The Days of Whine and Ruses

The arrival in the mail of ARCs, advance reading copies, of the forthcoming collection of twelve of your short stories, as selected by your publisher, represents a pair of switches being engaged.

With the exception of a possible discovery of a typo to be corrected, the inside work on the collection is done.  The outside work begins, in which you appear, from time to time at various Internet sites for service as a guest blogger or as respondent in an interview.  You will also appear at signings, where you will read from your collection to an audience of as few as two or three to those intermediate book signings where there are twelve or so, perhaps as many as fifty in the audience.  You will attempt to connect with them; they with you.

Switch number two:  You will begin writing at and about the newest work, its tentative title, A Character Prepares,  its subtitle to be along the lines of, Using the Techniques of Actors as They Prepare for Roles to Help You Produce More Dimensional, Interesting, and Memorable Characters.

That project, due by Wednesday, October 1, will be your companion, waking, sleeping, and in-between.  You will have lover's quarrels with it.  It will stomp out of the house, refusing to speak to you ever again, perhaps even threatening to consult a divorce lawyer. For your part, you will tell it you are beginning to find it boring, citing the lack of interesting conversations, which is bad enough, but you will doubtless take it that one step farther by accusing it if being predictable.  "Where," you will ask it, "is the mystery and excitement of our earlier exchanges?"

It will surely accuse you of cheating on it, of looking at other book projects, possibly even to the point of making some notes or writing an occasional scene.

You will both sort things out along the way, finding your rhythm and that particular narrative voice to keep it recognizably you, yet notable in its difference from the past work.  This is a venture you fully expect to question from time to time, as in, Are you out of your fucking mind, taking on a project like this when you could be working on a novel you have been playing out in your spare dreams for nearly two years?

The answer to the question is yes.  Yes, you are out of your fucking mind, which is the reason for the book in the first place.  Being in your right mind has come to represent to you a number of things in direct conflict with the more formal aspects of your education, things, in fact, you are at great pains to unlearn.

For many years, at least since you were in your second year in high school, where you in effect tripped the switch that turned on the writer mechanisms within, you set about a course of study and practice of a piece with a beginning piano or trumpet or soprano saxophone student.  Learning the language of notes and, beyond their grammar, their syntax.  It was one thing for you to enjoy watching your sister practice Scott Joplin's memorable The Maple Leaf Rag, which you then mistakenly thought you should be able to play, even though you had not practiced it.  You could hear it internally, the way you felt it ought to be played.  For all she was a good player, your sister could not play The Maple Leaf Rag the way you thought it ought to be played.

Your sister was quick to remind you that if you wished to play The Maple Leaf Rag the way you heard it, you needed to forget this business of writing, instead devoting yourself to the study of music.  At the time, you also favored a work by Maurice Ravel, Alborado del Gracioso, which more or less translates as The Afternoon of a Troubadour.  There were certain passages you thrilled to hear but which caused you to realize you would be years, if ever, trying to achieve.  Your sister hinted that these arpeggiated passages needed to be played with finger tips, involving cross-overs, where the left hand played in the treble line above the treble line the right hand was playing.

"Years?"  you said.

"Years,"  your sister said.  "And even then--"

"--even then?"

"You might not get it the way you hear it.  But--"

"But?"

"You could buy the recording of someone who has already put in the necessary practice.  You could listen to it while you were practicing your writing."

She was right.  You could and did listen to copious things Ravel wrote for the piano, including Waltzes, Noble and Sentimental,  which you still hear in your sleep.  

Even though this seems like a digression or, if you will, a riff or a cadenza, it is relevant.  Why would anyone who wished to write stories want to read a book about using techniques actors use to get inside their roles?  Because the techniques overlap.  Acting techniques help you see your characters and the characters of other writers.  The comparison works wonders with many of your students.  Acting techniques force the writer--including you--to "hear" the inner character to the point where the writer--including you--can "see" the character as well.

Your vision has helped you get more interior, have more fun while writing, and a major amount of fun while rewriting or revising or improvising.

Why couldn't a skilled writer simply invent characters and not have to mess around with what could be a distraction and a waste of time?

Because a skilled writer already uses these techniques.  The difference is that the skilled writer may not have articulated these approaches in the same way.  Story is drama.  Why shouldn't the same techniques that work for actors help the writer distance from herself to absorb the presence of the character.

