Objects in your dreams may seem more weird than they really are

Sometimes it happens over coffee, but more often a few bottles of wine or several bottles of beer.  Perhaps it even comes with coffee and cognac after a splendid meal where at least one of the servings was comfort food.

The "it" that happens is the recollection of a past time or times, of a past person or persons, quite possibly a cherished animal friend.  There's been just enough companionability to bring nostalgia and remembrance into the collective mind of the conversation.  With this companionability comes the awareness that this moment, too, will be evoked one day, under similar circumstances.

Remember the times we used to...remember when...remember.

The "it" can also happen when you are driving somewhere, for instance taking the Garden Street on ramp onto 101 southbound, a frequent if not daily point of entry for you.  Up the entry ramp, watching ahead of you, through the rear view and side view mirrors to secure smooth entry into the traffic stream, needing to be alert to merge left in order to be free of the approaching exit strategies that will take traffic off the 101 and onto either north or south Milpas Street.

Safely positioned now, at optimal speed, southward toward Montecito, then beyond to Summnerland, you've done in actuality what you do so often during the course of the day.  You're focusing directly into the present, checking the rear view mirror of the past, using the side view for hints and orientation and a form of triangulation where you are now merged with the reality of now, a direct part of its process.

The "it" can also happen in your dreams, your imagination and memory and your individualized sense of imagery having direct effect on the visions that present themselves to you.  At times, you expect to see signs that read "Objects in your dreams may seem more weird than they really are."

Remembrance comes upon us as much without invitation as with, sending images and emotions almost as wary as you when, for instance, you are trying to merge with the southbound traffic on 101, or, miles north, when you've sheared off the 101 to 217, westbound to the campus of the University, then need to cope with the left turn that will take you past a triple opportunity for merging vehicles as you settle  along your way to Ucen (for University Center) Way, and your own destination.  Because of your past experiences, at this latter place before turning onto Ucen Way, you think of UCLA, which is where so much began for you and so much ended.  

You think of how being at UCLA ended whimsical thoughts that you might teach and sent you roaring off the grid, convinced you'd pretty much burned any bridges behind you that did not have to do directly with writing.  You think of how you were distracted from a job at a newspaper, southward toward the approximate venue of the current new television series on FX, The Bridge,  and how, instead, you went to follow the Foley and Burke Shows, which were carnival concessions.  

You did not think it in so many words, but you were aware of how your resume, if you were being accurate, would include experience at being a shill, running a baseball throw booth, a dart-throwing (at balloons) booth, a guess-your-age booth, and experience with a booth called add-pans, cupcake pans with numbers on each depression for an about-to-become cupcake.  Customers tried to toss tennis balls into numbered chambers whose aggregate total would be under nine or over nineteen.

When you are at Ucen Way, having thought of UCLA and then into the present moment again, you are aware you are there to do something you'd never thought you would do, but have in fact been doing nearly half your life.  You are there, at the College of Creative Studies, UCSB, as a visiting professor.

Some times the "it" of recollection can be a particular bit of recorded music, which sends you back to times when you heard the same or nearly same material being played live.  In a sense, you've outgrown Tschaikovsky's 1812 Overture, but you are presented the memory of when it was presented to you by your mentor and her husband, complete with a firing cannon and university carillons on their hi-fi stereo with the enormous loudspeakers.  

Nor can you forget the first time you saw/heard it live at the Hollywood Bowl, with puffs of smoke from the firing cannons hovering in the Summer evening mist,  and an even more spectacular display of ringing bells, the chime replaying in your ears and subsequent dreams.

The 1812 is a splendid example because you've outgrown the music, but you still rejoice in the memories of Rachel and King playing for you and sense of absolute power and mischief when you heard the Hollywood Bowl version.  You turned impulsively to your date to tell her, "I want to write books like that."  This was a fine thing to say to anyone but her; your relationship was already beyond saving, but it was your good fortune to have similar things to say to the cosmos about you and your increased good fortune (and occasional embarrassment) to remember having felt such power and mischief and given voice to them.

