I Have Said It Thrice

"Just the place for a Snark!" the Bellman cried,
As he landed his crew with care;
Supporting each man on the top of the tide
By a finger entwined in his hair.
"Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice:
That alone should encourage the crew.
Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:
What I tell you three times is true."
The Hunting of the Snark
Lewis Carroll


Being the person I am, tidal in nature, certainly as mercurial as my September birth would indicate astrologically, I would nevertheless try to give as concrete, earth-bound answer as I could were you to ask me if I knew where, at a given moment, I was. High probability of an I-don't know answer, equally high chance of exact coordinates or some similar sense of exactitude. Almost no chance you'd get an it-all-depends answer. Travel with me has certain risks involved. If you are the sort who insists on knowing your destination and arrival time in advance, whether the travel is automotive, ambulatory,or in such literary excursions as essay or story, we are probably going to experience certain friction.

I am most likely to stop and ask for directions if involved in a story, proportionately less likely if engaged in an essay, bordering on surly if forced in real life to ask. Previously involved closely in the lives of three Blue Tick Hounds (the second-best nose in dogdom), and currently partnered with Sally, a compact mix of Aussie Cattle Dog and Aussie Shepherd, I have come to recognize the ease with which scent hounds become distracted, drawn off task as they say, by an interesting smell. My own life has become a fond imitation, drawing me off the lesser scents to the scents less traveled.

Accordingly, I have been drawn off scent by such recent distractions as denouement and roman a clef, finding myself drawn even farther afield by blog chum Marta's meme for willing suspension of belief, our collective token tossed into the collection bin at the phantom toll booth we have come to think of as story.

In the real sense, story is an impossible construct, a hopeless and helpless bystander to the formulas of quantum physics, those no-nonsense depictions of how things behave in the universe, how they combine or not, how they influence or do not, where they go, how much they weigh, and what they'll do if cornered. From observation, we know a certain amount about how our species and others will behave in many situations, but not all situations. The quantum persons are working on articulating how it all began, a seemingly impossible story to articulate, which makes the comparison between story and physics formula lass tenuous than it might seem.

Story is a systematic accumulation of cultural and mythic data, personified, placed in the laboratory beaker of the imagination, and subjected to the heat of conflict, tension, suspense, and agenda. The storyteller applies enough heat to cause combustion, then reports the results. My chum and collaborator Digby Wolfe visualizes the dramatic big bang as a riddle:


"The core [or plot ] of the riddle should be cleverness – hiding that which is in plain sight.

The tension of your riddle should come from the conflict between what happens as opposed to what seems to have happened."

We begin the process of buying into the riddle--suspending disbelief--when the individuals involved become human enough and vulnerable enough to cause us to feel--repeat, feel--concern for them, to become curious, even worried about what will happen to them. Rational, scientific, practical as we are, we want to push the boundaries of physical behavior on their behalf, extending our own wish to supplement with magic our impatient desire to cause things to happen or to withstand impending events on our own behalf.

And there it goes; we're in. To a degree, we're more than in; we're in love, we're smart, we're powerful. In the accelerated process of identification with characters and rooting for them, we experience the sensual thrill of running, swimming, moving briskly and efficiently through more than air and water; we move instead through obstacles, limitations, problems, physical and mental conundrums.

Only one problem: we have to give our fantasy legs, make it seem do-able, bring the miracle from the macro to the micro, and the starting point, the big bang for this process is to feel the inherent life and possibility of our fantasy with such clarity that we are able for just enough time to see the miracle in everything.

The Key

There are a number of keys to be found in my desk, most of which have a purpose I readily remember, but among my trove there is a key that unlocks no recognition or memory whatsoever.

There are two basic approaches to cleaning house, the guilt-driven approach, which is perfunctory in nature, usually involving a quick vacuum and shifting piles of newspapers and magazines from one room to another; and the writing approach, which is more intense and thorough as the writer considers the implications of the current writing problem and accordingly processes or denies it.

I was in the latter, methodically cleaning my desk, when I came upon the key. Still no clue, and so I moved it to another room, which is a step taken toward discarding it entirely, avoiding future embarrassments of recognition.

The image of the key has remained however to trigger by association its literary association the roman a clef, which is the second of two French words having literary significance. The other, of course, is denouement or unknotting, a term we learn early on in our attempts to claim the more formal tools of writing fiction for our own toolkit.