Did anyone ever tell you what a crazy fuck you were?

Your sister.  Only she used nicer words.  "You're a writer,"  she said.  We tended not to use profanity or language charged with colloquial energy.  She may have called you a crazy writer at that time.  Later, when she became a therapist, she embraced the opinion that persons such as you who used words often charged with colloquial energy were better positioned to embrace artistic risk.

You often use music as a backdrop when you write.  Music reminds you of the emotional tone you wish to set.  So this does converge as you thought.  Although you told you sister about Maurice Ravel and his compositions and shared many conversations about classical and jazz preferences, you never told her you had to stop listening to the opening of J.S. Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavichord or The Goldberg Variations, because they were too distracting and you couldn't work.

You know what she would have said.

Clues

As your experience with the aging process lurches onward, you begin to see a link between it and Christmas gifts for which you have no taste and even less desire to keep.  No matter how well you prepare for it, age brings surprises and the parasites of unwanted consequences.  In some cases, these consequences reveal their true selves to the point of taking over the personality of their host, turning the host into a curmudgeon or cantankerous pessimist.

Although you do not yourself identify with these sorts, neither can you  blame them for their grouchy persona nor fail to show empathy.  Among other things, they--and you--have reached the state of statistical probability where loss and its compatriot, grief, appear with regularity on the Seniors' Menu of the restaurant of Life.

What began in childhood, as the loss through forgetfulness or some expected attrition, moves forward to include friends moving away or the reverse, which is you moving away from friends. The loss of an ice cream cone no longer in contact with your hand, the ever so momentary lapse in your grip of a helium-filled balloon. Then follows the death of childhood pets. A small turtle. A salamander ordered from an ad on the back of a comic book.  A cherished pocket knife.

Perhaps a grandparent follows suit; in your own case, it was the witness of the loss of a classmate from drowning, followed by the death of another classmate from illness, then a grandparent.  But by that time, you'd seen the implications all about you of the kinds of loss that produce grief.

How old, in fact, were you when you lost count because there was so much of it wherever you looked?  And perhaps even now, you haven't lost count.  Perhaps you are still counting.  Perhaps you have reached the plateau where you are in effect playing catch-up, discovering losses and things to grieve some months after their actual departure.

Only today, you mention an acquaintance quite on the border of being a friend, speaking of him in context with his paintings.  "Ah, you haven't heard then?"

"Heard what?"  you say, but you already know from the context.

"January.  January 16, I think."

By this time in the arc of aging and loss, there are connective tissues, unanticipated lines drawing you from one to the next.  Thinking about this recent news of this painter's death, you recall the penultimate time you'd spent any time with him, which was at a birthday gala for one of your closest and dearest friends.  This reminds you of the times when, during your years as a smoker, you had occasion to take shirts, sweaters, and jackets to specialists who called themselves re-weavers, hopeful they could mend an unintended rent in the fabric.

Your maid, seeing the L.L.Bean dog bed next to your reading chair, leaves you a note wondering, "Ya busca una mascota?" This cannot help remind you that yes, you are looking for a dog and that you are fast approaching a year in which that dog bed has been unoccupied except in your memory.

You think of The Buddha from time to time and in various ways.  True enough, he abandoned a princely kingdom.  Even truer, he abandoned a wife and children, although the probability is that he left them provided for.  He abandoned attachment to things to the point where he was then beyond loss or grief, rather instead he was a part of what has been variously called Enlightenment, The True Self, even Nirvana.

In abstract and direct ways, The Buddha's achievements, although they seem splendid and immensely worthwhile, are achievements you regard as ideals, looking for ways to bring your immersion in and understanding of true story and of having a goal toward which you strive through understanding of yourself.

Grief and loss come to you the way spam emails come to your computer, sometimes from individuals and institutions you know, other times from sources you have yet to discover.  Grief and loss are by-products of a Reality you are learning and learning to incorporate in your stories.  It is still too early for you to know for a certainty if these multifarious strands and associations connecting the grief and losses in your life are a part of the overall source that allows you to proceed along the pathways you tread.

You do know you are essentially a happy person.  From time to time, you lose track of the pathway, mindful how much an accident it is that you ever found the pathway in the first place.  You are not surprised to lose it from time to time.  You would be supremely unhappy were you to lose the path for a prolonged time, a permanent time because you still have among your memories of lost things the memory of having been near desperate to find the path you thought you'd lost.

