Landmarks and Examples

Going home traffic out of Santa Barbara begins at about three of most afternoons.  Don't even think of a quick southbound passage on Sunday afternoons, when the tide of tourists set off back to Los Angeles.  You've been here long enough to have in your possession a number of shrewd, even scenic shortcuts to rely on when one purpose or another takes you southbound out of Santa Barbara during afternoon and evening rush hour traffic time.

Before moving here, you had similar intimate knowledge of pre-freeway Los Angeles, in particular the seemingly aimless saunter of side streets surrounding the canyons that slash from the Valley section of Los Angeles into the west side.  Shortcuts and landmarks in a real sense define an individual's relationship with the city in which one lives.

Landmarks and reference points define an individual's sense of belonging or not to one's culture.  These landmarks, particularly if they had their origins in cities like Los Angeles and Santa Barbara, have often been painted over or built over, or built on top of, or, of course, bulldozed to the ground, then replaced with something altogether different.  Yet the older landmarks and reference points remain.

A significant Los Angeles shortcut for you was the one you took most mornings to get you from various points of origin in or around the Olympic/La Cienega area to the lower parking lot at UCLA.  Although the traffic then was nothing in comparison to now, the time for direct, main artery commuting was precarious.  Not to worry; you knew the back ways, streets to take where there were few or no traffic signals, side streets that, when taken, imparted a kind of mischievous pleasure to the journey, because you were cutting the better part of a half hour from your drive/shortcut.

When you are in the class room or composing non-fiction, you are illustrating your remarks with cultural and literary landmarks, mentioning authors, novels, characters, and circumstances in the belief they will get the student or the reader where you wish them to be without the necessary traffic signals and snarled traffic of long explanations.

A few years ago, dealing with editorial notes on a reference work you were readying for publication, your editor in the bluntest of terms told you, Enough with Ahab andMoby-Dick, already.  This note came close on the heels of a list of habit words such as "accordingly." "thus," and "writ large" you'd been overusing throughout the manuscript.  You felt relief rather than defensiveness at the list of habit words; you do not enjoy them when you see them abused by other writers.  Why, then, would you object to their discovery in your own work.

The Ahab/Moby-Dick overuse was another matter, one you set out to defend, building the intensity of your logic in direct proportion to the numerous times you'd used these two beings.  Your most compelling argument for their use the fact that you continue, after all these years of being introduced to the whale and the man, to learn new things about it.  But this is not an argument for revisiting literary treasures.  This is an argument relating to your need for a wider menu of examples.  Ditto Huckleberry Finn.  Same for As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury.  While you're at it, how about another example for a stunning novella beyond Of Mice and Men?

How many times do you make use of The Iliad and The Odyssey?  How often do you sing the praises of the character behind The Wife of Bath?  Which student in any of your writing classes recognized Appointment in Samara or  They Shoot Horses, Don't They?

From time to time, you'll cross paths with an editor and a student about the same matter.  Who he? or Who she? are copyeditor queries you've seen relative to your use of an author, a character, or a literary allusion.  Your first response is always a step or two above mild irritation.  How could a person not know such a reference?  Why would a reader never have heard of Charles Reade, author of The Cloister and the Hearth?  Why wouldn't anyone with a social conscience be able to link the reference to Charles Kingsley's 1850 masterpiece, Cheap Clothes and Nasty?

If you are irritated at the editorial query, imagine the bewilderment of the student hearing such references.  In particular, process this:  you are not writing to bewilder or bedazzle; you write to light fires under ideas, causing them to boil over.  

Two of your favorite metaphors, which you take out on special occasions, are The Genie in the Bottle and Capturing Lightning in a Bottle.  Good, solid metaphors, one depicting a pissed genie of enormous force and power, having been tricked into a display of ego in which he scurried into a bottle, only to be imprisoned there, the other reaching out to capture in a bottle one of the many natural displays of simultaneous beauty and power.

Words caught in a bottle, trapped for a time, left to brood on what they would do should they achieve freedom, can be words packed with care into a paragraph or a poem or a story, exploding with the spectacular power that goes beyond the mere number of words.  Genie or lightning, words are forces the writer uses all his available wits to contain in some container.

