Una voce poco fa: Voices, voices everywhere

The rapid exchanges you hear that sounds as though it is from arguing neighbors is really the dialectic in your head, promised you by Rachel, your first mentor.  

At the time she told you this, you simply knew--in that instinctive sense of knowing--what to put down on paper.  You also knew that if you had nothing to put down, not to worry, sooner or later, something would come.  Thus hearing from Rachel that she heard voices was something of a relief, and you wondered if you'd ever be fortunate enough to hear voices of your own.

In other times, the voices sing a Siren's song, luring your own versions of Homer's Odysseus, having survived The Iliad, heading home to Ithaca with the amazing adventure-distractions of The Odyssey.  You hear those sirens, singing something that, in anomaly and cross-culture, come out as the plaintive Fado from Portugal.  You like the connection between the sirens of The Odyssey and some Greek mythology, as being sung by spirits of the sea, and of some of the sad Fado songs also having relation to the sea.  Sirens and Fados have agendas of their own, but their purpose is to provide, even provoke a distraction that is often fatal.

Siren's songs associate in your mind with all noir fiction.  Women singing songs or telling tales or following through agendas to settle old, off-stage scores.  They are thus captured by their own visions or senses of destiny as their male counterparts.  Sirens and noir women are sometimes--erroneously, you believe--referred to as femmes fatales.  They are in fact listening to their own, compelling inner voices.

Now, it is too late to ask her if her voices argued or, for that matter, any of the things you've wondered to ask her since she died.  You have her books, photocopies of her letters (the originals filed away with her manuscripts and papers in, of all places, Boston College), but what the hell, you've grown accustomed to your own voices, your own dialectic, and it pleases you to think of them as arguing neighbors because of the potential arguing neighbors have to escalate their differences of opinion into conflicts and confrontations of such rancor and spirited participation that police, responding to complaints about them, have occasion to fear for their own safety.

You've come to fear for your own safety in the sense of relating safety and its first cousin, comfort, to things put down on paper or on the hard drive of your computers as materials in woeful need of revision.  Thus one pair of actors in the dramatis personae of your dialectic, safety and risk.

The dialectic spoke to you in a different manner, back then.  You'd read a story or novel or poem that wrenched your senses so far out of line, you'd think you needed the equivalent of a sensory chiropractor.  And you'd wrench in the despair of knowing you could never hope to tell a story so well as this one you held before you in your hands and, now, in your gut.

Or you'd read a story in which you were yanked along, clunky paragraph or motive by clunky action, fascinated at what you considered its regal awfulness, thinking you would never allow yourself to sink this far.

For some long while, you were stuck on the fulcrum between those polar extremes, reaching for the unattainable in fear of producing examples of what you so feared and loathed.

In actuality, you produced more of the latter than you wished and, in what now seems irony, enough of the former to keep you imprisoned in the limbo of being a derivative copyist.

Along comes to mind now two books, one sent you for review, the other calling out to you from its place in your reference shelves, calling, "Remember what you said about me."

The newer of the two books is Aimee Bender's most recent collection of stories, The Color Master.  The older is John Gardner's estimable The Art of Fiction.

How could you not like Aimee Bender's work when, in the first story of the collection, second paragraph, there is a single sentence:  "It's unsettling to meet people who don't eat apples."? Forget that the first line of the story is: "I once knew a girl who wouldn't eat apples."  Of course, after reading the story, you can't forget that line or nearly any other.

As to the John Gardner book, The Art of Fiction, you were motivated after reading it to try all his novels.  You began with Grendel because of that character's association with Beowulf, and because having a novel told from the point of view of such a monster sent chills of admiration marching through you with the verve and persistence and madness of Tea Party politicians.  You loved Grendel but hated all his other fiction, the reading of which led you to observe how much better things would have gone if he'd have followed his own counsel in The Art of Fiction.

To avoid the siren call of convention or safety or, dare you say it, comfort, you need to hear that dialectic called counterpoint, in which your protagonists and antagonists hear the voice of your own vision, set against and over the safe and comfortable.  The risks are huge, and in them await the potential for something worth seeking.