Roman a clef is a novel with a key, meaning that the characters and incidents are slightly changed but not so much that knowledgeable readers will mistake the intent that they relate to real persons in real situations. In recent years the roman a clef has been given the wax job of cynicism whereby its contents must be truer than the biography because the identity and circumstances needed to be altered.

One of the more famous of romans a clef is Summerset Maugham's The Moon and Six Pence in which the Maugham character Charles Strickland bears more than passing similarity to the post-impressionist painter Paul Gauguin. It is a compelling enough story although far from the polished technique of other Maugham novels and, particularly, the gem-like hardness and clarity of his short fiction. Nor does it compare well to another Maugham roman a clef, Cakes and Ale, which takes its title from a memorable line in Twelfth Night. Cakes and Ale, which Maugham stoutly denied was based on real people and real events, is argued to be an accounting of the final years of the poet and novelist Thomas Hardy, his widow, and her subsequent romantic liaison with another novelist, Horace Walpole, best described as the Tom Clancy of his day. The Walpole-like character was mercilessly skewered, rendered as a feckless bumbler, and by indirection the widow of the late great novelist was added to the shiskebab skewer, her taste in taking up with such a man placing her somewhere between the onions and tomatoes. The matter actually came before an English court, which found Maugham's protestations interesting, given that there was another character in the novel, a medical doctor named William Ashenden, who spoke with a stutter, walked with a limp. Maugham, you see, had a medical degree, spoke with a slight stutter, and walked with a slight limp. Maugham also went on to write a novel called Ashenden, or The Secret Agent. Maugham was known to have had a deep reverence for Thomas Hardy. Thus the delicious gossip and speculation attendant on the roman a clef.

Another of my favorite romans a clef is Aldous Huxley's Chrome Yellow, in which one of the important characters, Mark Rampion, rings true to Huxley's friend, D. H. Lawrence, while another character bears comparison to John Middleton Murry. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night is widely recognized as a prism refracting the lives of two of Fitzgerald's expatriate friends, Gerald and Sara Murphy, and I still recall one of my undergraduate professors at UCLA inducing me to read the novels of Thomas Love Peacock because they contained so much, as he put it, delicious and accurate scandal. In my dear friend Barnaby Conrad's novel, Matador, the protagonist, Pacote, bears an eerie resemblance to the famed Spanish torero, Manolete. Indeed, Conrad and Manolete were friends. Yet another UCLA prof, knowing of my interest in Hawthorne, urged me to read The Blythedale Romance in order to get a sense of the individuals with whom Hawthorne lived and worked while in residence at the Utopian society called Brook Farm.

True enough, the roman a clef is a kind of historical core sampling. I first picked up and read Robert Penn Warren's All the Kings Men knowing it was based on the legendary Louisiana populist, Huey Long, thinking to get flavor rather than actual fact, because at that time I was more interested in flavor than actual fact.

The point I raise here begins in the form of a rhetorical question: Don't we all write romans a clef at some point in our career? We pull characters in from the sidewalks of our memory, subjecting them to casting calls as we prepare the dramatis personae of our novels and short stories, luxuriating in the convenience of being able to borrow a trait from one character, add it to the physique of another, and the ethnicity or lack thereof in yet another. We reset frustrating events in our life so that there is no longer the frustration of missed opportunity but rather instead the challenge foaming forth from met expectations. We return to fond memories, sometimes those involving persons no longer alive, rewriting them with the same tantivy we used in signaling a bartender for another round at some magical gathering. Years after the fact, I set down convivial events in a variety of places, but so many of them really began in The Old Spaghetti Factory and Excelsior Coffee House on Green near Grant in San Francisco, or in the Brass Rail on C Street in Virginia City, Nevada. Having got their essence to my liking, I lift them out of time and place and context and place them where they will do me the most good, in my current work, with a quick nod to the real individuals and events and places of the past.

Roman a clef. Novel with a key. The key opens the door to the inner landscape where all truth had its big bang at the moment of the individual writer's birth, spinning, expanding ever outward toward a common human destiny.

Alternate Currents

Genre fiction is often assigned the equivalent of right field bleacher seating if, indeed, it is allowed in the stadium. Only when some genre author seeks a tryout for the major leagues of literary fiction and is subsequently accepted or when some tangibly literary author takes a crack at genre do we experience a glimmer of the snobbery and exclusionism at play.

