Escape from Boredom: Why Characters Leave Home

So far as you are able to tell, you came to reading with no expectations beyond cultural prompts from your immediate family, most notably your sister, who introduced a conspiratorial note.  "Learning to read will help you escape from places you don't like,"  she told you.  "You'll see."

She was right.  You did see.  

You're aware of your mother often reading novels.  "When you can read,"  she said, "you'll be able to read books like these."

She, too, was right.

Your father seemed, in your memory, more given to magazines and crossword puzzles.  He even had magazines whose contents were entirely crossword puzzles.  Once, after you'd learned to read, you were home from school with some childhood illness, your father brought you such a magazine.  "See how you like these,"  he said.

The cultural strata into which you were born was in effect a roller coaster ride to the learning of reading, the rises and dips enhanced by parents and a sibling who were themselves readers.  You learned to read as a natural course of events, as you'd learned to tie your shoes, brush your teeth, and, when the time came for you to need eyeglasses, to clean the lenses.

You took well to reading.  When you were ten, your sister took you to the main branch of the Providence, Rhode Island, Library, and shepherded you through the mechanisms of securing your own library card.  Two weeks later, you were asked to wait in a room at the library until your mother arrived, whereupon the librarian who'd detained you informed your mother that you'd attempted to check out James Joyce's novel, Ulysses.

You'd heard about the novel and were curious.  Thanks to your mother, you were able to bring it home.  You spent some time trying to make sense of it--any sense at all.  You've spent at least fifty years, at various times inching your way to a greater understanding of that novel.  

You'd already had the conversation with a teacher in another city in which, after reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and then Huckleberry Finn, you asked the teacher if it were possible for a person to make a living writing such things.  You came close to hating the city and school wherein you'd first read those books, but you still remember the teacher telling you how handsome a living you'd be able to make if you were ever able to write stories of the level at which those books were written, but you must never for a moment suppose reaching such a level would be easy.

This is all backstory-as-time-line to demonstrate how you began reading, as your sister suggested, to get away from ordinary, how ordinary confused and bored you, how boredom played havoc with your growing-up-years, and how boredom drove you to even more eclectic reading tastes.  You were hoping to find the literary equivalent of the Holy Grail, the one book that would inspire and guide you toward developing the abilities necessary to write such remarkable books as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.

You had to learn, among other things, how terrible some of the writings of that author were and how important it was for you to realize how such a condition could exist without in any way diminishing your regard for him.  Even in recent years, when his autobiography was published, one hundred years after his death, at his request, you had to read through that thick, slap-dash undertaking, and still recognize the position of esteem in which you hold him above all others.

This is still, in a sense, backstory, approaches to how you have come to see how characters have grown through the years, even though in many cases characters over six hundred years old are still speaking to you as paradigms of what memorable characters should be.  You are, of course, speaking of a writer you think to compare with Mr. Twain.  You are seeing Mr, Chaucer as a canny, wise, observant creator of characters you can almost visualize down to facial tics and bodily gestures.

You are also leading to a discovery within yourself that you were in effect making even before you heard the concept and began wondering if you could acquire such a tool for your writing.

The tool is called the Observing Ego, which means in effect an aspect of self--go ahead, call it the writing self--that is Zen-like in nature, without affect, making no decisions, only observing; not judging.  You wish to add to the more conventional psychological use of the term the word empathy because you will be able to use this aspect of self to see characters without taking sides against them or judging their actions in any way except in the most dramatic terms.

The other characters make the calls.  You need ways to get into a cadre of characters with dark sides, selfish sides, limited visionaries, even tortured persons who take pleasure and energy from hurting others.

You're not surprised when giving a lecture or appearing on a panel when persons in the audience ask one of the three great cliche questions audiences such as those you speak before are wont to ask.  In addition to wanting to know what it takes to acquire the representation services of a literary agent, and which narrative point of view is the best, they want to know how to create memorable characters.

To show how long you've been at your trade, there was a long stretch of time when you'd set forth to answer that last question in terms of the word "memorable."  Your answers were accurate enough and, you dare say, adequate.  But now is another matter.  