Force of Hobbit

Yet again, the disciplined study of physics contributes to your understanding of the elements of story by offering opportunities for you to see the interaction of dramatic properties.  In this particular case, the understanding of force causes you the back off for a few moments from actual characters or, rather, to see characters as forces.

Force is actual power or potential, waiting in the wings as a character about to step on stage to deliver lines of dialogue and physical actions which are focused to provide a result.  Some characters enter the story with force or power, based on social or political positions or ability.  Other characters are depicted as latent forces, meaning they will grow into force as the story progresses.

Not all force is efficient.  Some vehicles you see from day to day in city and freeway traffic require relatively greater quantities of fuel to propel them.  Some characters have the equivalent of complicated engines, capable of providing force provided they are well fueled.  To put that another way, the characters and the engines are high-maintenance.  Each has a particular sound, a low, throaty rumble suggestive of the power, looking to unleash itself.

Some characters and some vehicles betray internal sounds rather than purr at idle.  Sometimes these characters falter, quit, or make random sounds suggestive of one or more internal ailments.  You could say of each that they are also high-maintenance, but in the other way of requiring constant triage and emergency treatment.  An older car may stall or belch exhaust smoke or require roadside attention.  Such a vehicle translated into character may require times in which to recover from various types of hangover.

As readers and writers, we tend to judge characters and cars in terms of their potential for generating force.  The car engine is often represented in terms of square liters of displacement, delivering X top speed.  Characters are represented in terms of their apparent eagerness to perform one or more tasks that will produce specific goals.

Some automotive dealerships use euphemisms about their products, such as single-owner or previously owned, these appellations contrived to take the sting off the word "used."  A used car seems somehow at the lower end of the scale of quality.  Even the term used in connection with a Bentley or Alfa-Romeo carry the sound of anomaly.  Used Ford or Chevy sound suspicious on their face.  Give a character a "sixty-dollar Chevy from a used car lot" and you are in effect telling the reader this character has severe burdens.

An engine or a character with demonstrable inherent force speaks to a vehicle with a potential if not actual destination.  Thus does story begin to form; you, for instance, would prefer a Porsche or Ferrari as a getaway car, were you robbing a bank, rather then the sixty-dollar Chevy Impala from the used car lot.

The engine or character meet the laws of physics and drama in the way or ways they change the direction of other forces such as friction or tradition, which may be in motion or idling on the sideline, ready to step up as opposition.  Indeed, what does drama and physics have to say about opposing forces?  Plenty.  What efforts are needed to overcome opposing forces, both in the garage and the manuscript.

Characters appear at times as forces for change or forces that have been blunted in the past, but are now ready for another shot at a goal.  They may also have to overcome some inherent force that has been biologically or experientially hard-wired into them.

Where ever you look, characters collide in a rhetorical or hyperbolic mash-up of the bumper car rides at carnival midways, and only yesterday, while reading a review of a book on the history of world wars an near world wars, there was the judgment that war was an arena into which two or more countries, each believing in the rightness of its cause, enter.

Gentlemen, and ladies, start your engines.  And may the force be with you.

Dreams of Finishing

Back in the days when you were in your larval stage, you lived on the fringes of an enormous housing development, then known as The Metropolitan (for the life insurance company) Project later to become Park La Brea Towers ( because of its proximity to the La Brea Tar Pits), and later, in another attempt at civic éclat, to Park La Brea.

By virtue of its size, over one hundred sixty acres, Park La Brea becomes a phenomenon, the largest housing development west of the Mississippi.  Thus two landmarks in your lifetime, shared with others of your generation.  You were alive while it was being designed, laid out, constructed, inhabited.  The western boundaries began on Fairfax Avenue, extending from Sixth Street north to Third Street.  The eastern border was at Cochran Avenue.  At various times, you lived directly across the street, at Sixth and Hauser, and indeed had the entire westward sweep as an extension of your back yard when you lived at 443 So. Cochran.

