Motive

Most stories of mystery and suspense elbow three suspects into a clamor for our attention, means, motive, and opportunity.

These suspects drive the story and our suspicions.  If all three are not present, the author will need to provide us with one or more persons of interest, all of whom had some reason to do the deed, the instrument by which the deed is executed, and a compelling reason for committing the act on which the story depends for its shape, its voice, and its resolution.

Stories other than mystery or suspense also acknowledge means, motive, and opportunity as their raison d'être,  a justifiable cause for arguing that all stories are mysteries-in-the-making.  

A character sets out to solve a puzzle?  Check.  Who killed Uncle Fred and why?  Double check.  What does Young Man or Young Woman wish to do as they move into adulthood?  Check.  How will the enterprising individual leave his or her home turf to find the necessary ailment to cure the ailment threatening those at home?  Check.

These scenarios are all variations of the same story, which is that of an individual seeking a solution; every protagonist has a motive.  Without motive, the protagonist, however interesting and worthwhile, is useless as a dramatic tool.  Motive is agenda.  Motive takes the character out of the shadowland of narrative, presents the character with the A-ticket to story.

When a writer listens to motive, the agenda appears; the outline of events begins to materialize, sometimes by waking the writer up at two in the morning, thinking perhaps a splash of milk will help.  But the splash of milk sits unused in the glass when the writer begins to see through those night eyes what the story wants.

Not all stories come at such unexpected times as two in the morning, but their effect is the same.  You're given the opportunity to listen to strangers, arguing, searching for answers to problems, not always understanding one another, perhaps not even discussing the same thing, but believing they are.

These events come about at stranger times than two in the morning, having the effect on you of considering any time a strange time, causing you to realize there are two kinds of time, ordinary time and story time.  Your motivation is to produce story in what appears to be ordinary time.  Your agenda is to disrupt ordinary and/or to commemorate hidden, extraordinary things in it.

Where ever you walk these days, your attention is drawn to volunteers, weeds or plants growing where they ought not, where neither you nor anyone else would look for them.  There are those who will think of any such growths as weeds, will think anything that grows where it ought not is a weed, introducing the irony of hair growing in places where it is not expected, having abandoned growing in places where it once grew with reckless abandon.

This anomaly not only describes an aspect of your physicality, it describes your motive for writing the kinds of things you write, for looking for the kinds of things you look for, and for listening to the persons in real life and in story that you so often find yourself listening to.

There are times, in particular when you are out on your nightly walk, which often seems more like a prowl than a walk, you think you see or hear characters who remind you of things you scurry home to write about, hopeful of finding out what they and you want, wondering if there is some language of prowlers and night people that can talk to your heart.

Are We There Yet?

A destination is an anticipated arrival at some place, status, and/or attitude.  The person doing the anticipation has with some deliberation set forth on a journey from Point A to a destination.  The anticipator may also have discovered awareness of embarkation without having experienced an official goodbye party or emotional send-off.

To a person such as yourself, with a considerable investment in story, destination is to you and those like you as a dividend is to the investor.  In concert with the possibility that your investment might have some positive results, there is also the fear that circumstances will obliterate it.  

To your knowledge, there is no Federal insurance agency guaranteeing that time invested in story will produce a profit much less a return on the original investment.  You are on your own.  Extending the metaphor, your eggs are in one basket.  You have no specific feel for when this journey began, although you do have specific memories of bridges, burning in the background.

The best you can come up with is a rainy afternoon when you were in the fourth grade, being read to by Mrs. DeAngelo, whom you approached after she'd read a good number of pages in, as Huck Finn was heard to say a few years later, "That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth."

You, who at the grade four level had already entertained making a living as a restaurateur and an aeronautical engineer, recall asking Mrs. DeAngelo if Mr. Mark Twain did indeed make a living from writing such things.

With consideration and appreciation, Mrs. DeAngelo said Mr. Mark Twain made a living from writing such things but that was because he had extraordinary talents and experiences and one--meaning you--should not expect to make a living from telling stories until you knew your way around them to a much better degree than you did then and there at Public School Number Ten in Perth Amboy, New Jersey or anywhere else you might happen to be.

