Food for Thought

pathetic fallacy, the--a literary device or tendency of written or spoken exaggeration by which inanimate forces and objects have life-like qualities attributed to them. A term yanked into the literary sphere by the Victorian-era critic, John Ruskin, a staunch advocate of realism in writing and the visual arts, the pathetic fallacy has spread like kudzu grass, reminding Julie Andrews that the hills are alive with the sound of music, that fires dance merrily before our eyes, that brooks, babble merrily in their courses, ad of course mountains which appear moody and somber in the sunset.

Pathetic fallacy is an addition to the laundry list of commandments and injunctions addressed to writers: Thou shall not split the infinitive. Thou shall show rather than tell. Thou shall not begin sentences with "and or "but." Thou shall not use one-word paragraphs. These commandments and injunctions appear in the works of critics whose work is alive with the sound of textbooks.

What arbiters and critics fail to note is that successful writers have been getting away with pathetic fallacies and other crimes against boring writing by giving the language at hand a fresh way of looking at the human condition or of our remarkable universe. Go for it; it is like getting a last shave out of a shaving cream bomb or a last brushing from a flattened tube of toothpaste. The best approach to take with an inventive use of language is the Do No Harm Rule, which unequivocally supports tropes that clarify a condition, person, place, or thing to the point of causing the reader to say "Yes! I have felt that way myself, but was afraid of saying so for fear of being thought out of the main stream."

John Ruskin did not like the idea of liberties being taken with art, nor was he a fan of sentimentality. But there are times when a wind comes up at sundown and the aspens seem to be sighing or laughing as the wind courses through them, and if you listen closely enough, the result does have a music to it. The risk of relying overly on the pathetic fallacy is the projected sense that you or your characters are talking up the case of the human effect on Nature, saying in effect that Nature owes everything to us and that we, in turn, owe nothing to Nature. The careful storyteller will investigate the intent of the story, its setting, its characters, and the way the story is rendered to make sure that the methods of telling do not reveal more than the actual content.



Wile E. Coyote--a scruffy,scheming cartoon character who, on appearances and behavior, would go unnoticed in a Dostoevsky novel, but instead lives in the butte- and mesa-littered American Southwest. The Coyote has one essential goal: to capture and devour Roadrunner, another denizen of the hardscrabble landscape. He of course will never succeed, domed to a series of near misses, frustrations, and even humiliation. A literary descendant of Joel Chandler Harris' iconic B'rer Fox, the Coyote is a candidate for beatification and ultimate sainthood as the patron saint of characters. He has a singular, ongoing goal that occupies him every moment he is on stage. His devices and stratagems have the complexity born of mounting desperation. He is so intent on bringing The Roadrunner to ground that he frequently finds himself in mid-air, his paws cycling in wild attempts to gain some footing--but it is too late; he has only the downward fall to disaster. He is, as Mark Twain wrote of the generic coyote, "a living, breathing allegory of want. He is always hungry." The Coyote frequently obtains ludicrous materials and devices from The Acme Company, a mail-order distributor. These items plus his own hunger-driven ingenuity, comprise his tool kit.

The dramatic center of The Coyote is in his single-minded pursuit of his agenda, making him worth concentrating on while creating any front-rank character. Note, for instance, comparison points between The Coyote and Captain Ahab or, for that matter, the Jay Gatz, better known to us as The Great Gatsby, and of course, Don Quixote.

Requeum for a Literary Agent

A tall man with wavy dark hair, a genial smile, and mischievous eyes sparking behind rimless glasses, he disarms you as he welcomes you into the cavernous living room, its shelves bulging with lurid and energetic covers from pulp fantasy and science fiction magazines. The room actually smells of pulp , ink, and the unique odor of mildewed paper. There is a sensuality to it that evokes the throb and drone of the rotary presses, whirring out newspapers by day and pulp magazines by night. Nothing prepares you for the explosively dreadful puns with which your host will bombard you at every opportunity. Worse yet, you recognize individuals you thought of as just slightly less than Greek or Norse gods and goddesses; they are the men and women who wrote the fantasy and science fiction stories you took into your being the way a kidney patient undergoes dialysis. Van Vogt. Sturgeon. Leigh Brackett. Henry Kuttner. C.L. Moore. Heinlein. Zelazney. And of course Bradbury, the only one in the room notably drinking milk instead of something shall we say more fermented.

