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.

The Distraction of Images

You know all about the other shoe dropping, not so much from living in apartment complexes as having been resident in a hotel or motel from time to time.  The person in the room directly above you removes one shoe and lets it fall to the floor with a thunk, waking you and keeping you awake as you anticipate the resolution, the thunk of the other shoe dropping.

On occasion in a classroom, you've even milked the analogy by extending the individual in the room above you to be a centipede, thus the dropping of more than two shoes.

In real life, as opposed to metaphorical life, story life, composition life, it can take time for the other shoe--whatever it might be--to drop, adding to the sense of suspense, anticipation, and general chaos in real-time life, where either so much is going on or nothing is going on, thus another distraction among the many.  (Story sorts out the chaos, much in the manner of a conspiracy theorist selectively discarding facts that might mitigate the conspiracy theory.)

In real-time life, you frequently scan books on acting technique and philosophy, in search of yet another form of circumstance by which you may bring some measure of authenticity and theme to your growing vision of How Things Work.  Even if your vision is of a genteel absurdity, nevertheless there has to be ways of demonstrating this absurdity without the need to lecture the characters or, even worse, the readers, while still maintaining a balance of plausibility.  This aspect of events seems the most consistent in the things you've written since you were about eighteen, at which point you'd decided that the formula-based story was beyond your means (you later refined that to being beyond your interest).  Although you are not as devoted a fan of Raymond Carver as many of your writer friends and, increasingly, your students are, the thing you admire most about him is his ability to convey that sense of plausible absurdity, of things having stretched as tightly as a pair of wrong-sized shoes bought in desperation at a thrift store.  You loved the shoes but size was an issue.

So you come across an acting book exercise in which the student is conveying a sense of being cold.  How, you wonder, would Philip Seymour Hoffman demonstrate cold?  And the very act of visualizing an actor you admire performing such a task brings images to you.  The images are so intense that you need to stop because of the distraction of images; you don't want to lose the insight here, which is that although the dramatic situation has to convey an emotion, the place where the situation occurs has to convey at least a sense--sight, sound, touch, temperature--if not an emotion.  Thus do you have a character in a situation, which is to say a focused, confrontational encounter with opposition, simultaneously responding to the setting.  Bingo!  Counterpoint.  I don't have time to be hungry now; I've got to cope with this!  Screw being too hot in here, I've got to make a decision.  It is literally a double bind, which has to create tension.  Hamlet, driven by his need to extract revenge from his uncle, sees his uncle in a vulnerable position and now becomes aware that he might exact the ultimate revenge by killing his uncle, thus settling the score.  But the uncle is saying his prayers, and if Hamlet were to kill his uncle while he is at prayer, the uncle will take an all-expenses-paid trip to Heaven, which is the farthest thing from Hamlet's intent.

True enough, were you to turn this musing in for an essay on the SAT, it would be returned to you with a stern note about topic sentences.  But what do they know about story?

Design for Living

design--a dramatic plan or structure; a deliberate manipulation of dramatic elements with the intent of producing a story; a plot or story arc intended to generate a lasting and memorable effect on the reader.

Design is, in this sense, a noun; it may also be used as a verb in which case it becomes the act of producing a plot line or arrangement of significant dramatic elements that lead to a satisfying conclusion. Plot-driven stories are those in which the design may become predictable, even though the emotional effects such as suspense, tension, horror, anticipation, dread, longing, etc may vary. The better of the plot-driven stories, say those of Harlan Coben or Lee Child, implicitly offer a design of sufficient complexity and issues at stake to lure the reader's attention away from the design while producing one or more of the previously listed emotions. In many ways, such stories are the equivalent of Navajo rugs, intricate, colorfully patterned, pleasing to experience. Character-driven stories are designed to provide emotional responses as well as moral, intellectual, and aesthetic challenges. Richard Powers's The Echo Maker, while superbly plotted, brings characters on stage with issues that actually call their very sense of self into question, luring the reader well past the notion of mere formula or suspense and into self-examination that could produce uncomfortable feelings.

A conventional approach for producing both types of pattern, the more geometrically structured as well as the more open-ended design begins with confronting a single character with a choice of behavior or the need to make some choice within a narrow time frame. On a more plot-oriented design, a character may be given a choice between serving out a long prison term or accepting a life-threatening assignment as a ticket to forgiveness for the crime that landed the character in prison. As well, a character may be confronted head-on with the need to chose allegiance between two feuding factions. One possible approach for beginning a character-driven story is to present the lead character with the need to find out some highly relevant information from his own past or from the past of family, a quest that will lead to the discovery of some unspeakable information. Jay Gatz, later to become Jay Gatsby, began a quest to find his former love, Daisy Buchannan, a quest that brought Gatsby into the midst of a complex pattern or love, betrayal, and social collision.

