I'd Love to Stay, But I'm Already Late for Another Story

When was the last time you had time do do something you wished to do without thinking you were in effect performing an act of defiance?

Most of the television drama you've been watching this year is cable rather than network, most of it crime or suspense related.  The few variations are apt to be one-off dramas or a specific miniseries with a specific number of episodes.

Your avowed purpose is to watch the behavior and performance of the actors rather than the quality of story. This has to do with your book project underway, which you've more or less begun to outline or do riffs in these Blog paragraphs.  The quality of story is high at one end, with some drama such as Fargo, Longmire, and Ray Donovan, and True Detective notable for the quality of writing as well as acting.

One thing you've begun to notice in such material has you convinced you are getting unintended results.  The thrust of your book in progress is to help writers of books gain better understanding of their characters through a close examination of acting techniques.  The results you're getting work on a scene-by-scene basis.

In basic terms, two or more persons gather somewhere to pursue their individual agendas, in the process revealing textual and emotional data which the viewer will put in a more holistic process.  This is no surprise or revelation to you.  In fact, the only surprise or revelation for you comes should there be scenes where the story does not convey hidden layers of meaning and intent.

The thing you've noticed is that at least one of the characters is in a hurry to leave the scene because he or she has to be somewhere else.  A minor variation on this theme is that at least one of the characters wishes he or she were elsewhere.

Stage-trained actors know to look at a larger picture.  If their character is in a particular scene, the actor "knows" or invents where the character "was" previously, then comes to understand as well where the character is going next.  This kind of knowledge has the potential for effect on how the actor delivers lines and what body language and gestures are to be used while delivering these lines.  Developing fiction writers need to be more aware of this approach.

Even in the more laid-back genera of comedy and romance, there is still a need for a focused sense of the present moment, which conveys the awareness that these are characters involved in the midst of a story rather than hanging out in Real Time.  The background for any story is this sense of immediacy.  Within this immediacy, someone wishes to leave, is in a hurry to leave, is expected elsewhere, perhaps even to the point of having a romantic tryst somewhere else, right after this present scene is over.

Story is growing more visual as the years of this century click off.  The narrative is becoming more hyperlinked and intense, reflecting any number of contemporary pressures and conventions.  For many viewers and readers, drama and story are exquisite forms of entertainment.  They become transportation away from the world of the need to work two or more jobs.

Drama and story give us temporary respite from the sometime social pressures of social media, the sense of being tracked by telemarketing drones.  They insulate us from the awful sense of having scant time to pursue any meaningful personal activities that do not contribute in some way or another with what we consider our chores and duties as we seek to make a living and be a responsible individual.  In this sense, they serve a healthier alternative to narcotics and denial.

All the more reason why dialogue--the dramatic information characters exchange--does not have the luxury of going on for extended paragraphs, in the manner of Ayn Rand, taking on with that odd Randian duality of antipathy for the state and the evangelical zeal to float that antipathy.

Scenes can't go on for too long.  Someone is late.  Someone is being summoned out of bed to come to a crime scene or a board meeting or an appointment with a marriage counsellor.  Someone is thus becoming frustrated because he or she does not get quality time from the significant other they pursued in order to have a Life's Companion.

In an interesting and lovely irony, sometime when you have finished a class or a meeting with a client, and see a restaurant sign that intrigues you, you experience a kind of Cosmic heartburn.  There is no one waiting for you, pissed she has not heard from you all day.  The sign is a large, flamboyant neon, Noodle City.  You can already taste the slide of a well-brewed bowl of pho, running down your throat, or a bowl of noodles with sliced vegetables, swimming in a succulent lagoon of soup.

No one for you to rush to see, no one to get pissed at you for forgetting to call when you'd got caught up writing the chapter you'd been struggling to meet up with for weeks.

In Search of Egg Cream and Story

You count yourself fortunate to have a large menu of writers who impress you well beyond the point where there is no thought of emulating their themes and techniques or your ability to be imitative of them, should you entertain such thoughts.

At one time in your earlier years, being impressed by a particular writer meant trying to capture his or her style.  You soon saw through the futility of this.  Even if you were able to do a focused imitation, why would anyone wish it when they could have the real thing.