To be sure, every genre comes with a built in genome of promise: the mystery novel promises the reader an intriguing crime-related puzzle, a romance presents an intelligent woman (who often has no idea how attractive she is) with the need to make a romantic choice, an historical novel promises a close-up of a particular geographical place at a specified moment in history, a fantasy promises some puzzle or complication caused by magic to be removed or solved by the use of a superior magic, a juvenile promises the reader an interesting younger protagonist involved in a quest. In recent years, it has become fashionable for genre writers to conflate historical setting with another genre, say mystery. Accordingly, all genres have their built-in promises. Readers who do not find these basic themes as expected stop reading, move on to another title, possibly even another author.

Genre fiction tends to be plot driven, which is to say the author drives the characters forward as though an Australian Cattle Dog were nipping at their heels, the events and goals of story forcing the characters into the responses we would expect from accelerating tension and dramatic momentum. Genre authors add to this plot-drive condition by imposing some sort of ticking clock, a time frame in which certain activity and behavior are expected--or else.

The mystery novel, for instance, presents a crime which is either committed before the readers' eyes or which has taken place moments before the start of the story. A person or persons set forth to "solve" the crime, to discover who committed the crime and then to bring such perpetrator to some form of justice before said perpetrator can commit another similar crime or perhaps an even worse kind of crime. Mystery readers have come to recognize that their inherent sense of justice is being played to; they also have come to recognize the imperfection of life as it is, looking to the mystery novel as their ritualized form of having their belief in justice affirmed and ratified. Each year an increasing number of literary fiction writers take on the mystery as an intriguing challenge. The most recent example of note is the Irish writer and critic, John Banville, the 2006 winner of the vaunted Booker Prize for his novel, The Sea.

It is less a mountain goat leap from steep escarpment to steep escarpment than it may seem to suggest from this calculus that all genre writers should read literary novels then attempt to write one, and that all literary writers should read mysteries, then attempt to write one. The mystery novel, be it the hardboiled detective or crime novel or the more urbane puzzle quest, is a splendid role model format for any kind of novel. Take something as recondite as The Ambassadors by Henry James, in which a problem is set forth. A wealthy widow wants her son to return home from his life of leisure in Paris, where he is indulging himself in the pleasures of an attractive French woman, take a position within the family business, then step forth after a time to run the family business. The wealthy widow sends a man who is more or less her boyfriend to bring her son home. The boyfriend has a rather nice job editing a literary journal which the widow is subsidizing. If the boyfriend is successful in persuading the son to return home, the widow will, quid pro quo, marry the boyfriend, more or less insuring his comfortable editorial life and adding the potential benefits of marriage. Not a bad errand to be sent on; in some ways the errand is considerably better than the cop given a case to solve or a private eye being retained to secure evidence of a crime. The boyfriend heads over to Paris, finds the son, persuades him to return home. Mission accomplished, right? Not so; the boyfriend becomes fascinated with the attractive French woman to the point of taking up with her. There is a resemblance if not a congruence between The Ambassadors, which was published in 1903, and The Maltese Falcon, which was published just twenty-seven years later. Although it is likely that Dashiell Hammett read The Ambassadors, Henry James had been dead sixteen years by the time The Maltese Falcon was published. The connection is only in my mind, a suggestion that the form of the mystery novel is an ideal medium for pursuing the illusive story genome, using it to bring convincing and provocative drama to the page.

Nor is it any more precarious a leap to suggest that all writers should read alternate universe fiction, a genre that posits among other things that somewhere in the universe is a world exactly like this one in every detail of its creation and history except--and this is where the author's inventiveness and purpose come forth, except, perhaps that in the alternate universe, characters who are right-handed in this universe appear as left-handed in the alternate world. Or perhaps there is a switch in which African Americans are portrayed as white and vise versa. Reading alternate universe fiction such as Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials Trilogy helps define a landscape where many things vary slightly from what we recognize as reality. Similarly, as a fan of the late lawyer-turned-novelist George V. Higgines (The Friends of Eddie Coyle 1972), I find his Boston different from the Boston of Dennis Lehane (Mystic River; Gone, Baby, Gone), and yet they both write of the same segments of that society and indeed, an author I discovered from the same neighborhoods in Boston, the late Robert Rimmer, wrote of an entirely different world (giving Bantam Books its first million-copy paperback reprint). Fond of Boston as I am, I'd need to spend some time there before I could write of it and were I to do so, my focus would be on an entirely alternate universe of Boston and surrounding suburbs. Reading the works of alternate universe authors is instructive in at least this way; it causes us to create our own place, color it with our own attitudes, landmarks, spoken language, and outstanding features.