Remembrance has become for you an improvised connective device, using some event or object or person to send your gaze upward to the rear view mirror, in which you see then feel the effects of something from the past.  

You've made no attempt to catalogue such things.  You reckon the remembrances are about half pleasant, which may account for your frequent smile.  The other half of the remembrances tend toward the bitter-sweet, thus you are, in a way similar to the fact of you teaching after thinking you'd foreclosed that option, at least even with the cosmos, your most informed calculus being that you have at least a fifty percent chance of experiencing something of pleasant nature  in the present or in remembrance.

Even if you encounter the bittersweet or the entirely bitter, nearly any composition of Maurice Ravel (except for The Bolero) can turn things around, or those first four string quartets of Mozart, or pretty much anything by John Coltrane.

So what then if you happen to catch a sour rememberance.  There's always a good chance the next will take you back somewhere you once enjoyed.

R.S.V.P., Regrets, and Dramatic Subtext

The invitation has the design and presentation of well-thought professionalism, and a cordial, conversational text.  After the time, date, and place of the event, there is the final commentary:  regrets only.

This is a step away from the more standard, RSVP, which is in effect asking the invitee--you in this case--to please let us know if you're coming.  Respondez sil vous plait.

Regrets only takes matters to more nuanced levels.  The most conventional meaning to be had  is a question: Are you sorry not to be able to attend this event?  

Looking at the invitation, its promise of a pleasurable event, and its kindness in the hope that you will appear and in consequence contribute to the pleasurableness of the event, you are made aware of the codes of civility, politeness, and protocol necessary to maintain a culture.  

If you are unable to attend the event, politeness and consideration for the host place upon you the burden of conveying your sorrow at not being able to attend.  But are you really sorry?  Is there the possibility you are sorry to have been invited in the first place, putting you in the position of the euphemisms of "fib" or "white lie" of regret.  Are you in fact relieved to have a previous engagement or commitment which allows you to send your regrets?

Such spectrums of nuance and possibility remind you of times where, when asked to RSVP, you were able to respond in the now dated language and verb tense, Shelly Lowenkopf accepts the invitation to dine or to celebrate or to watch two remarkable persons exchange vows or to watch one person graduate from some extended program of study and learning.  

You recall times when you were even moved to accept the invitation with alacrity, or those more special times when you were able to accept the kind invitation with alacrity because of your admiration for the person or persons extending the invitation and your anticipation of time in their company for whatever ritual, be it something as unmomentous as a pot luck supper.

Regret is a human condition well suited to dramatic interpretation, thanks to its power as a motivational force.  In real life, we regret things done and things left undone.  Sometimes the mere thought of your own behavior in a remembered event triggers the potential for a story, which becomes in effect your way of revising, editing the real event, getting some satisfaction of shepherding an invented character through what was once your own naivete, bad judgement, or, worse yet, hubris.

You join others in regretting things said and done to us in addition to things we have said and done.  This sense of regret is key in constructing characters who are setting forth to redress some words or deeds they may have committed, thus the driving force is atonement.  On the other pole, there is the possibility of a character acting to exact symbolic or actual revenge for real or imagined torts committed against them.

When you hear the word regret, used in some formal way, you begin an immediate line of questioning.  "We regret to inform you..."  Do you?, you wonder.  Whoever you are, do you really regret the information you're giving me?  Are you sorry about your having denied me some request?  Is your regret sincere?

You have no regrets about reckoning a number of friends to whom you can extend invitations or they you, where the responses are as conversational and straightforward as, "Aw, jeez, I can't," or, "Consider me there."  In such cases, there is often another question going along with the ritual of invitation and acceptance, "Can I bring anything?"

Sometimes such questions bring surprising results and consequences.  On one occasion, you recall asking if you could being something, thinking a few bottles of wine or some ale or perhaps even a bottle of rum, only to be told, "Potato salad."  This seemed simple enough.  The delicatessens you thought to apply for potato salad had what you considered lackluster potato salad.  Driven by a heady combination of wanting to do well by your hosts and by your own sense of self, you embarked on a process of making--and throwing away--enough types of potato salad to make you reevaluate your entire concept of it.  After consulting recipes, now lost to you, you prepared a large quantity of what you considered remarkable potato salad.

