to reduce itself by half. We do not ordinarily measure emotions the way we measure the likes of earthquake or wind velocity or even hardness nor temperature. We do know that some events from our past still haunt us and we wish we could undo them or at least the lingering effect they have on us. Often when we write, it is to undo such events entirely or to revise our individual performance in them to the end that our past feelings are assuaged or entirely discharged. There are times when we engage our emotions experimentally, even tentatively, curious to have the invented experience of them as dramatized in a story. A number of these provisional scenarios deliberately cross over lines of convention, wherein we are able to appoint agents of self into forbidden situations we may enjoy by proxy.

Nor is this to say that all emotions are embarked on a half-life course. No matter how old they are and how occult, the moment their recall brings them crashing into the present, we are as angry or sad or happy now at reliving them as we were experiencing them for the first time.

Emotions are the planets and asteroids in orbit about an event, they are the major players in the stories that are you and us. They influence the characters, edging them toward the actions that provide the outcomes we can live with or brood upon for as long as we shall live.

Timeshares in Inevitability

Once you're aware that each character in a story has a separate and distinct reality, you're ready to enter the frightening landscape of inevitability, which is, after all, the guiding force in drama.

First you have to get through a few outer doors, beginning with suspense and its reputation for being the fuel that powers story.  Suspense posits a critical interruption of agendas, of plans under way or about to start.  Menace is often a stowaway to the interruption, either threatened or actual, the remaining questions being where, when, and what the afflicted characters will do next.

Tension is the next barrier, a tricky one to get over because it is a tangible byproduct of characters having differing realities.  The moment two or more individuals spend any time together, each of them begins to question, however under the radar the questioning, the reality of the other.

Inevitability arrives in a longer story early in act two, where characters begin to sense opposition, disagreement, and a measure of what each judges to be self-interest in the other. You can see the classic pull between wanting the freedom of aloneness and openness of choice fighting with the urge to form friendships or romantic associations.  A tentative compromise is sent forth, either to be accepted, ignored, or rebuffed.  Thus does tension begin, slouching toward the Bethlehem of suspense, fulfilling the inherent promise of inevitability.

Those who came before us spoke of inevitability as Fate or the will of whatever gods were accepting earmarks or outright tributes.  Some of us still hold those beliefs.  Whatever.  The evidence is there before us in story after story, whether a play, novel, or short form:  place two characters in the same setting and they speak to the story at hand, they respond in some way that creates at the very least a fabric of tension.  They do what persons in real life often don't--they respond and speak that sublime dramatic language of dialogue.

Ah, the misbegotten scenes of the learning curve, in which characters chatted, expounded on theory and philosophy, missed the nightly showers of subtext and agenda in the dramatic skies.  Ah, the moments when the author in us, eager to be in command, wrested control from the characters, individuals whose goals we barely knew, all but holding up posters explaining the motivations that should have spoken for themselves.

But with time, we came to realize.  It was, you might say, inevitable.

How Do We Get Out of Here?

exit strategy--a dramatic design for concluding a scene in a novel or short story, a chapter in a novel, or an entire novel; a purposeful building of event, discovery/revelation, and surprise that will lead to a resolution in a longer work of fiction, or a significant, reflective pause in a short story.

The two key words for exit strategy are suspense and resolution. Ending a scene without one or the other tempts the reader to set the work down with limited need or intent to return. Ending a scene or chapter with suspense leaves the dramatic outcome unresolved, tempting the reader to remain, hopeful of experiencing further dramatic event, which is to say, how "things" turn out. If "things" turn out well enough to have resolved the major thrust of the story or novel, then the story or novel is ended and there is no pressing need to inject additional suspense.

In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels, the easy-way-out exit strategy was the trope "...and they all lived happily ever after." A notable exception, perhaps even a trend-setter exit strategy, was Huck Finn who, unwilling to be civilized, lit out for the territory ahead. This strategy was employed midway through the twentieth century when Joseph Heller had his determined bombardier, Yossarian, in a hegira similar to Huck, this one toward the neutral country of Sweden.