Words

Long ago and far away, while interviewing a chef for a forgotten story meant for a forgotten publication, you learned an unforgettable fact about chefs.  When the head chef is hiring an underling, he or she asks to see that individual's knives.

If the head chef approves of the care the underling takes in the upkeep of these knives, the interview moves on to phase two, which is a demonstration of how the hopeful employee slices, dices, chops, and other significant divisions of various vegetables into component parts of various sizes.

This information has remained with you for at least twenty years, a taunting reminder of how the earliest phases of your education had more to do with acquiring facts at all levels, frequently to the exclusion of any ability to perform useful work with the fact.  Although resistant at first to the prospect of "learning your multiplication tables," you've come to see the value of such exercises.

A chef's basic tools, a set of knives, interested you, but beyond the simple internal exercise of trying to imagine the set of knives of a particular chef, you never had occasion to put the information to any practical matter.

There was one memorable incident when you were introduced to a chef of some reputation, only to discover you had nothing to say to him until your imp of the perverse took over and, noticing the chef's style of dress, you decided on a wild risk.  "My guess,"  you told him, "is that your preference goes beyond the conventional German knives and into something a bit more unusual.  Shall we say Japanese?  Tojiro, perhaps?"

The chef was at first stunned, then impressed because, as he put it, "You don't look the type."  This could have meant any number of things, including a taste for Texas barbecue or that you had give-away mannerisms suggesting a fondness for macaroni and cheese, the former being true, the latter not.

Educations that stress soaking up facts are not entirely without use.  Somewhere, somehow, you the English major, learned of the fine knives meant for Japanese chefs that had found their way into the toolkits of many an Occidental and especially American worker in the culinary fields.

In short, your imp of the perverse had brought you in contact with a memorable meal, overseen by a chef with a European background and education.  You wonder at times if you were not educated into perversity from the fact of having to memorize all those facts, floating around with nowhere to apply them.  

What you've only come to terms with in recent years is to question why being aware of the kind of education you had didn't motivate you to find the applications you were complaining about.  But this exploration is a start to looking at the aspect of what to do with information, how to put it to work, where to set the fulcrum.

Artists, whatever their medium of execution and their style in doing so, are frequently given primary judgment on their ability to draw and to render.

A number of jazz piano players have told you of the importance to their ability to earn a living is an ability to provide accompaniment for a singer.

The equivalent basic for you is words.  You do carry them about the way a chef carries knives.  You have favorites, which is a way of saying there are words you love to use, invent sentences like necklaces in which to display them in a different light.  There are words you've learned not to use, words like very and somewhat, and suddenly.

There are remarkable words from other languages that mean something similar to American English words but have in their sound a touch of garlic or, in Spanish, that delight of a word, ajo.  It is, you've learned, better to be asombrado in Spanish than astonished in English.  El Doctor Livingston, supongo, sounds better than Dr. Livingston, I presume.  In Sanskrit, there are words called bija words that conflate the powers and characteristics of gods, goddesses, and insights so powerful that, when meditated upon, your consciousness is turned into a sitar, on which are played the music called ragas, which are themselves meditations to morning and evening, and other times of day.

If, like a chef, you are being considered for a job, you are asked to show your words in a few sentences, then, if these have any intrinsic power, you are allowed to show a paragraph or two, possibly even a page.

Even though, when you had the chance to chose when you were about twelve or thirteen between Spanish, Latin, and French, you chose Spanish in spite of your understanding that Latin would help you get a leg up on Spanish and Italian and Portuguese, and because you already had a novel written in Spanish that you came close to understanding.

Brian Fagan likes to show off by quoting from Homer in Greek and although you took some Greek, you are only mildly jealous and after all, he cannot recite from memory the first eighteen lines of The Prelude to The Canterbury Tales, where there is that mouth-watering glide from the days before the Norman Invasion, and the French, and that lovely slide into Anglo-Saxon:


WHAN that Aprille with his shoures soote 
The droghte  of Marche hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth         
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes,  and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,
And smale fowles maken melodye,
That slepen al the night with open ye,         
(So priketh hem nature in hir corages:
Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmers for to seken straunge strondes, 
To ferne halwes, couthe in sondry londes;
And specially, from every shires ende         
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
The holy blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seke.
  