There is always a clue somewhere.

So long as you look, there will be clues.

Voyages and Ventures

In a metaphorical way, story is The Titanic, setting out on a voyage, with a clear destination in mind, demonstrating the goal or intent so essential to dramatic narrative. In a more personalized way, story is still The Titanic, now splendid in an attitude of preening, overwhelming certainty.  Its sleek, expansive presence proclaims itself as the embodiment of the marriage of design and technology to the point where all who read the story now see The Titanic as an arrogant force, thrusting itself upon the seas it will traverse, again and again, invulnerable.

Human nature being what it is, half the readers of the story will be identifying with the class-based implications of such superiority, taking comfort in rooting for The Titanic to complete the voyage.  Some of these rooters, if questioned, would agree how this splendid craft represents mastery of the elements.  Others, accustomed to life-long associations with fine cars, multiple homes, and pleasure craft of their own, would apply the descriptive term yare, with its connotations of speed, agility, and readiness for action.

Human nature applies as well to the other half of the readership, those who are hard-wired to root for some unforeseen disaster. Among this group would be religion-based conservatives, in their way appalled by the hubris of such a vessel taking on the cargo of invulnerability.  Others voting nay to the supremacy of The Titanic are seeing it as a symbol of social class wars in which sleekness and invulnerability are equated with opulence for its own sake.  

As the denizens of the Indianapolis suburb from Booth Tarkington's novel, The Magnificent Ambersons, waited for George Amberson Minafer to get his comeuppance, those taking offense at the mere presence of The Titanic were likely to have felt the universe a more just place when The Titanic met her fate on her maiden voyage in the North Atlantic on April 14, 1912.

Story is a venture, set in motion against a tide or force, with some concrete expectation of an outcome.  Story is also Dorothy Gale, suddenly not in Kansas any more, wanting to get home. Her goal and probabilities for success are much different than the story of The Titanic.  Dorothy is young, vulnerable, her expectations more along the probable fate of the unnamed migrant farm worker woman immortalized in Dorothea Lange's now iconic photograph, taken during the Great Depression in Nipomo, California.

But story is also the same Dorothy Gale, older and wiser than she was in The Wizard of Oz, now wanting to return to Oz and Princess Ozma, a person she’s come to consider her best friend.

The essential beauty of story resides in the fact of there being many more than one for all of us, engaging, exercising, and satisfying our various needs for participation against real and imagined oppositions, demonstrating how without our slightest overt awareness, we book passage on voyages and ventures necessary to satisfy our sense of connection with Reality.

When the story is real enough, deep enough, resonant with enough implication, we can give up our childhood notions of heroes and heroines, taking on instead darker roles in which we, for a change, are the betrayer rather than the betrayed, the cynic rather than the naif, the jester rather than the Lear or one of the Henrys.

Although you got on splendidly well with your family, on more than one occasion, you reread The Metamorphosis for the avowed mischief of rooting for Gregor Samsa, fully aware of the embarrassment he caused his close ones by the act of turning into a large insect.

Reading for you now is not the mere anodyne of rooting for someone who achieves a goal of status.  Reading becomes the solver of the crime, the presiding judge of equally tenebrous litigants, the witness who is moved beyond knee-jerk one-size-fits-all justice to a front row seat where he understands how all the potentials for human behavior reside in him.  With more reading, more observation, and certainly more writing, you see a potential for being able to get along with yourself and those about you.

Funny

There are times when the perspective of mindless wandering through your personal history will deliver an insight as fresh and bubbly as a home-delivered pizza.  The most recent of these wanderings produced an insight you'd not sought but one which, nevertheless you value.

Early in your efforts to learn the tools of your craft, you brought a rigid determination to early drafts, in large part because you believed you needed a well-developed plot before you could begin.  At those times, you were aware of a singular defect, your inability to plot.  

Now, you can look back with amusement at the implications.  Then you fumed, fussed, thought, wrote notes, balled them up, then tossed them at your wastepaper basket.  Plot or design came first.  By the time you had such a design, often after hours, possibly days, you were pissed.  You brought being pissed to work.  Your being pissed showed.  Even you could see the results, which were that the salient aspect of your story was that it was written by an author who was pissed.