When the event was over, although your potato salad had been at least fifty percent depleted, you had considerable remains to work on.  Even good potato salad becomes boring after a time and thus, by day three, you began adding things to it, the most significant thing of all being sardines.  There was some magical chemistry you've never been able to duplicate, except that now, when someone asks you if they can bring anything or you are the asker, you have the memory of that potato-salad-with-sardines taste.

Thoughts of regret make you aware of the importance it has played in your life and your thinking about stories.  One of the more memorable novels to read relative to regret is Thomas Hardy's stunning novel, The Mayor of Casterbridge, which is about a hundred twenty-five years old, and yet still has one of the most compelling opening chapters of a novel yet produced.  Regret for behavior exhibited in that opening chapter inform the balance of the novel.

You regret many things, not so many as the things that give you some sense of purpose and pleasure, but enough to realize these things, these regrettable incidents, both in terms of things done by you and things done to you, supply you with an array of story that move past you like the ancient herds of migrating buffalo.

The Listening Game

Thanks to your editorial associations with the world-class archaeologist, Brian Fagan, you've had close, regular association with subjects and matters you only skimmed as a student and now take with the same grains of familiarity you employ when considering the motives and behaviors of friends, family, and associates.

You're no longer surprised when, in the course of working on a Fagan manuscript, you come across studies of tree rings from which certain definite inferences may be drawn, nor from the analysis of ancient atmospheres based on pollen counts taken from a core sampling of soil.  Such wonders extend to means of determining the diets of humans and animals long dead, after effects of famed volcanic eruptions, and analyses of frozen tundra.

By comparison with some of these measuring devices and your own study and association with narratives, many of which are close to a thousand years old, you've arrived at a place where you can approximate the time of composition of a spoken or written narrative.

As the publication dates approximate your own times, your ability to fix the exact moment of composition--your own version of tree ring analysis--becomes more acute.  The analog of the tree ring in this case is the authorial use of point-of-view, the filter through which the story must pass.  

The memorable frolic of Henry Fielding's 1749 masterpiece, Tom Jones,  betrays its time and place not only through vocabulary and, in many cases, stilted formality, but through the frequent pauses the author makes to address the reader.

Nearly a hundred forty years later, the presence of the author has been subsumed by the narrative voice of Mark Twain's eponymous character, Huckleberry Finn, who addresses the reader, yes, but as a fully formed individual who is in effect giving us a memoir of his most recent string of events.

Although you'd picked these two titles more or less at random, by way of demonstrating how the conventions of narrative in fiction had evolved, the two novels have more in common than in disparity.  There are remarkable differences between the two authors, not the least of which was their social backgrounds, but there are similarities there, as well.  

While Fielding still remains (largely through Tom Jones), if only as a benchmark for literature majors, Twain still influences and in a number of ways defines what the storyteller ought to do and how, in fact, the storyteller does so.

How many novels and dramatic narratives does one need to read before patterns of any significance emerge?  As you were embarking on your reading career, not certain what it would accomplish for you or you for it, you were faced with a number of ironic circumstances, the common denominator of which was the fact of the narrow path of potential a focus on literature offered in terms of a career.  

This was brought home to you one day when, as you sat in the main chamber of your favorite of all libraries you'd ever visited, the Lawrence Clark Powell Library at UCLA, you were joined by a fraternity brother with a thick, annotated reading list.

After a brief, whispered conference, you each managed to dismay the other.  He was studying for the impending examination for admission to the graduate school of the English Department and assuming you were as well.  He had no idea how shaky your grades in all but literature and music courses were.  In a moment of clarity rare for you in those days, you saw how structured and conventional his ambitions were.

You were already filled with one impossible fire, he with another.  Not long before this meeting, you'd read of F. Scott Fitzgerald's conversation, whether actual or apocryphal, with his classmate, Edmund Wilson, in which he'd confessed his wish to become one of the major writers in the world, then his throw-away question, "Don't you?"

