Things to Do in the First Paragraph

The same creative writing teacher who explained how you were essentially an ironist because you wrote so-called "biter, bit" stories in which individuals often ran afoul of their own devices, also told you to shoot the sheriff in the first paragraph.

At the time, this seemed to make a great deal of sense, because you took the instruction literally, and got to the point where you could write first and second paragraphs which the instructor pronounced as dandy. 

Trouble was, most of your attempts at developing the narrative stopped right there. You either had a dead sheriff, which meant the shooter could expect to be visited by a posse of deputies, or a wounded sheriff who was left asking his assailant, "Why did you have to go and shoot me?"

The teacher made a point of bringing in some aspect of story he thought we ought to know every Monday, giving us the rest of the week to consider the implications. One Monday, when you were feeling as though you might never get the hang of writing stories and would have to become a poet instead, the instructor announced that major characters had to have a motive. 

Once again, you let took him at his word and thought you'd begun to see your way into the third and possibly even fourth paragraph of a story,  "I shot you," Murdoch said with a scowl, "because you kept on arresting me for things I never done."

At the time, the name Murdoch seemed menacing and evil, almost something Dickens might have named a menacing and evil character. In another class, you were beginning to read Dickens. But your creative writing teacher said Dickens' baddest characters of which he was aware was named Sykes, which you had to admit had the sound of a man who would shoot a sheriff or anyone else who got in his way.

The instructor also had words with you about your decision to have Murdoch scowl, which he didn't think necessary under the circumstances of Murdoch having shot the sheriff. No matter that you saw Murdoch as a person who scowled and smirked, the instructor said. You may have forgotten to mention that he liked puns. "Scowl and smirk are," he said, smiling, "what you could call overkill."

You became distracted by the sound of characters' names, starting tentative lists, which you eventually began keeping in some of the many blank notebooks you'd collected over the years for the expressed purpose of keeping track of things that made good stories. From those distant times, you now recall a character you named Gordon Smirke. 

There were a few friends with whom you'd share what you thought were imaginative and provocative names for characters. They all seemed to think your talent lay in funny names rather than menacing or intimidating names.

"What you want most of all," the instructor said, looking at your list of character names, "are persons who seem to live up to their names and find themselves in constant trouble because other characters won't let them forget what they are called."

Your instructor's name was Mr. Quick.

Is Poetic Justice Another Term for Irony?

You first heard the expression "Biter, bit," from a dapper-looking high school creative writing teacher who wore double-breasted suits ever since he'd manage to lose and keep off sixty pounds he had absolutely no use for. 

He said you seemed to write "biter,bit" stories one afternoon when he treated you and another wannabe writer to chocolate milks at the drugstore directly across the street from Fairfax High School.

Every now and then, when you are in Los Angeles, you mean to drive past the intersection of Fairfax and Melrose to see if the drugstore is there, perhaps even find a place to park and see if the drugstore still has a lunch counter, thereupon to complete yet another of many cycles in your life, of orbits having been completed, of what once went around coming one more time around. 

In that sense, Los Angeles is filled with such places for you to drive past, a sentimental journey, a return to a place where a memory or vision first appeared. But such is the nature of Los Angeles that it grows ruthlessly, bulldozing, rebuilding, paving, tunneling into its and, in consequence, your past. unearthing glittering heaps of irony. There is story to be had whether you return in the present moment, of driving the writer's vehicle of curious reverie.

Biter, bit, which now sounds like a novel involving mad dentists, is a concept which in your case does manufacture more thoughtfully developed incidents and events sometimes referred to as story. One of the great shortstory writers of the twentieth century, John Cheever, often used it, now that you think of it, Someone who has taken large bites out of the world about him or her is suddenly confronted with an unthinkable prize or targets or temptation.

The expression biter, bit is a neat, two-word trope for karma, being hoist by one's own petard, which, until you found out what it was, you wanted to own one of, for the simple reason that you liked the sound of the word. Petard. All it means is a fucking device, a bomb. Blown up by one's own bomb.