For a time in the twentieth century, it seemed that all novels moved to some highly structured resolution where the murderer was revealed and justice restored, where true love was finally allowed back on track, and where all teen-aged rebellions gravitated toward a sensible maturity. Simultaneously, all short stories ended with a punch line, heavy irony, or a trick. But the effects of writers such as Anton Chekhov, Guy de Maupassant, James Joyce, and in later years, Eudora Welty, John O'Hara, John Cheever, and Alice Munro forged the exit strategy where resolution meant something less finite, more reflective of how individuals in daily life behave as opposed to moral finality.

Thus does another burden fall on the writer, the burden of articulating a life philosophy that attends the characters and story of a given narrative, then structuring the ending to approximate as close-to-plausible-as-possible a payoff before leaving the reader with the unspoken implication that, soon enough, these characters will become involved in yet another story.

Lord Byron, the poet, observed that tragedies end with death, comedies end with marriage. Modern stories begin with the tragedy of death as it evolves into the next step in the lives of the survivors. Modern stories also begin with the humor of the romantic energy of marriage, then evolve to such mile posts as developing relationships, children, career, and aging, to name only a few. The purpose of a well-thought-out exit strategy in any story is to leave the dramatic quality of aftertaste, the recurring appearance of characters after the story is ended, haunting the hallways and battlements of the readers' mind with add-on possibilities for new stories.

Hanging in There

cliffhanger--a suspense-generating device in which the immediate welfare (if not the life) of an individual hangs in the balance; a ticking-clock artifice at the end of which a character runs the risk of death; severe jeopardy left unresolved at chapter's end.

Most long term readers are aware of the concept of The Tales of Scheherazade in One Thousand and One Nights, in which a young queen extended her life for yet another day by telling her executioner/husband stories which left individuals in peril so great that the husband, driven by curiosity, had to hear the outcome. This was suspense with a vengence. Newspapers and magazines picked on this technique for telling stories in installments, each one ending with an impending disaster of considerable impact. Giving the device its name, Thomas Hardy, in 1873, published a novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes, which had been serialized in Tinsley's Magazine.

Against a background of restoring truly ancient church architecture on the craggy, desolate southwest coast of England, A Pair of Blue Eyes features young Elfride, a vicar's daughter, secretly engaged to a young architect, the young architect himself, and Henry Knight, older, unaware of Elfride's secret engagement, palpably interested in Elfride, himself.

Sitting on a high cliff above the Bristol Channel with Henry, hopeful of a telescope view of the ship returning the young architect from India, they are pelted by a gust of wind, which blows Henry's hat toward the edge. He scrambles for it, but finds himself unable to scramble back to the spot where he sat with Elfride. Trying to help him, Elfride makes things progressively worse. "From the fact that the cliff formed the inner face of the segment of a hollow cylinder," Hardy wrot, "having the sky for a top and the sea for a bottom, which enclosed the bay to the extent of nearly a semicircle, [Henry] could see the vertical face curving round on each side of him. He looked far down the facade, and realized more thoroughly how it threatened him."

Henry Knight is suspended by his arms from the side of a cliff where, "opposite [his] eyes was an embedded fossil, standing forth in low relief from the rock. It was a creature with eyes. The eyes, dead and turned to stone, were even now regarding him. It was one of the early crustaceans called Trilobites. Separated by millions of years in their lives, [Henry] and this underling seemed to have met in their place of death."

Readers of Tinsley's Magazine had to wait a month to see how Hardy would extricate Henry from this place where the Trilobite was the single instance within reach of his vision of anything that had ever been alive and had a body to save, as he himself had now."

Well, you argue, Elfride could go for help. But where, and how long could Henry hold on?

Thus was the cliffhanger born.

Particularly in a novel, a cliffhanger ending of one chapter presents a splendid opportunity to shift to another point of view, another time frame, another situation, playing the waiting game of suspense, where so much hangs in the balance.

Sexual Tension? moi?

sexual tension--the charged atmosphere present when certain characters appear together in a scene; at-a-distance thoughts and feelings of one character for another; a potential source of hidden agenda; a lurking subtext between characters or between the reader and certain characters.