You are in another world, a riotous collision of the worlds of all these men and women, orbiting about the picnic spreads of sandwich meat, bread, beer, wines. Lewis Padgett, one of the funniest writers alive, snarls as you are introduced to him. You look like a beer drinker, he observes, and there is already not enough beer.

Your host is Forrest J. Ackerman, although he has already warned you he does not use the period after the J; people should know it is James and they should know, he insists, that James does not require a period. He gives you a lap around the room, pulling names out of crowds of individuals. Hal Clement. Bob Bloch. John Campbell, who launches into a long serenade to the virtues of Chilean wine, effective, he says, and cheap. Here, Herb Gould; you might want to send him a story now and then. Pays good money. Curt Siodmak. Lured away from his true calling by the movies.

These and more were his clients, many launched into their careers by what he referred to as Ackermischief and Ackermanagement. In time, you appeared in magazines with the, lured them into your office when you were acquisitions editor for a Los Angeles publisher, variously spilled drinks on them or had drinks spilled by them on you at the Ackermansion or one of the other venues for collegial gathering. They all spoke of Ackerman as though he had pulled a sword from a stone, which in a sense he had.

You all had tales of fantasy and magic that seemed to emit from him like those misty miasmas of cheap sci-fi movies. Your own time of magical thinking began when you walked to his house to deliver a sheaf of manuscripts for which you had elegant expectations beyond your own ability to pay for gasoline. He insisted on a lunch of thick-cut liverwurst on a yeasty pumpernickle, enhanced with sliced pickles and a bottle of Pabst Blue-Ribbon beer, which you were only too willing to oblige him in the offering. Thus the magic began but two days later, when Clarence, the mailman, asked you to sign for a special delivery, you saw more tangible proof of the effect. The return address was Ackerman's and the contents was limited to a check for some wildly satisfyig amount in the range of fifty dollars, drawn against his bank, with a notation linking a magazine called Posse with the title of one of the stories in the sheaf of manuscripts. Every weekday for the next two weeks, a special delivery arrived from him with some similar notation, referencing magazines such as Gent and Dude and Amazing Stories. You became aware of more names of more authors trickling through the Ackermansion, names of authors you grew to read with admiration. You also became aware of Ackerman signing you up for nonfiction assignments which you discovered only after editors of various publications called to remind you of deadlines which you hadn't realized you'd had.

Through it all, Ackerman's mischievous humor, buzzing about like flies at a picnic, before what you like to think of in retrospect as a sort of defining moment. I can get you a considerable sum of money for a story called "I Was a Teen-aged Werewolf," FJA related, to which you muttered some riposte about working for blood money. But he was serious, just as he'd been a month or two earlier about having a sure sale for a story titled "The Naughty Venusienne." There is in fact a motion picture, I Was a Teen-aged Werewolf, the writing credits going to a pair of Ackerman clients and there is indeed a book, The Naughty Venusienne which FJA himself had to write because, as he said sadly, none of his clients believed him. He was many things to many people and like all remarkable sorts, his like will not be seen again. He drew remarkable people to his presence, made them feel the world of storytelling and writing and fantasy had blended into an endless party. He invited you in, took a lap around the room with you, introducing you to an ensemble cast the likes of which you had not seen before. True enough, you were young and impressionable, believing you could take on anything that came your way. In some measure, because of Forrest J. Ackerman, your first literary agent, you are still young, impressionable, confident in the belief that you can take on anything that comes your way. Hail and farewell, Forryack.

Catalyst

causality--the inertia of story; characters behaving as they do because they are driven by their emotions, their beliefs, or their responses to dramatic events and other relevant pressures within a story. In many ways, the defining concepts of story and the American legal system are similar; each is propelled toward a decision, solution, allotment of judgment by some relevant precedent. The rules of procedure are based on what happened before, past events, past thinking, past behavior. In the law, this reliance on the causality of precedent is referred to as stare decisis. In dramatic narrative, the effect of precedent resides in backstory.