You read these writers with a precarious mixture of admiration, envy, frustration with your own visions and techniques, and a lingering sense of helpless wherein you are transformed into the literary equivalent of what a junior high school band sounds like.

For reasons not clear to you, the junior high school band metaphor is far from a reach; you still hear the sound of your junior high school band, whipped into a lather by Mrs. Perry, clangorous in your memory after all these years.  When you consider some of your contemporary favorite writers, you hear with your mind's ears The Emerson String Quartet or some of the early hard bop groups of Art Blakey or Horace Silver, leaving you the uncomfortable comparison to your own sound.

The sound is your sound.  You own it and you own up to hopes of hearing yourself come in at a better quality.  You experience a sense of helplessness of the sort you associate with the helplessness Jack Benny had in maintaining his composure when in the presence of George Burns.

Among contemporary writers who impress you is Thomas McGuane who, even today, appeared before you in the form of a fresh short story in the current issue of The New Yorker.  McGuane owns you.  The moment you enter his world, your mind begins racing.  You see an outrage, a concatenation of missed connections, blunted agendas, unwanted connections, and messy, stampeding connections with such elements as the universe and society.

McGuane is also one of a handful of writers you favor and whom you seem existentially unable to sit down to read a work through in one sitting or, if the work is longer, in a matter of a few days.  At the discovery of the new McGuane story and the first few paragraphs, you had to set the story aside to b rave the Friday go-home traffic southbound, hopeful of staying ahead of the surge all the way to Los Angeles, where you were scheduled for a reading and book signing of your recent short story collection.

Seated at a remote rear yard table at the Cafe Luna in Summerland this morning, you managed several paragraphs before someone unintentionally spilled coffee over you and the magazine, in effect foreclosing on your reading time until after your workshop had ended, by which time the pages of the magazine had formed what appeared to be an inseparable bond.

You managed a few more paragraphs of the story on line, enough to see how McGuane's art imitates life to the extent that his story took some wicked, unanticipated, whim-based turns which may or may not have coincided with whims of your own and insidious ways in which a yen or yearning becomes transformed into obsession.

You were overcome with a desire for an egg cream, a drink which has neither an egg nor cream in its chemistry.  An egg cream does contain milk, which you do have in your refrigerator, although your milk has been non fat for some time, while the egg creams of your past are of whole milk.  Egg creams also contain Fox's U-bet Chocolate syrup,

which may open some doors to allow substitution of Hershey's or Bosco, or,even more on the ugh side, any generic chocolate syrup.  Such substitutions will not do.  An egg cream, a proper egg cream, has as its constituent chocolate presence Fox's U-bet chocolate syrup. One inch of Fox's into a glass.  One inch of cold whole milk.  Now the difficult part,  Fill the rest of the glass with seltzer water, which is to say the old-fashioned siphon, pressure bottle.  Such things are not easy to come.  An ordinary bottle of carbonated water is a half-way measure because, alas, it does not produce a frothy collar of foam, the egg cream equivalent of a head.

This is where the day began to get away from you.  A yen is not to be satisfied with half-way measures.  The local source for Fox's U-bet does not have siphon bottles.  The sympathy with which you are regarded when you discuss the nostalgia of the egg cream turns to borderline irritation when you bring in devices that will in fact provide enough spritz to provoke a collar.
You are driven to Amazon, which is borderline taboo because of its attitude to book publishers, thus the following devices seem beyond your reach:

Thanks to some quality time in the microwave, you are able to get in a bit more of the McGuane story, which is also about things gone well beyond the pale of the ordinary.  You have also gone beyond this pale because unless you plan to drink a great any egg creams, your cost per unit is fated for an upward surge.


Fresh in your mind's eye is not the  idealized egg cream but Thomas McGuane's genial face, eyes twitching with mischief.  Whether in person or at a distance through a story, he has become one of the growing cadre of authors who drag you kicking and screaming from expectations of the ordinary.  This is a place you must identify for yourself and find at all costs.

Being out of the ordinary means more than knowing Gelson's Market has Fox's U-bet Syrup or that the classic egg cream must have seltzer.  Out of the ordinary means places you must go, persons you meet there, time you spend there in thrall to some yearning or other.