You can almost taste those Anglo-Saxon words, The holy blisful martyr for to seeke/That chem chaath cholpen, whan that the were (two beats in that) sek-e.  Like a dab of German mustard on a bratwurst, exploding against the back of your mouth.

Words, all over the place, and over thirty years of students recalling your screeds against -ly adverbs.  Get a better verb, one with a dash of ajo y chile in it.

Words as tools.  And what do the words do?  They connect facts with use, at long last.  And what are you looking for?  You are looking for ways to make the connections so that the words seem invisible and only the meanings are there, waiting to be inhaled.

Distant Lights

Some nights, when you are in places where there is no cloud cover or fog or mist, you are able to see stars spilled about the vastness of the sky.  The longer you look, the lights seem to be pulsing, not mere light then, but light with a radiant agenda, broadcasting, emitting, sending forth.

If you look long enough, you are filled with an odd mixture of awe, grief of loss, and the oh, so supportive sense of thanks for being able to see these points of light and time and space.  The grief is almost overwhelming in ways that remind you of things closer to hand than these stars.  

The grief is from the knowledge that some of these stars have died, years before you were born.  How can you grieve for something so far away in space and time that you cannot name it or fathom it in the way of an astronomer?  

The distance that would seem to be exclusionary is overwhelming in its vastness.  Perhaps then it is the sense of light from dying stars that reminds you of things you have previously seen and have now only in dreams or memory.  Things you have once held close still send their light to you, and in that sense you appreciate again their names, their relationship to you and yours to them.  The thought of their name sends the light traveling.

You experience the frustration of wishing you knew the names of all these points of light and their approximate distances across the great void from you.  At the same time you are grieving for these dead or dying parts of the galaxy, you are stunned by the reassuring patterns of constellations and stars you do have names for.  

Once, when you stood inside the great library in London, you did not understand why tears formed in your eyes, then began their travel down your cheeks.  Men and women you knew by name and work had been in this room, reading, studying, perhaps writing at the works that were now the light they emitted in their lifetime in books, essays, poems, broadsides.

Often these moments,where you see the light from those distant times or read the words from more recent times but nevertheless times before you were here to see or experience in any way, fill you with a sense of being connected to something beyond the focus of brightness and ideas.  

You look into the night sky and see a sense of business and purpose more satisfying and nuanced than the military precision and purpose of ants or insects at work on a feeding project.  You see a busy, extraordinary universe in the full intimacy of evolving, becoming its destiny.

You look into a library and see a similar, but more accessible process, a history of a species, radiant with ideas and speculations and, most wonderful of all, a history of the ideas of a species gone awry.  Both the species and some of its ideas have been at times remarkable for wrongheadedness and positions of a hundred eighty degrees from actuality.  You see the other side as well, the side where the ideas resonate and show no signs yet of being wrong, and the species, for all its interior quirks and misapprehensions, still radiates qualities that have been identified over the years as empathetic and inclusive.

In a library, you are able to pull forth a book, say one filled with the works of a man for whom the word daft seems to have been custom-tailored, fitting him with an appropriate drape.

Among other things, he wrote:


I went out to the hazel wood,  
Because a fire was in my head,  
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,  
And hooked a berry to a thread;  
And when white moths were on the wing,          
And moth-like stars were flickering out,  
I dropped the berry in a stream  
And caught a little silver trout.  
  
When I had laid it on the floor  
I went to blow the fire a-flame,   
But something rustled on the floor,  
And someone called me by my name:  
It had become a glimmering girl  
With apple blossom in her hair  
Who called me by my name and ran   
And faded through the brightening air.  
  
Though I am old with wandering  
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,  
I will find out where she has gone,  
And kiss her lips and take her hands;   
And walk among long dappled grass,  
And pluck till time and times are done,  
The silver apples of the moon,  
The golden apples of the sun. 