Sexual tension is the elephant in the living room, an elephant that is often not recognized much less spoken about. Powerful enough when the involved characters are aware of it's presence and actually preparing to act on it, sexual tension is often the force that drives seemingly comfortable, secure characters over the edge, from their comfort to a combustion that produces consequences.

Obvious instances of sexual tension in story must include that between Dolores Haze, aka Lolita, and Humbert Humbert. Don't forget, Humbert married Lolita's mother as a subterfuge whereby he could have access to Lolita. Don't forget, however young Lolita was, she was neither innocent of Humbert's intent nor did she wish to blunt it. Don't forget, Humbert was aware of a ticking clock in that Lolita would be growing beyond his area of interest.

Look back into the chemistry sparking between Jane and Rochester in Jane Eyre. Did that not create a powerful incentive for the reader to continue, hopeful of more glances and touches of the hand. And what about Charlotte's kid sister, Emily, so far as Wuthering Heights is concerned? Was there not profound unresolved sexual tension between Cathy and Heathcliffe, made even more agonizing when Cathy agrees to marry Edgar Linton? On a more contemporary level, many of the John Cheever short stories were larded with it, "The Country Husband" being a notable example of its magnetic power.

Shakespeare knew a few things about sexual tension, evident in Twelfth Night, where Viola feels it for her "boss" Orsino, and has it felt for her by Olivia. In Much Ado About Nothing, the audience is given a pretty strong signal in the tease and banter between Beatrice and Benedick, and the sexual tension between Romeo and Juliet is so powerful from the moment of their first encounter that they are figuratively if not literally screwed, because they are both dead within thirty-six hours.

Observation: When sexual tension is resolved, the story flattens until something comes along--jealousy, guilt, discovery--to lift it upward again. Thus observable, smoldering sexual tension becomes a prime mover, a powerful engine for causing characters to take steps either to consummate or to flee from temptation.

Categorically Speaking

genre--the various categories of fiction; specific niche fiction shelving in bookstores and libraries; a system for classifying types of fiction; defining characteristics of a particular type of fiction.

Readers approach fiction variously for escape, entertainment, inspiration, distraction, and other similar mind- and spirit-enriching reasons. The common denominator for all readers is the understanding that the characters and situations are invented, products of a writer's imagination. This common denominator extends to include the Reader's First Expectation, to wit that the reader will be given sufficient reasons to suspend disbelief, in other words to forget that the characters and situations are unreal, thereupon to consider them as though they were real and accordingly to empathize with them.

The Reader's Second Expectation is that the specific categories or genera will contain but not necessarily be limited to specific circumstances,complications, conditions, emphasis focus, and formulas.

Here are some of the more prevalent fiction genera and what readers expect from them:

Adventure: novels and stories about individuals at accelerated risk and danger.

Chick Lit: young women protagonists, confronting sexuality, shopping, romance, careers, friendship.

Chivalric Romance: men on horses fighting dragons, wicked royalty, and their own sexual urges as they pursue Ms. Right.

Comic Novel: Imagine Ivanhoe of chivalric romance fame, riding off into the sunset with Rebbecca on his horse instead of Rowena. Imagine also Chris Buckley, thanking us for smoking, or that other Chris, Chris Moore, in everything he writes.Imagine satire as a subgenre, in which case you'd have to consider Joe Heller's Catch-22 as an icon.

Crime Novel: one or more murders have been or will be committed,now someone has to find out who and why. The "someone" occasions subgenera such as private investigators, sworn police officers, little old ladies, large young ladies, park rangers, process servers, innocent civilians, etc.

Erotic Literature: Individuals of both genders attempting to get laid with a modicum of originality, told in evocative prose.

Fables, Fairy Tales, and Folklore: Since neither the reader nor writer believe the individuals in these narratives actually existed, the overall tone and payoff must offer the reader something, perhaps a moral or an insight or even a laugh, to repay the time put forth reading them.

Historical Fiction: stories set in a particular period in time, reflecting the details, manners, and customs of that time. These may actually include actual historical personages, either as protagonists or cameo roles.

Literary Fiction: novels and stories having to do with moral choices, philosophical issues, mankind as a species adapting to the social and ethical challenges that confront it.