Although you still use the expression, you've come to favor the longer, more ironic trope, "Taking great aim at his target, he shot himself in the foot," of the more reductionist "Shooting one's self in the foot," both of which pay off on the creative writing teacher's use of biter, bit, the perpetrator perpetrated upon, the shooter, shot. 

Hello and welcome to the world of PJ, which even Cliff's Notes recognizes as poetic justice, and since you are on the subject of the biter, bit, and the often ironic ways of poetic justice, there is in fact a time when you were paid by Cliff's Notes  to substantially revise and add study questions to a title of theirs delivering to the reader the substance, implications, and relevance of a novel you'd not yet read. Thinking back on the experience, you can say with some emphasis that writing the Cliff's Notes study of the novel gave you a leg up on the novel when you actually read it.

In all the ways in which biter, bit exemplifies karmic justice or poetic justice tinged with irony, you see in yourself a cadre of characters, of men and women in effect auditioning for roles in the concepts that light up the interior regions of your brain pan, urging you to go ahead, develop full stories in which these individuals may participate. 

He or she who does is done to. This is good information for a writer to have about the work he wishes to engage and, to the self or selves he cannot avoid engaging if he wishes to have any shot at succeeding.

You could ask what succeeding means, but you are fearful this will turn out to be of a piece with the revelation that petard is often an exploding device, one that blows up in close proximity of its creator.

Fiction: The Mischievous Brats of Prank and Invention

Plot may, without too many doors left open for argument, be seen as an arrangement of dramatic furniture through which characters must navigate with some measurable success. 

To extend the metaphor from the usual domain of furniture in the  inside rooms to outside events, plot may be seen as an elaborate garden maize through which characters must navigate, with no garden shears, of course.

Such metaphors are important to you because you do not readily see plot as the living, agenda-ridden thing it must be, not until you bring a cadre of characters on stage, then percipitate an argument--my argument. 

"You're not going to wear that red dress again."  This spoken less as a question and more like a statement of disbelief. "And what's wrong with the red dress?"  "Perhaps you hadn't noticed, but every time you wear that dress--" "Aha! I get it. You're envious of the attention I get when I wear it."  "Not so much envious of, as concerned about."

Now, things are growing heated, and we haven't even seen the red dress, much less have we any hint of its past history. But we do have the makings of a story because the dramatic furniture has been arranged in a way to provoke a heated conversation in which attitudes and conflicting impressions of past times are brought on stage and allowed to butt heads.

Sometimes a few glasses of wine or a not-so-restrained hand on the rye whiskey in a Manhattan cocktail will lubricate the mechanism for a revelation of plot points. Such a strategy has on occasion been the primary tool in your toolkit, both here on earth and within the terrain of a story in which, through constant shifting as the number of drafts increase, the dramatic furniture has been keyed to least comfortable and provocative arrangement from its former position of most inviting and comfortable.

Once you've managed to fan simmering sparks of resentment or envy or jealousy or suspicion into a recognizable flame, things begin looking up. New details present themselves, which remind you of past events you were a part of, or wish you'd been a part of; the eye for mannered or rational behavior wanes, the thought of reporting actual fact vanishes, and the mischievous brats of invention and prank step forth to undermine what may have been a photo of an actual time and place. 

Instead of the ordinary, the full complement of rascalls are out, looking for ways to trip the actors, smudge their lines to the point where they are unreadable. Small wonder you are to this day so enamored of the famed stateroom scene in the Marx Brothers motion picture romp, A Night at the Opera.

You know writers who are more direct in causing their stories to begin and to continue some discernible movement, and you often find yourself envious of the ways in which they seem to know with prescient accuracy when the next story point must be sounded or played or referenced--where anything is preferable to the extreme of nothing, of the cast, sitting about, discussing the existential nature of reality and illusion.

Much as you admire and have tried to learn from these writers, it falls to your lot to creat a semblance of unholy chaos from which to begin sifting through the layers for the artifacts and periphenalia of story, however small.