Because you and your fraternity brother each held rank on the staff of the campus humor magazine, you'd had numerous chances to read his material.  Although you had hopes about the quality and potential of your own work, you were not overly impressed with its quality, which was why you were in the library, going through a pile of books and journals, looking for things to grab hold of, hand- and footholds on the steep escarpment of literature.  You placed yourself several steps above your companion, and you thought at the time you understood why.  He was reading to get into grad school.  You were reading to burn bridges, close doors, and fling yourself into the mercies of George Gissing's 1891 narrative, Grub Street, where a first reading had brought forth an immediate sense of identity.

The establishment you sought to enter was in fact Eastern based, or so you thought.  You had no wish to go East.  By this time, and because of the times you'd been in the East, you hated the East.

Your fraternity brother wanted the conventional track to teaching, which at the time was an MA from Berkeley or Stanford, a PhD from a Big Ten or Ivy school, then perhaps back to someplace adventurous:  Montana, Oregon, with luck, home again in Los Angeles.

That evening, you are sitting in Ken's Hula Hut, a jazz joint in the wilds of upper Melrose, before the area became upmarket decorator, furniture, and design country.  You're wanting immersion in the hard, reaching harmonies of the be-bop aspect of jazz, careening past swing and into places where convention was carded, asked to show ID.  You were well into your admiration-friendship of the alto sax player Sonny Criss.  That night, between sets, you were talking about future places, future plans.  Criss was asking you if your instrument spoke to you yet. You knew he was aware you were no musician, thus you thought you understood his question.  You said yes, the conversation between you and your instrument had begun.

"Next set,"  he said, "I'm going to play an old standard.  Gershwin.  'Oh, Lady, Be Good.'  Gonna play it like you never heard it played before."  He nodded, in thought.  "When your instrument talks to you, you go where it takes you."

Your fraternity brother got his PhD, didn't publish much, got cancer, died.

Criss followed his instrument, got cancer, died.  Too soon.  1977.  From time to time, you play his many records, sometimes laughing as you consider how far ahead of his time he was and how effective he still sounds today, and how effective his friendship feels today.

You got stage IIIa cancer, probably could have died, didn't.  From time to time, you listen to Criss and his instrument.  You try to listen to your own.  It is a listening game.  You are listening for the tree rings and the pollen and ash and the sounds of writers through the ages, listening to their own instruments.

What's going on here?

"What's going on here?"

Intriguing way to begin a scene, even more intriguing if the scene happens to be the opening scene of a short story or a novel.  Not too shabby a way to begin a chapter in a novel.

The question throws an immediate challenge at a reader.  As the dialogue and relevant dramatic activity develop, the reader begins to understand on some non-written, non-verbal level how this question and its answer are metaphors.  The reader not only wishes to find out, the reader becomes aware as information is given a slow trickle onto the stage how much is yet to be learned about the essential details, how much may be buried within details not yet presented, agendas not given full disclosure.

The reader is alerted to watch for revealing clues, which may be buried everywhere, within sentences, with casual references--"Oh, that old business again?"  and a suspicion that things have gotten out of hand and may--no, not may, will--reach the bursting point.

Life has any number of bursting points up its sleeve:  relationships end, jobs are terminated, individuals fall ill and die, minds become confused, other minds change.  Thus do things burst.  

Life has many surprises up its sleeve, thanks to its intensity of agenda.  Life doesn't set out to make you fall in love or become curious, but because you are a product of a process of evolution, there are things and sounds and tastes and, yes, of course, persons with whom you experience attractions.  These have evolved even as you have evolved.

Sometimes these attractions seem on a level with the attraction between two elements, say hydrogen and oxygen, or perhaps corn meal, some oil, a touch of cinnamon, and perhaps an egg.  Sometimes the attraction is between you and stories.  This attraction has also evolved from rather straightforward, linear stories to ones where there is more implied than said, more in the interstices than in the action scenes, more in a shrug from a character than a long explanation.

Most successful stories are about something going on, about some one or ones, reaching the point of combustion at the potential of something going on beyond the ordinary, the normal, the accepted, the acceptable.  Such stories remind us to be suspicious of explanations that are too glib or formulaic.  