Fond as I am and familiar as I am with the parts of Los Angeles written about by John Fante, a writer I much admire, my Bunker Hill is not his, my vision not his, least of all because we come from different cultural packages, but nevertheless because of that least of all. Fond as I am of the parts of Santa Barbara written by Ross Macdonald, whom I knew and admired, my Santa Barbara locales are different, my characters different, my attitudes different. His mysteries, which I believe transcend genre, and indeed all the titles I've mentioned to this point are alternate worlds I love to visit and revisit, even as I create my own alternate worlds and the mysteries wanting to be solved among their denizens.

Making a Scene

The scene is the basic unit of story. To see this unit properly, visualize a pellucid container, a laboratory retort, a British ale glass, a water glass. Into it are poured such elements as character, landscape, ambition, suspense, reversal, surprise. Others, to be sure. Depends on you and, of course, the story. Depending on the length and intent of the story, a number of containers will be required to accomplish the emotional and intellectual dramatic ambition. The material--if any--between these containers in short stories and novels is a particular form of narrative we'll look at later. This same between-the-containers information in stage plays is called stage directions; in the teleplay and screenplay, this narrative information is director's notes and actor cues.

Starting with the first empty container, we have the introduction of certain dramatic and narrative information. Individuals appear on stage, at the very least bearing some form of expectation or anticipation. They expect something to happen, they are warned of an impending event of consequence, they are already awaiting a particular event--or they are expecting things to go on as they have in the past.

In the opening scene of Waiting for Godot, Estragon and Vladimir are already present, doing something. Through their conversation, which features the line, "Nothing to be done," we are introduced to one of the major themes of the story, the added fact that they are where they are because they are waiting for a character named Godot, supplemented with visual and verbal information about the personality of each of the two men. We also begin to harbor the suspicion that Godot, whomever he may be, will never arrive, causing us to speculate on our own about who or what Godot really is and what the significance of his non arrival may be.

Speculation is a necessary quality in opening scenes because the moment the reader/viewer begins to speculate, at that moment the reader/viewer is invested in the story, has some stake in its outcome, perhaps even begins to root for the agenda of one character over the agenda of another.

We are pulled immediately into the opening of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations with the information that the first person narrator as a youngster, couldn't pronounce his name, Phillip Pirrip, and so called himself Pip. This confession reminds many of us of our own early difficulties with language and the resulting linguistic train wrecks. In short order, Pip tells us he is an orphan, living with his sister, an overbearing nag. Pip is given to visiting the graves of his parents. Nice kid, we think, starting to feel sorry for him, already imagining a life of humdrum tedium for him. On one particular visit to his parents' tombstones, a growling, horrific man, his leg in a prisoner's chains, grabs him, threatens him, makes demands of him.

Whether it is the play, Waiting for Godot, or the novel Great Expectations, we have been given dramatic information that remains with us in each subsequent scene, information that directly influences our emotional response and reception of the scenes to come. The aggregate effect of the dramatic information is called throughline or story arc.

Beginning and subsequent scenes contain at least the following elements:

Characters
Setting, the locale or landscape in which a scene is set
Beats, or events
Tempo, the pacing with which characters say or perform the beats
Blocking, the positions characters occupy during the course of a scene
Dialogue, what the characters say to one another
Subtext, the result of what characters say as opposed to what they truly feel

Scenes may contain other information relevant to the story, conditions such as reversal of an agenda, the discovery of new information, shifts of allegiance, moral choices to be made, and surprise.

Scenes in short stories are more likely to run in chronological order, but such movement is not a convention to be strictly observed. In longer works, novels, stage or screenplays, the order of scenes may shift from present to past in order to provide backstory. In longer works with multiple points of view, a shift in time or chronology can be useful in provoking a sense of suspense. While shifting focus to another time, character, or both, a part of the reader's mind remains with an unresolved situation that took place earlier.