There is the additional fact that the walls of your kitchen, much of your gas range, and a good deal of the appliances adjacent the toaster are freckled with flecks of Fox's U-bet Syrup stains.  But that is another matter.

Tourist Trips and Traps

Travel is a risky business these days.  You can be seated behind the passenger from Hell on a red eye from LAX to JFL.  You can be made to empty your pockets and shaving gear, suffer three or four infants yowling out The Anvil Chorus on a Virgin flight to Gatwick or Heathrow.  These are only the tip of the iceberg.

The day in which you are not reminded you live in an active tourist destination is a rare one.  Vehicular traffic in your city is mottled with the extravagance of out-of-state license plates.  Fleets of stretch limousines prowl such go-to areas as the courthouse, the Botannical Gardens, Stearns Wharf, and that quintessential symbol of the city, Mission Santa Barbara.

On your way to morning coffee, you with some frequency are beset by large vehicles with exaggerated shapes, meant to haul large groups of tourists about the notional whimsy of local neighborhoods.  Your attention is often co-opted by serious-looking individuals, consulting maps in confused speculation. On frequent occasion, you are invited to participate in the speculations.  

If your opinion of a worthwhile restaurant becomes a part of the speculation, you feel the squeeze of moral choice.  Do you, because you live here, keep your favorites secret because, after all, you discovered them only after long experiment?  Or do you assume your inquisitors want--actually want--the more tourist oriented venues?

Your reading materials feature inducements for travel, and with the possible exception of real estate salespersons and career coach sorts, a significant part of the work force here has something to do with tourism and transportation to exotic destinations.

Through the simple pleasures of eavesdropping at coffee houses or hidden meals at the restaurants you're tempted to hide from tourists, or while standing in cashier lines at various markets, you process the numbers of individuals who live here, visiting other tourist destinations.  Where ever its origins and destinations, tourism ranks among the more democratic activities.  Even those on bare-minimum budgets have options of free transportation to gaming destinations.

Destination is the key word here.  Whether you are reading or writing, destination becomes a default factor.  True enough, one motive for reading is to gain information.  Yet another motive is to gain experience. Still another is escape.  Being informed, experienced, and transported are potential destinations you seek in much the same way you seek these things through real time travel to real time places.

Here, the picture blurs in interesting ways.  Stories are destinations we have been "sold" on by their authors, but also by critics, teachers, and peers.  Among the many things you have come to believe about story, because of your own information, experience, and escape, is the salient belief that all story is a representation of an alternate universe.  

You do not limit this belief to the alternate universe of science fiction or fantasy.  Story impresses you because of the lingering sense that, were you to visit the locale of a particular story, you would encounter the characters from that story.  At the same time, your visit to the place of the story may overlap with the visit of another reader, but it also varies from the other reader's experience of the story.

Story also impresses you because, like the story or not, you now have some degree of connection with it.  The connection is braided with feelings, the tantalizing effects of speculation about the characters and what you would do and how you would feel in such places.

The same duality of interpretation of story inheres in response to a place and, indeed, the actual persons of that actual place.  Check the Internet comments on a given restaurant in a particular city.  One reviewer will come away preferring to have had cat food and thinking dismissive thoughts about the waitstaff while the next reviewer will speak with passion about making ritual returns to this particular city and this special restaurant.

You have many causes to envy an individual for her or his extensive travel experiences.  To pile more onus on that envy, there are your feelings about people you know who take regular vacations, reminding you of your own use of leisure time.  But you recall with the special, braided and complex warmth of long, close friendship,your conversations with Barnaby Conrad, wherein he envied what he considered your intensive reading experiences.  While he spoke, you were envying his travel experiences.

There are enjoyable similarities between the reading and writing aspects of travel as compared to the pack your suitcase and book a flight aspects of actual travel.  There are distinct differences, but for the moment, these don't concern you.  Your concerns have to do with the comparisons of travel agents, critics, reviewers, stunning destinations, awful destinations, no hot water, no suspense or concern for characters, no fluffed-up pillows with chocolate bars, no burning curiosity to read another title from the same writer.