Most successful stories are about someone trying to do something they consider extraordinary because they want something beyond the conventional or easy.  Such stories are often about someone being upset by the energy of the character trying to do something, such as stepping out of a mould and attempting to define or achieve individuality.

What's going on here?  Someone attempting to find individuality in a bustling, crowded, polarized world is what's going on.

You could also ask the question about the stranger arriving on the scene, the new kid in the class room, for instance, or the new worker in the office, or the new editor in the publishing house.  What's going on here is the new person bringing the aura of suspicion and change, of the unfamiliar.

Go back  to Madam Bovary, opening paragraphs, when the new kid was brought into the schoolroom, wearing that strange-looking cap.  You'll see how the new person, the stranger in town, the unknown quantity has effect on the locals.

How often do you ask of your dreams or your stories in progress or your waking life, What's going on here?  How often do you give straightforward answers?  How often do these answers help you move along to the next plateau and perhaps the next story?

Dialogue as a Second Language

You're used to hearing writing described as a lonely process, although you do not agree with the assessment.  True enough, you're often alone in the physical sense, even though on occasion you leave the comfort of your work area at home for a coffee shop filled with customers engaged in chat and conversation.  You do this to fine-tune your focus on work by blocking out the very conversations you'd come to experience.

Once at work, you're far from lonely; you're in the company of characters and landscape you've created, focusing on them,  In the process of this focus, you've transported yourself into another landscape of time, space, and causation.

For the past several days, you've been living in two parallel universes.  One of these is the alternate universe of your own devising, dropped on your desk almost like a legal brief or, to apply heat to the metaphor, like an indictment.  

You'd not set out with any plan to design this alternate universe the way you'd have done had the material on your desk been a novel.  This universe was a group of your short fiction, often written in times such as these, between classes and editing assignments, or as delightful excuses to avoid working on something longer.  

The stories have all had homes in various journals, some no longer thriving.  Every one of them has passed through some form or another of editorial review.  The fact of their having been published was a contributing factor to their being about to appear under the same covers, subject to yet another editorial review, and of course your own.

The other parallel universe is, of course, the world of reality as it is, or as it presents itself to you, as the reality it is.  This other universe and your response to it and your interpretation of it, is a direct and proximate cause of this alternate universe you've brought together over some years and in various moods, all of which are recognizably you--so far as you are concerned.

Going through this potpourri of your visions, you've focused on the world of dialogue, which is the world of characters speaking in dramatic terms as opposed to the conversational tones you're used to hearing about you when you're out in the actual world.

This morning, you're at one of your favored breakfast spots, puttering with the New York Times crossword puzzle, making some inroads on a latte with an elaborate design, waiting for the rest of your meal to be delivered and for your frequent Sunday morning companion, Jim Alexander, to appear.

Other breakfasters are beginning to appear, including a gentleperson of about your age, who is seeming to address the same puzzle as you with a vigorous ease.  Sounds of conversation waft about you like the pleasant bitterness of coffee aroma from your latte.  These sounds are in their way incomplete or distracting even though the persons engaged in producing them seem comfortable and sociable.  They are speaking in conversation.  You've been intent these days on dialogue.

When Jim Alexander arrives, you're relieved because at last, with another writer present, you can switch to dialogue.

Dialogue is in most cases another language, neither American English, conversational discourse, nor the oblique approaches to communication so useful and serviceable in the world of reality.  The inner dialogue a character has when alone or when being introspective among a group of others is called interior monologue.  This inner talk is also unlike the more descriptive aspects of narrative; it is taut, tense, often incomplete or barely declarative sentences.  It is the poetry of your inner selves, the articulations of your fondest desires, your most forbidden fantasies, your darkest moods, your agendas of discovery and understanding.

You live in an area where there is a significant and diverse Latino community, thus numerous occasions for ESL or English as a Second Language Classes.  With that in mind and your sense of disconnect at having spent so much time in your own world of your own language and your own visions of trying to express ideas, feelings, understanding, and empathy, you are teaching the equivalent of ESL classes every time you give a writer's workshop.  You are trying to write and feel your way into the language of story.