Park La Brea being one phenomenon, the other was your membership in the generation alive and avid of story before the commercial appearance of television, meaning you got your early introductions to story from fifteen- and thirty-minute radio performances, ranging from serials and soap operas to Lux (as in soap) Radio Theater, Suspense, Lights Out, and Inner Sanctum.

You well understood how these aspects of story were fictional exploits, devised by men and women much like your parents and neighbors, who, by acts of conjuery, brought them to a semblance of life.  Thanks to your sister, who taught you the word simulacrum, you had an early launch into the speculations about real versus imaginary, actual opposed to fantasy.  

Thus, what does it say about the larval you, after you discovered a thick book, printed on the same kind of paper your comic books and Big Little Books were printed on, and took it for absolute, no nonsense reality?  The book, likely to have been a companion of one of the workers in some way responsible for the construction of Park La Brea, was Madam Toussaint's Authentic Book of Dreams and Revelations.

You'd had enough experience with dreams to know you could expect their arrival, perhaps not on the same scheduled basis as, say Captain Midnight or Jack Armstrong, The All-American Boy, but often enough to expect their appearance.  At the time you discovered and began to paw through the contents of Madam Toussaint's Authentic Book of Dreams and Revelations, one of your most memorable dreams had been of you, holding in both hands a double orange Popsicle, one stick in each hand.  

You may well have had vivid and memorable dreams before, but that one was by far the most vivid, including the detail of a slight degree of melting, which prompted the dripping of the frozen orange-flavored water onto your hands.  To this day, you recall your disappointment at waking up to discover nothing in your clenched fists.  You also recall your sense of such things as Fate or Pre-destination, or the ability to see into the future as a result of your mother, later that afternoon, interrupting you at your reading by giving you a dime at the time the ice cream truck habitually made its way down your street, and her suggestion that you might enjoy an orange Popsicle.

You later learned the origin of the name Toussaint, including its political and mystical implications, thanks to your natural range of curiosity and your coming into the editorship of a magazine, Borderline,  whose mission statement said it was "The Magazine that dares the unknown."  In its way, Borderline reminded you of the baggage of superstition and speculation you yet carried about, offered the virtues of cynicism, and further suggested conversation, readings in science and skepticism, as well as healthy pragmatism.

Having survived Madam Toussaint's Authentic Book of Dreams and Revelations, Borderline Magazine, and pseudonymous authorship of such books as Dowsers, Divining Rods, and Water Witches for the Millions, Phrenology for the Millions, and UFOs for the Millions, not to forget editorship of Borderline Oddities, here is what you think now:

There is a handy and accessible relationship between story and dreams, balancing on the fulcrum of reality.  In one dream you recall, you were aware you were flying to London.  In the dream, you soon arrived, witness the buildings and geography, which you took as confirmation, "Ah, here we are already."  Still in the dream, the question of transportation arises.  You were flying.  You were the vehicle.  You know this because of the times when you were aware of being inside a plane, asking one or other of the passengers, "Where are we going?"  Their answer, "London."

True enough, dreams need decoding and unraveling, but not as Madam Toussaint would have them.  You have to understand the difference between literal and figurative.  If, for example, you dream of falling, had you, as in one dream, jumped, or, as in another, were pushed by an old high school chum named Bruce, or, in yet another, had missed your step on a stage and fallen?

Dream is an individualized take on Reality in the same, personalized way Story is a variation on a theme.  Story relies on relevant, meaningful details in much the same way Dreams rely on them.  Often in dreams involving automobiles, the car in which you appear is a VW Bug.  No surprise, there have been any number of them in your life, and when they come up against realistic anomaly of behavior, they relate to the two variations on a theme, respectively a VW hatchback and a VE square back, each of which embodied idiosyncrasy to a fault.

Dream and story are your own, cultivated, agenda-driven platforms, presented by and from you as simulacra of Reality.  Just last week, in a dream, your dear old pal, Conrad, appeared, saying, "Why don't we try something different for lunch?"  And you were thinking, How good to see you again.  Death has not changed you.  Under better circumstances, you'd suggest lunch at the newly opened Brewery in Carpinteria, where, at the same location before it became the Brewery, Conrad had an exhibition of his paintings and rascally trompes l'oeil.  The Brewery does a mischievous hamburger, which you can order to go, then head back to Santa Barbara and the place where Reality has dictated he wait for you.  