You're concerned with the kinds of tour guides Mark Twain introduced you to in The Innocents Abroad, and the kinds of travel agents who, mindful of a potential bonus for getting you to book a particular tour, are all over you with verbal taunts and hints.  

Travel is of equal risk when the book is bad because of an unreal sense of destination or when the characters seem to have phoned in their participation, or when the alternate world for which you'd had such high hopes fails to materialize.

Literary Stretch Marks

Stretch marks appear on the body as narrow vertical grooves, reminiscent of laugh lines around the mouth or crow's feet about the brow ridges.  They betray a rapid weight loss or the creeping determination of sustained gain. In effect, they are scars, resulting from tears within layers of skin.  

For many individuals who have them, and depending where they are located, stretch marks represent a continuous challenge.  Even if they can be camouflaged or hidden under clothing or undergarments, their host knows they are there, influencing the behaviors of denial or rationalization.

With a combination of exercise and disciplined approach to a healty lifestyle, persons who have stretch marks can remove significant amounts of their traces. In some instances, these scars may be removed altogether.  

For many, however, stretch marks are a lingering presence, a benchmark of excess or deprivation.  For others still, stretch marks provoke considerable interior monologues and questions related to the advisability of tattoo.

Stretch marks often appear in the stories of emerging writers as descriptions and explanations.  Neither of these is needed to any significant degree, but such is the nature of many storytellers in the early stages of their career that they see descriptions and explanations as indications of their writing ability.  Emerging readers collude in this belief.  They often mistake elegant descriptions and explanations for story.

Other literary stretch marks may be seen in the form of long, conversational exchanges.  Such exchanges are offered between quotation marks as dialogue, but they are in fact little more than descriptions, thinly disguised as narration, but sandwiched between quotation marks.

With a combination of a focused approach to reading the works of other writers and heeding suggestions from that wonderful outlier of a book on editing, Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Browne and Dave King, writers can acquire an awareness of the places in their own composition where stretch marks dwell, waiting for opportunities to spring forth and proliferate.

Not all literary stretch marks leave scars.  Habit words, for example, leave the kinds of irritation that proliferate the way flies and ants seem to know when you're interested in spending quality time outside in general and dining al fresco in particular. 

Any word can become a habit word, if used often enough.  You've spent a few years, trying to pluck the word "accordingly" out of your tool kit, and because consequently seems like a nice alternate, you ding that as well, because it is an adverb.  What about "as a result"?  Another habit word you've put out an APB and BOLO for is "and," which even now you find yourself slipping in more than you wish.  

Not to forget your own personal fingernail on the blackboard sound, although who has blackboards these days?  You go well out of your way to avoid using "that," consulting your own secret, inner editorial Fitbit to measure the number of thats in an entire manuscript.  Two thats on a page are enough to set off your inner cringe alarm.  

While we're on the subject of habit words, how about all the times you begin sentences, even paragraphs, with "Not to forget," which has become overdone as a substitute for "furthermore," or "in addition."  You'd be remiss if you did not also add to the list of stretch mark wannabes such tropes as "Then," "And then," and "Then, too," all of which, if used with care, move the text right along without attracting undue attention.

While not a habit word trope as such, beginning sentences with the word "it" will bring the first cousin of the stretch mark into play as a speed bump, causing the reader to stop for a moment to question the provenance of the it.  Starting a sentence with "as" brings in the potential mischief of cutting the momentum of meaning in two.  "As he entered the room, he heard music."  The effect there is to flatten out the emphasis.  Which was more important, his entry into the room, his hearing the music, or the simultaneous combination of the two?


Stretch marks also appear when too many gerunds appear in close succession.  "Reaching the top floor while reloading his gun, then securing the safety catch, he--"  Whoa.  Just whoa, although you might wish to give some thought to putting the word "just" on your B list.  Just sayin'.  There is a difference between reading text and hearing it read aloud.  A clutter of gerunds in rapid succession sounds like the after effects of cafeteria lunches on middle school tummies, right after meal time.  

Almost forgot another potential stretch mark culprit, ending a sentence with "this."  "Are you happy with this?"  Am I happy with what?

The most significant questions of all:  Do you grasp the broadband potential of stretch marks? Have you taken the necessary precautions to insure your manuscript does not go out into the world while still displaying them.