Mrs. DeAngelo was well aware of persons from California, thinking they could do things such as that, and while she did not wish, as she put it, to be a wet blanket, she invited you to consider that Mr. Mark Twain had been brought up on story in the first place, then had gone forth on a purposeful journey of discovery on which he learned many of the things he needed.

You also recall asking her if there was still time for you to learn the things you needed.  She scanned you with great care.  You were short, an ungovernable flop of dark brown hair refusing to leave your forehead for protracted periods of time.  You were not happy because of your growing impression that you were not going to be back in Los Angles (where you felt you belonged) at any time soon.  Mrs. DeAngelo said she did not have much experience with such things, but saw the possibility that you might be able to make some of your living that way, but you'd have to hustle to make up for lost time.

So perhaps that was when you did step off the curb, as it were.

Whether abstract or specific, destination resonates with implications of some goal, of a journey, of a plan.  In true, dramatic fashion, many destinations, including most of your own, are arrived at only after detours, obstacles, and opposition.

When we reach destinations, we are often travel weary, perhaps even a bit disillusioned by our first glimpse of the place we'd striven to reach.  You were, in fact, bordering on disillusion those years when you'd earned enough credits to allow you active membership in The Writers' Guild, its significant benefit for you the ability to finance a VW Beetle with a sunroof and an FM radio, which a great friend of yours called decadent.  You were disillusioned about many of the places where your work was published or performed, but you were always re-illusioned by the siren-like call of projects that came calling, knocking on the doors of your mind, asking for a destination.

"Is this it?  So this is it--the Holy Grail, graduate school, romance, publication, Santa Fe, independence, or whatever."

You are by no means disillusioned by the destination you appear to have arrived at today, August 13, 2014.  To Mrs. DeAngelo, or rather her ghost, because she is long gone to destinations reserved for fourth grade teachers of students of your generation, you ask if there is any chance persons can make any semblance of living from the things they write.

Once again, she scans you, noting you've put on some height, a few wrinkles, some smatterings of gray.  She recognizes you, all right, and tells you you'd better hustle because you got such a late start.

Tourist Destinations and Story Destinations

For considerable times, you've lived in tourist destinations. While living in these tourist destinations, you've gone to yet other tourist destinations, carrying with you among your baggage and sensitivities a deja vu of tourist attractions and tourist behavior.

With one or two notable exceptions, most tourist destinations have going on about them a full spectrum of activity and governance in addition to the activities fine-tuned to captivate, entertain, and feed tourists, in the process inducing them to spend additional funds on tours, memorabilia, and that lovely portmanteau definition, souvenirs.

You've lived a good chunk of your life in the city of your birth, Los Angeles.  Now, a hundred miles north, you live in yet another tourist destination, which is itself a few hundred miles south of one of the great North American tourist destinations, San Francisco.

You also lived in Providence, Rhode Island, a pleasing enough city although one not thought of as much of a tourist destination.  Because of your and your father's interest in baseball, you ventured to a more definitive tourist location, Boston. 

Between all these were ventures to such notable tourist destinations as New York, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Miami Beach, and perhaps your most favored, not so much because there is much of anything left as because you are better able to experience its history as a series of ghostly adventures.  This is Virginia City, Nevada, where Mark Twain got his start and where, in a much smaller way, you got some traction.

Thinking of tourist destinations brings to your mind a link you'd never before considered, although, now that you do think about it, there are connections between tourist destinations and attempts to make a living in ways related to writing stories, writing about stories, teaching courses about ways in which stories were written, and, of course, in ways with direct relationship to preparing written works for publication.

Readers expect to be entertained, to see buildings or settings where notable events took place, and come away with a sense of having experienced a sense of what it would be like to live in such a place under such circumstances.  

Readers and tourists love scenes of battles, which brings to your mind Bobbie Ann Mason's wonderful short story,"Shiloh," about a relatively young couple--mid thirties--who'd married young and are now experiencing extreme relationship difficulties.  A major scene in the story takes place during a picnic at Shiloh, the scene of a great Civil War battle.