Wherever it is set, a scene is an arena, making the analogy between scene and lab retort apt. Compounds and substances are put into the retort which is then set on a flame. The elements of a scene are introduced in anticipation of the heat from internal and external circumstances raising the temperature to a combustion point. Scenes are accordingly heated by circumstances to the goal of producing combustion. Persons and circumstances respond to the heat of pressure or opposition or frustration or grief or seduction or some prize being offered. The ultimate goal of any scene is the presence of a recognizable emotion. The dramatic means of achieving the emotion is by applying enough pressure, heat, intensity, or frustration to cause there to be some eruption which disturbs or accelerates the growing momentum that passes from scene to scene.

In Macbeth, the audience gets an early taste of where things are going when, returning home, Macbeth is hailed by the three witches as the forthcoming Thane of Cawdor. Scene by scene, Macbeth buys into the scenario by which he will actually become Cawdor. One important point in the play comes when, seeing King Malcolm being delivered his dinner by a servant, Macbeth begins riffing on the theme of last supper, quickly equating what he is about to do to Malcolm with the martyrdom of Christ. Thus conscience is introduced into the crucible, the heat of conscience is applied, and before our eyes, Macbeth weakens, combusts, cannot go through with his planned murder.

The final scene in a story, novel, or drama is the ultimate combustion, the unthinkable come to pass, its result an emotion that becomes the key signature of the work. Scenes are microcosms of an orchestrated macrocosm, where the whole--the-result--becomes greater than the sum of its parts. The payoff of a scene is the awareness of a snowflake or two, landing on your head. The payoff of the short story, novel, or drama is being hit with a snowball.

To see this analogy come to brilliant life, read Robertson Davies' Fifth Business, where the narrator tells of ducking a snowball thrown at him by a schoolmate. The snowball hits a passing woman, well into pregnancy. As a consequence, she delivers prematurely, causing the narrator a life of guilt and recrimination. It is not merely that Davies was such an accomplished storyteller, his opening scene serves as a role model for scenes and snowballs everywhere.

Ante Up

As George Orwell notes in his comprehensive essay on Charles Dickens, this author was a serious muckraker, a class and social critic, a fierce gadfly of The Industrial Revolution, and yet he attracted considerably more readers than he did political enemies or detractors. Orwell didn't make this comparison, I did: John Steinbeck went after many of the same targets as Dickens, digging, I believe, deeper and wider, certainly adding such subjects as race, migration, immigration,women's rights, scientific investigation, and politics into his examinations. Further, he, more so than Dickens, portrayed the middle classes. For his efforts, he was branded as overly sentimental and naive, a brand that at first blush I naively thought was the result of anti-intellectualism and academic jealousies, but have more recently come to believe is the more insidious effect of a concentrated Conservative (note capital C) effort at discrediting him because of his alleged left-leaning sympathies. This last observation is a distraction from my intent in raising the issue; it will be dealt with later as I begin to pursue the evidence of a smear against Steinbeck for the unwanted vision of behavior he excavated in his major works.

The intended thrust is that Dickens and Steinbeck produced individual and aggregated identifiable works because of the characters they chose, how they allowed their characters to behave, and the results they achieved in helping others to see life as they did. Although each wrote in different times and of differing places, each had a particular filter over his work. Similarly, Mrs. Woolf wrote of a particular class of the social structure, some few years ahead of her more or less American counterpart, Mrs. Wharton. And to add a kind of thematic balance, Sarah Orne Jewett, Willa Cather, and William Faulkner established in their respective works a kind of regional calculus that reminded us how the very specifics of a place and the individuals within that regional specificity caused them to be transsubstantiated into universal truths.

All prologue to the question for the individual, what do you bring to the table? What's your ante to get into the game of being a writer? Do you prefer fictional locales that are, on their face unreal? Do you do so from fear that greater specifics will bring you trouble? Do you write novels set in the distant future so that individuals who read them will not be likely to recognize themselves and thus spare yourself the embarrassment of having them confront you? Was that me in your novel, I who bore you and endured you while you were learning how to tell these very stories that dare show me as who I am? Why, pray tell did you in your last novel or in an earlier short story name a junior high school after me?