You attack the word "memorable" as not being apt enough.  You want something more like dark or brooding or haunting or disturbed.  Memorable is too conventional, too ordinary.

The Observing Ego or the Writing Self would now tend to become bored with memorable characters, wanting to turn the heat up under them.

In so many ways, not with a direct relation to your age, maintaining the Observing Ego or, better yet, the Writing Self, is hard work because more energy is required to be beyond memorable.  Being present and observant and empathetic and brooding and dark is difficult work.  The performance levels are necessary in non-writing life as well as within the composition mode, and the necessary efforts to get nourishment from reading are excruciating.  But anything less produces ordinary and ordinary produces uninteresting, boring results.

The circularity presents itself to you in terms of ordinary and boring as benchmarks.  Life, reading, and writing story require a hand on the heat knob, turning up the flame.

Failing to Plot Is Plotting to Fail

The energy required to keep you afloat and operational is considerable, but considering the spectrum of things you wish to engage and be operational in, the balance seems fair enough.  Truth to tell, much of the energy required is energy directed at keeping you focused on the task at hand.

You are not using ADD as an excuse because you don't think you have so much a deficit of attention as a surplus of things you'd like to become engaged with to a greater extent per sitting.  In some senses, you remind yourself of Odysseus' sailors, being distracted by the song of the Sirens, those stunning, beautiful creatures with remarkable voices which they used to lure passing sailors to their doom.  

Your Sirens are concepts, ideas, the equivalents of play sets that draw you into their games.  They also represent intriguing words or concepts or facts you become aware of for the first time, then wonder what they mean, how they work, where they fit.

So you tell yourself in the most powerful oratory and logic you can muster that you are the opposite of ADD, you are in fact Multiple Attention Disorder, which keeps you away from activities better organized individuals would tend to before pursuing their own particular sirens.  

Hasn't worked out all that well so far.  All about you, note pads bear your near-illegible penmanship and its attempts to sketch in the stray observation or incident.  The hundred or so books you brought with you to this residence have expanded by a factor of at least five.  Only today, an individual you'd met briefly a few years back sought you out to give you an enormous box of literary journals and books on the theory that you, of all the persons he knew, would be best able to cope with and use them.

One robin does not make a spring, but it does produce a number of books which, you might add, are distractions at the same time they are serious and necessary adjuncts to your primary goal, which is getting words down in keepable form as a preparation to wrangling them into short stories, novels, essays and longer essay-type works you could think of as nonfiction books.

Which brings you to the next point:  For all the considerable energy required to keep you afloat and action, the energy required to neutralize the inertia of doing nothing is even more considerable.

You carry an interesting pair of polar opposites within you.  You may be slow to act but this is not from indolence, rather from the need to pause to consider which enthusiasm to follow.  Choices require investigations, more choices require assignment of priority.  What may seem like indolence is you in metaphor going through your pants and jacket pockets to investigate the index cards and backs of ATM receipts for lists of priorities.

You once worked for a publishing venture where the house mantra was "Failing to plan is planning to fail."  You'd not heard this until you'd signed on, but when you did hear it and saw the seriousness affixed to it, you knew a fuse had been lit, a time clock had been hit.  

From a managerial style sense, the mantra makes sense, but you'd already come to conclude that the planning involved in the types of ways you wished to invest most of your time was the approach of assembling all the information, then finding the proper order or plan for it.  You even began to call the approach rearranging the furniture.  Then you heard about the Chinese vision of feng-shui, and you began to sense the Cosmos was ratifying your approach, or perhaps you'd come to discover what the Cosmos already knew and that you in fact were the one doing the ratifying.

There is a calm comfort in the knowledge that you are more energy efficient by being in the midst of a storm of activity rather than having to draw on the energy to overcome the inertia of being a single-tasker.

The closest thing you can equate to the Cosmos having anything resembling a Code of Justice comes from your beliefs that 1) if you want something done at all, give the job to a busy man, and 2) you can't possibly get "it" all done.

Of course you do your level best to live by this code, nodding and tipping your metaphoric hat to the notion that you may well be arranging data to favor your vision while the very opposite vision might be the inevitable truth.

