Don't Give it another Thought

In recent weeks, you've been telling your writing students (and yourself) to avoid two tendencies in composition. The first of these is not to allow any one character to remain alone on stage for more than a few short moments. The second  target for avoidance relates to synonymous verbs to the great metaphorical tape worm for all writers, the verb "to think."

With the possible exception of a lone character being on stage in a place where she or he oughtn't be and the attendant danger of being caught, a lone character will become self-consciously aware of having none of what stage people call business, the movement necessary to accompany justification for being "there," on stage, in the first place.

A lone character is perhaps waiting for someone who is late or not going to appear at all or, of equal mischief, show up with someone the lone waiter cannot abide. Even the great absurdist, Samuel Beckett, gave us two characters to wait for Godot, who, as a matter of fact, never arrives. 

Two or more characters have someone to talk to or to pointedly ignore. Two characters in a scene can project disharmony by virtue of each speaking to a different subject, certain the other character is understanding him. 

Two characters can plot revenge on a third character, settle differences between themselves (although we readers will soon understand they are each settling different matters of which the other has no clue), plan to disrupt an ongoing agenda or support it.

One character can check his or her watch or Fit Bit so many times, consult an iPhone once or twice, or settle in for a nap. Whatever the decision, all momentum of story comes screeching to a halt. The reader turns pages to see where "the good stuff" resumes; the viewer rustles nervously in his or her seat.

As readers or viewers, we expect movement, not thought.  Jim began to think Mary was not going to keep their appointment. No, thank you; that won't do it. We expect to see Jim do something that will convey his awareness that Mary has opted out and his emotional response to the awareness. Remember that glorious punchline for the play and later motion picture, Mr. Roberts. One character, Ensign Pulver, on stage alone, the stage being the afterdeck of the World War II cargo ship, running toward the stairway to the bridge, shouting, "Hey, Captain, I just threw your goddamned palm trees overboard."

Characters with no relevant actions to perform often do second best, which is to wonder "how it all began," the "it" being the moral or existential position in which the character feels trapped. Thus thinking becomes a speed bump, jolting the reader or viewer out of direct engagement with the story at hand.

The discovery of thinking characters within an early draft denotes the need for more effective movement to demonstrate the growing acceleration of the story to the critical point whence it boils over, streams down the sides of its container.

While it is kosher for the reader to catch the lead characters thinking, we need to remember how the reader now wants to see that character in action, implementing the fruits of his thoughts or plans rather than merely mulling them over.

When Action Is More than Physical

You used to be one of the persons who drew a line between the tightly plotted, action-based story and the more leisurely stroll through the lanes and boulevards of recollection. Even when your characters in adventure stories were faced with momentary mind boggle responses, you were all too aware of the story of the three princes of serendip, in which three princes, through a combination of accidents and sagacity, discover the location of a lost camel, whence the word and concept of serendipity.

Whence, indeed, your apparent mission to leave no diversion in a narrative un-diverted. Long before the glorious Lawrence "Yogi" Berra's advice to all of us to take it when approaching a fork in the road, you believed such digressions--now almost the unifying theme in all infomercials--provide sufficient substitution to plot, by which is meant the things characters do in the service of their most hidden agendas, which in turn were their most important reason for appearing within the narrative in the first place.

When you spoke of "The persons who drew a line," you are seeing in the dimly lit rooms of retrospect those who liked to see themselves as favoring the reflective story while regarding action-based narrative and its flurry of declarative sentences and active voice as from a promenade somewhat above the narrative shouting and sword wielding, giving them the moral high ground.  It is a truth universally acknowledged that moral high ground abounds in most English Departments in most universities and colleges offering the English Major option.

In retrospect, you can do well to congratulate yourself for having asked the question "Why not both?" to such forgotten masterpieces as Hammett's The Red Harvest, in which the eponymous title meant blood, wherein heads were cracked, striking unionists were left gut shot; scabs were un-unionized workers who were all too willing to cross a picket line, and morality meant the step beyond doing no harm regarded to be "nor cause any pain to others."

Why not, as in an apparently hectic pace of dramatic engagement and a simultaneous tug o'war between the binary sides of a moral argument.  You hoped to accommodate both in your stories, sometimes in the earliest possible draft. Most of such stories were paid for on a price-per-word basis, thus four drafts on a story paying a penny a word was the equivalent of leasing out your finished work could in effect reduce your pay downward to a quarter of a cent.

Fortunately for you, a number of the magazines taking on your stories wanted stories that were in fact plot-directed, yet giving the appearance of character driven, paid a flat fee, regardless of word count. You could, and did, digress, go retrospective, reflect on the vast potentials of differences between the Then and the Now.

All you have to do today is watch at work the man and women who are your favorites among their acting communities. This observation reflects well on qualities of timing you used to admire in George Burns and Jack Benny, but also the kinds of expressions and gestures each used to project the words, spoken at a particular pace for a specific effect. 