Sometimes, if we read carefully, we can see authors at play, using friends names in one way or another. I have been a suspect, a protagonist, a corpse, a Marine Corps recruiting officer, and a Bronx detective in the works of friends and a number of less respectable personae in the works of shall we say less than friends. My dear friend Barnaby Conrad has found his way into a number of my stories as Conrad Burnaby, thought to be a purveyor of replica watches and automotive chop shops. Digby Wolfe appears often as himself, a bemused Englishman who at an early moment in is career had to go on stage to warm up the audience before the Beatles. Brian Fagan, a world-class archaeologist, appears as Major Fagan of the Salvation Army. When called upon to read a short story in Steve Cook's modern lit class, I chose a story in which he appeared in a mandatory group therapy session as the result of a bureaucratic mishap, and in more than one story, Duane Unkefer is referenced as living unhasseled by the police in his 1968 Pacer, thanks to his weekly classes for wannabe writer cops. So we know what I bring to my work, which is mischief at the very least, if not a kind of noirish romanticism.

These visions you have need not be humorous or dire or dreary or overly optimistic; they needn't be parody or satire or dark horror, but they must reflect or refract some semblance of your vision, all the while projecting a world, a universe, a solar system palpably real and plausible. It is said of some times, times such as the present in fact, that they trump in their quotidian display any attempt to parody them. It is said of some times that the unthinkable not only came to pass, it set up branch offices and is seeking an employable staff. Nevertheless we must look beyond the very incidents we create to see how, by exaggeration, we can evolve our drama into satire, mindful in an absurdity of its own that such drama will eventually come to pass.

Outrage and absurdity are every bit as Darwinian as the so-called deadly sins.

It remains for us to pick a target which we will weave into our work. But weave we must if we are to keep up with the unyielding tenacity of our human condition and render it in drama for all to see.

Smoke Gets in Your I's

Someone has experienced one of your stories, has either read it as text or heard you read it. The response is instantaneous: "I marvel at and am jealous of your vocabulary."

Bad news.

You know immediately that you have failed to reach that individual.

Same is true of the reader/listener who compliments you on your sense of humor, your brisk, convincing dialog, or your ability to describe a person, place or thing.

All these qualities are valuable. Vocabulary, humor, convincing dialog, and ability to describe things are important tools in the writer's toolkit. When, however, they are presented to you before anything else, they are indications that in one case, at least, the assembled dramatic DNA got away from you, and you'd better set the radar out to detect responses from others.

One robin hardly makes a spring; one reader envious of your vocabulary or your other strengths does not mean your work is an overall failure. Thinking about reader or editorial response to your work can become a endless guessing game, reinforcing not your confidence and technique but your very lack of those qualities.

If you stop to think about it for a moment, the first response you look for is, What a wonderful story! Perhaps you'll settle for, I was thoroughly convinced, or, That story moved me. Or, I've been in situations like that myself. Or, what wonderful characters and what gripping problems.

Story, baby, story. Truth to tell, if they like your story, you don't have to worry about such things as style or vocabulary or sense of humor. Think of it this way: forget about all the copies of his work sold before his death in June of 1988, in the twenty years since his death, over a hundred million of Louis L'Amour's books were sold through regular trade sources. We can only guess about the Amazon and Alibris sales. He was a story teller, a gifted one, but a stylist he was not. He burned to tell stories, figured out the best way to tell them, then told them.

One "best" way is to pick a group of individuals who want something, then set them at the acquisition process. It can be a group of editors pursuing an author for a title. It can be The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, that noir descent into greed and ambition by a writer known only as B. Traven. It can be The Little Women. It can be Dorothy Gale wanting to get back to Kansas.

Another "best" way is to pick a group of individuals who don't want something, then set them at the consequences of trying to prevent the thing they don't want from happening. In this case, the goal is to prevent something.

Yet another "best" way is to have a character discover something heretofore unknown about him/herself, then attempt to cope with the results.

Just as we must all struggle with finding our self as a person, then as a writer, we must find our own "best" way to tell a story, which is to say we must discover then define for our self which situations and elements makes the spine tingle, the hackles rise, the disbelief suspend, the commitment kick in. Then there is the risk of going public, showing or reading the work, watching carefully (but not defensively)for response, then evaluating two things: do you still like the story after the comment? and, is it possible the commentary reveals a startling discovery?