Tourist destinations provide activities such as displays, reenactments of historical events (The gunfight at O.K. Corral, for instance), local cuisine, photo opportunities, local crafts (in fact the raison d'être for such places as Madrid, New Mexico), and a range of dreadful souvenirs that seem fated to final resting places in closets or attics (statuettes of the Eiffel Tower, I Heart NY tee shirts, statuettes of the Statue of Liberty, etc.).

Some story, such as Mason's, are more interested in an investigation of the interior landscape, providing the reader with a sense of having learned something by virtue of having been taken to a deeper, less traveled place within the human psyche.

Some tourist destination types of story are confections, deliberate attempts to play on emotions and outcomes that speak to the causes of the problems in Mason's story, rather than their solution.

Nearly a year ago, thanks to your invitation to be a part of a nearby writer's conference, you had the opportunity to stay at a tourist location, Morro Bay, California, which grabs you immediately because of its seaside locale.  After being there an hour or so, you were filled with the fantasy of wishing to live there, for reasons that had nothing to do with tourist destinations, rather kinds of elegant solitude, spectacular sea views, bright, coastal light, and nearby hills of soft pastel and rich, earth colors.

In more recent months, you've had cause to consider two places in New Mexico, Santa Fe, and Las Cruces, as destinations for far more than tourist attractions.  If New Mexico had a coastal front or even a large, moody lake, you'd be more inclined.  For now, and probably the rest of your time, they are more meaningful to you than tourist destinations, but for all its quirks, California is your destination of the heart.

Dramatic destinations are another matter; they are places where the locals are as bewildered by the human condition as you, manage an occasional, elegant meal, served on thick, substantial platters, with a decent wine or ale, a plate of cheese and fruit with rich coffee and a fresh baguette.

There, the locals are driven, cranky, imaginative, preoccupied but not so much so that they cannot stop to scratch a dog behind the ears and tell a blooming young girl that she is a beauty in the making.

At first, you may have some trouble, focusing on the things the characters say in context with the way they say them or, in general, they behave.  But in the resolution, the closure, things will work out well when you realize you and they speak the same language and understand one another.

I Thought You Said Your Story Doesn't Bite

When you lose your concentration while composing, you often resort to a trick that reminds you of a Peter Sellers joke.  The set-up for the joke has Sellers in his role as the absent-minded, woefully inept Inspector Clouseau, now standing on a street corner, observing a small, unleashed dog.  A stranger approaches, asks Clouseau, "Does your doggy bite?"

Clouseau is emphatic.  "No."  Whereupon the stranger stoops to pet the dog, now sniffing at Clouseau;s trousers.  Seeing the stranger approach to pet him, the dog promptly bites the stranger's hand.

The stranger confronts Clouseau.  "I thought you said your dog doesn't bite."

To which Clouseau replies, "That's not my doggy."

Your trick for regaining your concentration is to begin describing things about the setting, or the characters, or their responses, or a combination of all these.  This is tempting; all these have some measure of connection to the story at hand.  

There is one significant problem with this approach:  "Some measure of connection" is a considerable distance from "a direct bearing on the story."  This leaves unanswered questions about description, such as "What, then, is a description with a direct bearing on the story.  A favored example is the opening paragraph in Jonathan Lethem's excellent novel, Motherless Brooklyn, which at first seems an ominous, even off-putting description, "Context is everything.  Dress me up and see.  I'm a carnival barker, an auctioneer, a downtown performance artist, a speaker in tongues, a senator drunk on filibuster."

This is Lionel Essrog, the protagonist, speaking directly to us, breaking the fourth wall between character and audience, addressing us in direct, descriptive terms.  The next line, the fourth sentence, gives us the necessary information.  "I've got Tourette's."  Then, he goes on to explain (describe) it.  "My mouth won't quit, though mostly I whisper or subvocalize like I'm reading aloud, my Adam's apple bobbing, jaw muscle beating like a miniature heart under my cheek, the noise suppressed, the words escaping silently, mere ghosts of themselves, husks empty of breath and tone."