Action no longer needs to duplicate the sword fights, daring escapes, and dank dungeons of your youthful taste. Look, for just one example of how Noel Coward brings movement, action, implication, and meaning into two individuals, each out for a cigarette on two adjoining hotel verandas. A boy and a girl. Formerly married. Now, about to go inside and engage in physical consumption of a second marriage, each to another person, that same day.

The activity in Coward's setting is so instance that each is well along the way to wanting to elope with the former marriage partner. Thus have you grown from sea battles and charges of light brigades and Bengal lancers to the ongoing sense of combat within the individual at any given time, over a range of possible issues.

And the Beat Goes on

At the time you began undertaking the structure and intent of story so that you, too, might be able to produce such dramatic gems, to your immense relief,a contemporary view held there to be two essential types, the plot-driven story and the character-driven story. 

Predicated on your belief that you were no better at plotting than you were at math, you threw yourself into what you considered character-driven stories, only to be told that your results were not stories.

Thus your introduction to such terms as pastiche, slice-of-life, vignette, and entr'acte, all of which you were made to feel were in the same relationship to story that tap dancing was to ballet: they were things writers did when not writing short stories or, indeed, when not able to write short stories. 

If your narrative were any of these things, you needed to ponder what elements were missing in order to transform this mongrel into a thoroughbred. That was then.

Story as such has undergone considerable evolution. While you may not have kept pace with that evolution, you have at least maintained contact with it through your activities as editor and teacher, perhaps even coming to some negotiated settlement with it so far as your own writings are concerned. On balance, you have seen yourself and the short story into the twenty-first century.

This is of considerable moment since such matters as the narrative voice (and thus the presence of the author), the use of detail, and conventional visions of what was once regarded as plot have frequently been spotted roaming the literary streets, causing the same sorts of distractions inherent when an actual individual is seen wandering the streets not so much from agenda or motive as from dementia or a related affliction.

The three main methods for implementing dramatic narrative are narration, interior monologue, and dialogue, all of which originate with the characters when, in earlier times, they may well have had their beginnings as an adjunct of the authorial presence. The author no longer belongs in the story, having selected the dramatis personae to provide the work through action. 

Hence the expression "authorial intervention," which is the equivalent of the current neologism, splaining, its most odious form being mansplaining, which becomes a man explaining female psychology and physiology to women. Authorial intervention is the writer, explaining or interpreting the story to the reader.

All aspects of the twenty-first century story are transacted through action, the most basic element of all in story, but often lost under a welter of plot-related considerations and adjustments. Any given moment, whether narrative, interior monologue, is expressed through action. A single moment of action, even the action of a pause or hesitation, is called a beat.

So long as the beat or movement or, if you will, action, goes on, the story continues. When action stops, story stops, but even more to the point, description begins. 

Plot: Ave Atque Vale, or So Long; it Was Good to Know You

Not by any means that two robins are sufficient to make a Spring, but. Michael Chabon's most recent novel, Moonglow,  and Rachel Cusk's even more recent novel, Transit, provide ample evidentiary argument for plot not being the driving force behind story it once was.

In the former novel, Chabon uses his grandfather as the engine driving such aspects as the reader rooting for a favorable outcome. We'll have to wait until Chabon reveals in writing or interview how much of his actual grandfather went into the sausage that became the narrator's grandfather, an engaging character, much in the manner of the tummler or on-site event manager at a Catskills hotel, nudging the guests from buffets to events.

The latter novel begins with the confession of an unnamed narrator that she'd been emailed by an astrologer, eager to share with her "important things in my immediate future."  By the end of page one, you were off to the races with the narrative, especially when the narrator tells us of this also unnamed astrologer, "She understood that many people closed their minds to the meaning of the sky above their heads, but she firmly believed I was not one of these people."

In a real sense both novels took you away from the narrative gold standard of an interesting character with a problem or goal, onto a more rarefied--platinum, if you will--approach to what story is...

...strange, quirky, vulnerable individuals you would not ordinarily talk to, focusing on events that disturb and threaten to devour them. 

One of the promises you gave your late wife is that you would continue two courses, memoir writing and fiction writing, she taught--and loved--at the local education (which has been subsumed by the local city college and morphed into CLL, Center for Lifelong Learning. At this remove, you've indeed grown close to some of the regulars, aware of the enormous binary in each, the desire to tell a story, whether the actual one of their own self or the imaginary one of their creative bent.

Getting pages out of them is a different matter than your previous graduate students, who were going into debt at the rate of $1175 per unit credit, with most of the classes being three-unit ventures. These graduate students and, later, your undergraduate students, somehow managed to produce huge, incredible tsunamis of narrative.