After a time, you were not satisfied with the result.  You had no problem with being pissed about political or historical things.  You had even less trouble being angry at things being done to persons by their superiors or by persons who went around feeling superior without any valid claim to superiority.  But you had as yet developed no way to channel your attitudes of impatience with and at the causes of injustice.

More time down the rabbit hole.  You had to learn how to get around the plotting problem.  When you began your deliberations about story with a focus on characters, you began to see how possible it was becoming for you to begin stories without the need for a plot and, thus, without the impatience of yore, relating to your ability to plot.

Soon, plot began to find itself lower and lower on your list of priorities.  Character was, and in many ways still is, the driving force for you.  Let those who were tricky, even smooth plotters plot away.  You felt the relief of wanting no more to do with their approach.

Story began to matter because you were moving away from the definitions depending on plot.  After a time, you realized you were at the crossed purpose of thinking of story as driven by the very concept of plot you'd discredited.  More and more, you were admiring writers who seemed to be telling engaging stories without having obvious traces of plot.  To be sure, there were reversals, conflicts, betrayals, shifting of allegiance, and the like, but these always seemed to come from character, not because the author had arrived at a spot where a thing had to happen.

You were aware of pacing, letting you know, after a certain point, that something was going to happen and that the protagonist was not going to be happy about it. If the protagonist were happy about it, watch out for unanticipated holes in the floor.  Check the air pressure of the tires.

Ah, now we were beginning to get it, weren't we?  One day, working to finish the novel for which MacCampbell had got you a contract for one of the best advances yet to come your way, you remembered something Raymond Chandler had written about, introducing a character, waving a gun, coming in through the window.  Your new character came in during a remarkable scene which you had before you now and may have to try soon to replicate for its enhanced learning potential.

This was back before the days of wireless phones and cell phones.  Your protagonist was on the phone with his girlfriend, who was breaking up with him when the man with the gun came in through the window.  Your protagonist covered the telephone with his hand, then told the gunman he'd have to come back later for whatever it was he wanted.  The gunman was not about to come back later, nor was the protagonist's about to be ex girlfriend about to be happy with his explanation of what was going on.

When MacCampbell read the scene, he wrote in the margin words to the effect that you pretty well couldn't have got your protagonist in more trouble, and he especially liked the idea that the gunman had climbed in the wrong window, thinking your protagonist to be someone other than who he was.  Alas, MacCampbell wrote, it all has to go, not because it isn't any good but because it is funny and this publisher does not wish to publish funny.  Let's save it for a publisher who likes funny.

Due to some mistake, the scene remained in the manuscript, the publisher loved it to the point of deciding he was going to publish what he called romantic intrigues that had funny in them.

Story had more or less seemed funny to you before that event, but it has become increasingly a vehicle for some revelation you considered funny.  Looking at the stories in your about-to-be-published collection, you see this as a given, your equivalent of plot.  At times, you try to imagine yourself telling students, there should be some funny thing in a story; story should turn on funny.  Every one of the twelve stories in the collection turn on funny.

Thus, from funny, you taught yourself how to plot or how at least to inject into your narrative something that turns on funny and which demonstrates one of the unarticulated things you knew almost from the get-go.  Funny is dramatic.  Perhaps you should say that funny is not a joke, it has structure, comes about as a result of quirky, pestered, obsessive individuals who are following their dreams.

You don't need the tools you're told you need, at least not until you learn how to do without them.  That may not be funny but it is ironic.  You don't have to be pissed to write about being pissed.  You often get better results writing about people who are trying their hardest not to show how pissed they are becoming.  You watch them, trying to keep in control, much in the same way you watch a skilled actor doing drunk by taking extra precautions to present extreme sober.

That may not be funny.  

But it is.

The Naive Narrator: A Writer in Search

In your bookshelves, there are at least two collections of poetry from Ezra Pound, who, by some force of logic, you ought to detest on principle because of his attitudes to the cultural group from which you come and in which group you have by now long, tangled roots.

A you write this, tectonic plates are shifting under continents, some like waiters and bus boys removing table cloths in restaurants to make places for new servings.  Poetry is changing as well, whisking forms out from under you, substituting new ones, making of anapests and spondees and dactyls the equivalent of genuine Persian or Navajo rugs woven in China and, indeed, genuine Chinese rugs loomed in the Philippines.