Picaresque: a more-episodic-than-plotted novel in which a rogue, scoundrel, con-person, deluded or intelligence-challenged person sets forth on a mission (which is usually to seek a fortune, his own or someone else's). You could consider James Leo Herlihy's Midnight Cowboy in this category.

Political Novel: a novel in which one or more of the major players is a politician or is a close-at-hand observer watching politicians as they behave. George Orwell's 1984 is political as well as speculative and cautionary, demonstrating yet other genera. Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men is political as well as biographical. Allan Drury's Advise and Consent takes its title from the U.S. Constitution and involves a number of U.S. Senators in action.

Romance Novel: a youngish woman who is often more attractive then she realizes is forced to make romantic choices.
Speculative Fiction: a novel or story that portrays an if-things-continue-the-way-they're-going scenario; Utopian or dystopian views of as yet unrealized outcomes. Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, George Orwell's 1984, and Philip Roth's The Plot Against America are speculative; so is Robert Heinlein's A Stranger in a Strange Land and, indeed, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.

Alternate History: stories and novels that rewrite actual history, then improvise on what the result might bring. See Len Deighton's SS/GB, and Ward Moore's Bring the Jubilee in which, respectively, Germany won World War II, and the Confederate States of America won the U.S. war between the states.

Fantasy: stories and novels in which magic is a key element. These narratives may also involve alternate universes which are accessed through such a portal as the rabbit hole into which young Alice fell. A subgenera of fantasy has one or more individuals being transformed by magic into an other-than-human form. Yet another subgenera involves a quest for an object which is the power source of magic, such as the sword which only Arthur can withdraw from the stone in which it was embedded.

Horror: The writer's intent is to portray events that will seriously frighten the reader. See Stephen King for any number of role models.

Science Fiction: an extrapolation on actual scientific reality, extended to expand the dramatic, emotional, and moral landscape in the world as we know it or in imaginary worlds where most of the conditions we recognize exist in some modified form. Science fiction may use either the "hard" sciences such as chemistry, geology, or astronomy, or extrapolate on the so-called social sciences ranging from anthropology to political science.

Thriller: the clock is ticking, the metronome is hurrying the pace along, and the good guys are in, seemingly over their heads, in a mismatch against a hugely powerful opponent, while the risk to the protagonists increases.

Conspiracy Fiction: "they," whoever they may be, are against "us," whoever we may be in a paranoid scenario come to life. See Richard Condon's The Manchurian Candidate as a prime example, but see also the screen version of The Verdict, David Mamet's screenplay adaptation of Barry Reed' s novel in which a down-at-the heels lawyer, superbly played by Paul Newman, goes up against a particular "them," not to forget where it all began in Erskine Childers' still compelling The Riddle of the Sands, followed by Graham Greene's The Ministry of Fear. Lest the genre sound too pulpy, consider Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and Umberto Eco's brilliant spoof, Faucault's Pendulum, by way of injecting literary tropes into the text.

Legal Thriller: bright young attorney goes up against prestigious firms with unlimited resources to tip the scales of justice in favor of an underdog client; fading, possibly alcoholic attorney scores a courtroom triumph, once again proving that justice will out. The deck in legal thrillers is always stacked against the good guys.

Psychological Thriller: Is the narrator psychotic or merely naive? Are the inmates running the asylum? Will the bright young psychiatrist break through the catatonic seizures of the targeted character? What about Richard Powers' penetrating dive into what an ego actually is, via The Echo Maker? If ever there were a rich example of a genre, both literary and thrilling in its implications, this is it. Unless, of course, you wish to consult Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn, in which the private eye genre and the psychological thriller meet up in a back alley somewhere. The protagonist in Motherless Brooklyn is a PI who is afflicted with Tourette's Syndrome, a fact that may or may not trump Powers' protagonist, who is diagnosed with the Capgrass Syndrome.

Spy Fiction: Is it really espionage if you give vital information to a friend or worthwhile cause and are not paid for it? Are there moral justifications for spying? Suppose you are a spy for a cause you are willing to risk your life for as in, say, Graham Green's The Confidential Agent? Whatever your answers, readers of spy fiction are alert for betrayals, double-dealing, and covert operatives being lured into death traps, sometimes by alluring ladies wearing tightly belted trench coats, but sometimes by alluring young ladies wearing nothing at all. Any of the novels by Eric Ambler or John LeCarre will set the bar of performance at an appropriate level.

