The Literary Equivalent of Bigotry.

Making fun of a character or in any way criticizing that individual through narrative comment reduces the dramatic presence of that individual and in the process undermines the narrative authority of the writer.

Once the reader gets the sense of a writer not liking one or more characters, the worm of doubt appears, then inches its way toward the apple of plausibility and credibility. You can almost hear the reader thinking, If the writer has such little regard for a character, why should I?

If the reader has any significant experience with reading--and it is a serious mistake to assume most readers are lacking such experience--you can almost hear the reader asking, Is what I'm reading a story or some resurrected fable, the characters' roles and clothing dusted off, their dialogue brought closer to contemporary.

To be sure, there are enough word choices, verbs in particular, with which to show characters thus discredited as somehow lacking or inferior. He slogged his way through the day. She stammered an apology while fumbling through her purse. He lurched. She fluttered.

To be equally sure, such approaches approximate the literary equivalent of bigotry. If the writer's goal is to topple a character, either from a high horse or a moral high ground, at the same time withholding obvious judgment, the writer must allow the character freedom to play his or her assigned part without stage directions.

By all accounts, this is well enough into the twenty-first century for the writer to realize how dramatic narrative has evolved in its way to the same extend the English language evolved as a consequence of the Great Vowel Shift. 

Dramatic narrative is descriptive, filtered through the perceptions of the characters. There is no longer an omniscient authorial presence lurking among the scenes or, indeed, a chorus, filling the audience in on backstory before the actual drama begins.

The answer has become manifest: Dramatic narrative does not describe, it evokes.  Many contemporary journalists and essayists bring the toolkit of extensive vocabulary to their work, producing memorable and helpful descriptions. Dramatic narrative challenges the reader to process story information by inference, nuance, and implication.

By dramatic necessity, story has to present a range of characters beginning with protagonists, those individuals whose observed actions cause things to happen. There could be no story without the obstacles and competition of opposition, forces that translate into individuals known a antagonists.

The storyteller allows the reader to observe these opposing forces through their actions rather than the authorial choices of verbs and adjectives expressing some higher form of enlightenment. By allowing the reader to happen on the opposing forces without authorial nudges and winks, the writer brings the reader into the midst of the issues both sides must consider, then deal with.

Anything more is propaganda bordering on bigotry. Anything less is not yet story, is it?

Thirteen Ways of Avoiding an Elephant

In the world of staged drama, once the play has begun its course, the fourth wall, separating the audience from the cast of players, is by convention not to be broken. A number of the early dramas took care of this matter by having a chorus address the audience, offering bits of relevant information, perhaps as in Shakespeare's Henry V, reminding the audience they will need to imagine battlefields and the channel, separating England from France.

Once the story has begun, theatrical convention is quick to remind us, the action of the play becomes reality. We of the audience are, in effect, eavesdropping on the characters. All too often, we become aware of times when the fourth wall was broken, when a character speaks directly to the audience. 

A modern example is the way the character of Frank Underwood, as portrayed by Kevin Spacey, in The House of Cards, appears not only to speak directly to us, he is apparently inviting us into a conspiracy against the other members of the cast.

A similar technique, often spoken of as "the aside," may be found in novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, extending well into the twentieth with writers such as Aldous Huxley who, insightful and incisive as he was, appeared not to be able to resist slipping in the occasional paragraph meant more for the reader than the other characters.

Evolution being what it is, twenty-first-century narrative tends to be conveyed through the triad of narrative, interior monologue, and dialogue, the emerging modern writer content to delegate filtration of the dramatic information to the characters.

And yet, we have a valuable fourth-wall presence with us in this century, emphasizing the personality of the kinds of story we now think of as modern. In essence, this personality manifests itself with the meme of evocation rather than description. 

To put the matter in another way, even the characters are described by the way other characters react to them, the locales and settings evoked by the likes of an allergy-prompted sneeze, a shiver that seems unintended, a sense of awe that leaves a mouth agape a moment or two too long.

The contemporary fourth wall is subtext, in its way a reminder how prescient in some ways was the troubled presence of Ernest Miller Hemingway. Story, he wrote, is an iceberg, with only an eighth of it visible, the vital seven-eights below the surface, unseen, yet making its presence felt because of the ways all the characters react to their awareness of the material below the surface of the story.

Two splendid examples of Hemingway's understanding and mastery of this subtext device are found in "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," and "Hills Like White Elephants," both of which evoke as tangible emotional atmosphere the basic themes of the stories.