Some years ago--it must have been many, because he was dead by 1987--you got into a discussion about Pound with the British poet, Peter Whigham, who, among other things, was surprised not only that you'd read his translations of the poems of Catullus but as well because you did not confuse his Catullus with the Roman Catulus, who among other things, had only one l.  Whigham was impressed that you could quote from both poets, an ability enhanced when and if you happen to be drinking.  

Disclosure:  At the time you were reading such poets as the Catullus/Catulus and Pound, you were doing a good deal of drinking.  At the moment of writing, you still have five bottles remaining from a six-pack of Sierra Nevada pale ale given you as a gift.  But there is the vestige of curiosity about how much drinking you'd have to do in order to remember such poetry.

Whigham is brought into this conversation because of his belief that the thing preventing Pound from being considered great is the fact of readers not taking the trouble to memorize lines of his.  You promptly responded:

"All things are a flowing,
Sage Heraclitus says;
But a tawdry cheapness
Shall reign throughout our days..."

You added several other bits and pieces from Pound's work, each one causing Whigham to say "Jesus" with increased intensity until, finally, by way of getting you to stop, he handed you a glass with a few inches of some amber liquid.  After one taste, you knew the liquid was not a single-malt whisky.  After another, you had a thought that the liquid might be some drug store or house brand bourbon.  You also recalled another line from Pound.

Whigham said "Jesus" again.  Then he said "All right."

The stuff Whigham poured was not all that bad, and your conversation soon drifted away from what you could remember of Pound's poetry to one of the specifics of why you liked his work and, indeed, the work of the poet, Kenneth Rexroth, who'd introduced you to Whigham.  

You knew Rexroth, and quite liked him, ever since the time you and he had got into a contest one evening while sitting on the deck of the Vedanta Temple, of seeing who could remember the most sexually oriented limericks.  His translations of Japanese and Chinese poets give you goose bumps and tics of reflexive response because of their poignancy.

The intended theme here is shifting and changing, which you have done in many ways by thinking of that one mention of Heraclitus, then attaching some of Pound's conflating the vision of change with the imagery of merchandise moving over the landscape like a tsunami wave. 

You were in a huge store today, seeking a new waste basket for your former, which had begun to speak to you as a poster child for entropy as it changed from an orderly, well-woven, even pleasing form into a chaos of tangles and jutting strands.  The waste basket pleased you at one time; it was a pleasure to toss things into it.  In recent weeks, you'd begun closing your eyes before tossing, thus missing more often than not, defeating the tangible purpose of a waste basked.

Somewhere along your way of changing from the earlier versions of you into the present one, you'd begun to realize how much story is about change.  Some characters change, particularly in longer stories.  Relationships change.  They become more comfortable, more knowing.  Or they become less comfortable, causing some of the participants to wonder in amazement at the previously hidden or unseen aspects of a partner.

Reflecting about change and its effects on your vision brings yet another metaphoric wave swirling about you, leaving deposits of silt as waves will do.  Moving close to a first-year anniversary, you are aware of the times you catch yourself reading newsprint and text without wearing reading glasses.  This is the result of what passes for surgery related to having the lenses you were issued at birth replaced with some new technology in which your vision is more acute.  Your once dominant eye delights in what it sees, yet is shouted down with some frequency by the formerly less aggressive eye to the point where you find yourself indulging the game of closing the dominant eye, making up for what the then weaker may have missed.

With your new vision, you find yourself focusing on small details, noting the contexts in which they stop you in your tracks with heart thumping and skin tingling at the excitement of things you may have missed before or things you are finally coming to see on your own, not so much with the new lenses of technology as with the lenses of your own education.

Some years ago, you began receiving phone calls and notes from your Alma Mater, suggesting you were at an age where you were at the peak of your earning curve and wouldn't you like to remember the place that made it possible for you?  This opened a fearsome and cynical portal for you.  To your credit, you took these solicitations with good humor.  Because they were funny and because you were able to see it.

The matter is always funnier when the target is you.  You learned from a master.  When you discuss point of view in a classroom or workshop setting, you can't help winking at yourself when you get to the naive and innocent narrator.

