Characters with Intent

Whether or not you're working from outline or the sense of being so immersed in your story that your characters are talking to you, sending you sensory messages about where they want to be and what they want to be doing, there is a moment between the ending of the last scene and the beginning of the next when you might with good reason stumble.

The moment of stumble may arrive when the new scene begins, not with a dramatic sweep of intensity but rather a confused moment or two when the characters seem dazed, as though having eaten a too large meal, suffered through a boring lecture, or worse, entered the wrong story (See Mario Vargas Llosa's remarkable Aunt Julia and the Script Writer.)

To prevent this beginning-of-the-scene stumble, you need some preparation. A simple laundry list will do it, a list for each character:

1. What is the character just coming from--what had he/she just done?

2. What is the character doing right now?

3. What is the character's immediate goal? (What does he/she want right now?)

I am particularly reminded of my mentor the actor telling me her experience on opening night when a fellow actor, appearing in his first Broadway play and having been lackluster in rehearsals, seemed not to be waiting in the wings for his cue to go on, then was reported to have been seen out in the alleyway, chinning himself on a fire escape. At length the actor appeared, sweaty and breathless from his exertions, gasping for breath as he delivered his first lines. Thus did Marlon Brando "prepare" himself for his portrayal of a character who was nervous and excited. Here was a character who felt his nervous excitement, then behaved accordingly.

The character moves into the scene with at least the subtext of having recently been doing something else, possibly not wanting to be here.

The character is here with intent in place.

Some of us may have our characters scoot about like the bump cars in an amusement zone, exchanging meaningless dialogue, more or less warming themselves up for the essential movements and behavior of the scene; others in our midst may have made a story board or, as I do, rely on a few scribbled notes on a three-by-five index card. All these and other similar roads lead to the payoff of fully informed characters starting in fully engaged presence.

It might illustrate the point for our writing self to stop for a moment before we enter a new scene--any new scene--in our world of reality, then take note of what we are bringing to it in terms of past history, attitude, agenda, hoped-for action, perhaps even a sense of what we will do after that.

The Dark Side of the Moon

When Constantin Stanislavski (1863-1938) said, "Love the art in yourself, not yourself in the art." he was primarily addressing actors and in some major the actor he wished to become. We can take his admonition to our writing heart as well because of the way each discipline--the written and the acting--are wrapped about the armature of the creative self, the person who wishes to convey stories, attitudes, behavior, agendas, ambitions through the creation of plausible characters.

In order to engage either craft, you need some basic tools, primary among which is the point of view you have of the world. This is not as simple or simplistic as first blush may suggest. Suppose for instance that your choice of story to tell is the fantasy or the alternate universe. To make your fantasy or alternate universe emerge from the shadows of your imagination into the articulated stage of your story, you must have some sense of the laws of gravity, chemistry, morality, attitude, and spirituality of the landscape, and you must understand the effects such traits have on its denizens.

Supposing you are an unrelenting optimist and create a world (this one, an alternate one, or a fantasy one) in which all are equally optimistic. Trouble arises immediately because there is no story when all are of a similar mind. Thus you must, for all your optimism, be able to create a plausible pessimist, a creation you'd expect to find lurking somewhere within the darker side of the moon that is you, a creation you don't often bring out in public. Not only must you do so, you must invest this person with qualities that will make him or her attractive enough to be a threat to the optimists in your story and perhaps to your readers. If you merely go scouting about in the market where you shop or the school where you teach or the office where you work, you will find second- or third-rate pessimist, a copied pessimist. You will be reminded of all the times when you watched reputedly hard-nosed investigative reporters on television letting some bigot or politician or publicist go without asking probing questions. You felt somehow cheated, which is what your readers will feel with a second-rate pessimist. By creating a first-rate pessimist, you will have brought an entire range of potential to your story, rendering it at once more tense, exciting, thrilling, and threatening.

You will have created a character whom your protagonist optimist will eventually defeat in some degree, allowing your reader to feel that your protagonist was in a serious, threatening contest instead of the sort of warm-up game many sports teams engage at the early days of a season.

It is not enough to merely say I want to tell stories; you need to be more specific than that, focusing on the types of stories that touch you on some basic emotional level which will be transported into the stories you write. Even if you are the sort who watches the market and picks stories based on your judgment of which kinds of story sells the most copies, you will still need to give something of your hidden or darker side of not something of your special technique with which you feel confident. If all you have to bring into your story is a statistical ability to replicate all the other commercially successful stories about you, there is still not enough in your toolkit to cause an editor to encourage you, a publisher to take you on, a readership to embrace you. The editor, publisher, and readership already have available the things you would imitate; what they want from you are the things you originate; they want from you your take on the real world or the fantasy world or the alternate world or the romantic world.