You were quite young when you first read this and had only begun your wandering.  Although you rely on your wanderings still being robust and sincere, you are surest of all about the fire in your own head.

When you look at the night sky in its distant, pulsing clarity, or the stanza of a poem or a short story or a novel and then have pause to wonder where and who you are, you are lit by the fire in your head.

Visions

You come from a culture where argument is a way of life.  If there are no arguments and a kind of agreeable stasis results, your culture will have none of it.  Besides, your culture has hard-wired into its dramatis personae a kind of willful mischief.  Questions are asked.  Arguments start.  The wrong person is brought home for dinner.  arguments start.  The right person is brought home for dinner.  Arguments start.

Much of these arguments are anticipated in a collection of texts much like the Corpus Juris, or Body of Laws that govern other cultures and countries.  As if you had to ask, this collection is The Talmud.  From the get-go, which is to say the first page, The Talmud speaks to the matter of bringing together oral and written tradition.  See?  Bringing together.  First page.  First argument.

The visions of your culture encourage this conversation, a guarantee of, among other things, generations of arguments, opinions, visions of protocol, procedure, and propriety because what appears proper to one aspect of the culture might not be appropriate to another.

The clash of culture and cultures goes well beyond interpretation of texts and traditions.  To some in your culture, the name for a pudding-like dish is pronounced "kugel," the accent on the first syllable.  Thus, KUgel.  To others, the same dish or a relatively similar version is pronounced "kegel"  Thus, KEgel.  From an objective stance, one can say the matter rests on regional pronunciation.  After all, the objective observer would say, Yiddish is not the only regional language spread throughout the world.  

English, at the time of arguably its greatest poet, Geoffrey Chaucer, was so conflicted with regional pronunciations and with written variations in spelling that Chaucer wrote an amusing poem to an individual he probably invented for the purpose of making fun.  In Adam Scrivendi, Chaucer is addressing the then equivalent of a scribe or computer, a professional copyist, asking this writer, this copyist to please not mess with his rhyme scheme by using regional dialect or spelling.

There is a certain amount of fun inherent in conflating Chaucer with some of the traditions of your culture because, well, because Chaucer saw the story in differences, of visions that clash in the night or the daytime, or at any time language was used by anyone.

Although you do spend a certain amount of time with members of the same moral, ethical, and visionary choir of which you are a sometime member, you like the notion that not all of us in this same choir of convenient metaphor have the same vocal range.  There are altos and sopranos and basso and contralto and the occasional Quaker, who does not sing but rather meditates.  There are various sects of Buddhists, and to be sure there are within your immediate choir devotees of that popular aspect of the All-Pervasive known as Shiva, while others in that same frame of reference prefer Krishna or Durga.  Your own preference is Kali, but what the hell, we are all of us content with a certain sense of community while at the same time entertaining our own vision, a vision constructed as we describe our own orbit while on a planet describing its orbit in a solar system in which yet newer solar features are discovered with mind-boggling regularity.

While sipping contentedly at a San Pellegrino on the rocks while awaiting your first course at dinner this evening, foot tapping to the two-four tempo of an accomplished jazz guitarist, Carlos, the chef, appeared tableside, gave a courtly bow, then asked you "How do you see your crab cakes being served?"

You'd never been asked that kind of existential question.  Perhaps your quick inventory of your brain for an appropriate answer gave Carlos the clue he wished.  "Quizas en tomato?"

Quizas is one of a few all-purpose Spanish words.  It can mean perhaps, or maybe.  Another such word is segun, which can mean accordingly or according to or depending upon, or all depends.  With those two words and no others, you could carry out a kind of conversation.

You in fact played the segun card.

Carlos, perhaps in recognition of the state of crisis always ambient in a restaurant kitchen, played the trump card.  "Okay, I put them on a tomato.  So you want the thin sliced like we use on the carpaccio or the thick slice from the plum tomato?"