A Writer Prepares

You might not been aware of the Constantin Stanislavsky book, An Actor Prepares, if Virginia had not given you her copy, shortly before her death.  Stanislavsky was a major figure in the modern theater, training actors and directing them.  Using his techniques, some of Stanislavsky's pupils came to this country, starting workshops in which  techniques known as The Method or Method Acting were presented to aspiring actors.

How do you assess Virginia's influence on you?  Let's begin with a motion picture released in 1942, a biography of the athlete, Lou Gehrig, unfortunate enough to become better known for the degenerative affliction amyotropic lateral sclerosis than for his considerable career as a first baseman and power hitter for the New York Yankees baseball team.

At the time you saw the movie, you were more a fan of the National League Brooklyn Dodgers, in no small measure because their broadcasts were done by Walter Lanier "Red" Barber, who spoke as though he'd taken a bite out of a fluffy biscuit with a smear of honey.  As much as you were fond of baseball at the time, you were fonder of Red Barber's conversational descriptions, laced with enough metaphor and sense of enjoyment to have you sometimes gripping your shoulders in wonder.

Lou Gehrig died in 1941, not yet forty.  The motion picture was a tribute to his life, cut short by the neurodegenerative disease that would be named after him.  In it, there was a scene portraying Gehrig's college days, a baseball scholarship at Columbia University, where he waited tables at a fraternity house to earn spending money.

The fraternity brothers pranked Gehrig, as portrayed by Gary Cooper, by having a seductive Southern belle type young lady flirt with Gehrig. Young as you were, you appreciated the flirtatious lady.  Forty-some-odd years later, you sat in the den of Virginia's home, watching the scene on a TV screen as she explained how she portrayed the flirtatious lady.

Your friendship with her began around 1980, when you and she began discussing such things as acting, acting techniques, and how an actor prepared for a role, all of this coming from seeing her on occasion at the Santa Barbara Vedanta Temple.

She spoke and you listened until March 28, 1986, when her emphysema symptoms became more than she could bear and she took her life.  In many ways, you hear her talking about her craft, her studies, associations, her tumultuous marriage to the actor Yul Brynner, and of most interest to you, her time on stage and in actor's workshops.  You've read and reread many of the books on acting she recommended, in particular the one by a pal of hers, Uta Hagen.

Variations on the original Stanislavsky teachings were bound to proliferate as more actors, impressed with the techniques, turned to coaching themselves.  A friend of yours from the Santa Barbara Writers' Conference, Davida Hurwin, studied with Jeff Corey, whom you knew from your days at UCLA.

On your own, you discovered another acting coach, Sanford Meisner, reading his books and listening to him on filmed presentations.  Almost without thinking about it, you began subjecting your own fiction to acting exercises and approaches, growing more convinced the actor and the writer were siblings of intent, each wishing to portray memorable characters who seemed to be the engine of the story in which they appear.

You're trying to recall the first time you told a student or a client to imagine their characters as actors, then instructed them to direct the characters to perform the story as opposed to relying on what you call authorial description.  Your best guess is back in the mid-to-late 1990s at USC and at the Santa Barbara Writers' Conference, which means if not twenty years ago, close to it.

The last prolonged work of nonfiction you did, The Fiction Writer's Handbook, makes ample reference to such concepts, including, in its early pages, a brief essay on the process of actioning.  This process, a collaboration between the actor and director, causes the actor how to express physicality, the movement that goes along with the dialogue the actor delivers, the pace with which it is delivered, and what things the actor does while speaking.

There is more, of course, but not enough.  Besides, now that the collection of short stories has been put to production and will be appearing in advanced reading copies in the next week, the time has come to begin something new that has been rattling around like the loose change in your pockets.

Thus:

A Character Prepares:

Acting Techniques and Wisdom to Make Your Fiction Come to Life

  Based on An Actor Prepares by Constantin Stanislavsky and Works 

by Other Noted Acting Teachers

Set aside Lightly

The imaginative and volatile writer, Dorothy Parker, once wrote a scathing review of a book in which she said, "This is not a book to be set aside  lightly.  It should be thrown across the room with great force."

The set-aside-lightly test comes into play in every book you read and, quite to the point, to the books and stories you write.  This test allows readers to walk away from a misadventure.  It also allows you to back off for perspective.