You could make the argument that these opening sentences of Lethem's first paragraph are pure tell, in opposition to the admonition often heard, "Show, don't tell."  You could make that argument, but instead you will make the argument that this opening paragraph must have been written a hundred or so times to have such a visceral effect and to bring the character of Lionel Essrog on stage.

You could go on to say that these sentences and the ones that follow all have relevant use and payoff in subsequent chapters, and you can as well say we're not given Lionel's name until page 7.  In what will at first blush seem like a digression, you can also say that the author shows Lionel's job as a private detective, but--and this is truly an important exception--the author does not remind us of a tradition that quintessential private detective-turned-mystery-writer, Dashiell Hammett, introduced into the American detective narration.

After years of writing on-the-job-reports for the Pinkerton Detective Agency, Hammett introduced his iconic character, The Continental Op, writing stories as though detective reports to the agency.

Even if this description/information is arcane, it is as relevant as Jonathan Lethem's use of narrative in Motherless Brooklyn, published on the cusp of the last century and this newer one.  Narrative has evolved along with the way humanity has evolved, and in relationship to composition, printing, and publishing evolution. 

A reader who reads purely for pleasure, with no intent of critical theory or dissection and deconstruction as a writer would dissect or deconstruct, would be on some level aware of the evolving conventions manifest in the modern story.  A contemporary reader would have no trouble with Motherless Brooklyn, its author, or its protagonist.  "Oh, yes,  a private detective with Tourette's.  Bet he gets into some trouble because of that."

Indeed, he does.  Lionel Essrog warned us of that in the first paragraph.

Your point here is how your own love of detail and its description have often led you to pet the dog that was not Clouseau's.  You were bitten by one of the things that can and does hold a story down.

Yes, yes, you know; Donna Tartt's latest, The Goldfinch, has won the Pulitzer Prize, has been compared to Charles Dickens, has sold thousands upon thousands of copies.  But you couldn't finish it, thinking of it instead as The Albatross,  a lovely bird, more lofty in ways than the goldfinch, but known also as a kind of dead weight, referred to in metaphor for a burden.





action verbs

A Soft Spot in the Heart Is Not a Soft Spot in a MS

A soft spot, when found in the heart, is a delightful place of openness and receptivity, a visiting or revisiting with something or someone treasured.  A heart with a large number of soft spots is the measure of an person engaged in the business of living in and about the universe.  

A soft spot in the heart is a potential for vulnerability because openness works that way in humans, signifies that a heart can be broken, but also that the broken heart can be repaired.Having soft spots in that sense is being open to risk.  

Soft spots and risk seem to spend a good deal of time together, working their symbiotic relationship on one another and enriching the life of their host.

Soft spots in stories is another matter, more an affliction than a genome for happiness.  A soft spot in a story is the equivalent of a speed bump in a city street, slowing down the progression of emotional evolution from desire into yearning, which prompts action.  

If we've given any thought to the effect of Newton's laws of motion on story, we know in tangible levels that story is based on actions set in motion.  In a mechanical sense, motion continues until it becomes impeded by a force of inertia.  Easy enough to reckon inertia in fiction as opposition, provided the opposition is a personalized social force of some kind.

In story, inertia can become and often does become an analog of consequence.  If the story progresses without speed bumps, we are lost in the awareness of consequences the story triggers within us on a quite individual basis.

Soft spots in story equate to ruptures in its fabric, places where the structure is not taut enough or close enough together to provide effective transmittal of emotional and dramatic energy.  You could very well say--and have said--that emotional energy and dramatic energy are congruent since each is a compression of yearning, action, and consequence.  The yearning provokes action in the characters, which produces consequences.

Sometimes consequences can become apparent diversions, which, later, are seen as directly applicable.  This is an important nuance because of an analogy to another aspect of mechanical behavior that also obtains in story--the law of conservation of matter.