A Catch in the Throat, a Sigh of Despair

A middle-aged man with shiny gray sidewalls spreads his script on the lectern, makes eye contact with the audience, clears his throat.  He begins to read a scene, describing his diagnosis with cancer, from his memoir to his classmates in your memoir course.

Those present already know the man to be an M.D.  Yet they think of him more by his first name than his M.D.-ness, just as they think of the Ph.D. in geology by his first name, and regard a Ph.D. in sociology by her first name.

Aspects of gravitas, humor, empathy, and accomplishment reveal themselves through the writings of these and yet others,including a J.D. and, such as yourself, mere civilians, in pursuit of one or more tangible goals.  These aspects escape with greater prominence than such outward tells as clothing, jewelry,or titles, standard signs in addition to vocabulary and speech intonations by which humans assess, then judge other human.

You are watching the editorial process at work, interested individuals telling others such as the M.D. at the podium details which, in their opinion, can make what he reads have even more resonance and staying power.  

In the course of the M.D.'s reading, you notice a catch in his voice, which could be a simple matter of embarrassment at reading in public.  But there could be more.  He continues in halting speech, causing you to look over at him, up from the notes you were taking on his presentation.  He, the M.D., has found material in his own work that touches him on a deep enough emotional level to cause this advance warning that he has approached territory he is sensitive about.  His senses are engaged, his emotions raw and spontaneous.  He is reliving an intense emotional memory.

The Ph.D. in geology has done such things, writing about a time in his life of intense focus at a remote outpost of the world, at once vulnerable, intrigued with the work at hand, and all too aware of the physical dangers about him.  Such moments are not all that rare; you've seen both genders get caught up in it, sometimes with the sweetness of sentimentality, other times in recognition of a monumental loss, other times yet in response to awareness of some epiphany and/or reward to accompany the epiphany.

You're no stranger to such things, your own voice choking in the telling of a tale or the awareness of a connection you'd not seen before.  Such things are like shooting stars or comets trailing across the night sky.  You are no astronomer; you do not by any means know when they will appear.  The sources of some are, on reflection, obvious, but others leave you unable to decode the tightly woven braid of emotions behind the feelings.

You often read aloud the fiction you're working on, hopeful your stumbles over a word or phrase will serve as a clue to revise or delete altogether the offending passage.  At times during these readings, your voice will choke up at something you'd hoped was dramatic and effective, redolent of your voice, written as a part of a larger awareness, by no means intended to be obvious as well-written.  When you realize this material is something to keep rather than to remove as an emotional hangnail, you are in effect getting the kind of response from writing you wish to elicit.

Yes, you had to learn that, too, how to take the good and useful with the derivative and showing off, but once you saw the truth behind the dynamic, you knew you could not contrive these places, they must come of their own, as a part of the muscle memory that is you telling story.

The ending of two stories, miles apart in intent, still bring a catch to your voice when you find yourself reading from these stories at readings.  In a thematic way, they both relate to dogs who appear in your stories and to dogs who appear in your life.  Tucked away in your memory is the vision of your late Australian Cattle Dog, Australian Shepherd mix, Sally, and the times when you taught at USC.  You brought her on the trip for company.  

Your last class ended at 6:40.  During Spring and early Fall months before Daylight Savings Time reverteed to Standard Time, Sally often waited for you by a grassy sward adjacent the parking structure where you were ticketed.
The evening light was sunny, not yet obscured by long shadows.

Your class, in the Social Sciences Building, was about the length of a football field away from the grassy knoll where Sally waited for you with your and her pal, Lizzie.  There was a moment when you approached, about half the football field length away, where Lizzie would see you coming, then nudge Sally with a "There he is."  You could see Sally spring to her feet, scanning the horizon until she saw you, identified your shambling gait, then started toward you, her run a fluid, rhythmic lope, her target you.