The conclusions here may seem mountain-goat leaps toward resolution: (1) Even the most prolific writer is in some way vulnerable and an outlier, your younger self no exception to that description; (2) story has begun the shift as emphatically as the Middle Ages Great Vowel Shift, from the search or quest to the sometimes wry, other times vulnerable confrontation with Reality.

Satire: The Pretty Girl You Can't Escape

In his time, Jonathan Swift had a weather eye for satire, appeared in retrospect to come by it naturally, and in one of the lovely ironies attendant on satire, was forced as punishment into circumstances from which he produced his most memorable satire of all.

One of the great escape literatures of his time was the look backward into the alleged better times of the pastoral past, where dryads and nymphs frolicked, where Pan and Daphnus and Chloe took to the forest, not only for a quick canoodle but to recharge the same anti-urban excesses that would, a hundred or so years down the line, affect Ishael in Moby-Dick.

You'd do well to consider how one of Swift's earliest published pieces, perhaps even the absolute first, published anonymously , took on the pastoral with an unrelenting focus on the incessant clatter and, indeed, squalor of the city life, knocking the underpinnings from pastoral escapism by showing the lifestyle most of Swift's seventeenth- and eighteenth century readers had to endure.

Born in Dublin, educated there and in another sense as a polymath, Swift pursued a career in the clergy, working his way to the Big Tent, which was London, only to be sent down (of course Dublin is "up" from London) to the minors of Ireland again. 

It was here, in Dublin again, where Swift's eye for satire took him to the very thing most of us remember him for, his dynamic solution to the Irish potato famine, arguably helped along its way to a major calamity by the Brits. Thus "A Modest Proposal," Swift's way of reminding the Brits of what they'd had a hand in wreaking, all the while using that sincere, sympathetic narrative voice so perfectly characteristic of satire.

Prior to his memorable modest proposal, Swift had written, "Satire is a sort of glass [mirror] wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own."

There was no way you were going to matriculate as an English [Literature] major without being attracted to the splendid satiric voices of their times, Alexander Pope and John Dryden, with Pope performing open-heart surgery in "The Rape of the Lock" and Dryden upsetting the applecart of propriety with "Macflecknoe," a single course "The Age of Pope and Dryden" being sufficient to yank you into the study of English history you were at previous pains to ignore. You wanted the dish on why P and D seemed as funny as they did.

Which brought you to the more modern times of Evelyn Waugh, whose life span more or less coincided with your mother, and Aldous Huxley, whom you actually met.

During this time of drinking at the Pieriean Spring, you'd had enough personal experiences with satire to know you wanted to continue drinking; an egregious satire on Ernest Hemingway had brought you an unsolicited thumbs up and a "pretty good stuff," from EMH, himself, while a collaborative venture targeting the then vice-president of the United States, one Richard M. Nixon, had the FBI out and about, asking questions about you for some years.

To this day, satire is your friend, reminding you of the time when your parents, always eager to feed you and your friends and pack take-away for later, questioned you about one friend from your earlier days, even to the point of wondering what you had in common now--except for the past.

Thinking about this incident reminded you of one of the defining statements between Raylan Givens and Boyd Crowder, those two wonderfully arch enemies in the TV series Justified.  "We dug coal together."  So far as satire is concerned, "We went to school together."

Satire needs a target. Your target is escapism, individuals (including yourself) attempting to escape from unpleasant realities.

Satire targets escapism.

When Hyperbole Becomes Exaggeration

Exaggeration puddles in vast, subterranean pools under the surface of Reality, waiting to be drilled, fracked, and otherwise exploited by writers in the manner of oil deposits being mined by Exon. Chevron, BP, and Shell.

In the world of Reality before us, there are so many Things and Persons to account for that we begin to generalize about them unless something extraordinary about a place or object or being calls it out of the shadows and into a fuller attention.

Other standards apply in the worlds of dramatic narrative; a place, object, or being has to arrest the writer's attention before it is allowed past the starting gate. As the number of written drafts increases, the place, object, or being assumes enhanced definition in the writer's awareness, which is then made more particular by the writer's choice of words and the clarity of subsequent events.

You may write about a specific place at a definite historical moment, yet your version of that time and place will, if you are successful, differ from the same moment and place differ when drawn by another writer.

At one point in the late 1970s or early 1980s, you were moderating a panel composed of three mystery writers who set their narratives in and about Santa Barbara, each of them, through detail and atmosphere, evoking the terrain. Nevertheless each terrain differed in accordance with the vision and personality of the writer.

Directing their conversations, you couldn't help observing how, although each was constructing a particular form of puzzle which a lead character was responsible for solving, each of the three was also writing in an unintended genre, the alternate universe. 

At the end of a day of writing, you tend to feel better in direct proportion to the degree of authenticity you have imparted to your characters, the things about them, and the settings in which they interact.  Since your move from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara in 1974, you tend to write of Santa Barbara with the nostalgia for the Los Angeles of your childhood, which you felt when comparing your new home to your old. 