There are some points of intersection between these two visions of how get things done and the famed parable involving the tortoise and the hare, in which the hare has beautiful muscles and running technique, but is no match for the persistent gait and determination of the tortoise.

You might be wrong, but you will be too busy being wrong to find out.

Eye Contact

Some of your favorite essayists are writers who set their thoughts down on paper long before you arrived in any condition to be able to read them.  Even then, you were not devoted to their work because of your fondness for fiction and poetry and because you had not yet enough experience of your own to ante up when you read these worthies.

You were reading fiction and poetry,hopeful of being transported to a place of experience without having to think.  Writers such as Dickens, writing as Boz, William Hazlett, and Emerson set you down the remarkable path of the essay.  In more recent times, Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, Gertrude Stein, Wendell Berry, and--even though you thought he had a rotten persona as a teacher--Gay Talese, helped fit all the working parts in place to the point where a work such as John McPhee's recent New Yorker piece on, of all damned things, golf balls, had the effect on you as a Tom McGuane or Deborah Eisenberg short story.

Thus you come to another remarkable essayist and longtime blog friend, Gloria Garfunkle, who writes flash fictions, self-examination essays, or what you would call investigations.  Some years ago, GG extracted a promise from you not to call her by her actual name because at the time she was a practicing therapist and wished to keep her professional life and writing life separate.  

The fact of her also being a self-identified individual in whom a bi-polar imbalance existed made her professional and personal writings all the more momentous for you to the point where she became a part of the role model pantheon for the kinds of essay you care most about and most wish to write.

You could not have come up with a better character, a psychotherapist with bi-polar imbalance, in a sense a perfect metaphor for an engaging character.

Think then of the essay as more than a form; it is an interesting eponym because in the first place, to essay something is to test it and in the second place, the essay has become through convention a way of playing out one or more hypotheses, carrying one or more to some resolution.

Think then of this:  When you switched banks earlier this week as a result of your longtime, locally-owned, small town bank being taken up by a larger bank almost like a coyote having a neighborhood cat for supper, the manager who supervised your enrollment spoke of changing banks as a source of grief and mourning.  True enough.  Habit and tradition die a slow death.

When a car dies or reaches the stage of moribundity, you cannot help recount some of the trips you took together, the moments of tiff when you saw some repair bills, the moments of joy as you cruised together into some remarkable vista, some place neither of you had been before.

Now, we're leading up to something momentous.  Your relationships with moribund computers.  With the possible exception of your Ancora and Conklin and Shaeffer fountain pens, you've used computers as more than a tool, more like an intimate instrument.  You and your computers have had thousands of conversations, shared correspondence, investigated possibilities.  Your computer knows your intimate secrets.  True, you get some IMs on your cell phone that your computer knows nothing about, but if sharing were possible, you would.

You had a momentary pang when you switched from PC to Mac, and you did feel some sense of loss at the departure of previous computers. Without any conscious awareness on your part, your computers, in particular your laptops, became the equivalent of an intimate, a close, cherished friend to whom you could tell anything, with whom--and this is important--you could essay your way through ideas and concepts to some form of understanding.  In a sense, your past computers were partners, collaborators in the writing of essays, reviews, blog posts, books, lectures, speeches, love notes.  

To this day, you still think with nostalgia about the fire engine red Olivetti portable typewriter, given to you with love and devotion by an individual you'd hoped at one time to be your mother-in-law.  That Olivetti and you produced how many books together?  How many short stories?  That Olivetti, that splendid, fiery, Italian machine.

So here is the difficult part.  Here is the mountain goat leap from machines, implements, cell phones, pocket knives, fountain pens, to live, sensate beings, to absent family, absent friends, absent lovers, and above all, one being most recently gone from you.  Here is the part about someone with whom you had any number of the experiences and exchanges you had with such inanimate things as fountain pens, computers, and your Leica camera.