Of course you are anthropomorphizing when you conclude her pleasure at seeing you was reflected in the way she ran, but that vision of her spoke to you as she increased her speed in her joy at running and her eagerness to contact you.  The sight of her ranks in memory among the more beautiful things you have seen.  Writing about her, in full stride, bridging the gap between you, produces the catch in the throat of which you speak.

Writers live for such catch-in-the-throat moments.

When Sally met you, any pretense at decorum was gone.  Your briefcase was dropped, contact between dog and human was made.  In a moment, two creatures, a thirty-pound dog and a late middle-aged man were rolling about and playing on the grass, which was just the thing for them to be doing of a late evening.

Theme Park

Long before you were even aware such things existed, you were a fan of plot-driven stories.  This is due to the number of plotted stories you found as your interest in pulp magazines expanded your reading horizons.  Add to this your belief that most writers plotted out stories before beginning to write them.

The occasional literary story you found exciting contained a demonstrable plot, which you not only could find in theory, you did in practice, at once keeping the door to literary fiction open and strengthening your belief that writers took care to plot out stories before embarking on them.  Otherwise, what else could you do?

Then you heard the actual term "plot-driven," which caused you to understand there must be some form of opposite, as this conflict played out in the backstreets and alleyways of your psyche.  If, you reasoned, there were plot-driven stories, some opposite must obtain.  

Sure enough, the words hollered themselves out to you, like a recitative in vocal music or a response of a cheering section to the cheerleader, or the call and response you heard one morning from a gospel church, as you stood in a gas station, transfixed while pumping gas.  "Character driven, character driven."

Because you were having difficulties with the construction of plots, the discovery of character-driven stories had a big impact on you, opening what was not yet in your mind as the front door, causing you to think you'd found your way into story through the back door.  This has more or less remained your approach, because after all the years of trying to plot your way in, the process works best for you when you encounter a situation that speaks to you.  

Then you place armatures into the circumstances, wrapping traits and characteristics about these armatures to the point where you begin to see them.  There follows an excitement to see them in motion, working on something related to the circumstances so recently presented to you.

Such a moment arrived today, perhaps in response to your awareness that you'd be meeting a few friends for drinks at day's end.  Perhaps there is yet another factor in play, your having introduced a short story of Flannery O'Connor to your Adventures in Fiction class.  In "Good Country People," there is a character who has a wooden leg and another character, a door-to-door bible salesman who, on learning of the wooden leg, resolves he will do whatever necessary to steal it.  You still recall, in your presentation to the class, asking the students to imagine a writer pitching such a story to a producer.  As well, you recall the emphasis with which you said, "'Good Country People' is a classic character-driven set up,  Can't you just see the writer pitching away?'There's a woman with a wooden leg and a door-to-door salesman, see, and when he comes to call on her, thinking to sell her a bible or two, he notices her wooden leg, whereupon he makes up his mind to steal it."

However the moment arrived, it came forth like this:  A man asks a woman he's been dating for a few months to accompany him to a cocktail lounge/restaurant where a group of his friends are meeting for drinks.  So far, nothing to indicate where the excitement for this conceptual arrival resides.  Thus, so far--so what?  

The most possible tension lies in the fact that the protagonist's friends have yet to meet this woman he's been dating.  Will they like her?  Will she get along with them?  Still pretty much so what? here. But quick on the heels of this so what? comes the additional thought, the woman the protagonist has been dating becomes at first tipsy, then drunk, then, because of the protagonist's suggestion that they leave, obstreperously drunk.

Suddenly, there are dozens of questions to be answered.  Who is the man?  Who is the woman?  What's going on here that causes her to get drunk?  As some of your friends in A.A. might ask, who is she getting drunk at?

As the O'Conner bible salesman knew he would steal that wooden leg (with no idea what he'd do with it after having stolen it), you knew the woman was to be modeled on the hair cutter you just acquired after being cast loose by your long term cutter, who has just retired.  Indeed, your new cutter made it clear that she was divorced, her children off on their own, and no romantic connections.  Co-opting her to fit this potential story is a done deal.  Now the man who'd been dating her.  You still don't know who he is, but you know his name is Warren.  He's probably got close to twenty years on his date, which will have an effect on his friends, won't it?  And why not an effect on her?