Ball's in your court.

The Unseen in the Scene, or Once More with Feeling

The main reason for an editor sending the writer back to revisit a scene in a story or novel has more to do with what has been left unsaid than what has actually been said. The scene in question--to use a baseball metaphor--touches all the bases, touches them in the proper order. Nevertheless, something seems missing the scene reads flat or, worse, reads as though it were some TV Guide two-sentence description. A moody Danish prince sets out to avenge his father's murder and his mother's remarrying the murderer. High concept, low interest. To continue the metaphor, the runner touches home plate, scores. But the score does not change the dynamic or outcome of the game. Ho hum.

Our goal is simplicity defined: No more boring scenes.

The way to make this revision come flying off the page is to give the characters an edge that relates first and foremost to the writer's feelings, which are now followed through, played out in the author's imagination, then set forth on the screen or down on the note pad. By now the writer will know the characters well enough to be able to identify with them. By now the writer will also know quite well the personal feelings resident in the story. Time now to make a dance card, a list of how each character feels about each of the others, a list that could lead to an unanticipated confrontation between two characters not scheduled to be on stage together.

It may be the writer's intention, as an example, that John and Mary intend to marry, but being each involved in an art or profession, marriage is not the priority their art or profession is. At the moment, the glue holding them together beyond the friendship and attraction and, of course, lust, is the glue of comfort. Okay, along comes the writer now to light a fire under that comfort. Let's even stipulate that John and Mary would eventually marry and be even more comfortable together, but for whatever reason the writer devises, one of the two feels constrained to make an issue of getting married, perhaps out of some fear or losing the other. Immediately another emotion is introduced, causing the kettle of comfort to boil over. John, for example, resents having to propose marriage now. His resentment shows in his behavior, leading Mary to think for example, that she is losing John. Suddenly a circumstance (marriage) which is of itself complex, becomes exponentially more complex, imparting a kind of psychological density and authenticity to a fairly common situation. The emphasis shifts from the relative ordinariness of the story into the mounting irony and complexity of the situation, which reminds the readers of the complexity of life, which leads the reader to a deeper sense of the reality of the characters.

It is not the complexity of the plot or indeed even of the conflict between the characters; it is the complexity of the characters and their own backstories, influencing their behavior.

Another way to look at the equation: action is required and recognized, which in turn produces emotion, which in its turn provokes or drives the characters to further action.

How, you ask, do I begin? Make a list of all the characters. Starting with the major characters, compile a list of how each feels about all the others, right down to the guys who deliver the pizza or Chinese takeout. Then start down at the very bottom, with the guys who deliver the pizza or Kung Pao Chicken, the maids who clean the rooms at the motels. You are holding now a template for irony, resentment, misunderstanding, and conflicting agendas, not to mention hidden agendas.

When characters are driven by their feelings (which are extensions of your feelings about the situations and circumstances), their clashes can be splendid and even their apparent agreements are seasoned with the spice of tension.

Exercise

My mentor the actor gave me, in addition to her collected Greek Dramas and her Stanislavsky texts an exercise to perform from time to time: Imagine you are a Mars probe, recently landed on a new planet, programmed to report back to earth what you have seen and smelled. Part two, imagine you are somewhere on this planet and report back what you see, feel, hear, smell, taste.

Part of what your characters are resides in the reports they send back from places, situations, circumstances the story forces them to encounter. They are never in a place without intent, even if it is the intent of getting out of the place with all deliberate speed, only to be buttonholed by someone they cannot shake off with ease.

Tonight at about seven in the evening of a California standard time, I was in a supermarket, rounding up sausages and buns and chili sauce and relish, thinking to celebrate this remarkable evening. Most of the employees at the market radiated an unusual jubilant aura; many of the customers seemed stunned. They--the stunned ones--wore McCain/Palin buttons. Taking a corner with a bit too much brio, I snagged the wheel of the shopping cart on a display. Looking up, I locked eyes with a young girl who smiled at my snag, then looked down, embarrassed at being caught smiling. When I smiled back, then shrugged, she let her eyes meet mine again and the smile broadened. That is the contact I remembered, a smile shared by strangers over a brief mishap, a smile shared on this most remarkable of evenings in history. That was the in-person contact I remembered before returning home to watch a different kind of history being recorded and reported.

A character stores impressions, smells, sights, odors, perhaps tastes, certainly sounds. I look forward to using the contact with the youngish girl in a story, one I have yet to conceive much less to have begun. Or have I?

Some years ago, caught up in some bureaucracy with the local Humane Society relative to being able to bring Sally home to live with me, I caught sight of a man being denied custody of a cat, an experience that appeared in the most surprising way in a story where I wouldn't have suspected it to have any relevance at all. The editor who took the story said that scene was uppermost in her decision to give the story a home in her magazine.