You were hunting this afternoon through a clump of papers on a coffee table near your reading chair.  A plastic envelope with a compact disc in it fell from between the leaves of a manuscript.  It bore the name of your veterinarian and your late dog.  In all probability, the disc has an x-ray or some other photographic image authorized by you for the purpose of diagnosing a distant symptom, long since diagnosed and dealt with.  The material on the disc is in effect no different from the three-foot by four-foot photo of your late dog, or the oil portrait of her, or the photo of her as a two- or three-year old, residing in the kitchen bookcase.

In the spirit of devotion and that complex bond between dog and human, you've had any number of conversations with her that were more verbal essays, ideas and concepts floated before her as though she could understand them and partake of them, then help you form some sort of resolution or decision.  The many times you asked her, for instance, "What about it?  Eat in tonight and finish off the pasta with the Bolognese sauce, or perhaps The Habit and a burger for you and the albacore tuna for me?  Or perhaps we go sharesies, half of each for the two of us?"  Did you expect a finite answer?  No, of course not.  Did she understand the implications?  Probably not.  Most probably not.  

But she did understand the intonations of your voice and through those tones, she had a wide spectrum of your emotions and attitudes, which became tools for her and the ways, particularly through eye contact, she conversed with you.

You've spent a major portion of your life focusing on ways to communicate, which means you've had to learn how to extract information, how to process it, how to infuse it with your experiences and the conclusions those experiences left you with.  Many of your tools have been from visuals such as books, film, canvases, walls which were receptacles for frescoes.  Many of your tools were recordings or live performances of music.  Other tools were conversations with individuals--family, friends, mentors.  Still other tools came from your internal essays, your conversations with and within yourself.

On April 15 of this year, you left a tribute on this digital wall to the friend who'd left you hours earlier.  You called it "A Thirty-Pound Learning Curve," essaying some of the internal and external conversations you'd had with her since the November afternoon in 1997, when you brought her home from the Santa Barbara Animal Shelter.

The mechanical devices--computers, fountain pens, and the recording device on the cell phones--captured what you had to offer with an admirable kind of objectivity you'd not expected.  There were all your notes, as written or uttered, first of all for you to see, then to revise and correct.

Sally captured all you had to offer as well, with a significant difference, and after all those years you had with her, you could experience that difference every time you made eye contact with her.

Voices in Your Head

Begin with the notion of every book you've read being a conversation between the various authors and you.  Now add to the books you've read all the paintings, drawings, and photographs you studied to the point where you'd become lost in them even for a matter of moments.  Think of these lost moments as conversations.  To those conversations, add the notion of every form of music you ever listened to.  All these conversations conflate to form the voices in your head.

These voices in your head speak to the state of the world around you, sometimes on topics of epic banality, in other cases with the fiery rhetoric of a prophet on overdrive.  These voices have already made you aware of your dissatisfaction, your fears, your hidden longings, and the times when contests of wills in which you were involved more often than not went against you because you were young and your opponents were, in no particular rank, adults, your own ignorance, and your own naivete.

Because these voices in your head come from external sources, they could not have been conspirators in any delusions you may have composed, even though they spoke to you in ways that urged you to form delusions.  

These voices are voices of the imagination and process of other tangible individuals, set in motion years--sometimes hundreds of years--before you set foot and awareness onto this landscape of the present moment.  They remind you of one of the primary causes of art, science, and wisdom, the illumination of dark spots.

All these experiences are talking to you, trying to engage you in the kinds of conversations you had with some frequency while growing through your teens and twenties.  Back then, you were trying to define who you were to yourself, trying to find explanations, approaches, and philosophies that would serve as a rallying cry for all the voices of others you heard in yourself.  Which of these voices would you follow, and what strengths and encouragements could you borrow from these men and women while, at the same time,  you were busy trying  to cajole the voice you knew was in there somewhere, being intimidated, shut down, perhaps even shouted down by the clamor of information and the ambient chatter of Reality?

You've become used to rereading, rethinking, rewatching, relistening.  Even in the process of revisiting, you find yourself able to see what once attracted you and why, although it may no longer hold excitement and meaning for you.  Only thr other day, flicking through radio stations as you drove, you heard a few bars Violin Concerto in E Minor,which you had not listened to in years.  You felt your cheeks tingle in what you knew was a blush; there was something nearly sexual about this, as though seeing an old lover from the past, who was no longer as she was when you first knew her, but now of even more elegant stature and posture.