If you have learned anything at all about story, you've learned that it cannot be described, it must be conveyed, through dialogue, interior monologue, and narrative.  These are not languages of English or Spanish or any other fine and descriptive language; these are the languages of the human spirit, caught up in the immediacy of coping with the world we all inhabit and try to understand.

What is not said in a story is as important as the things that are said, he said.

 You pick up a promising novel, find yourself intrigued by the narrative voice issuing from a lead character, then watch for the anticipated event that will confront the character with the need to act.  Or react.  Or take steps.  Perhaps all of these.

In almost no time at all, you've bonded with that character, his or her narrative voice, and way of responding.  You may even begin to suspect the character of some quirk or flaw or predilection.  If all the circumstances are positive, you might even have a few moments of realizing you've been transported to a place you had no interest in going, arriving at a time other than the present, where you had no particular interest.

Let's say you're four or five pages in, aware of a growing commitment to the story.  One other moment of realization comes to you:  You're in to stay.  Unless there is some egregious flaw or breach, unless the hologram of plausibility and tension is shattered in some unanticipated way, you're in for the long haul, intending to real all the way through.

Although you do read many books during the course of a year and have dealings with entire manuscripts or portions of works intended for publication, you do not arrive lightly at the states you've described here.  Nevertheless, when you do reach that state with a work you're reading, a feeling of satisfaction and warmth begins to seep through your awareness.  

Even though the narrative itself may be horrific or disturbing in its thematic implications (such as the manuscript you're reading for a friend, dealing with a front-rank character who has just suffered a debilitating stroke), the warmth of satisfaction at being "in" a narrative is tangible, appreciated, welcomed.  Of course you hope to produce such an emotional landscape with every story you write.  These feelings are the ones that seem to have appeared as you set about trying to learn the storytelling craft.

Here you are then, engrossed, engaged, pleased to be identifying and sympathizing with this narrative voice.  You come to the end of a chapter, which ends in satisfying tension or outright suspense, for a moment smiling at the degree to which your focus has been arrested by the character's depth, complexity, and momentary dilemma.

With eagerness, you turn the page, only to discover the author has pulled the rug from under you, swept the tablecloth from under the place setting with a deft flick by switching to the point of view of another character, one who is being introduced to you in the opening lines of the new chapter.

Cut to you being in your publisher's office, having just had a pleasing chat with your editor, who has excused herself to get a copy of her notes on your recent work.  You're curious to see the notes, pleased to see your editor's office is every bit a jumble as yours when you worked for publishers.  There is a knock at the door.  In comes the editor's employer, the publisher, who introduces herself, then presents you with what you can only call a high-class problem.  

The publisher wants to engage you in a three-book arrangement which will be likely to occupy as many as five of the next years of your life.  You don't have to make up your mind right here on the spot, the publisher tells you.  Take your time.  Then she hands you her card.  Maybe by the end of next week you could let me know.  She offers her hand, then leaves.

You sit there, stunned, flushed with a sense of purposeful satisfaction at reaching such a plateau.

A moment later, there is another knock on the door.  It is your editor's assistant, holding a folder with your editor's notes on the project for which you were summoned here.

You've done here in imaginary effect what the imaginary book you were reading and describing a few moments ago had on you.  You've introduced parallel narrative lines.

With your hard won understanding about the nature of parallel lines in a geometric sense (having experienced severe difficulties with geometry in high school to the point where you did not grasp the concept of alternate interior angles of the same degree), you now accept that in reality, parallel lines meet only in infinity.  In dramatic narrative, they meet in the last chapter.

Or sooner.

Two distinct characters being set in motion, confronted with intriguing obstacles or decisions, causes you to understand on some level that their stories are tied by some link, the discovery of which will add even greater satisfaction to your pursuit of this narrative.  

You read on, absorbing the status and demeanor of this new character.  While you do, a new suspicion begins to grow in your mind:  Perhaps there will be yet another character introduced, causing you to have to go through this same exquisite tension yet again.  A favored novel, Wilkie Collins' 1868 The Moonstone, was written in this multiple point-of-view fashion.  You'd probably experienced this narrative approach before reading The Moonstone, but because of the effectiveness of this form of narrative, this has become the default example for you.

