Readers as kleptomaniacs in a big box store

Curiosity is a force in fiction that causes the reader to care what happens next and to whom it happens. It is a dramatic element, curiosity is, always coming on stage breathless from the last place it attended, playing on our sympathy, our sense of personal identity, and the depth to which we are able to empathize. The sight of a character in want, danger, or serious speculation is sufficient to arouse our curiosity by flashing those warning lights of complication.

You could do well to add denial to the list; with enough denial leaking from a character, the concept of arousing interest becomes the dramatic code words for not when but how soon the thing being denied will explode its ashes all over the character. "Oh no," a character will announce to the Cosmos, "I've got too much on my plate to even think about romance." (Actually, The Cosmos is a nice metaphor for The Reader.) This is quickly followed by a chance meeting with--surprise--a romantic interest of spectacular quirkiness and energy, to bring to the mat all previous defenses to romance.

When a thing happens in Reality, there is often a mark-up in cost of the sort we are reminded of in post-holiday sales, where the discounts on list price are stark reminders of the profit margins enjoyed by so many retailers. This mark-up is usually the addition of complications that abound with all human events, reminding us how Reality has its own agenda. When a thing happens in story, the extraneous complications are discounted, filtered out, making the effect seem undiluted, intense, fraught. We are curious to see what the consequences will be, in some measure because we have been programmed through previous reading to expect that no act, even the act of inaction, goes unnoticed or unpunished in story. Drama is the quintessential tier of on-end dominoes, placed to trigger the next. No more dominoes, no more story.

To exaggerate the metaphor, readers are kleptomaniacs in a big-box store with awesome security. Readers are curious not only to see if they are correct in their suspicions, they want to project themselves into story to see if they can get away with lifting that tube of lipstick or that pair of sunglasses without being caught.

Vulnerability in one or more characters is a starting point for arousing the reader to be curious--to care. Add a touch of potential menace or failure and the reader has felt the oh, oh buttons being depressed. It is also possible to start with a character in high gear with hubris or pomposity for starters. The reader cares to the point of wanting to see that particular character crash against the guardrail of humiliation. Of course the seasoned writer will up the ante by allowing the hubris laden and pompous to win a few rounds first, enhancing the desire to see and taste the deliciousness of the ultimate crash. Those are the stakes for those of us who wish to sit in the game.

Ante up, guys.

Suspicion

The moment suspicion elbows in front of you in the cafeteria line of reality, trust and optimism have suffered setbacks. By its very definition, suspicion evokes pictures of police line-ups, of persons of interest being displayed so that a potential miscreant in their midst might be identified. Suspicion is the fly in the ointment, the fox in the chicken coop, the awareness of and dread response to something gone wrong. It is the herald of the fall, the serpent in the garden, and hell, why not, the snake in the grass.

Things that seem too good to be true generally are in fact too good to be true; along comes suspicion with the notion that things are not as good as they seem, that there is a worse result than the one already planned for. Suspicion is the gut fear that the tab, when presented to you for payment, is going to be more than you bargained for; it is the sickening sensation that there is yet more to come when you believe you have met and gotten into bed with Rock Bottom.

Suspicion is the cynicism we offer up to the cheerful, the naive, those who seem always to have one more cheek to turn, one more smile to offer, one more rabbit to pull out of a hat; it is our protective coating to prevent over-optimistic rhetoric into our thinking and behavior. No wonder it is such a strong presence in the novel of detection, the tale of social consequence, the story of Edenic happiness known as the Utopia. Small wonder utopias are invariably boring and dystopias are so fraught; suspicion looms on the horizon like the rise and set of the sun. Suspicion exists to keep us honest, to convince us that no one, not even protagonists in novels and short stories are perfect; it recognizes our trespasses and the incursions of those who trespass against us. We are alive and suspect even in our better moments. Indeed, some of our better moments come as the direct result of our having suspected ourself of meanness of spirit or lack of motivation. We suspect we could have done more, should have done more, even to the point of seeing retrospective ways in which we could have done so. We could have been better children, better students, better lovers, and when someone praises us for something we have written, our momentary gratefulness is submerged by the suspicion that we could have done better, tapped more into the internal music and vibrant meaning of the work.