These are all starting points, with the vector force leading to the date drinking to the point of intoxication, a thing she'd never done before.  In fact, now that you think about it, the last time they were out at dinner, she could scarcely finish one glass of wine, asking him if he'd like to finish it.

This is how you come at story.  This demonstrates character-driven story.  You have to develop characters, their backstories and contemporary expectations of themselves and each other.  You have no idea what she will say when she achieves the drunkenness that will cause some form of dramatic explosion.  You do know you could not have plotted this story.  You also know enough about yourself to say this is your process.

Somewhere, somehow, this much will get you to select the kind of cocktail/lounge restaurant where this story will begin, whether perhaps one of Warren's friends recognizes or thinks he recognizes the date.  You will assiduously avoid any turn suggestive of a plot-driven story, such as an approach where the date was once a high-price call girl and one of Warren's friends recognizes her from having once been her customer.  Way too much plot-driven activity in that.

There is no theme or symbolism yet, because those are things you will likely not see until someone gets to the completed story, then tells you she or he loves the theme of this narrative.

There is, in fact, no story in the narrative yet.  It is all there, waiting for you to discover it, a line at a time--if you're fortunate.

The Agon and the Ecstacy

The sound of an epiphany arrives with an unmistakable flourish of trumpets, announcing the arrival of royalty.  No matter if the sound plays only within the head. Epiphanies are, after all, individual experiences, your invitation to share through creativity.

A note of caution, however:  epiphany is royalty arriving to pay you a visit.  Following in the tradition of working-class folk having to put on a gala to celebrate the arrival, you need to become a host, with all the responsibility that entails.  Right now.

Things will henceforth never be the same.  You'll no doubt need to max out your credit line, but matters will balance out to your advantage, even though you'll have to take on extra work to pay for your gala.

The epiphany to which you refer this time--for your life has become a cavalcade of them--is the beginning of inference that some authority you hold in great esteem has defects.  You not only recognize these defects in your elected authority, you see them as well in yourself.

Congratulations; you've just discovered the humanity of your authority figure and the humility-as-squatter resident within you.  Not only that; you've taken a step toward understanding both.

Love and writing have a good common ground.  Each is brought on by some explosive awareness of stunning beauty, which the beholder rushes to capture, and who are you to refuse the presence of love or writing in your life?  In your rush, you stumble with great frequency over visions, anomalies, and lies.  Brushing the dirt from your knees, you rise, then return to your work.  You follow the likes of your authority figures, knowing you cannot hope to capture what they have, for it will not be your own.  You must take what you have learned from them and make it your own.  

Twain's dead-pan tall stories must be your own versions, wrought out of the individuals you see about you. Melville's clash of cosmic forces may become story points to your visions, but your life at sea has been limited to one trip from the Long Beach Harbor to Catalina Island, numerous ferry rides from New Jersey to the Manhattan terminus, and life on the ferry service plying the waters to the islands in the Strait of Juan de Fuca.  

Cather's ability to evoke prairie and its denizens must be transformed to your awareness of the Grand Central Markets in downtown L.A. and Guadalajara.  Austen's ability to explore the outer banks of free independent discourse, even before the term for it was coined, become wall sconces flickering with guttering lights as you make your way down the dark corridors of narrative.  Lewis' satiric visions, at once tempting and too hard-barked for you, help you see the need to trust the characters you select to dress and comport themselves without stage direction from you.

Love and writing change on you after the romance wears thin.  You either change with them, working at your best effort to take their clues and leave some of your own, or you become caught in the natural presence each provokes--the abrasive force of friction.

To avoid this uncomfortable tear and scratch of fiction, you must remember yet another epiphany:  you don't form love or story, experiencing each forms you.

What's a Story without a Satisfying Plan B?

In your four-part roles as reader, writer, editor, and teacher your approach to story has evolved from the acceptance of the episodic to the appreciation of the ironic reversal.  No more conditions where an event triggers a response, any response, which sends us we off to the next scene where someone wonders aloud, "What are we going to do now?"

