Where They're Coming from

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Altered States of Reality: Your Own Vision of It

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

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

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

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

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

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

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