The startling discovery often handed writers on a silver platter is the comment from the reader/listener who wants to know more, more information about the characters, more information about the plot, more information about the backstory. News for you: the reader/audience who wants more information is exhibiting a symptom quite common among readers. The symptom is called suspense.

Sol Stein, the publisher, editor, writer with whom I have a long, cordial relationship, told a funny story in one of his books on writing. I think the book is How to Grow a Novel. After saying a few complimentary things about me, Sol writes of how he heard me reminding a class of a basic maxim of his, Never take the reader where the reader wants to go. Good advice, Sol writes, but he doesn't remember ever having said it and generously attributes the notion to me. My take is that we both believe it (which is true) and we respect each others judgment. I have heard Sol on numerous occasions use the W word, withhold; make the reader wait to get the information.

Some of us are driven to get all the information out right now, in a wide, sprawling spectrum of background, weather reports, and details showing social and racial castes. Others have made the choice to start with the laser approach, reminding me of the enormous sense of power I had as a kid, sweeping through the neighborhood with a prize magnifying glass from a box of Cracker-Jacks in my pocket, ready at a moment's notice to direct the sun's rays on some paper or cloth that struck me as offensive, causing said paper or cloth or plant leaf ultimately to burst into flame. To me still, these years later, the set-up of a story becomes a magnifying glass, focusing rays of attention, causing the immediate sense that any moment, things will burst into a delicious flame.

Burn, baby, burn.

Lines in the Sand

If they are to have any chance of being seen as plausible and realistic, characters must project two sets of boundaries, the internal ones which represent to them moral choices and stances they have made or taken, and the external ones in which they define their landscape, the intimacy they will share with others, the closeness they invite from others.

As readers, we have an acquired sense of the inner and outer boundaries of our favorite characters: where they draw the line, and indeed, places in their landscape where there are no lines drawn. We even have a sense of boundaries in characters such as Hamlet, who seem ambiguous, or Don Quixote, whose behavior informs the word quixotic. Much of our sense of human behavior is drawn from our observation of characters, but there is, of course, an on-going supplement from our experience with the individuals we encounter in our non-reading, non-writing lives. You could even visualize, in a map-reading term more recently made famous by Bill Clinton, a triangulation of sources by which boundaries are formed and set into effect.

The difficult part for writers comes with the realization that characters of their own creation not only need to have these inner and outer boundaries established, they as well must experience the inertia for forcing these characters to the limits of their boundaries, then pushing them over the line. Put in another, more formulaic way, writers must experience intellectually and emotionally the truth that dramatic writing is the unthinkable come to pass.

Actors tend to discover the relative ease with which they may carry a role of character unlike their own self well over the boundary marker, while finding difficulty in separating their own boundaries from those of characters they see as being similar in nature or agenda.

Writers who have yet to integrate this construct of dramatic unthinkableness within their creative toolkit tend to portray certain characters as extremes of good or extremes of evil. In worst-case situations, writers will portray extremes of evil, for instance, with a handy trait of loving small animals or helping old ladies across the traffic-laden intersection, and perhaps portraying extremes of virtue with an overly indulgent taste for Reese peanut butter cups.

With the construct of the unthinkable in the toolkit, the writer begins to see another way of looking at the character, not of good or evil, right or wrong, or any of the other pairs of opposites we use as a shorthand to define human behavior, but rather as a line drawn in the surface of a landscape. The landscape may be hardscrabble soil, a broadloom carpet, or a tongue-and-groove wooden flooring, depending on the persona of the character. But there is a line beyond which he or she will not move. Now, get us there, and show us the effect it has on the character.

The goal of dramatic writing is not to demonstrate the frailty of the human race because that has been demonstrated in ample measure by the events of history and by our individual recollections of self and family and friends and others we are able to observe. Nor is the goal of dramatic writing necessarily a cynical one--not unless you chose to make it so. The goal is to replicate the diverse nature of the individual, struggling against component warring factions to effect a dignified presence. Some of us writers may see the enemy as the Culture, which can be taken to mean any conventional system, Church, State, Family, Clan, School, Political Party. Others in our midst may see the enemy as the Balkanized Self, the warring factions resident within the body, struggling for a sensible order in which there may be some consistent plan rather than stealthy inward Pearl Harbors. palace coups, or uncontrolled buying binges.

Unthinkability.

Think about it.