Your stories are about normal status having extended its boundaries, of men and women forced beyond themselves in search of something they want with intensity, knowing the something may not be at all good for them.

The Choices We Think We Have When We Think We Have Choices

Most writers you know feel as though they had not so much chosen storytelling for their principal means of identity as storytelling had in fact chosen them. This turn of phrase qualifies as a pathetic fallacy because it acknowledges story as an animate thing; it also deals with logic in ways storytelling has throughout the years dealt with it, which is to say by exposing the universes of storytelling and drama at their most resonant quality as arts rather than sciences.

In similar manner, most writers you know are content with the apparent anomaly of living with at least one limb in the world or art, the other in the world of science. You, to dip into the barrel of anecdote, are often content to allow your judgment to trust or rely on the outcome of scientific discussion. 

No sooner having done so, you are also content to risk the consequences of outcome on so-called gut reaction or, if you will, intuition. You recognize this position as a fence straddle, your temporary solution to the inevitable consequence of being a product of particular times. And you recognize the need to get off the fence because, like it or not, you were born into a world where the humanity of which you are a part has begun to conjure more triggering consequences. This is so for the reductionist fact of humanity being extensive enough to nearly strangle this rotating orb we live on.

Story and drama give us ways to see and feel better able to deploy about the extraordinary interplay of activity and consequence.

With your acceptance of writing having chosen you comes the image of yourself at grade three or four level, simultaneously eager for the physical participation of play at sports and the awareness you were not much good at many of them, When sides were being chosen, you were keen to be chosen, at the same time uncertain of your abilities, aware in ways you could not do descriptive justice to the feeling of being breathless and sweaty after play.

When you reached the level of being able to make such judgments, you were pleased to be chosen by the writer team, somewhat respectful of those who could draw and paint well, increasingly respectful of those who were chosen to play musical instruments, given to degrees of coolness and outright disdain to those chosen by such things as mathematician, historian, teacher, and the so-called soft trades of selling.

With a similar resolve to your determination to work at bettering your athletic skills, you later set forth to better yourself in your reading and writing skills, mindful the two were a package. Reason and intuition told you there was no way to advance your writing abilities without reading, and spoke as well to the outcome of your reading skills revealing more coded information to you as a bi-product of your writing.

A child of your times,of the Great Depression, the effects of World War II, and the rung of the social ladder onto which you found yourself, you inherited tastes, tendencies, and proclivities in your reading. These in turn influenced  the writing that came directly from your instincts, and the ways you found for coping with the binary of commercial fiction and literary.

Lacking the insights to engage your abilities in the kinds of conversations you'd ultimately begin to have, you turned to the plot-driven, one- and, if you were fortunate, two-level skeins of action and their consequences, hopeful the time spent analyzing and dissecting plot-driven materials would in the richness of time provide you with an entry into the literary world.

You enjoyed well-plotted stories for their punch-line resolution in much the same way you enjoyed a well-related joke. But an hilarious punchline to a joke, and a "therefore it follows", geometry theorem-type closure  left you wanting more, the added dimensions you sometimes saw, sometimes missed in literary fiction, in particular humorous literary fiction, by which you meant a narrative of some painful or distasteful consequence, into which had been injected at least one hilarious scene if not two or three of mischievous device.

The punch line from a joke was never quite enough, nor was the often ironic note of a well-plotted short story.  Ha ha and so what. You wanted the meat course, the story course rather than the plot-driven result.

Experience Is the Best Toucher

Imagine a stage occupied by two or three characters, in the process of arguing with one another, or plotting some future event, or pausing in the midst of a heated no-I-won't/yes-you-will moment, say Macbeth, having earlier agreed to kill their house guest, the King, not telling Lady Macbeth he cannot go through with the killing.

The atmosphere of activity and purpose give off the tang of action, of movement awaiting another  breath of energy.  Since we are imagining, let us extend our vision to see additional characters, waiting in the wings, stage right and stage left, waiting for their cues to go on. Thus the metaphor is expanded to include yet more movement and energy--more action.