In the years since you'd last heard the Mendelssohn, you'd among other things revisited Haydn and taken on many of the Mozart piano concertos, the clarinet concerto, and in particular the early string quarters he'd dedicated to Haydn.

There were such things going on in your reading as well, with some equivalent older loves holding up and things you once considered classics or at least necessary icons having lost their luster.

There is, accordingly, some form of conversation, going on much of the time, sometimes even seeping into your dreams where, almost like a commercial thrown into the dream for some university Lit program, a book or author appears and you find yourself circling about it rather than rushing to it or engaging it in some immediate dialogue.

There are any number of persons you once knew and, because they are lo longer alive, know now only in your memories of them.  In waking or dream life, you often play the game of wondering what one question you'd ask them or what one thing you'd wish to tell them, were you able to have a real-time conversation for just a moment.

This turns out to be a fun way of keeping in contact with the memories of so many special ones.  In effect, you now can do it with books, short stories, essays, pictures of all sorts, and any number of musical contacts.  Charlie Parker turned modern jazz on its end with its startling, tumble of chord changes and reaches.  

He's been dead just short of fifty years.  You were afraid to risk returning for a listen, but having done so, you can relax; the old 78s still hold up, fresh, harmonic, inventive.  "Back Home Again in Indiana," will never be the same, not after he turned it into "Donna Lee."  That said, you also have to admit that a young, seventeen-year-old-young trumpeter name of Miles Davis gave Parker some good, close inspiration.

Not to forget Eric Blair, who holds up.  What wonderful, straightforward, compelling language.  Called himself George Orwell.

Just about a week ago, you got a kind of checking in to say hi email from a photographer you admire.  You sent back a note, I Love you, Zoe, then took down Zoe Strauss's book, which still holds you.

The voices in your head, a lively, eclectic chatter.  Still taking care of business, a term you'd come to associate with another icon of the be bop era, Dexter Gordon, who'd start his sets saying, let's take care of some business.  Dexter's been gone since 1990, but you can hear him, holding up, across the gap.

Improve through Improv

When casting a play, film, or a pilot for a potential series on TV, a director will arrange to have groups of actors improvising scenes or situations as a means of detecting potential chemistry among the actors.

Improv(ization) is a valuable tool for writers as well, far more serviceable than the so-called prompts so popular among the more dillettantish of writer's groups and classes.  This is so because improv helps clear the writer's head of the writer's traits and quirks, opening it for potential discovery of traits resident within the character.

For the longest time, without acknowledgment in so many words, you used yourself as a source for all your characters.  Part of the reason was the hubristic one of thinking you had enough insight and ability to recall things to preclude any other resources.  Another cause for thinking yourself such a rich resource was your acknowledged eccentricities and quirks.  

Not only that, you were edgy, introspective, and unpredictable in the bargain, at times telling yourself you might not have learned much at the university beyond the awareness of the depth of your difference.  What eccentricities and foibles you lacked, you could pick up on an as-needed basis, all thanks to one of the most important instructions you got from the university--the ability to use the library to research needed material.

As proof you were not so precocious as you'd thought yourself to be, you needed some time to see the essential flaw in logic here:  what you lacked, you could research.  This was in effect you telling yourself you got information about the human condition from beyond the borders of your own psyche.  Callow, confused, and constricted as it might have been, your psyche was by no means enough a resource.  You were the equivalent of a small duchy, say Luxembourg, in comparison to something as wide, diverse, and far reaching as Brazil or Russia.  There was (and still quite is) a world out there to be observed and stored away, where it could be recalled when needed in the act of creating a character.

You'd by then developed a revision technique of rewriting a scene from the point-of-view of a character other than the one you'd originally used to filter the dramatic information.  You'd given this a name, borrowed from basic physical behavior--refraction.  Ned and Fred are in a scene you write from the POV of Ned.  After a few shots at it, you realize you've got most of the information you'd hoped to introduce hanging out there in some tangible form.  