"I come here,"  you said, drawing yourself to what you hope was a posture of a man who is open to experience and enlightenment, "to experience your vision of how the crab cake should be presented.  Take me somewhere I have not been before."

Carlos nodded thoughtfully, then retreated to the kitchen.  There was a scattering of conversation at the next table.  The person closest to you asked if your conversation with Carlos was usual for this place.

"Depends,"  you said.

When Carlos returned with the crab cakes, your neighbors asked to see it.

"Who would have thought?"  a woman said.

"Visions,"  you said.  And thus this reflection on visions, which is a way of going about one's orbit in quest of one's own vision, a wish to observe the visions of others, and a willingness, no, an eagerness to hammer out the differences.  

Patterns, Fish, and Roxbury Drive

Patterns and people have a notable similarity.  Some in each category are bright, vivid, expansive, and interesting.  Others are unimaginative, predictable, boring.  Still others are flamboyant, over-the-top, seemingly self-canceling.

A pattern is a matrix, a template, a repetition of a design or motif, which is one of those words from one culture meaning pretty much the same in yet another.  A theme or salient design (aha, another near- if not complete synonym), played forth in some systematic repetition.

People meet head on with patterns in the best dramatic manner--action.  You could say that individuals who are predictable are being observed following a familiar pattern, one egregious example being Fred, who has for his past four marriages, chosen younger, taller women, all of whom were redheads.

You could also say that persons who write stories that follow certain patterns which, upon examination, reveal similar themes, are playing roles in dramas constructed to fill some unspoken need.

You have an on-again-off-again relationship with patterns in that you are quick to look for them, just as quick to be dismissive of them or the source that produces them.  This is a matter of predictability inserting itself toward the head of the line of things you like least about stories, real or invented.  Thus the problem to haunt you from time to time:  the appearance of the predictable in your work.

You can remember long (and expensive) discussions with a man named Arthur, back when you were still an undergraduate.  Arthur had an office on Roxbury Drive in Beverly Hills.  In one of the rooms, he had an enormous fish tank, filled with brightly colored fish, which provoked rather heated discussions between you because of his opinion that the fish appeared to be quite happy where they were, and you expressed the belief that fish on Roxbury Drive had little choice but to appear happy because that was in a sense the pattern of Roxbury Drive.

You were a student, looking for things, trying to sort out and understand things.  Arthur was a highly respected psychiatrist.  Roxbury Drive, at the time, at least, had an incredible number of psychiatrists.  A recurring theme among your expensive conversations with Arthur was the expectation most persons had of consistent behavior.  Numerous times, Arthur asked you if you believed you were being consistent, and your responses, often in the form of another question, had to do with your wondering what was so important about consistency, even to the added question of whether consistency was a turn-off.

These conversations at one time caused you to pose the question of whether a similar tank of fish in a similar office below the equator would result in the fish swimming in a counter-clockwise orbit.  Your observation of Arthur's fish had them swimming always clockwise in their search for happiness.

You at the time were not so much searching for happiness, at least not in any sense of pattern, as much as for, in no particular order, girlfriends, story ideas, experience, a sense of what you were good at (perhaps influenced by a growing awareness of the things you were not good at), and some system wherein all these quests could be conducted in some kind of harmony.

Somewhere back in those days, you wrote a short story called "Fish," which you greatly admired and, until your recalling it now, assumed it was triggered by a reproduction of a fish drawn by Picasso which was given you by a girl who worked in the campus bookstore.  True enough, the Picasso fish was called out in the first paragraph of the story, but there is a good possibility of the Picasso fish being a motif for the happy Roxbury Drive fish in Arthur's office.

Over the next years, you developed a pattern of working at jobs of incredible boredom and monumental demonstrations of things at which you had only minor ability, in order to pay down the cost of those expensive conversations you had with Arthur.

Did those conversations prove valuable to you in the long run?

Ah,yes.  They helped you see patterns of consequences, results of being a smart-ass kid, then refining that quality to an increasingly easier to live with cynicism mixed with unfettered, surprising bursts of optimism and enthusiasm.