 If drama is not the hulking, breathing presence of action, you can question the state of drama, almost to the point of extending the metaphor of drama to the condition of a fully charged cellphone in an area where there is no Internet reception, even further thus of energy with no outlet.

Dramatic energy, if free to extend itself, produces movement, reaction, additional exchanges of dialogue. To keep the energy of the metaphor going, imagine the exchange of dialogue among characters as an equivalent of Cyrano de Bergerac, in Rostand's eponymous drama, engaging in swordplay with his opponents.  The dialogue becomes fencing, dueling, action urging itself toward outcome.

Now, we come to what this is all about: action with intent. Then the recognition of intent accomplished or not; success or failure, advancement or retreat. Here is the convenient moment to sweep all this metaphor and these two wildly disparate plays, Macbeth and Cyrano, under yet another metaphor, the rug of action. Action inspires and informs experience.

Some of the players on stage and others in the wings, waiting to go on, are filled with the necessary and relevant experiences of the characters they have been assigned to portray. In addition, these players have rehearsed to the point of muscle memory relevant experiences they have had in the distant past or more recent past. By "relevant experiences" you mean elements with some causal relationship to the story at hand.

Among the many goals of story is this: an arrangement of experience in ways that will initiate emotions within the reader. It becomes necessary to say here that among the potential emotions to be evoked in the reader, boredom is neither permitted nor encouraged.  The reader may be shown one or more characters who, themselves, are bored, but this boredom, which is presented with action, must not incite boredom itself within the reader, rather it must evoke sympathy or impatience, or some other visible form of discomfort.

This arrangement of experience is best remembered when it causes the reader to relate it to some similar experiences the reader has experienced,  We may with justification call this arrangement of experience by the term plot, saying of it then that it is the best arrangement of experiences within the narrative for evoking direct, accessible feelings from the reader.

Storytellers in effect contrive characters with specific experiences and their resulting consequences. An individual who grew up in drought-plagued farmland will have a different set of responses to water as someone who was born on or near one of the Great Lakes or a wide, meandering river.

A good and proper place to begin thinking about plot is to recall how you related information to a group of friends, and to a group of students. You are giving them a peek at a larger story, as told by someone else, and as such are adding a sense of experience to the information that takes on the quality or qualities you wish to evoke. 

If you are relating a more or less linear presentation of fact, you want a less troubled or preoccupied narrator, but the more interior you wish your narrative to take the reader into the emotional terrains of the characters, the more the reader will need reasons to question the lack or presence of the same elements we find so reassuring when they come from reliable individuals.

Funnels, Filters, and Prisms

In the worlds of physical reality, a funnel is a pipe with an enlarged, conical mouth, which makes transferring liquids, particles, and numerous powder, seed- or grain-like substances from one container to another without spilling.

In those same worlds of physical reality, a prism is s solid, pyramid-shaped form with two interior polygons, transparent in nature, used to transform invisible rays of light into a visible spectrum of colors.

A filter is also a mechanism for dealing with the passing through it of one or more media to remove some elements in suspension within the medium. Filters are indeed porous; they may be layers of sand and gravel or charcoal. 

Filters may be paper or cloth. The thing or things being filtered may be the items of focus within a given filtration process or, quite the opposite; they may intend to prevent certain elements such as sulphur or mercaptans from brewed coffee.

Useful as these devices are in physics and chemistry labs, kitchens and coffee shops, they also have functions in narrative and in that special, structurally arranged narrative we call story. As a filter can effect the end result or governing personality of a filtrate, it can also have measurable impact on the way a narrative emerges from the author, on its way to the printed page or computer/electronic reader screen.

The accomplished writer gives readers, through choice or choices of narrators a sense of personality and atmosphere. Writers,editors, critics, even teachers are aware how, through the years of their reading, storytelling has evolved to the point of matching more closely with the facets of dramatic narrative. 

The more recent stories do not rely as much on the shadowy presence of the writer, in effect slipping in stage directions as the story progresses. "He was a short, furtive-looking man who shifted his gaze constantly as he walked, as though he were being stalked by a predator."  Pure authorial description. Or intervention. Such a sentence could be "fixed," with the author being filtered out, the filtrate being made to seem as though the description were not author's description but rather a principal character's inner thoughts.