In the ideal story, there are no random events or details.  One of the more emphatic demonstrations of this hypothesis is John Steinbeck's novella, Of Mice and Men.  Readers who have read other of Steinbeck's work, say East of Eden, or The Grapes of Wrath, are aware of his ability to construct a larger, more intricately braided narrative.  These, as well, do not overindulge the use of detail for its own sake.

There are no soft spots of the mechanical sort in Of Mice and Men; you've looked any number of times.  The two principal characters, George and Lennie, demonstrate emotional soft spots, which become apparent to the reader, not, as some critics have argued, in demonstration of Steinbeck's sentimentality, rather in demonstration of his having removed clutter and unnecessary description with the result of leaving a stirring, inevitable force of causality as the driving force of closure and resolution.

You've been hired to seek mechanical soft spots in the narratives of others.  Friends, editors, and literary agents have indicated to you soft spots in your own work.

In the sense of being able, you can and often do catch soft spots in your own work.  How nice to think you might at some time be able to catch all of them.  But you don't believe this is probable.  You are still enough the idealist to think some writers are in fact able to catch all their soft spots.  The best you can say of yourself on this August evening is that you hope to develop the skills and concentration that will allow you to see more of them.

Some, but by no means all soft spots:

1) Chatty dialogue
2) Not enough tension
3) Not enough opposition
4) Not pushing one or more characters over their pre-set behavioral boundaries
5) Trying to arrange too happy an ending
6) Infusing the narrative with gratuitous description
7) Making your characters too nice
8) Making your characters too awful
9) Authorial intervention
10) using Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century omniscient narrative filters
11) Being too vague in consequences or outcome
12) Being too specific in consequence or outcome

Action Verbs, the Steroids of Drama

 From time to time, students and individuals seek office hours, wishing to present you long, rambling, detailed narratives for your commentary and, in a significant sense, your approval.  The troubles begin when you realize some of the individuals are not real, they are your characters.

Most of the students are easy to deal with before much time has elapsed.  You begin to see direct applications of time tested approaches to turning narratives into stories that have the same potential for engaging readers as dogs in animal shelters have for engaging the affections and stewardship of adult humans.

To a lesser but still satisfying extent, you're able to provide individuals with suggestions that seem to infuse them with a galvanic radiance as they set off to put their narrative visions to work.  The difference between students and individuals is often age based; individuals have had time to develop defenses, suspicions, even layers of intransigence you find only in rare occasions among younger students.  The young want to sweep forth in energetic parade, seeking simultaneous adventure and world-changing results.  

The individuals are another matter.  They want to argue, to insist on the aptness of the logic and justice behind their narrative.  You would think the roles would be reversed and somehow the more adult the writer, the more the writer would wish to change the world, in a sense that possibly jumps the metaphor track, to break up the cultural gridlock in which they have become angry, horn-tooting tourists.

Nevertheless, you find yourself able to cope, to slip in direct suggestions as opposed to generalizations and the canned tropes of convention.  One method you employ with satisfying results is to ask the students to consider conventional gridlock in which they feel trapped or to identify conventions they feel have somehow betrayed them.  In a real sense, you've given them a Swiss Army knife for their narrative toolkit.

Thus equipped, the students and some adult individuals are able to lever, drill, pry, etch, chop, and otherwise hew away at narrative beyond the point where it is mere complaint and now heading for the shape of story.

And so you come to the trouble, which, as usual, begins with you, to whom long, rambling narratives, the occasional harangue or heavy-handed satire are no strangers.  They, too, wish the equivalent of office hours with you, wherein to argue, badger, and insist on the scholastic, historical aptness of their complaint.

At such times, particularly after a day of teaching and consulting, your own work may come out lackluster, seeming flat in every dimension except argument.  But you insist:  Story is not argument.  Story is yearning that triggers action that produces results, which produce the ash of consequence.  Close at hand to many of the fire places you have seen and, indeed, have used yourself, there is a broom of some sort and a shovel, tools to cope with the remnants, the ashes.

You quite agree with Robert Burns' sentiment that having the gift to see our self as others see us would, indeed, from many a blunder free us.  In that same spirit, you find yourself wishing for the gift to see your own work and your own characters as you see the work and characters of others.