The nostalgia has changed form over the years, influenced by the sense of entitlement you notice from the older generations of Santa Barbara and the added bite of irony present in the sense of entitlement you sense in other Angelenos who have moved to Santa Barbara to get away from the clutter and sclerosis of twenty-first century Los Angeles.

Everywhere you look in the worlds of Reality that have been translated into fiction, there is exaggeration, the device whereby animals, persons, places, and things become larger and more articulate than their actual presence outside of story. You have to exaggerate a character and her/his  self, her/his problem, and, of course, the solutions.

The one thing most resistant to exaggeration you've discovered over the years is dignity. You cannot exaggerate the pursuit of dignity inherent in most of humanity, except when that pursuit becomes an end in itself. Then inflated quest for dignity becomes the primary target for the heat-seeking missile of satire.

Preternaturally Sober

With your forged identity papers falsely adding two years to your then nineteen, and the topping off of your growth spurt at six feet, three inches, you were able to make your way into the fabled cocktail lounge in an iconic cluster of buildings between Crescent Height Boulevard and Hayvenhurst Drive at the eastern end of The Sunset Strip.

This was The Garden of Allah, where writers you might not otherwise have known or known of gathered to ease away their daily encounters with the Hollywood studio heads, and where choice bits of information were thrown to you with the three- or four-drink sincerity of hard drinkers and hard writers, by which was mean that they would wobble off to write their own stuff before getting such sleep as they could in order to appear at the studios to turn out their pages, and you would go home to study for tomorrow's classes at the university.

You still have in your equivalent of a reference shelf the two-volume set of Greek Myths as presented by Robert Graves, a purchase pressed upon you in at least fourth-drink sincerity by a writer who told you, "All memorable story comes from these myths.  Read through them, then bring them up to date. Change the magical powers of the gods to fate or karma. You'll never want for story." Indeed, he called two recent motion pictures to mind, then told you the myths from which they had been taken.

The occasional actor found their way into The Garden of Allah as well and as you sat amid a group of the regulars one night, watching from afar a delicious, ironic scenario evolve at a corner table, candle lit, shadow drenched, populated by a couple who seemed to you out of a French or Russian novel of decadence.  

The woman was of the romantic fantasy you then indulged, slightly but not dangerously older, which is to say thirty. Her dark hair barely covered her ears, leaving the long neck that caused you to say involuntarily, "Modigliani."  Soon, your table reached agreement. She was, indeed Modigliani-esque.

She wore a full-length gown and a row of pearls that reminded you of the grin on her companion's face. For his part, he was pouring champagne, which seemed to you a remarkably wonderful thing to be doing, particularly because the next round of your whispers at your table had to do with, "Look how she's guiding his free hand. Do you see that?"

What we all saw was a seduction in progress, our opinions varying from moment to moment as to which of the two was the seducer. Someone saw fit to nudge you for lesson time. "We should always know who the lead character is."  This became an issue while we all became aware that the man was becoming drunk, drunk to the point of losing any chance of success that night.  

One of the actors after a time suggested they should send you over with a respectfully written note to the man. After some heated discussion about the content of the note, the decision came down to, "Order yourself some coffee before it is too late," this barely winning out over, "Order some fucking coffee. Now." and enough laughter from us that she, the dark lady of the scenario, looked up and over at your roistering group.

Soon we lot interest in that spectator sport; the man was at the point of resting his head on his hand, his elbow wobbling on the table. One of your memorable takeaways from that night was the vow made to yourself never to reach that degree of drunkenness in the presence of any lady, much less a lady of that beauty.  

The major takeaway came from the drunken swain.  "When I am cast as drunk," one actor said, "I endeavor to act preternaturally sober."  In addition to loving the word preternatural, you appreciated the solemnity and incisiveness of the advice. The best way to appear convincingly drunk or, for that matter, anything else, is to exaggerate sobriety. Look at that poor drunk, trying to keep it under control.

Two weeks later, although you had not set forth to test this new information, you were in as opposite a world of The Garden of Allah as you could imagine, which is to say a sorority house, made aware, thanks to a precipitous forward snap of your head, that you were, charitably, less than sober.  You took in the wisdom of your elders. You must appear to be deliberate, thoughtful, by all accounts sober.

One of the sorority sisters, also a classmate, watched you for a moment with interest.  "You seem unusually quiet and thoughtful. Is--is there something wrong?"

"Er--" you said, focusing on the fact that you'd recently had breath mints. Many of them."Er--no.  Not at all."

She looked closer.  "You've been drinking, haven't you?"

"Not," you said, "on a week night.  No, no."

"My god," she said, "I get it. You're shitface drunk."

"No, no," you said. "Sober. Preternaturally sober."