We funnel dramatic information into a story, some authors yanking on the handbrakes to provide a full description the protagonist has either wandered into or, worse yet, is about to wander into. Much as you admired the novels of Aldous Huxley, he funneled background and descriptive information into his novels, causing you almost as much energy from the exasperation as energy required to consider and ruminate on his ideas.

The prism becomes your favored media for breaking the powerful beam of dramatic energy into its component colors, adding through implication colors not readily available to the human eye. We know such colors exist. We've seen them in museums or galleries or in some special edition of The Scientic American, or The Smithsonian, wherein we're tantalized with ultra-violet and black-light vision, shown things we would not see under more normal circumstances.

Small wonder we need these filtration, funneling, and refraction devices, mechanisms that break down the humdrum of the quotidian for the sake of the arranged and enhanced reality we've come to think of as story.

Like the vast particulate information passing through funnels, filters, and prisms, story will find its way through,

First Draft

 The first draft is meant to turn you on to the limitless possibilities orbiting around your concept for a story, much in the manner of a planet with several moons. You become the metaphorical Sorcerer's Apprentice, so eager to get the keys to the car, as driven by authors you admire to the point of idolatry.

The first draft is the metaphorical equivalent of the new bride's first at home dinner, where one ingredient has the power to intrigue a guest and, thus, several ingredients, used in the spirit of generosity, will have the power to impress three or four guests with your culinary abilities.

You are supposed not to think when writing a first draft, but like the old trick you learned in school, trying not to think of an elephant is more difficult than it seems. And if elephant is too easy, try not thinking of a Reuben sandwich or the type of young salamander called an eft. 

You're pretty good at not thinking while writing a first draft, but pretty good is a long way from effective.  Even so, you can get a few pages at a time until you become aware of making a decision to use one word for another or pointedly not using an adverb when you were well on your way to writing one.

Much as you tell yourself and numerous students not to think while in the act of composing something fresh, you rate the task as near impossible, even when some of the thoughts don't interfere with the flow of words and ideas but instead are the warning signs you've put in place to avoid certain words or usage. Dont need an and here, you tell yourself. Watch the tendency to start so many consecutive paragraphs with the same word. There's another time you've begun a sentence with it.

Okay, so every once in a while, you let some thought rise up to the surface and call itself to your attention, whereupon you stop to think, which is not too bad if you're focused on what you're going and can barely get the word down in legible form if you're using a pen or avoiding one of your most flagrant typos, inserting unnecessary g's within words. 

The ultimate goal is the messy kind of treasure maps you used to draw to amuse yourself when you were bored in class and could not resort to the overt act of reading when you should be listening. You could read the maps. Maybe they weren't neat, but so long as it was your map and your treasure, and the authenticity was clearly not an issue, you were free to add details that added to your pleasure.

You want as much information a you'll need in the construction of a specific story, but you won't want it all at once because you'd already found books and essays written in that manner, and found themso boring you were unable to force yourelf to continue. You get information into the draft that you know cannot possibly last, but somehow, writing it down, allowing one or more of your characters to speak it or challenge it, emphaizes its authenticity and,thus, the entire atmosphere of authenticity.

Sometimes, you'll be larding in so much information that you're shunted off onto another track of logic by your own mind. Aware of the logic, you try to find ways to make it a part of the story, but when the first draft times are over and you begin to wonder what you will do with the work you have at hand, you recognize you've probably reached the point where you have to make significant judgments about your manuscript, questioning whether it is a short story, a novella, or the skeleton of what could be a novel.

When your curiosity reaches the stage of asking yourself if the draft is of a short story, something in-between short and a longish novel, or something crying out to send you off in search of more material, you understand you've finished a significant stage. The first draft is over.

Now, you need to see what you have as opposed to what you thought you had, where the material is wanting to take you, as opposed to wondering where you wish to take it.