Alas, often the form was dull for all it was tangible.  Instead of reflecting, you reasoned, why not refract?  Thus you switch POV, a useful exercise that opens the door for tension, excitement, edge to slither onto the landscape, stirring up mischief by taking the dialogue in directions you'd not expected, often with a force or attitude you'd not expected.  Yet another presence emerges from all this.  After working through the exchanges of dialogue, then removing the clutter of needless words, excuses, circumlocutions, and plain old explanation, you were thinking you had the scene nailed cold, except that there was still a missing presence.  Have you seen this child?  Have you seen this dog?  

The missing presence was excitement, for which you could as well substitute tension, suspense, the tingle of intrigue.

Now, you have no problem naming the missing guest as the kind of focus that comes when characters are in true chemical terms, causing a stir.

Often in improv scenes, actors will "discover" a particular gesture or piece of business, a wave of the hand, a stop to drain the contents of a highball glass, a final sip of coffee, tossing a pillow or some object with which they'd been playing at another character.  Take real, close, fucking notice of this; characters in stories who do such things are tossing not a pillow but a trait at the reader, a tangible bit of evidentiary material that relates directly to establishing in the reader's mind the chemistry and relationship in general between characters.

You bring the characters on stage, get them in an improv mode, then turn them loose.  Ned tosses a pillow at Fred.

"Hey!"  Fred says.  "What you do that for?"

"Felt like it,"  Ned says.  Then, after a moment, "  Returning the compliment."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Didn't want to leave you being the only one throwing stuff around.  Stuff like the truth."

"Are you saying I'm--"

Ned interrupts him, tossing an apple at him.  "Here,"  he says.  "Catch."

Let's Hear It for Schadenfreude

The German word schadenfreude has a lovely, Teutonic edge to it, almost a malevolence when you consider its meaning, which is a tempting state of mind.  Fully clothed in schadenfreude, one takes pleasure in the discomfort of one or more others.  

To put the matter straightforward, when we acknowledge its presence within ourselves, we are looking for the most convenient shortcut to our individual dark side, the place where we leave out better natures outside on the temple steps while we move inside to pay reverence to the forces of comeuppance.

Schadenfreude becomes even more an engine of revenge if we see someone for whom we feel antipathy brought down from some height of satisfaction or power or ability.  In such instances, this condition, which sounds somewhere between a skin disease and some form of lower bowel complaint, is a close parallel to the effects achieved at the hands of humor, which condition is the lowering of status of something pompous or self-absorbed.

But pause for a moment to consider.  A significant cause for identification with characters in story bears a close relationship to schadenfreude; we take pleasure in seeing those in power toppled by individuals they may well have abused or, worse, ignored.  

We rejoice when our guys finish ahead, even if the ahead is only a somewhat ahead or a detente with the fates kind of settlement.  Those of us who enjoy humor take an even deeper dive into the seas of comeuppance or retribution or the cosmic shaking and drying of a large dog only just bathed .

The purpose of humor is to bring down the self-absorbed, the self-important, the paradigm of all that is fussy, punctilious, and supercilious.  A major element of your favored Shakespearean comedy, Twelfth Night, is to remind us of the Malvolio lurking within all of us.  He is a man who has unarguably splendid taste in his romantic aspirations, but so, in fact, do we all.  His manner of approaching his beloved reminds us to fine tune our own aspirations so that our folly is not the mere act of daring to hope, rather our folly is in the manner in which we demonstrate our hopes.

However we fare in our pursuits of our goals, the outcome is secondary to the manner of the pursuit.  One who loves well, pursues with a semblance of consideration, grace, and imagination, mixed with a grand measure of abandon, wins regardless of outcome, has engaged process rather than attempted to become the process.

We read to examine the process by which fictional beings pursue seemingly unattainable goals, allowing us to root for outcomes, to learn technique and posture from our observation.  We also learn to avoid dangerous overextensions of self and of individual resources.  

We find examples against which to measure our own past performances and to measure with care our own fictional inventions, to say nothing about our participation on real life events.  If we judge ourselves to have performed with greater nobility and posture than some fictional character, saved and savored for that purpose, we feel free to celebrate our superiority.