Tragedy: Back in the day,when Aristotle was alive to write about tragedy, the genre signaled the fall from grace or power of a member of the nobility; it might even mean the tumble from power of an entire family. Now tragedy has become democratized, Death of a Salesman earns its way in the front door, so too do the likes of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, and the venture into tragedy inspired by the plight of Hester Prynne, Herman Melville's Moby Dick. Thomas Hardy's novels, particularly Tess, Jude the Obscure, and The Mayor of Casterbridge portray wrenching, tragic events which not only illustrate their own circumstances but remind readers how close at hand the prospect of tragedy is in their own life. Theodore Dreiser was well aware of the implications of his An American Tragedy, wanting to earn recognition as the American, middle- and working-class Henry James. If tragedy is not paced properly, that is to say, if it is speeded up, it tips over into the realm of comedy. Comedy is tragedy on steroids.

Western: first things first; a Western is a historical action novel, set in the American frontier some time after 1840. Some of its many potential themes are well dramatized in Jack Shaefer's magnificent Monte Walsh, which is an episodic, semi-picaresque growing up and aging of a cowboy. Other Western themes: Cows vs. sheep; ranches vs. farms; cowboys and Indians; Indians and the cavalry; the coming of the railroad: free range vs. barbed wire; cattle drives. Western writers to study for imaginative ways out of the conventional themes include Dorothy Johnson, Elmore Leonard, Larry McMurtry (particularly Horsemen Pass By and, later, Lonesome Dove), Mari Sandoz, and Wallace Stegner. In particular, the McMurtry Horsemen is a demonstration that the history of the West is still very much taking place now, involving some of the very issues with which it began its life under the hands of Owen Wister (The Virginian) and Zane Gray's epic, written in 1912, Riders of the Purple Sage.










See genre promise

Hanging in the Balance

A mantra is a series of words or syllables which combine the names or aspects of the godhead and are intended as an adjunct to meditation. The word has its roots in Sanskrit, which is itself intended as a language by which to convey the meaning and intensity of mystical scripts, formulas, chants, and poems. To make matters even more intriguing, the words used in Sanskrit-based mantras are encapsulations of the personalities of gods and goddesses are additionally special, meaning that even a person who has some Sanskrit is not likely to use these so-called bija or jewel words except when chanting or meditating on mantras that contain them.

This is probably more than you wanted to know about mantras and Sanskrit and bija words, just as Melville probably, now that you think about it, told you more about whales than you want to know. But the fact is that there are mantras for the writing and telling of story; they are not in Sanskrit nor do they have bija words in them. One of the more powerful mantras for story telling is: Never take the reader where the reader wants to go. Meditating on this mantra has caused many aspiring writers to understand how important it is not to tell the reader too much about whales until the reader is sufficiently invested in the story that he has to suffer the stuff on whales to find out what happens to the characters. When the reader is sufficiently caught up in the story, the writer can successfully thrown in a chapter or two about whales and although the reader may ultimately complain, the reader will, as some recent characters in American political activities have put it, stay the course.

Another mantra of significant value to the writer is the single word withhold, a word and concept not to be taken lightly. The reader reads to be made interested in characters who take on a bigger-than-life resonance, continuing to read to see what happens to the characters. At more or less the moment the reader finds out, the story is over. In answer then to the question, when does a story end, the answer becomes When the reader finds out what happens. In exaggerated theory, the ideal place for the discovery or revelation or even the backstory-as-explanation is the penultimate chapter of a novel because, cumbersome as such an arrangement might be, the reader would put up with it to find out what happens. Come to think of it, the reader would even put up with all that stuff about whales to find out what happened to Ishmael.

The product created by withholding is suspense.

Suspense is the glue that holds stories together.

Mantras may lead to insight, even mystical union. Suspense leads to dramatic discovery.