The Pheremones of Drama

While on your way to the kitchen not too many days ago, you came upon your cat, Goldfarb, staring with great focus at something beyond your own line of vision.  Prompted by curiosity, you moved closer to the window that would give you a better perspective.  You could still not make out the subject of his interest, yet your curiosity continued, even to the point of supplying you possible scenarios.

So far as your relationship with Goldfarb is concerned, if he wishes something from you, he will find a direct way to communicate his wish.  For the better part of five more minutes, you watched a cat who was watching something you could not see.  

This continued until you were reminded of Angus, the Border Collie companion of your late wife.  Angus, and most of the Border Collies of your experience, have a fixed gaze of an intensity which they use as an effective tool in herding sheep or cattle.  Intense as Goldfarb's gaze was, you reckon the intensity of one of Angus's stares at least two times more intense yet.

Goldfarb's gaze was the curiosity of a cat, linked to one or more of his basic wiring circuitry.  A bird?  A dust mote?  A spider web?  Not knowable beyond speculation.  Angus and his kin use the stare to convince their target of the absolute priority of their goal, which relates to the herding training wired into Border Collies and the additional maneuvers they are taught.  

From time to time, you are likely to exhibit some of the ability to focus on a thing or task, perhaps even to the point of multitasking on subsequent strategy, which is to say, what you will do next, just as you acknowledge the potential for Goldfarb and Angus to click into a locked focus and begin to formulate a subsequent move.

No surprise that such observations nudge you into comparisons with story or, better still, an awareness of story you may have not articulated to yourself as of this moment.  A simple and direct comparison between the observations of a cat , a Border Collie, and Story in general suggests that all three share the common denominator of immediate action.

Story is immediate action.  There are occasions when the chronology is shifted about to bring in the relevant events from the past called backstory.  Most readers from about the age of Middle-grade or pre-YA readers onward are able to accommodate a non-linear sense of time because they have had intense personal experience with it.  

From about the middle teens onward, whether we are consciously aware of doing so or not, we focus on the immediate present, perhaps yanked back into past time because we've remembered something we'd forgotten, but as well drawn into the future in recognition of a need to have a particular task engaged at a certain time or to validate the assessment of personal obligations by such future-related thoughts as, "After nine p.m., I will have no obligations and my time will be my own for the next several hours."

Story is not only categorized by genre, some thoughts are given to the potential age range of readers, based on the linearity or complexity of time sequencing and such other sophistication as social, moral, and psychological conditions.

Narrative filtration such as point of view, reliability or naivete of the narrator, and authorial presence are among the qualities of story that have evolved over the centuries.  Without having specific critical vocabulary or training can give accurate estimates of when a story was composed, their clues coming from the awareness of change in narrative techniques.

You'd be hard pressed to identify with any accuracy your awareness of when you were first "in" a story you were reading, absorbed to the point where you'd lost contact with the present moment of the time frame you were in.  You were too busy being absorbed by and, thus, "in" the immediacy of the story itself.  

You do know you are aware of such transportation now, which is one reason why reading is so pleasurable for you, and also because this is the sort of transportation for which you strive when you compose fiction and nonfiction.  This is also the sort of transportation you have in mind when you edit your own work or the work of someone else, and indeed when you present such matters to your writing classes.

When dialogue becomes too conversational, what you call "chatty," it ceases to be dialogue, transformed into non-dramatic things such as explanations or defensiveness or screed or morality.  When story stops being immediate, it devolves into the same kinds of narrative analogs to the things dialogue ceases to become when it descends into conversation.

Story and dialogue stride along with purpose.  They are worthy components of the dramatic effect.  They support one another, engage one another, exude the same kinds of chemistry we find in two or more actors radiating a kind of chemistry that becomes the pheromones  of drama.

Sisyphys, the One-Trick Pony of Mythology and Literature

Your recent bouts of binging on TV cop shows that were either cancelled--Detroit 187--or sensibly allowed to run its dramatic arc--The Badge--helped you see things about ensemble casts and story shapes necessary for planned chapters in the book you are in effect writing to get back into the two novels causing you the most itch.