Thematic and relevant to today's events is this reminder to take care not to miss the miracles of the ordinary hiding behind the curtains of the momentous events.

Being There

The first-person point of view is a tempting one, particularly for the control freak writer who sees it as a means of perpetuating control over the characters (as opposed to delegating to them the responsibility of being themselves) but as the first-person narrative gains traction and the characters gain the sense of how they feel about one another, about themselves, and about their intentions, a number of pigeons come home to roost. The first-person narrator must either appear in every scene or find some other plausible way to know what took place when he was off stage, all this in the name of plausibility. This very problem was recognized early in the game, leading to the introduction of partners, buddies, individuals with whom the main character could share opinions and gain information.

Another pigeon the first-person narrator has to deal with is an effective means of demonstrating--repeat, demonstrating--emotions; it is not enough to say "I was frightened," or "I was hungry." Such states must be conveyed to the reader in gestures, dialogue, and other responses involving the senses as well as the intellect and the ability to perceive.

Yet another homeward bound pigeon is the narrator's ability to convey sufficient vulnerability to cause the reader to feel concern for his welfare.

To be sure, there are more, but the purpose here is not to elaborate them, it is to show that in order to be effective, the writer has no where to hide; the writer must face and draw energy from the conditions and situations to be heaped upon the characters in expectation that they will seem plausible to the reader.

There are certain situations where, for instance, a person hired as a maid will refuse to do washing and ironing; a cook will "not do" hamburgers, an auto mechanic will only service German-made cars, and so the list of potential "only" and "don't" expands. We ourselves may not do certain things, or only do certain other. When we become writers, there is nothing we don't or can't do. Somewhere within us is a memory of a feeling that can be expanded, expedited, used to convey the very thing we as mere mortals won't or can't or don't do.

Somewhere in the game, it has come to us, perhaps as a whisper or suggestion easily shrugged away: we have given up on the passivity of reading for pleasure, taking up instead the active participation of being all the characters in the stories, memoirs, histories, and speculations we read. We are the characters we read--unless, of course, the author has managed to keep us at a distance. Even so, we persist.

Jerry Friedman, whose novels I've been privileged to look at editorially, recounts his early days in television, having had to drive about West LA and Santa Monica and Hollywood for early two weeks, accompanying the gifted actor, Peter Falk, who had to find in thrift stores the raincoat and hat and baggy pants that allowed him to be Colombo rather than Peter Falk. It is no accident that the characters in Jerry's novels have that epic aura of life of their own rather than being mere adjuncts of him. We need to be all our characters, shifting from one to another in each scene, quick-change artists of the highest order. We find in ourselves something to give them that makes them come to their own life. Cloning may be exciting for scientists but unless the clones have some unanticipated agenda to drive them, they are mere albatrosses about the neck of the characters they represent.

Brendel's Chopin is notably different from Polini's Chopin, which in turn is markedly different from Mitsuko Uchida's Chopin. The same calculus obtains with our attending operas which, with the exception of Puccini, have relatively dumb stories, but we don;t go for the stories, we go for the voices of the men and women who become the characters in the dumb stories.

Do something nice or awful or seemingly fated to your characters; give them the opportunity to live and thrive, to surprise and frighten you as they gather momentum in the pursuit of their agendas and their intentions. George W. Bush was simply another yahoo out of Connecticut on his way to Texas before he smashed up his father's car, only this time it wasn't a car, it was us and a country.

The Writer Qua Shaman: An Investigation

It took a long-term interest in distance running to alert me to the awareness that I was more likely to be cranky or irritable on days when running was not an option. The purpose of distance running was to eliminate my tendency at age thirty-five toward a waist line with the same numbers, a purpose which over time became the more basic one of distance running felt good. In distance running, even when out for a run with friends or the occasional drag racing to see who pays for the beers, there is time to reflect on things. One such reflection was that I was more likely to be cranky or irritable on days when writing was not an option; another reflection was that I had now raised my daily need-to list to include writing and running; yet another reflection (which had the consequence of my running into a parked car) was that unless I assembled some remarkably spavined and gouty sample of humanity, I was never going to place first in a 20K or marathon. As well, such rewards as National Book Awards, Guggenheims, MacArthur Foundation grants, and the like were out of range. Yet I continued to run and to write for the satisfaction inherent in doing each.

Over time, both my hips have become supplemented with titanium inserts which pretty much had me trading in my reliable Etonic Streetfighters for trail shoes and swim fins. The writing still persists without interruption, although the kinds of reflection and self-inventory occasioned by writing brought me to an important understanding. It had been there for long years, waiting only for me to verbalize it as the fact it is. I cannot write with a neat desk. This may be a case of egg preceding chicken; then again, it may not. I have insufficient data or memory to discern if I have ever written on a desk that was neat or, having done so, what the quality of the writing done on a neat desk was.