In a dramatic narrative, characters and concepts are in a steady condition of clash. It is not enough for two characters to confront one another with disagreement, each must reek and sound of his agenda to the point where the reader can sense its presence. Even if a character does something "Because I felt like it," the reader must be able to sense the plausibility of that character doing so. No amount of simple action for its own sake can cover up the lack of causality. Story with event but no causality is mere episode, inviting the adjective episodic.

A helpful mnemonic device for causality is the word "because." Story happens because someone wants something, because some one doesn't want something to happen, because in some field somewhere, an ox is being gored and because its owner is not going to let the matter pass.


Schrodinger’s cat—an existential conundrum proposed by the German physicist, Erwin Schrodinger to demonstrate the dual nature of matter; another useful, more literary-related way of looking at the famed Frank R. Stockton short story “The Lady or the Tiger”; an illustration of the role played by choice in fiction.

Schrodinger’s posited a cat is locked in a box, along with a radioactive atom that is connected to a vial containing cyanide. If the atom decays—and it surely will over time--it will open the vial. The cat, inhaling the cyanide fumes, will be killed.
When the box is closed the observer does not know if the atom has decayed or not. This means that the atom can be in both the decayed state and the non-decayed state at the same time. Therefore, the cat is both dead and alive at the same time - which clearly does not happen in classical physics.

The parallel between the cat and a given story is waiting to be drawn, so let’s draw it. When asked to list vital constituents of a dramatic incident (story), writers will supply such ingredients as character—“How can you have a story without character?”—and such other elements as plot, suspense, and reversal. It is the rare, thoughtful professional who will add one of the key qualities inherent in the fiction of the twenty-first century—ambiguity. (Odds are this metaphorical professional will have read the short fiction of Anton Chekhov, who dispensed with the heavy-handed moral or thematic finality of the short fiction of his contemporaries.

If we imagine story and Schrodinger’s cat to reside on opposing sides of the equal sign, we can “see” and "feel" the power of ambiguity in story. Fiction with the built-in element of duality provides an opening for reader participation, that condition where the reader feels not only close to the characters and events but becomes immersed in the outcome.

Since about 1902 (picked because James Joyce's Dubliners was published then), endings—conclusions, or payoffs—in fiction, particularly in the short form, have tended to move away from the highly visual, seemingly inescapable conclusion, drifting toward uncertainty, opaqueness, and choice. Some of this tendency can be related to the uncertainty of the times in which the stories are set; some of this tendency reflects a closer understanding of human affairs. When we consider the movement away from the fables of Aesop and, more recently, the short stories of O. Henry, we welcome Erwin Schrodinger and his ambiguous cat into the dramatic arena.

The Defining Moment

defining moment--a point in a story where one or more characters becomes committed to a course of action that will bully those characters and the story arc they carry to a conclusion; a tipping point resulting in accelerated story inertia; a dramatic point of no return where one or more characters can no longer resist the conditions and forces that set the story in motion.

A story may have more than one defining moment. Romeo and Juliet has at least two, the scene in which the two first meet and the sleep-potion-taking scene. The former is truly defining; thirty-six hours later, both characters are dead. Had they not met and been attracted, both may well have had greater life expectancy. The latter is a device as defining moment, its consequences causing one of the two partners to believe the other dead. Many action-driven narratives, notably Westerns, force a character into the corner of having to take sides in an argument. ("You're either with us or against us.") In the memorable "I coulda been a contender" scene from On the Waterfront, one brother, Terry, realizes his brother, Charlie, was the architect of his being "a punch-drunk palooka" instead of a serious contender for success as a prize fighter. Terry's awareness becomes a defining moment when Charlie, charged with insuring that Terry does not testify against the longshoreman's union before a Congressional committee, becomes overwhelmed by guilt and remorse to the point of not being able to carry out his assignment, a dereliction that leads directly to his death.

Defining moments may come at any point in the narrative. They may be such innocent presences as an anniversary or birth date, the more accelerated trope of a ticking clock, or the rising tension of a deadline come due. When they appear, their effect on the reader will be of an enormous boulder, poised on the lip of an escarpment, ready to roll, then slowly tumbling forth. Their effects on characters will be to enhance, modify, speed up, or in some other manner effect their behavior.