The N Word

Narrative is as slippery a word as a politician's promise at a fund raiser. Often used as a synonym for story, it is more associated with fiction than nonfiction, is sometimes used as a sly dig to suggest that a reporter or scholar is indulging more in story telling than in research or reportage. Speaking of a writer's narrative voice implies fiction--how that writer tells a story--or fiction morphed into myth or legend rather than straightforward accounting of event.

Sometimes when leading up to a revelation that the material under discussion is not yet a fully developed story, I'll use the word narrative, by which I mean a progression of events, before springing the trap door of what elements could morph this narrative into a full-fledged story. Treating the student like an author in such cases produces positive results in the sense of allowing the student to believe he'd known that all along. Treating an author like a student usually brings forth some form of stubbornness, which does no good at all for the story.

Narrative is some selected personality, apprehended in the act of relating dramatic events; it has a perspective, a point of view, an attitude, all of which should be manifest as the reader reads. Narrative may be you as author provided you have taken some steps to articulate what your perspective and agenda may be. In other words, there is no way of avoiding the responsibility of taking some side or stand. Neutrality is at best a Platonic ideal, but in drama it is an albatross the weight of which quickly makes itself felt as the need for explanation and fair presentation standards emerge. And they surely will.

Look at it this way, narrative is the macrocosm, the universe of the story, however brief or expansive, expressed in some pattern selected to produce the senses of tension, risk, and consequence. Suspense is very much the glue holding dramatic events together. When the time comes for greater specificity, switch to dialogue.

Some historical eras produced politically charged concepts of narrative that did for narrative what corsets and bustles did for women at various times or skin-tight pants did for men at other times--they caused constraint, certainly made sitting and standing more a discomfort than before. In one dramatic example, narrative was thought to need more realistic detail, a thought that resulted in entire laundry lists of clothing, medicines, nostrums, and utensil invading the orderly progression of story across the pages. Other times required of characters that their inner consciousness be brought to account, bringing forth paragraph after paragraph of internal monologue. English majors, who should by no know better, have their heads filled with these details and some in their midst are even able to recite the names of the various theories--modern, post-modern, Marxist, neo-Marxist, Feminist, et alia--some even to the point of being accorded merit raises in pay.

Applying the razor of William of Occam to the matter, narrative is a vehicle by which story is advanced to effect a dramatic result. The result is variously called closure, ending, resolution, and prismatic spread. But don't be fooled by definitions that state or imply such conditions as should or ought. Out on the street, narrative is the stuff that carries story without dropping the reader.

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.

Random Notes on a Theme of Narrative Reliability

1. Not the start because who can say where such things really begin, rather the rallying point for a close look at narrative authority and reliability came from having finished for review J.M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year.

2. Several pages in, Coetzee reminds us of Barthes and Foucault, architects of deconstructionist critical theory, doing away with the author and drawing us toward the text as the be all and end all, reminding us of Diderot and Sterne.

3. I'm especially sensitive to Sterne and Tristram Shandy, which informs in tone a portion of my in progress Exit, Pursued by a Bear. I admire Dennis Diderot for his encyclopedia constructions, which inform my in the works Writer's Tool Kit, a kid of cross-referenced irreverence that speaks to construction and attitude.

4. Coetze literally tells three stories at once, all on the same page, each layer or level separated by a horizontal line. Thus we hear informal opinions on such things as politics, literature, music, the rule of law, morality, which we readers understand as being the very Strong Opinions one of the characters in the book (who bears certain similarities to Coetzee) was engaged to write by a German publisher. The middle section of the page relate to the author's relationship with a stunningly attractive woman he has hired to be his secretary, and the bottom section is the ongoing relationship between the secretary and her braggart, self-made-man live in boyfriend.

5. The writer is called Senor C and has won a slew of awards; he also has enough money that the secretary's boyfriend, an investment counsellor, is interested in appropriating.

6. Although Coetzee, a Nobel Laureate, has migrated to Adelaide, in south central Australia, this small ensemble cast lives in a high-rise on Sydney's ocean front.

7. Is this novel a roman a clef? Is it a complete fantasy?

8. Doesn't matter. What matters is that it kicks format for a field goal, blurring lines between real and invention, making the invention seem plausible, making the plausible seem somehow like the very confessions tortuously wrung from prisoners of war that Coetzee so firmly resents .