Particularly in a longer short story, a novella, or a novel, changing points of view in rendering the narrative will have a measurable effect on the dramatic design.

A Twofer

scene, the--the basic unit of dramatic storytelling; an integral moment in a setting which one or more characters have entered with agenda and expectation; the crucible to which the heat of ambition, agenda, or desire is applied; a period of dramatic engagement in a particular setting where personalities and goals collide, producing a sense of movement toward a resolution or trial.

Put enough of these basic units together and they assume a form suggesting a specific path toward some arbitration, trial, discovery, or resolution. As the collection of scenes emerges, the characters in them appear to grow in resolve or stubbornness, producing varying dramatic options to the point where they become memorable enough to eclipse the narrative in which they appear.

In varying degree, scenes have at least the following ingredients: setting, characters, beats, pace, blocking, tension, subtext, dialogue. They may also contain reversals of fortune for one or more characters, shifts in the power exerted by one character or organization over another character or organization, shifts of allegiance within the cast of characters, surprise, discovery of relevant information, and revelation.

The setting is the thematic and physical locale for the scene; the characters are the individuals who come into it, having just been somewhere else. The beats are movements or activities, a pause to consider, a decision to turn a response into a riposte, a reaction to an invitation or an insult. Pace is the tempo with which the beats occur, slow and leisurely or at staccato intensity. Blocking is the sense of movement and placement of characters in the setting, where they will go if they are in motion, where they will remain if sedentary. Tension is the atmospheric pressure of something about to happen, of impending pleasure or gloom or discovery, while subtext is yet another atmospheric pressure, the palpable awareness of the difference between what a character says and what that character is thinking. Dialog is what the characters say to other in ways that express who they are, what they mean, what they intend.

Characters come into scenes with expectations which may be met or frustrated. A character who achieves an expectation, no matter how deserving he may be of the success, may experience buyer's remorse or conversely indulge exuberant celebration. Just as likely, characters may enter scenes with fears, hopes, prejudices. A character who enters a scene with no expectations needs to be sent home and re-costumed to reflect the basic assumption of story that the characters within them have a sense of being right about something.

A character who is right about something--an interpretation, an entitlement, a sense of being a victim, a sense of having something to protect--has earned admittance to the tent of story and must now pursue the goals that drive him, perhaps tentatively at first, but then with the increasing intensity of ambition. 

 Some characters require one or more scenes in which to ratify or shore up their sense of being right, which instills within them the glorious dynamic of defensiveness, which they are free to interpret as Justice must be done. Even the ghost in Hamlet has an agenda, which drives the story forth, stirring up from beyond the grave the stew of ambition, power, and sexual jealousy. That lovely, dysfunctional family, the Macbeths? They are also propelled by ambition, but who can say that Dorothy Gale is a passive observer.

Scenes should be wound about the armature of at least one salient emotion. Characters may not agree with that emotion, may be prevented from recognizing it by the sun-in-the-eyes of their own agenda, but the reader will see through all that and be able to identify the emotion. A significant example of this is found in the character of Bobby Dupea, wanting at this point in the film Five Easy Pieces nothing more than a conventional breakfast in a small roadside lunch room. "You want me to hold the chicken," the waitress asks Bobby, producing not only the crucible overflowing but a subsequent persona for the actor Jack Nicholson.

A scene is a crucible, an arena, a place where characters go armed with the baggage of their past, their attitudes, their agendas, fortified with the toolkit of their abilities and hopes. The scene is the Swiss Army knife of story.


magical realism--dramatic narratives told from the perspective of one or more narrators who have a vision of reality that differs from the conventional; stories in which beings, places, and events appear as though conventional, their existence supported by the behavior of one or more characters and/or the writer; narratives which suggest alternate origins, universes, and abilities than those found in conventional literature.

Against a setting most characters and readers would agree is a rigorously plausible rendition of reality, the writer of magical realism adds one or more fantastical elements that barely slip under the net of reader believability or are not overtly challenged because everything else seems acceptably real. Accordingly, characters in magical realism are less likely to seem vulnerable than those in super realism, the measure of a writer's ability and popularity measured in accordance with the degree to which readers believe their characters are subject to harm. Thus the intriguing comparison between two seemingly incomparable couples, Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley in Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, and Lyra Belacqua and Will Parry in Pullman's The Subtle Knife, the former being lovers from an all-too believable wartime reality, the latter lovers in a reality infused with alternate universe topography and magical realism. The argument here is that while the relationship between Henry and Barkley is convincing enough and poignant, the young love romance between Belacqua and Parry is the more memorable because of a greater depth of detail and nuance, in spite of being set in a patently unworldly world. The further argument becomes: no matter how fanciful the setting, if the details of a commonly felt emotion are strong and nuanced enough, the reader is more likely to suspend disbelief to the point of accepting the magic along with the realism.