Hemingway was often a victim of the device he used so well when, in such novels as Across the River and into the Trees," he avoided the technique. More contemporary writers, say Louise Erdrich, Deborah Eisenberg, and Francine Prose, have demonstrated their ability to take us as readers to places where we may well experience the discomfort and uneasiness of being plunked down into the very moral dilemmas we took up reading to avoid.

In short, writers have long understood how, regardless of time, place, or culture, there is always some elephant in the living room in which we are now present, conveying the presence of the elephant without calling it by name, making us well aware of how we are given to joining the other characters in their attempts to avoid the obvious.

The Worlds of Fiction and Chewing Gum

Antonia S. Byatt's 1990 novel, Possession, which, incidentally and, you believe, deservedly won the prestigious Booker Prize that year, is often listed as a romance. 

Of the many reasons you admire the novel, one stands out: It is also a mystery, which happens to be your absolute favorite genre because of your long nourished belief that the mystery is the paradigm for the longform fiction.

Readers read novels to find out who killed Cock robin, but they also read novels to find out how individuals in tight positions behaved as a form of tool by which they are able to make their own way in matters of moral choice.

Short stories, which are at the top of your preference triangle, are, because of their construction, less the mystery than the novel. Short stories seem to you more reflective of how individuals are in the process of stepping in chewing gum and then trying to get the gum off the sole of their shoe or, when the occasion arises, off their bare foot. 

Having stepped in real and metaphoric time on chewed gum, with and without shoes, you know what a nuisance the experience can be because of the resulting nuisance of dealing with the gum.

Novels are another matter; you read them and write them for different reasons. For some time now, you've been writing about novels and their effect on you in the worlds of fiction and the worlds of chewing gum. Possession is one of the hundred novels you are writing about for your current project (about which your literary agent says, "Will you for Christ' sake, finish it already and get back to your novel?").

Thinking about it, then skimming through it, then saying the equivalent of fuck it, whereupon you realize you need to reread it once again, you arrive at the awareness that it has been a life changer for you. Had it been published earlier, it might have sent you back to school with a different purpose than the one for which you went, which was to learn how to be a novelist and short story writer.

What you did not understand when you embarked on the university and a course of study was the extent of the literary life, which has already lead you down a number of surprising distractions.  Novels are distraction. Writing them is distraction, including the distraction of understanding that you prefer short stories and, in recent years, novellas. 

Editing is a distraction and so is teaching and its adjunct, research.  In a real sense, everything is a distraction, including the distraction of stepping on unseen wads of gum, which you are every bit as likely to do whether or not you write novels.

Possession is also about parallels of two timelines and a romantic relationship within each. Plus, Possession is about what you might have become had you, like your friend, the mystery writer, Tom Dewey, gone back to school. The last thing you saw from tom was not one of his wonderful mystery novels, it was a paper in a journal about some forgotten writer of the Victorian Era.

Every time you read Possession, it picks you up and shakes you by the shoulders, reminding you of all the things a novel can do at once, while telling an unforgettable story.  More than once, you've told the mystery writer, Joseph Wambaugh that his novel, The Secrets of Harry Bright, was the novel you wish you'd come upon sooner so that you'd have spent more time being influenced by it into becoming the things you hope to find in your own pages. You meant it.

In the unlikely chance you are able to spot Dame Antonia Byatt out and abroad, you'll tell her that even though you read Possession when it was first published, twenty-six years ago, and have reread it numerous times since, it continues to influence the way you think about the way you write, edit, teach, and go about in the abstracted state in once often finds himself before stepping on chewing gum.

Once More unto the Breach, Dear Friend

In an ironic action reminiscent of a Zen aspirant being given a smack by a teacher, you, while preparing notes for a classroom lecture related to ways of composing the twenty-first century short story, felt a whack from the cosmos.

Or perhaps it was another kind of irony, one in which, after all the years and publications and books of others you'd brought into being and edited, you at last learned to identify a missing piece in your writing--indeed an awareness that anything was missing.

Some years back, a friend, in fact a friend from a high school creative writing class, said, after reading one of your stories, "There's always so much going on in your stuff. I feel like I've blundered into a family squabble and the family are complete strangers to me."

You said in reply something along the lines of, "Fiction is not linear. It's more like a core sample, extracted from some remote country, where you have to guess at most of the conventions and the use for many of the artifacts." 