In the celebration, we become our own schadenfreude.  Indeed, who among our real and fictional friends, even our own creations of characters will be among the first to prank us.  

Questions, Always with the Questions

To continue with your insights from yesterday's investigations, what benefits are there in use of a question to start a narrative?  Questions require attempts at answers, don't they?  When a mere sentry opens Hamlet with the question, "Who's there?" we find out soon enough, don't we?

Aren't stories the equivalent of questions, dramatized?  Aren't essays voyages of discovery?  Perhaps the questions are unanswerable or not given complete definition.  Perhaps the essay leads us away from the port of origin, but does not lead us to the expected destination.  

More than once, you've heard the story about the Buddhist monk, who is accused of a number of improbable things by civilians, including the allegation that he is the father of an abandoned child.  The monk returns every allegation/accusation with another question:  "Is that so?"  From his tone, the response is not defensive, perhaps even tinged with a bit of open curiosity as though, were the accusation truthful, the monk would process the information in some unexpected way.

This exercise in parable rhetoric suggests the enormous convergence of possibilities within a continuous search for a defining answer to a question.

What a wonderful response resides in the question, "Is that so?"  Short, pithy answer, it is filled with the potential for causing dramatic as well as contextual mischief.

How does a character in written story convey meaning, nuance, agenda, and all the spectrum of emotions characters in any written story are intended by their authors to convey?  How would you, for example, portray the character of Bartleby?  How would you portray Jay Gatz from South Dakota, who has become Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island?  How would you portray Indiana Jones?  How do you, in various costumes, humors, and guises, portray yourself?  Who are you?

Isn't that last question the keystone to why you wish to be a storyteller?  If you knew the one answer you'd be able to provide every time the question arose, would that help you gain the skills for storytelling you seek?

While you're on the subject of questions, what effect do these seven recent questions have on your process as a person and your process as a writer?  If you were able to answer them, would those answers open the door at which you have been rattling the knob lo these many years in order to forge your abilities as a writer?

The questions, you hear yourself responding in the same tone as the figurative Buddhist monk of a few paragraphs back, are of greater relevance than the answers.  The answers can and do differ, with no tangible loss of sincerity.  The questions remain, fresh inquiries, persistent, haunting, provocative.

What does this say about characters who give long speeches as opposed to more simplistic, even reductionist responses?  Which says the most about a character, long answers to short questions or short answers to short questions?

How does a character convey feelings, agendas, and attitudes, using as few words as possible?

Let us return for a few moments to last evening's foray into the Shakespearean past, with our encounter with the three witches from Macbeth.  After the three witches agree to meet Macbeth "after the battle," how do we know they are being called by their familiars, or spirit helpers?

The first witch says, "I come, Graymalkin!"  No real clue yet, so an actor (remember, boys played the part of women back in the day) might appear to be listening to a call from off stage or at a distance, as though hearing a call we cannot hear.

The second witch nails the job with "Paddock calls."  Paddock is her toad.  Were you the second witch, you might cup your ear, then nod before you delivered your two-word line.  Then you might use your hands in a gesture to signal that you'd heard.

The third witch takes back to simplicity.  She simply says "Anon."  Six words, shared between three actors, conveying the notion that they are about to depart.  The first time you saw this play, it was a filmed version.  Young as you were, you knew something was up, but if you knew at the time about witches having familiars, you didn't know it well enough.  You had to look it up in the footnotes to the text.  Holy fuck, Graymalkin is a cat, Paddock is a frog.  No telling who or what the familiar of the third witch is, but there she is, going at it for four hundred years now, conveying her witch-ness, hearing her familiar--whatever the fuck it is--calling to her.

Now, time for them to leave.  In tandem, they say:

Fair is foul, and foul is fair
Hover through the fog and filthy air.

A one-word stage direction, Exeunt.  They're gone and we're into a new scene.

Let's come back to 2013 with a question. How do actors on the page convey story without going off on long, reader feeder-type speeches and descriptions?  How do we turn the actor-beings in our mind to characters who filter the story for us, so that there is as much of them and as little as us--well, you--as possible? 

You could start with a question, then watch with great care to see how the character responds.