Such widely diverse authors of magical realism as Ben Okri, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende, and Alice Hoffman employ the medium with a significant lack of defensiveness, while the Japanese author, Haruki Murikami, is so deft in his applications that the reader may totally buy into his uses of coincidence, dream states, and implied symbolism.

A good governing principle for the use of magical realism is to set one magical element into a world of detailed realistic detail.

Conflict of Interests

conflict--the clash of agendas between two or more forces within a story; thus the internal argument of conscience versus desires raging within one character as well as the differing views of appropriate behavior among opposing sides. Conflict is opposition writ large, the duel between dream and reality, between age and youth, between conservative and liberal. Conflict emerges from two wellsprings, the desire of an individual to survive, and the sense in story that every character believes he is right. Conditions that stand in the way of survival represent conflict. Conditions that emerge when opposing forces insist on the aptness and correctness of their positions are representations of conflict. Since its appearance and subsequent evolution, the human species has struggled against the conflicts of weather, starvation, illness. Since its reemergence in the middle of the twentieth century, Israel has been in one form or another of conflict with its neighbors, each side convinced of the validity of its position.

Story often begins with a character being propelled by a goal. The character collides with one or more obstacles, reversals that cause frustration and possible humiliation. These obstacles are often other characters with contrary agendas, but the obstacles may be emotional or philosophical forces within the principal character. In either case, the principle character must seek a way through or around the labyrinth of obstacle to some degree of settling the claims of the original goal.

Real life characters who identify their goals, then set methodically forth to achieve them are admirable, often becoming role models for emulation. They represent progression, but they do not represent story. A woman setting methodically forth to accomplish something rarely achieved by a woman is story because of the presence of obstacle, which in story becomes personified, even objectified.

Conflict begins in story with an individual who wants something to come to pass or who wants something not to come to pass. The conflict is engaged when the individual acts on his goal. The conflict becomes tangible and irreversible when a person or persons reacts to the individual acting on his goal.

Conflict always has consequences (if it does not, the narrative effect becomes reminiscent of the boy hollering wolf).



tension--a sense of potential menace, vulnerability, humiliation, conflict, or reversal hovering over characters as they pursue their agendas; a radiant quality of apprehension affecting readers who have come to have concerns about characters; a dramatic shading valued by some writers to a greater degree than actual conflict, tension is the flashing warning light, the buzzing smoke detector that warns of the consequences of conflict.

One instructive way to look at tension is as an atmosphere of dramatic tentativeness, of characters attempting to behave as though nothing is wrong, trying not to recognize the elephant in the living room. Thus by the indirection of subtext the reader will become apprehensive for the appropriate characters.

Another way of instruction: Tension is the tightening of hopes, anticipation, of thinking nothing more could go wrong, just before one more thing goes wrong. Tension is being in bed in a cheap hotel, awaiting the comforting presence of sleep, then hearing a shoe drop onto the floor in the room above, then waiting for the other shoe to drop. At length, the shoe does drop. But a moment later, one more shoe drops...


style--the appearance and expression of written personality; often enhanced by an adjective to connote spareness, flourish, orotundity, even baroque complexity. Style is the physical fingerprint of the writer, demonstrated by such traits as length of sentence, cadence, length of paragraph, use of adjectives and adverbs, punctuation; style may emerge as formal or informal, depending on such idiosyncrasies as "one" instead of "you."

Most writers have a pronounced style, making it possible to identify their work without signposts (Hemingway comes to mind as a prime example.) while other writers are said to write in a particular style, say journalistic or scholarly or discursive. Some styles, such as material appearing in The National Geographic, are so focused on clarity and accuracy that authorial presence tends to retreat into the background.

Style is what remains of a manuscript after it has been revised by the writer, winnowed to achieve for the author a sense of comfort, which is to say that all self-consciousness has been edited out. If the writer is not comfortable or happy with his style, happier results may be found by examining writers with agreeable styles, looking for things to include or remove from one's own work.

The difference between style and voice has its origins in the author's intent in writing the work; voice comes from an emotional and/or philosophical atmosphere. Style relates to the way the writer dots i's and crosses t's; voice is a direct reflection of the author's attitude.

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.

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.