Structure presents itself and is invited to come into the living room and take a load off its feet and perhaps a glass of lemonade or would you rather some tea?  What kind of structure?  Why, dramatic structure, of course, structure propelled by the major players thinking they are aligned with like minded cohorts.  If we dwellers in Reality share anything with those who live in story, it is the mutual malady of thinking persons we like must agree with us.  Isn't that why we like them?

Injections of irony into a story sometimes get a bad rap; some critics you've read build on the meme of irony being the thing that closes on Thursday, speaking of it as though it were Lance Armstrong or Barry Bonds, denying their ingestion of metabolic enhancements.  You wish to add the word reversal to  the mix, thinking this takes us well beyond the kinds of irony associated with sarcasm, which has for so long become associated with teenagers who are impatient with their parents.  

You know this at close hand because your own teen-aged hormones and agendas, most of them focused on getting a girlfriend and writing things of publishable quality, led you to any number of sarcastic presentations to your parents.  At one point, you were glad to have these incidents beyond you because the memories of them did not have room for you seeing yourself at your best. 

This awareness opened the door to even later times when you were able to regard both parents without sarcasm, while seeing the dynamic between you in a near reversal, where you could visualize their potential for sarcasm toward you.  They, being who they were, did not return the sarcasm favor.  

In the way of your parents being first generation here in the U.S., you set forth on your own tradition by becoming first generation sarcastic teen.  This may have been your springboard for looking at the world through ironic lenses, and for being stunned by its appearance in the Jane Austen you'd read, long before you found Austin as comforting now.  Remember, you were hitting the high end of your teens and rushing into your twenties on the backs of Hemingway, Eliot, and that master ironist, Ezra Pound.  You did not wish to be seen admiring Austen then any more than you'd wish to be seen sitting at a cafeteria table with girls while in grammar school.

The first ironic reversal you were able to articulate came in several instances during the course of Austen's Persuasion.  Anne, its protagonist, has broken off her engagement with Wentworth, heeding the advice of an older mentor, and seeing Wentworth as unsuitable.  That was then.  

Wentworth has had considerable success in his career.  Now, Anne is in a position to see how favorable this success has been at making him more the kind of man an Austen heroine would consider.  But alas, he is paying attention to two young teen-aged girls who are clearly flirting with him, obvious in their gestures.  And Anne can do nothing about it.

Of course being helpless in such a situation as Anne's in Persuasion is just the sort of thing that requires the literary equivalent of an anabolic steroid.  Anne realizes her mistake, realizes she has feelings for Wentworth.  Now, the burden is on her, against considerable odds.  Except that the conventions of story render the effect of a directed verdict in a court proceeding; we know Anne is going to have another shot at retrieving what she has lost.

But the true ironic reversal comes in yet another Jane, in fact Jane Eyre.  Our eponymous protagonist has no doubt of her feelings for Rochester.  She loves him, but cannot be with him because he is married.  He suggests they move to Europe and live together, but she has  no desire to live as his mistress and knows that she would indeed become his lover were they to spend much time together, so it is So long, Mr. Rochester.  

But that is not enough. That may well be one of the strengths Charlotte Bronte brings to her fiction.  A man who is about to go to Africa to become a missionary, proposes to her.  In Africa, she'd be away from Rochester, whom she loves.  Lovely irony at work here.  She has to say no to love without marriage, whereupon she is offered marriage to a man she does not love.

Many of us--you included--respond to loss, or awareness of the complete inaccessibility of something we wish, by developing and pursuing a Plan B.  The more potential for Plan B in a story, the more depth to it, and the greater its potential for having a shelf life.

You can still get off on an episodic story.  There are occasions where nothing will do it for you the way a hamburger or tuna salad sandwich will do it for you.  But not for long.  You understand how a character has to be forced from Plan A, trying all the while to get a life of some lesser sort, in the process becoming enmeshed in Plan B.  However tempting it is to blame such twists on the Fates, our arguments fail in the fire of the knowledge that our hard-wired duality will force us to see some version of some truth, not necessarily our own.