The perspective defines itself.  Continue reading or stop right here?  If you happen to be at the writing end, the perspective asks of you "Why is nothing happening here?  Why is there no engagement or related sense of connection?  

If you focus long enough, the answer will come to you with your own material.  If nothing seems to be happening in something you're reading, you can peek ahead to see if you can find a place where the story has returned.  But this has a caveat:  If you don't find something quite soon, adios.  Spanish for set aside.

Some of your favored tellers of stories are those who present characters you are not able to set aside.  As a reader, writer, editor, book reviewer, and teacher, you find yourself trying in various ways to articulate the reasons why you are so drawn to the writers you admire and, by extension of that admiration, find their characters so compelling.

You play about with words such as vulnerability, which to you means an ability to be hurt or blindsided in some way.  If a character is vulnerable, she may not only not achieve the goal that got her into the story in the first place, she may suffer disappointment, humiliation, or loss of status, one particular aspect of status being freedom or independence.  

Because of a current close involvement with Henry James's 1881 novel, Portrait of a Lady, you are able to track the vulnerability of its protagonist, Isabel Archer, on your own terms, you are also able to measure the fact of your students, all in their twenties, concerned with her welfare.  Since the context of your class is a reading-for-writers atmosphere in which the students are required to write, not about Isabel Archer but their own characters, you are curious to see why they care, then put their concerns alongside yours.

A major concern is the sense of independence real persons and characters seem to strive for, an independence to pursue personal interests however trivial they might seem to others.

You also notice your continued engrossment in narratives where protagonists have difficult choices to make, where there are risks and the consequences of failure.  One of the most difficult times for you, with the possible exception of your middle school years, was the five or so years roughly between twenty-five and thirty, where felt the oppressed and disengaged sense of being at a complete distance from any connection to the things you wished to be doing.  The only pole stars in your heavens were two novels, learning experiences, the first of which was written entirely with a desk pen from a failed construction company, written on stationery from that company.The title and more or less theme came from a popular song with wide currency during your extreme youth, "The Object of My Affection."  The other was a novel set in Mexico, from the days when you lived over a fireworks factory, and were awakened every morning by a man attempting to play the Gilbert and Sullivan song, "A Wandering Minstrel, I" on a sour coronet.

Neither of these novels were bad in terms of their story or reach, but there were moments in each where they could be set aside while explanations were trotted out and displayed.  The novel set in Mexico got you a literary agent who got a publisher to read it all the way through, asking you to consider some changes that caused you to understand how you didn't know the material as well as you thought.

There you were, in a situation you'd meet again, face to face, in the kitchen of the poet, Kenneth Rexroth, when you happened upon the novelist Thomas Sanchez, explaining in resonant self-pity to a young woman how, his fine novel, Rabbit Boss to the contrary notwithstanding, he was a failed novelist.  Your situation then was being in a place where you'd not even failed yet.  You hadn't yet grown to the point of an articulate dream you could utter.

That night in Rexroth's kitchen, you were all right.  You'd been through the failure and moved beyond it, were in fact on your way to another failure and the need to make a choice.  In a matter of weeks, you'd become the editor in chief of a publishing venture you were already finding ways to set aside.  You'd think you were getting a bit tipsy at lunch with an editor pal who ordered yet another bottle of wine before taking you in to the Century City office of his boss, introducing the two of you, then leaving you, tipsy and bewildered while his boss said you ought to consider becoming his editor in chief and moving back to New York.

Books set aside.  Projects set aside.  Choices set aside.  

There you were, some time later, in New York, getting out of a taxi on Sixth Avenue, being hailed by the man who'd offered you the job earlier.  "Can't stay out of New York, can you?"  he called.  You smiled. The joke was, you were about to interview with a man who was a publishing legend.  In the interview, you were quickly aware you did not have chemistry, did not like one another.  "Why in hell should I hire you?"  he asked.  With a blaze of speed, you saw yourself a few years hence, his editor in chief, which was not what you wished to be at all. You wished for California.  For trees with oranges and tangerines.  For brown, splotchy hills, jade-colored oceans, and for sun, as far as you could see.  You wished for ghost towns and adobe ruins and vast expanses of desert playa where once there had been ocean. "Why the fuck wouldn't you?"  was your response.

To this day, there have been times when you have set yourself aside, but there were also times when you picked yourself back up to read the editorial notes in order to begin the revision.