The book is about how characters need a toolkit of nuances, denials, neuroses, pluck and a swagger that frightens off any hope of luck or good fortune or even earned credits that will offset mistakes, bad fortune, and worst of all, lousy judgment.

You were watching to see how various characters distinguished themselves in nonverbal and verbal ways, watching much in the same way you read certain writers you much admire or find tendentious and plodding.  In the process, the need came over you to return to your notes on characters you consider iconic from dramatic and print backgrounds.

You have considerable notes on Ahab, Inspector Jaivert, Don Quixote, Jim Hawkins, Long John Silver, Sir Wilfrid of Ivanhoe and the two ladies in his life, Rebecca and Rowena.  You seem to have had ongoing fascination with Miss Rebecca Sharp and, to a lesser extent, Scarlet O'Hara, and in more recent years, you've settled into preoccupations with some of the characters from Middlemarch, notably Edward Casaubon, the pompous scholar. For almost as long as you've known him, you find yourself as well fascinated by Charles Ryder from Evelyn Waugh's masterful Brideshead Revisited.  

Although this list of characters appears random, they seem to you to be wrapped in tight coils about the armature of yearning.  The one individual from myth who joins this list of focal characters, King Sisyphus, also occupies your notes to the point where you have even gone off on riffs improvising  on the theme of the chore he is doomed to repeat through eternity.  

You see these other characters to the point where they take on the roles of friends in your life, individuals with whom you were once close, say classmates or workmates, individuals you pause to wonder about the way you wonder whatever happened to Stan Cook or Gabe Jellen or Jerry Shamrock, all individuals with whom you exchanged dreams, fantasies, arguments, and long dinners where, long after the food was gone and the bottles were all depleted, the crazy tailoring of friendship reverberated into the pre-dawn hours.

Now, when you think of Sisyphus, there is a hint of the drunken camaraderie of your earlier years.  "Love you, man.  I totally accept you can't hang out any more.  Got your rock to tend to.  Awesome you're so committed to it."

At one point, you'd got to thinking of him answering you, "Fuck you, man.  Fuck you and your patronizing hypocrisy. I've got Albert Camus on record as understanding my unique situation.  I don't fucking need you to love me or think he understands me.  You don't understand me or what I do."

You might suspect such words would have put a dent in your relationship, get you thinking, Fuck you, Sisyphus,  You're not so much.  Just because you have your work cut out for you and can engage it unselfishly, I can remember times when the simple act of thinking about you and the eternal preoccupation with your rock that Zeus put on you, and I could feel your vibes of resentment.

Then, the realization came to you.  

You're caught up in the same round of activity.  You break out a page or two, hone it down, move it around, check for all the weasel words and passivity, perhaps even think you've seen the last of it, so you set it aside to mellow.  

Some people brine chickens or turkeys or even roasts.  You set aside stories and essays, stand-alone pieces or stories or drafts of chapters. A brined turkey is okay to cook but a story you set aside does not necessarily age for the better.  Maybe it was a bad idea all the time, too diffident or nervous to tell you right out it wasn't what you'd hoped when you started.

Then you get to thinking of old Sisyphus.  Love you man, but you aren't so fucking much with your rock, you know.  Other persons have it just as bad, some have it even worse than you and that rock of yours.

You try that kind of messing with a manuscript.  You fucking try revision or such extremes as throwing away a third-person point of view, switching to first or maybe multiple!  Go ahead.See how a writer's got a real problem, nailing the story or the narrative or conveying the essential information without any hitches.  You, even offering some of us a cut to ghost write your memoir because you've gotta be out on the field, keeping the rock moving.

Well fuck you, Sisyphus.  We've got to keep narrative moving, keep the story cranking, coming up with the kind of nuance you wouldn't understand with your one-trick-pony routine, you and your goddamned rock.

Character Shove

When there is any doubt about shape, structure, and intent in story, your best answers come from a long-winded conversation with the paradigm for the mystery/suspense tale.  There, the goal is to identify the who in “whodunit?”, the why?, or motive, and the how?, or means of committing the crime.  

The mystery/suspense tale goes right to work, up-staging and stealing scenes from the fable or moral by offering the reader an opportunity to empathize with one or more characters tasked to solve the problem at hand, bring some anti-social force to justice, and in the process restore the fabric of community.  