We are quick to suspect that some individuals are liars, all the while seeming to ratify our own relationship with the concept of truth, not in the slightest suspicious of our own tidal relationship with such abstractions as absolute accuracy. Parallel lines meet in infinity while truths converge readily within our conscience.

To use the words suspicion or suspect immediately denotes a negativity that haunts the rest of the thought process, the introduction of the worm of doubt into the apple of reality. There are the usual suspects of mystery and cliche fame, the unusual suspects of our imagination and doubt, gaunt, dark-eyed travelers in trench coats who loll about at street corners, waiting with abundant patience for us to pass by, whereupon they follow, just at the outer range of our awareness. We are always suspicious unless we are in those delusional states known as love, happiness, listening to music, or writing. And even then we are fearful, suspicious really, that the love, happiness, music, and writing will not last nor will the coffee that sustains them.

There is nothing worse than being suspected of entertaining some activity we may have contemplated but not yet done--unless it is the worseness of writing about a suspect or some individual's suspicion in an unconvincing way, producing the suspicion that you are not as accomplished a writer as you'd suspected.

Happy endings

Sometimes you get to wondering about happy endings, the people who read them, the people who are disappointed when they are not to be found, the critics who make fun of them, and the people who write stories that contain them.

You suppose within your wondering what is really meant by a happy ending, particularly what it would take for an otherwise realistic ending to seem by degrees happy, very happy, and Disney happy. Such endings could gradually lapse from being a more or less believable narrative of human affairs into a denouement wherein everyone got what they'd set out to achieve at the outset and those who'd opposed them through some agenda of selfishness or self-aggrandizement came to see that all had turned out for the best. It could also be that certain generational and cultural scenarios played out in demonstration of the fact that there is some universal wavelength of wisdom and understanding to which we could all tune for a sermon in which our behavior was rationalized.

This already alerts you to the residence within you of some cynicism, some willingness to suspect and expect dark motives in many of your fellow humans even though you look upon yourself as a relatively happy person in whom the fires of suspicion need some considerable fanning to flare up into active flame.

The conceit of the happy ending opens doors within your imagination, bringing forth scenes related to the behind-the-scenes aspects of happy endings. You begin by imagining a few individuals working at a Disney amusement park which, although certainly oriented to making a profit seems also focused on providing something that could be called good, clean, family fun, centering on some employees wearing costumes which allow them to impersonate such Disney regulars as Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Minnie Mouse, Goofy, and perhaps even the Duck nephews, Huey, Louie, and Dewey, all of whom with apparent good cheer work the crowds, expressing their willingness to pose for pictures. The employee portraying Goofy has long since wanted to be promoted out of his hot, stuffy costume and inside, where he might be working on a newsletter or doing statistical analyses of which rides were the most popular and which less successful ones needed some sort of enhancement or outright replacement. And suppose said Mr. Goofy was confronted by his manager relative to his quarterly performance review. Not nearly as many customers wanting their pictures taken with you as with Donald Duck. Let's set a nice respectable quote for the next quarter so that we can qualify for a merit raise and a promotion to a new assignment. How is this going to make Goofy feel, particularly in relationship to Donald Duck? Your own suspicion is that when the costumes come off and we're out in the employee parking lot, Goofy is going to have some choice words for Donald.

You happen to have known the late sales manager at Harpers when the Laura Ingalls Wilder books were selling so well, whence your reports that she was an extraordinarily nice person but also one who was more than willing to let someone else pick up the tab for whatever was being consumed. Accordingly it is easy for you, who actually read and enjoyed some of the Little House books to imagine another writer of such scope as being a mean drunk or downright abusive, moving from the world of the good time and happy ending to another more severe world altogether, and other writers of happy endings yet feeling utter disdain for his or her audience.

To be sure, there are happy endings in life, touching, inspirational stories in which remarkable humans and remarkable animals are represented as sought-after ideals. Such narratives work if they do not seem manufactured, which is to say overly plot-driven. Probably the best definition you can think of is one that comes when the story ends before the good times are over and, by extension, a sad or noir ending allows the reader to see the price that is left to be paid.