I do have memories of being driven to such things as sharpening pencils that were already sharp, vacuuming already-vacuumed floors, cleaning imaginary dust, on a whim taking a shower, dusting for cobwebs, rearranging nearby books, making sandwiches, making coffee, eating said sandwiches, drinking said coffee, non of which worked quite as well, seemed suited for the job, you might say, as messing up the desk.

"How can you work in such a clutter?" one earnest applicant for an editorial position at a company where I had hiring powers once asked. To which I replied, "If you are to work here, you will be required to work in such a clutter." Her response was an immediate compression of lips, an expression that conveyed to me the sure knowledge that she might well restore order to the place but order was not the requisite here, accuracy was, which led me to question, "Could you be accurate in such an atmosphere?"

Took her a long time to answer, but finally, her answer was a resounding yes, whereupon she got the job, whereupon she infected a number of us with a neatness we were unused to, which ultimately resulted in a lowering of accuracy.

My current work area has a desk space approximately 13 inches width and 30 inches in length, with some immediate vertical storage slots, a few small drawers, and a few larger drawers. Being my mother's, it was more suited for her 5'3 proportions than my 6'3. I have actually perched a three-shelf book case atop it to keep closer to hand the books, ink bottles, and unoccupied Altoid tins I keep at hand, making the desk seem more snug and efficient. But it is not a neat work space. Unlike those remarkable sorts who are able to keep track of all their tools in such a near chaos, I do not know where everything is; much less do I know what everything is. Everything changes. Some days it seems more than comforting, it seems necessary for the ink bottles to be close. Other days, photos of my parents, of past blue-tick hounds, incipient bottle-cap collections, bottles of saline solution, paper weights, and scratchy reading glasses lurch to the forefront like armies of rebellious pawns abut to go awol in a chess game. A mouse pad with the insignia of the College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences at the University of Southern California seems to have more to do with long consumed coffee lattes than with the wireless mouse that waits offshore from it, like the barges that bore William the Conqueror's men to Hastings.

Closest to the laptop is a three by five index card with one word, intent, written on it, a reminder (subtle or not) of my own intent to write something about the intent a character must acknowledge before said character can undertake action in an authentic manner.

This distinctly unneat desk, if viewed properly, is a shrine to the lares and penates, the household gods of writing. They must be cared for, arranged in the proper order, perhaps even serenaded with a chant or two or even with one of my more lyrical strings of epithets when I cannot get the goddamned wireless printer to pick up the signal from the Airport Express, which has been configured according to instruction, then connected to the goddamned printer itself. This all relates to the ritual as well as the discipline and habit of writing. The writer qua shaman comes along, makes a few invocations, then begins the work or begins opening the portals to allow the inner writer to let the work emerge, either from within or from without. One of the best invocations is "Now where was I?" for it does imply having left some spot where one had been deposited, was it only yesterday, by the tidal nature of the writing process?

Am I so removed of defense systems and reason as to equate an untidy desk as the shrine to the work ahead? So it seems.

The Writer as Actor, Part I of an Ongoing Investigation

A major moment arrives early in Uta Hagen's transformative Respect for Acting. She cites the example of the nineteenth-century French actor Coquelin. "One night," Hagen writes, "after having received accolades for his performance from the audience...Coquelin called his fellow actors together backstage and said: 'I cried real tears on stage tonight. I apologize. It will never happen again.' His approach to acting was obviously Representational. For him, a genuine experience on stage was rejected in the belief that it would muddy or blur the acting."

Hagen describes the two types of acting as Representational, wherein the actor finds a form based on objective result for the character, which he then carefully watches as he executes it. The Presentational actor trusts that a form will result from the identification with the character and the discovery of his character's actions. Said Presentational actor works on stage for a moment-to-moment subjective experience, which is presented as it were from the interior.

What grand advice for the writer, who after all is creating characters from the depth of his or her own experiences. Anything else seems mannered, perhaps even over-the-top, indeed nineteenth-century because of the remoteness of the creator from the character.

One way to digest and use this in-the-moment approach is to recall that the writer's task is made more original and genuine by using the movements and words of character to evoke rather than describe. Think of it this way: the best outer description has already been done in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Time now for the inner description that comes when the writer puts the character through each relevant moment in the story, allowing the character's gestures or lack, words or lack to stand as the response to the moment. This is not merely to remove adjectives or adverbs, which are, after all, valuable tools of the language. This approach is to remove the author's stage directions, the author's judgement, allowing all to come forth from the character.

Put another way, the shout, the loud voice, even the exclamation point are the tracer bullets of defensiveness, they light the way to the target which needs no lighting in the first place.