Ernest Hemingway called out attention to the bigger-than-life fact that "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark 
Twain called Huckleberry Finn.”  In similar literary epistemology, most readers of mystery/suspense fiction know and any number of agenda-bearing moralist writers understand this salient fact:  All dramatic narrative comes from the story of detection.  

The unrelenting forces of evolution nudge and shove storytelling narrative ahead, like the mysterious movement of rocks that seem to move on their own volition, across the scorched floor of Racetrack Playa in Death Valley.  We now understand the physical forces urging the rocks forward. Geologists have identified the phenomena as a condition called ice shove.

 Thanks to a protracted bout of watching old and new cop shows on TV and haunting local theaters for stage dramas of any sort, you’ve begun to get a clearer picture of the movement of characters across the scorched narrative of story.  Your findings are subjective rather than scientific, although they do involve the observation of chemistry.  You call the phenomena character shove.

The story of detection started its way in the world focused on the musings and ratiocination of a single, bright, quirky detective. This gives us the outlier minds of Auguste Dupin, who might have been Edgar Allen Poe’s secret alter ego, or of the rose-growing detective, Sgt. Cuff, from Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone.  

Within a short span of time, writers knowledgeable in the construction of story began borrowing from earlier traditions, which were the equivalent of the buddy system, a narrative wherein conversations between characters, say Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, advanced the story beyond the limiting platform of one character on stage alone, thinking convenient, defining thoughts for the reader.

Thus came into being the buddy system, paired or partnered characters, chosen to advance the story through the dialectic of a chemistry where the consistent product was edgy, cantankerous differences of opinion.  From one of the earliest buddy teams of the slave, Xanthias and the god, Dionysius, appearing as a middle-aged man in Aristophanes’ The Frogs, to such modern teams as Rust Cohle and Martin Hart of True Detective and the electric combination of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson as portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, the chemistry of the buddy system drives story.

Among your observations about the effects on story being nudged on it by the evolutionary progress, there are these:  Story is becoming more visual.  Characters are driving story toward extensive trespasses on convention.  The lack of proper chemistry between characters can leave any given story at the starting line.

What to make of all this, and how to get it going:

1. Consult a recent edition of The New York Times Book Review.
2. Find the section in which the current best-selling titles are described in a single sentence.  Exaggerated example:  A moody Danish prince is persuaded to avenge his father’s murder.  Read at least twenty of these.
3. Write a similar log-line sentence for a novel you wish to write. Better if you do not know how your novel will end.
4. Compile a list of as many of the characters as you can to dramatize the novel.
5. Decide which character or characters will be the narrative filter (POV).
6. Decide which character or characters will be the narrative buddy of your protagonist.  Examples:  Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, M.D.; Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin; Superman and Lois Lane.
7. Write at least one improvised scene between your principal character or characters and every other character on your ensemble list.  The improvised scenes need not be related to the theme of the novel, their purpose being to let you see and feel the dynamic between all the characters in your cast.
8. Write a brief bio of each character, including their esteem, lack thereof, or outright animosity toward one another.  Make sure you have at least one case of ambiguity, a splendid example of this being the one between Walter White and Jesse Pinkman in Breaking Bad. Think about social, ethnic, age, and other societal markers.  Example:  One of the earliest detectives, the estimable Sgt. Cuff in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, is from the working classes.  The first interview he conducts is with the butler, Betteridge.  He is not only uncomfortable at the thought of questioning his social superior, young Rachel Verinder; she returns the compliment by being uneasy in his presence.
9. Allow your improvisation scenes to proceed to edginess and combativeness, your goal to produce clues to all parties that will produce as quirky and memorable an ensemble.
10. Write at least one paragraph about an incident that precipitates the goal of the protagonist.  Huck Finn wishes to get away from his abusive father.  Norah Helmer (The Doll’s House) has in secret taken a loan to pay off her husband’s debts.  George has promised Lenny’s mother that he will look after Lenny, this before the main action for Of Mice and Men.
11. Write what you believe will be the opening scene.
12. Write what you believe will be the subsequent scene.
13. Congratulations.  You are now well on your way toward completing a draft of a quirky, compelling novel.