The sound of clanking on the floor is the sound of a key, fallen from your pocket.  The fallen key is the construct of the action verb.  The key to unlock the troubles is one or more verbs a character can act upon as opposed to ponder.

And there, you have it.  Act vs. ponder.  Instead of considering ways gain entry, he kicks the door in.  True enough, some gifted actors can portray pondering in ways that will cause you to observe, "Oh, he's pondering his options."  But kicking in the door here is more definitive in important ways.

Thinking in this dramatic sense is the equivalent of authorial intervention and/or authorial uncertainty.  Give your characters the steroidal equivalent of action verbs.  So what if they can't pass the urine test.

Reading for Things below the Surface

Let us, if we can, examine the butterfly up close, allowing us to see the loftiness of its essence without leaving it an inert clump of segments on the dissecting board.

Story is the butterfly.  Check.

Story is a functional group of scenes.  Check.

Scenes contain and may be held together by narrative.  Check.

Sometimes, the connective tissue is implicit, not overt in statement.  Check.

A successful scene has an emotional payoff.  Check.

Some emotions are complex, a possible braid of two or more other emotions.  Er, yes, check.  There is more to be considered here.  The "more" is considered in the light of the D. H. Lawrence short story, "The Horse-Keeper's Daughter, wherein emotions are not only manifest and braided, they take us where Lawrence wished to take his readers.

Lawrence was nothing if not an emotional man, in a constant state of argument with himself, his culture, and his goals.  You first became aware of him when he was said to be the model for the character Mark Rampion in Aldous Huxley's novel. Point Counterpoint, which you read with the anticipation of a follower of a magazine serial.  

There was something about Rampion--his outspokenness and apparent disregard for convention--of appeal to you for you were then outspoken and in disregard of convention to the energetic extreme a twenty-year-old finds attractive.

Later, perhaps twenty year later, when you met Huxley, you pressed him for details of Lawrence, whom Huxley spoke of admiring even more so than, as he called her, Mrs. Woolf.  "One gets Lawrence best,"  Huxley told you, "not with the novels, not with the poems, but with what he does in the short stories, where--"  and Huxley sent his gaze off into his own interior lands  "--where he seems to be arguing with his feelings in much the same ways he argued with Freida."  

You spent some considerable years wrestling with this information, alternating between believing you understood the implications and waving them--and Lawrence--off.  In consequence, there was some thought, some processing, some understanding, most of it surface understanding.  Through it all, you were unabashed in your admiration of Huxley, for all the wrong reasons and precious few of the right ones.

Suffice it to say you were impressed by Huxley's ability to see the humor of circumstances from a safe distance.  Meanwhile, your own life did you the favor of holding your head under water for a time, causing you to admire the vast, colorful life under the surface.

If, as your check list appears to indicate, scenes in stories are directed to some emotional atmosphere, we can in actual effect read a story with note pad in hand, using a word or two or three to indicate the target feeling of each scene.

When we've finished our reading, we have an even closer sense of what Lawrence and many more contemporary writers are attempting to leave, for us to see under the surface of the story.  Thus the richness combined with complexity and potential argument young Jack Ferguson, the male lead in "The Horse Keeper's Daughter," feels when Mabel, after he has saved her from drowning herself, announces, "You love me.  I know you love me, I know."

Of course your specifics are relating to Lawrence now for at least two reasons beyond your own more chemical reasons of identifying with some aspects of his behavior.  You are soon to teach a course in which Lawrence's short stories and one novel, Sons and Lovers,  will be pinned on the dissection board for close reading.  In the back of your mind, not far below the surface, there burbles Lawrence's book Studies in Classic American Literature, a series of essays of front rank American authors of the nineteenth century.  With your fascination above and below the levels of consciousness, you wish to write Volume Two of Studies in Classic American Literature, your introduction defining that gallimaufry of narrative in your own terms.

A story is built on a structure of emotional and psychological responses, arranged with great care in order to pull us under the surface for minutes at a time, where we may see through the murk unanticipated beauty and understanding.