9. How much has the concept of a reliable narrator shifted since the tail end of last century? What constitutes reliability in 2008?

10. The kinds of novels and stories that provoke the most thought are the ones that stray in one way or another from conventional narrative format.

11. Used to be, the most significant ingredient to be found in fiction was suspense, and if you could not manufacture suspense, you were obliged to infuse the next best thing which was tension, and we all know that racial, political, artistic, and sexual tensions are powerful primary causes.

12. Now the ingredient is ambiguity, which can be made to contain tension and perhaps even suspense.

13. What do identities mean? What are motives? What is reality? We had at one point to memorize the names of the Nine Muses. 2008 we can replace them with the nine ambiguities.

14. I think I will be spending more time with Coetzee, especially this one, and looking for ways to tear Exit, Pursued by a Bear farther away from the satire I'd intended and more into a moral ambiguity that seems to be hanging about like the coastal fogs or marine layers that sit off shore here during June and July.

15. I wanted to get this down before it got away.

Missing from the List

One of the assignments I'm fond of inflicting on myself and on students is the one in which we attempt to list as many of the essential ingredients of story as we can. My fondness extends to the point where some students invariably come forth with an element I have either not considered at all ever, or one I'd allowed to slip into the dusty drawers of forgetfulness .

Thus we have such elements as character and lot, voice, dialogue, narrative, point-of-view, suspense, reversal, tension, suspicion, hidden agenda, scene, backstory. All in all, I reckon between twenty and thirty building blocks.

My purpose in embarking on such a list and inflicting it on students is resident in the next portion of the assignment. Now that you have your list, give it a hierarchy, starting with the most important element and trailing down to the least important (to you) or the one you feel most estranged from.

This list, set in an order of importance, provides an intimate portrait of the writing personality; it is at once a clue to how you define story and which elements you find either the least useful or with which you are most uncomfortable. 

 At this point I jump in with the confession that plot is invariably at the bottom of my list, to which I add, perhaps even projecting a certain perverse pride, that this is so because I am not very accomplished with plotting.

How then, someone will ask, do you get stories?

And I reply, Why, through characters, of course. My characters all think they are right. Whenever they enter a scene, they expect this rightness to be validated, observed by other characters, perhaps even characters who are strangers.

It is a lovely kind of conversation/therapy session/confessional/shop talk; it gets them thinking and it keeps me thinking. For some considerable time, I'd had characters at the top of my list. In more recent times I'd leaned toward voice, arguing to myself that the tone or attitude I brought forth would influence the characters. That approach lasted for quite a while. We often wish to hear a particular story or reminiscence repeated because of the tone of the teller. I think I have heard all Barnaby Conrad's stories about the time he spent as a younger man serving as secretary to Sinclair Lewis, but somehow the story of how Conrad, showing off with a bow and arrow, let one fly only to fatally and unintentionally impale a toad sends me into paroxysms of mirth. Ditto the story Lewis told Conrad about the attractive woman on a neighboring deck chair on the Queen Elizabeth, reading a copy of Lewis' latest novel. Thinking he was about to make serious romantic time with the woman once he revealed to her who he was--"Are you enjoying that book?"--he was stunned when she stood, advanced to the deck railing, and dropped the book over the side. I know these stories but they are made more memorable by Conrad's obvious pleasure at telling them.

Which brings me to the deck railing as it were; the moment of truth. Character was a good thing to have considered number one. Voice was an excellent thing to have replaced it with. My current favorite is subtext, which is something I describe as the trough between what a character says and what the character does. Implication, if you will. Actually, I've been quite pleased with myself for having seen that lovely distinction and because I've been on such a nonfiction vector these last several months, I've only had one opportunity to try a story in which subtext was deliberately elevated to the top.

But there is something important I have forgotten, not just for the moment but for all these years of trying to move my craft along some line of progress. It is the thing every successful story has in abundant measure. Indeed, it is the thing the creator must carry about as though it were the most advanced iPod, listening to it, using it, being aware of it.

My bad for having forgotten it or for merely having taken it so much for granted that I may have on occasion obviated it.

It.

Enthusiasm.