Can a story exist without a single defining moment? Any "No" spoken in reference to fiction is just as likely to provoke from some writer a dramatic riposte which in itself is a defining moment, thus the best answer to the question is "Probably not," with this reminder hovering: A close examination of the more oblique modern stories, vignettes, and sketches will reveal the artifacts of defining moments. Even Chekhov, likely candidate for fatherhood of the modern short story, for all he discarded the moral finality of his narratives, will reveal defining moments (see "The Lady with the Dog.")

As a practical matter for the writer, defining moments may be regarded as platforms for the necessary presence of evoked emotions. An effective defining moment or set of them will have the effect no writer can find fault with--characters and situations who remain in memory long after the story has been read.

A Twofer

expectations--the results each character foresees when venturing into a new scene, a guiding compass as the character is being borne along on the stream of narrative within scenes or connecting them. A character without expectations in a scene is the equivalent of the scenic backdrops found at tourist attractions, where one inserts one's head and is photographed as a comic memento.

Every character wants something; this is the passport to cross the border from joke or anecdote or vignette into the landscape of story. Accordingly, imagine the tourist character equipped with a fanny-pack right out of the L.L. Bean catalog. Along with that character's desire, rolled neatly and resting on top of history/backstory, attitude, and feelings about the other characters in the story is expectations. That character expects the next scene to be an occasion of achievement, boredom, surprise, humiliation, frustration, severe reversal, sexual opportunity, inspiration, or challenge. These will be delivered in such a way and by appropriate characters to send the story forward, leaving as emotional residue an identifiable counterpoint. Expectations are the qualities that give dimension and life to story, allowing the character to do what characters are intended to do--react. The character need not use all the tools in the fanny-pack in every scene, except for expectations and the personal sense of having been in or lived through some situation or encounter before entering the present scene. Without these two possessions, the character is sure to be turned back at the border.

willing suspension of disbelief, the--a term coined by critic-poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge to account for the inertia of skeptical disbelief a writer must overcome in a reader in order to have his narrative accepted as real. With so many books being published and so many sources apparent for short stories, readers are daring writers to be more convincing, at pain of not pursuing a story to its conclusion. Sophisticated readers have come a long way from the early days of the novel and short story; they know the characters are inventions of the author. But they also know that a skillful writer can make them forget this fact, empathize with fictional beings, root for their favorites, and experience severe distress when their favorite characters experience reversals.

The trick here is to make the reader forget that the characters on the page are inventions. One way to do this is to quickly present characters in their attempts to solve the problems and reversals of fortune with which they are afflicted. Another way to accomplish this goal is to show characters setting off on a quest, a perilous journey, or a new venture in which they will become at accelerated risk. Yet another approach is to endow the character with some physical or emotional flaw which they must struggle to overcome. Johnny Tremaine, the young, eponymous apprentice to Paul Revere, experiences an accident early on; molten silver is spilled on his hand, permanently fusing his thumb to his palm. In Tracy Chevalier’s novel, The Girl with the Pearl Ear Ring, a young peasant girl is forced to take a job as a maid when her artisan father is blinded by an exploding kiln.

Every short story and novel, regardless of how fantastic or quotidian, has to cope with this problem: Does the reader believe implicitly in the characters and situations? Step One in this remarkable alchemy from the dross of initial concept to the gold of finished work begins with the writer believing in the characters. From there, the author must portray characters behaving in ways that are feasible to them so that the reader not only does not question them and what they do but as well begins hoping none of the obstacles are too big to be overcome. Thus by indirection, the key to overcoming disbelief is vulnerability; no matter what the characters are vulnerable to--greed, love, fear, confusion, ambition--that vulnerability becomes a wedge that lifts the fence of plausibility, often just enough to allow the reader to crawl through.

Out of Character

Sherlock Holmes--a quintessential essence of the presence needed in a character, he is the embodiment of curiosity-as-agenda, happiest when engaged in solving problems, so comfortable with his considerable abilities and deductive process that he walks the sharp cusp between being right and being insufferable. Truth to tell, Holmes, in his deductions, is often right, which has a direct, supportive effect on his insufferable behavior. This volatile combination of traits should and does make it difficult for Holmes to find happiness between mysteries to solve, leaving him vulnerable to boredom which, in his case, leads to violin playing and cocaine.