You might wish to dig through the cobwebs, extract "Fish" and see what it does for you.

Truth to Tell

Truth is a record or vision of actuality.  Individuals from various disciplines, not by any means the least of being writers, attempt to define that state with varying degrees of success.  For writers and for philosophers, attempts to define truth are welcomed, the former seeing the attempts as story, the latter as the see-saw of thesis and anti-thesis.

From time to time, in particular when you are composing at top speed, you'll find yourself saying, "Truth to tell..." or "In truth..." or even, "The truth is..."  None of these means your previous words were deliberate untruths or even invented visions but rather as signals that you are about to blow the whistle on yourself for having misread something or having held something back or not having seen a greater actuality that has appeared, seemingly from your fingertips as you type rather than from your brain as it plays its part in the composition.

Many of the actors you've known--especially your mentor, Virginia Gilmore--speak of finding the truth of a particular character, a trope you take to mean that the actor has sought and appears to have found the vision of life and of surrounding individuals and events the character regards as true.

In a way, the actor is attempting to see more truth than the boundaries of the character, including the time, place, and conditions in which the character is placed, and that character's truthful feelings about the other characters in the story.  The actor is, in effect, translating the writer's truth in writing the story.  One actor you know told you only days ago that he regarded the truth of the character Nora Hellmer in Ibsen's play, The Doll's House, as hearing the voices of other characters in her head in the manner of an insane person, hearing voices.  Because this actor was directing that play, his vision of the truth of Nora and, indeed, the entire play, was of vital matter because that truth has an impact on the momentum and emotional release at the end of the play.

Your definition of a story and its basic component, the scene, has its origin in the belief that each is a landscape into which one or more characters enter, each believing he or she is right.  This translates to each character believing in the individual integrity of his truth.  This observation reflects on your earlier vision of story as a clash of characters, each arriving on stage with the insistent assertion of the truth and integrity of his mission.

The actor reads the text of the story, then circles the entire thing, looking for hints that will lead to the assumption of the truth of that character, the amount and degree of it brought forth by the actor, the propellant of that character's behavior, including response and sense of chemistry with other characters.

Over the years, you've read of the dynamic between the actor/dancers in The Westside Story, the Jets and Sharks.  At times, between takes, when the actors were not in character, they nevertheless clashed as an aftereffect of realizing the truth of the enmity between the two fictional gangs.  There were actual off-stage fights, examples of actors seeking and finding a truth.

The actor has to start by finding his or her truth, then a sense of the truth of all other relevant characters with whom there is contact of any sort.

The writer must define not only the truth of each character but work to remove potential obstacles to the reader seeing the potential truth of the story.

In these paragraphs, you see yourself moving from the straightforwardness of declarative sentences into the abstractions arising whenever you attempt to define the truth inherent in the characters and the story.  Words such as apparent, seeming, potential, are all qualifiers, ironic in their injection of ambiguity into the costume worn by the various participants in the composition of a story.

Writers and philosophers arm-wrestle with words, meanings, and actions in their attempts to portray what is so and what is not, trying to portray truth in a venture that is a figment of the imagination.  The story did not happen in reality.  It was invented in a writer's imagination, then honed, turned, and spun until it has the appearance of truth, which is to say a plausible series of actions in response to a plausible series of dramatic displacements, some of which may be arguments.

In the real world, wars have been fought over such destabilizing events and arguments.  One faction revolts against the entrenched order of another.  One word is seen as untrue.  For some considerable time, the Turks have seen a conflict with the Armenians, but have not allowed it to be seen as the same truth the Armenians saw.

The writer has to take all sides, perhaps even to the point of showing greater favor to the antagonistic side, the side against the momentum of the protagonists, because to do so is to give the writer's protagonists a plausible, worthwhile opponent.

In the struggle of writing the story, the writer may well be seized by the greater truth of the antagonist, the worthy opponent, changing his mind.