True enough, you did talk that way then, somewhere in the last century, and, you like to think, you're successful in many of your attempts not to talk that way now.

At any rate, your friend said something like, "Ah, geez," to your remark about fiction not being linear, then showed you a check for three hundred dollars he'd received for one of his short stories which, as you recall, was quite linear.  "How," your friend asked, waving the check, "do you explain this?"  

He thought for a moment, then said, "Wait. Before you answer--I don't want to hear."  At the time, the amount of the three-hundred-dollar check meant nothing to him. He even spoke of going to the bank on occasion to visit his money. 

At the time, a three-hundred-dollar check would have meant something to you, but you had to be content with the silent satisfaction of trusting the talent you'd raised on the table scraps from your interest in writing and the sense of advancing on a goal, not quite as rapid an advance as you'd wished, still, an advance.

On your way home, you took some solace in the fact that you understood some of the implications of your status. By then, you'd published a number of longform and short fiction, book reviews, essays. You'd been an editor for a number of publishing houses. You knew this much--the span between your outstretched thumb and first finger--about writing, with this much--your outstretched hands extended to their limit of expansion--left to learn.

In time, that became your approach to most writing, in particular toward fiction. You write to learn. You contrive situations about which you have little or know experience and/or knowledge in order to grasp the enormity of your lack of awareness. Then you try to negotiate some kind of outcome, meanwhile reading, observing the world about you, asking questions of it, listening, should it care to provide some answer to your questions.

While preparing your notes for the How to Write the Modern Short Story, you thought about your friend, his three-hundred-dollar check, his linear stories, and yours, a degree or so less linear than his. You thought about material of others you'd read since then. You thought about the edits you'd done on the twelve stories you'd selected for inclusion in a collection of your stories. 

This all made you think of an essay in the works for your current book project, outlining the things you'd learned from one particular novel you believe you've already learned so much from. You spoke of its artistic and technical accomplishments and how they caused you to realize how these accomplishments had led you to show off, attempt tricks you'd not considered before, risking and, indeed, experiencing beyond the embarrassment of mere failure but the humiliation of trying tricks without first practicing them.

Then the answer came to you, like a sensei's slap on the cheek. So far, so good with the writing to expose the things you need to discover. But don't stop there. Write at least one more draft after that. At least one more.

One-size Theme Fits All

When you are pressed, by yourself or others, to deliver a personal philosophy, a definition of story, the major thematic ingredient of drama, or a description of the Human Condition, the chances are overwhelming  that your answer will be: "Nothing is what it seems."

You continue, whether the presser is you or someone or some ones, with the observation of how this answer affirms and ratifies your positive nature on the basis of how frequently you are surprised by discoveries of things you had missed as you were coming along from youth to maturity to middle age to whatever you may be at the moment.  

For a time in those teen-to-early twenties years, you were thought bright and precocious, which is always dangerous because the inevitable follow-up of that is being thought an asshole. Let the record show you set forth with great vigor to fulfill that prognosis. 

Whatever you are thought of by others now, you take refuge in being a late bloomer, which is to affirm your belief that, however you are seen now, you still have some potential for understanding one or two of the greater mysteries of life.

From among these mysteries, one--irony--erupts and splatters about you like a bottle of ketchup that had delivered more of its contents than you'd intended. There you are, in effect, with more ketchup and irony than you'd intended, wondering how to avoid similar mishaps and at the same time how to make do with the quantities of each you have on hand. 

This discovery has made you wary of ketchup and irony, but also ill prepared to deal with a surplus of either and a general sense of having no strategy to avoid either. Life is made of excesses of certain things and a great dearth of others, each of us charting his or her personal formula.

A few days back, you had a delightful exchanger with a great chum from your undergraduate days. After he'd texted you with a description of himself today, you were able present a picture of yourself as looking much the way you did then, except for the retreat of a bushy and rebellious hedge of frontal cowlick that had retreated like an army in disgrace.  

Then you realized how physical you description had been, not taking into consideration how you were working your way beyond precocity, toward your destiny of seeming an asshole. Your comfort was the awareness of the bonds of friendship rather than such traces of wariness you experience with regard to ketchup or irony.

Things that are what they seem hold little interest for you to the point where, if questioned about having dropped something because of the perception of it having been hot, your response is, "Not hot. It was what it seemed."

Reaching your current current destination on your way toward the end of the journey, you are reminded of the one thing you admired from the late comedian, Bob Hope.  When he lay on what was his death bed, his wife asked him where he' wanted his final resting place to be.  "Surprise me," he said.