Added truth to tell, Sherlock Holmes cannot be trusted with his own point of view; he'd not only put off too many readers, he'd tick them off as well. This sets the stage for John Watson, M.D., a filter for narrating the Holmes adventures, and a perfect foil for allowing Holmes to explain the force of logic behind his reasoning. The presence of Dr. Watson as buffer allows Holmes to talk down to Watson without talking down to the reader while explaining the Holmesian logic.

The buddy system has been with us in storytelling as far back as Aristophanes' memorable The Frogs, in which a slave and his master are setting forth the story through dialogue and action. True dat; Sherlock Holmes is mystery fiction, but any number of buddy teams work the genre, Archie Goodwin coming to mind as a Dr. Watson surrogate for Nero Wolfe. A Sherlock Holmes-like character has weathered six seasons of TV in the persona of Gregory House, M.D., emerging as a preternaturally bright diagnostician who is given a team of associates with whom to consult, said consultations often involving House's impatience, irony, bluntness bordering on rudeness, and bluntness bordering on childishness. Instead of Holmes' cocaine use, House is addicted to pain killers, instead of a violin, his musical interests are considerable and extensive. The popularity of the series and its potential for quirky puzzles speaks to the point of major characters who are the literary equivalents of extraordinary individuals wearing ordinary clothing.

Strong characters such as, variously, Captain Ahab, Captain Nemo, Nora Helmer, The Wife of Bath, and Sir John Falstaff, do not have to rely on the obvious strength of being diagnosticians; any laser-like focus will do, whales, for instance. All support the vision that strength of character resides primarily within an overriding passion for some thing; the surplus strength may spill over into morality or even empathy. Followers of Sherlock Holmes, Gregory House, M.D., and some of the others listed here are well aware of the numerous puzzles solved by these individuals. Indeed, they are followers precisely to see the solutions. But they are also followers out of the curiosity to see what these iconic characters will do when there is no readily available solution.

Coming to Terms

arc--the path or direction a story takes once it is set in motion. This useful term, its origins in geometry--a curved segment of a circle--helping it serve as a mnemonic device. Why is this so? The concept of "story line," also a traced path of the progress of a story, suggests the moment in medical thrillers when the patient dies and his vital responses flat line; thus a story line connotes a thin, even episodic progression of events, a story arc suggests layering, dimension, an orbital path, all constructs reminding the writer, the reader, and characters that story is multidimensional, multifarious, filled with implication, surprise, and the anarchic energy of impulse.

By its very shape, arc implies movement, the story being nudged, dragged, pushed, in some direction, both chronologically and in terms of pace. Helpful to writer, reader, and characters, arc allows each to see where the story has been, where it needs to go, and what further impediments may cross its path or, indeed, collide with it.

Two of the most important individuals in the writer's professional life, the literary agent and the editor, will frequently inquire about the arc of a story, by which they are asking where the story is going. Story arc is momentum informed by volition; it is episode injected with "because" or "as a consequence." Arc is a record of things done past in present because, and as a consequence.

arena--a place wherein story is the featured event; a locale for a scene or the entire story, its landscape never neutral, in fact frequently inhospitable. In some stories, the characters may not know they are in an arena, content to think of it merely as a place--perhaps not the optimal place nor even a good place, but not bad. The readers, however, understand. Why did Bobbie Ann Mason's iconic short story, "Shiloh," take place on the park grounds that were once the arena for one of the most fierce and bloody battles of the American Civil War? Was it mere accident that Allison Lurie named her protagonists the Tates for her darkly funny novel, The War between the Tates?

Arenas in story are famously located in bedrooms, offices, law courts, tennis courts, front seats of automobiles, back seats of automobiles, hospitals, supermarkets, Roman coliseums, anyplace where characters gather to explore and exploit their agendas. Wise writers have come to consider the settings for their scenes with the same care they use in selecting characters. If there is some plausible reason for including a particular scene in a story, its venue should be chosen with as much deliberation as the cast of characters is selected, allowing it's personality to have a tangible effect on the characters, whether a sneeze of allergy, a memory of a painful experience from the past, or a sense of discomfort and unwelcome.