When you think about story and structure, no wonder you think about parallel lines; you are setting forces in motion, causing concern for their safety or possible detours into disaster.  You are creating the suspense of wondering how the character is who is out of immediate focus.  You are creating entire lines of concern you'd not imagined when you began puttering with what the story was and how best to tell it.

Parallel construction is a different matter altogether, a negative one that in effect creates distraction and that unwelcome presence, anticlimax.  Parallel lines keep the focus where it belongs, on the characters, away from you, the writer.

Parallel lines help introduce into the story the forceful presence of implication and evocation, both of which are well above simple description.

What is not said in a story is often every bit as important as the things that are said, particularly if the reader is saying them for you.

The Dark Side of the Story

When you take a quick look at yourself, you're more apt to be blinded by the brightness of enthusiasm and an eagerness born of impatience to get things moving.  This quick look sends back reports of near normality because of the way the enthusiasm trumps so many resident quirks.

You would in fact rather be up and eager and alert rather than lugubrious, dark, cynical.  In this frame of mind and reference, you are aware of but forgiving of your quirks.  Sure, have a few quirks, but on balance, you're pretty upbeat, your politics left-leaning and your mode social.  

You're pretty much the sort who is not surprised when out in public, at, say, a coffee shop, trying to slip in some writing, one or more strangers will approach you and start a conversation.  Even at your age, you're not invisible when out in public, even though there are times when you try to make yourself invisible as a kind of actor's exercise.

Nevertheless you tend to gravitate more in your reading and writing to characters on the dark side of the line, darker than you.  You set a tentative boundary because you don't want the dark side to be so tedious in its darkness that plausibility disappears.  Let's leave it at this:  you recognize the need to push characters of your creation over the line you've set up for yourself in real life.

If you allow your characters to stop where you see yourself stopping, don't expect to experience a tingle of excitement or apprehension or tension when you reread what you've written.  Don't expect the transactions and responses and subsequent resolutions to resonate for you.  

Don't expect to push the confrontation to the point where the responses frighten you.  Under such circumstances, you're trying to get out with a show of edginess and probing while still maintaining a degree of comfort.

Yeah, well.  Comfort has to go.  Nice has to go.  If these two qualities are allowed to remain, somewhere along the way, the narrative is going to turn to mush for you, and you are not all that fond of mush except that it is oatmeal, prepared with some deliberation.

You're looking for encounters between and among individuals that reflect some plausible image of the reality you see going on in these early years of the twenty-first century, slightly beyond the bubble of comfort in which you live, bleeding into the polarity and extremes you see just beyond your line of sight and reach.

You're looking for entitlement, encounters with connectedness, desperate seeking for connections which may in the final analysis be impossible to maintain for any significant time.  You're looking for individuals who tie meaning into knots they find it impossible to untie, persons who seek meaning from things they've purchased at the literary equivalents of garage sales.  

You're looking for persons who've tried any number of conventional and unconventional things, hopeful of extracting tangible meaning, men and women who've been infused with expectations they can never seem to meet.

When you were in high school, it seemed to you many of the girls you were interested in were drawn to sullen types in leather jackets who seemed to understand motorcycles.  You were sullen in all the conventional ways but cared nothing for motorcycles and accordingly knew little about them except for the two primary brands being Indian and Harley-Davidson.

Trouble was, sullen seemed to go better with motorcycles and leather jackets.  Your brand of sullenness got you nothing but a few premature creases on your brow.

The way you see yourself now, if you're not careful, is someone whose sullenness is masked by his enthusiasm for the wild literary rides of investigation and essay, and from reading literature with an increasing focus on the noir or dark side of men and women who have begun to feel betrayed by the conventions they'd been led to believe would bring them a measure of happiness.

Dylan Thomas, the tormented and troubled Welsh poet, wrote of his craft:


In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms
I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.

You're looking for the meanings in that secret, dark side of the heart, meanings that will help you and your characters find some escape velocity from the heavy orbit of convention.