Because of your considerable past experiences, you have every confidence that Life, being what you perceive it to be, will even in this final moment, offer some surprise. You hope to be up to the task of accepting it. In so many ways, you have managed to realize some of your dreams, but almost never in ways you'd thought, nor to the outcome you'd imagined. If, indeed, nothing is as it seems, then least of all are you.

Provocation.

The things a character wants determine his social and political platform, allowing us from witnessing some minor activity to speculate what he will do when a larger issue arises. 

An individual character may practice a form of self delusion by building an agenda from some abstraction such as freedom to explore options or deciding to speak up in the presence of injustice. 

Abstractions such as these may be a firewall to prevent the character from seeing the eventual outcomes of greed, self-indulgence, or a woeful lack of confidence. Sometimes in the behavior of characters, we see defensiveness such as vivid protestations of disinterest or complicity. 

But the discerning reader can see and in time recognize the Maginot Line of response, see through the offered explanation and into the action.  Don't you see?  I had to.  Or, I did it for you. In other words, implied words, I was, don't you see, provoked?

In the presence of such individuals, the introduction of an opposing character, a man or woman who judges individuals by deeds rather than words, has every chance of provoking story. 

This sense of a story being provoked carries the weight of drama. Stories do not happen by chance. Even if there is an element  of accident, the forces involved in the accident have agendas, if only the agenda to occupy the same place.

Stories erupt from a combination of provocation and combustion.  The goal of the major character provokes an atmosphere of desire, impatience, perhaps even desperation. When the chemistry of these forces reach a critical mass, there is combustion. Now the story begins.

Like a boulder perched atop an elevated ledge, the story is already critical mass. How difficult it is to see in real time, such a boulder, perched on such a ledge. Try as we might, we can't help visualizing it in motion.

This is the only moment in story where appearance is valid; from this beginning point, story is motion, gathering momentum, its acceleration growing. The moment the story comes to rest, it is over, waiting for another provocation to move yet again.

Not-So-Absent Friends

You are on your way to a cozy venue where a dear friend, perhaps your dearest friend of all, is giving an informal lecture. Mindful of your own need to appear in your own class for a scheduled lecture and discussion: "The Nature of Satire in the Twentieth Century English Novel."

You'll have to leave your friend's lecture early if you're to be be on time for your class, but you're used to a lifetime of such high-class problems as having a dear friend who gives entertaining lectures, having a classroom venue of your own, and having the ability to effect compromises allowing the best possible outcomes.

When you arrive at your friend's presentation, he has already begun.  When he sees you, he points to an empty seat nearby, one with a RESERVED card on its lap, then, without skipping a beat, resumes his narrative, his audience caught up in the web of reminiscence he weaves with an easy, practiced poise. Once again, you realize ho gifted a storyteller he is.

What good fortune to have him as a friend, a confidante with whom you share secrets and ambitions. Your backgrounds and politics are different, but this has provoked no problems or areas where there can be no discussions.  

What a privilege it was when you became his editor, a relationship that seemed to inspire even more trust.

After a time, while he is still speaking and his audience is following with rapt attention, you become aware of your own obligations and the time it will take you to reach the university and find a place to park.  

You make eye contact with your friend, point to your wristwatch, then hitch your head toward the direction of the university. He nods his understanding as you rise to leave, then mouths the words "Pharmacy. Lunch. Tomorrow."

No counting the times you've lunched at the Pharmacy Cafe in the Upper Village.  But something is wrong. You both seem to recognize the wrongness at the same time. "Wait," he says, aloud, then advances toward you, arms open for an embrace which you rush to meet, a sense of desperation seeming to filter into the surroundings.

While you are embracing in what feels an odd cocktail of joy,abject grief, and regret, you both understand. This had not seemed a dream before; there was too much of the comfortable familiar about it. But of course, this is  July, 2016. He died on February 12, 2013. 

You are each telling the other you miss him while the certainty of the moment being a dream spins you toward waking state and the remaining dregs of joy at the visit and sorrow at the loss. Full awake now, you can hear the wry note of his voice, "What's a cocktail without a dash of Angostura bitters?"

You sit up in bed, sorting out the results of the unanticipated meeting, pondering the triggers that brought it to you with such plausible presence.  After a sip or two from the nearby water bottle, you check the time: five thirty. Already traces of the dawn beginning. You sit in the dark among other absent friends, waiting for the day to begin.