At times in your life when you have reached this point of trying to make a reduction of story by bringing it to a steady simmer the same way you'd use to make a reduction of some balsamic vinegar, you come away from the exercise more than a little depressed, saddened, cynical over the lack of absolutes.  But you recognize the dialectic within and without yourself and you come away with the self-awareness that you are not by any means alone, your being and imagination are filled with characters yearning to impress you with their truth, the as it were of their splendid, conflicting visions.

Your Inner Stage Manager

A frequent question, often asked of you or by you.  "What's your story?"

With the same measure of frequency, the question is often asked in some degree of pique or, to use a word you admire for its sense of nuance, dudgeon, of which there can even be high dudgeon.  He asked in high dudgeon.  He fucking took offense.

The question is often a response to the aura or vibe cast off by the individual of whom the question is asked.  Why are you, he, she, they, or them so pissed, and at what?

You've seen the questioned asked, have in fact asked it yourself, of another person about whom there is curiosity.  What's her story?  Why is she acting the way she does?  When the question is asked among a group of writers about another person, you feel justified in thinking there is an additional nuance to the question:  "What is her backstory?"  By this trope, the individual's past history is being called into reference as a means of establishing some means of approach to that person.  

Not all answers to the backstory question are complementary.  "He's into martyrdom."  "She's a control freak."  "He's a special needs person--he always needs to hear about himself." 

On the other hand, sometimes the answer to the backstory question is the social effect of a visa:  "She's a good listener."  "He's funny ha-ha (as opposed to funny weird)."

We are all of us story incarnate.  Some among us, you included, talk the way you think and think the way you talk.  Thus, when you are alone or in company, the narrative theme you're aware of is supplied by your Stage Manager, a description you pulled from Thornton Wilder's iconic play, Our Town,  in which a character known only by that name provides the actual narration for the drama to come.  You take note of the place, the time, the persons present, relevant and irrelevant details.  

You interpret what goes on about you and if not on a direct, translation basis, provide some kind of subtitle, even to such seemingly straightforward questions as the one you were asked this morning when ordering your coffee.  "Medium or large?"  "Nonfat or regular?"

Your Stage Manager calls your attention to things of interest, defines them for you, reminds you of tasks you had on the daily agenda, stopping at the bank, for instance, to deposit a royalty check, deciding whether to do the banking before or after your one o'clock meeting and, thus, which branch of the bank.  Logistic stuff as, indeed, narrative in story is logistics.

Your Stage Manager also deals with elapsed time.  This is taking too long.  Or perhaps losing track of time as some remarkable narrative in stories, say in John Cheever's remarkable short story, "The Swimmer" compresses and deals with elapsed time.

You are your story incarnate, striving to become in general story incarnate, a working plan that will have you as aware of the stories of others as possible without giving up on your own narrative.  At the same time, you will not be so exclusively immersed in your own story that you will be insensitive to the needs, ideas, and boundaries of others.

There is a certainty that you will be attracted to stories quite like your own and equal in your curiosity of discovering similarities between individuals with whom you have no apparent connection.

In a discussion you had this morning, you said, to your surprise and ultimate delight that the thing you hope to bring to story is surprise.  This hope is based on your belief that there are not all that many basic stories, two or three, perhaps four, but not many more, thus the need to bring yourself into the stories you compose and the great likelihood of you bringing your interpretation fanny pack with you into the reading of the stories of others.

Saturday, in a discussion with a student who works days as a psychiatrist, and who is workshopping an interesting novel of suspense, you noted the falling off of tension toward the final chapters.  You were struck with the notion that a possible solution would be to kill off a major character.  The psychiatrist blinked, took in the information, then nodded.  "That could make a great deal of sense, dramatically speaking."

You were, in a sense, asking for and getting permission to enter his story, therein to make some radical suggestions.

In similar fashions, you have influences on the stories of those about you, and they on you.  Your favorite stories are mysteries, thrillers, speculative fiction, and alternate universe.

Until earlier this evening, in a conference with your Stage Manager, you hadn't realized how much you favored ghost stories, until it came to you how, at this stage of your life, you are haunted by individuals fictional and real who appear before you, causing you to imagine conversations, adventures, and to recall past conversations and adventures.