Shelly Lowenkopf's Blog

So Predictable

2009-07-10T09:41:00.000-07:00

predictable--a narrative condition in which the reader correctly guess the intent of a character and the outcome of that intent; dramatic circumstances in which there is little or no nuance, where the reader is neither surprised nor challenged.

If a reader is truly caught up in a story, he will have taken sides, begun to root for the success of some and the failure or worse (humiliation) for others, indulged in the trope of reader as matchmaker, seeing potential romantic entanglements. Additionally, the reader will be able to take cues from the text much as a dog about to be taken for a walk will take cues from the master putting on a jacket, clanking house keys, or reaching for a leash. Certain situations in story provoke the speculation that something--a disaster, a reversal, a surprise--is forthcoming. The shrewd writer, which is to say the writer who understands the dynamics of story, will be aware of these anticipations, then prepare for them in a way that will provoke surprise and keep the reader off guard and guessing to the point of not being able to take time away from the reading.

Never take the reader where the reader wants to go. Readers do not wish to be left standing still, which they may easily feel themselves to be if they are presented with laundry lists of details, forced to listen to long, philosophical discussions, subjected to weather reports or travel-writing descriptions of scenery. At the extreme least, readers want to feel as though they were eavesdropping on some form of intimacy; better still they wish to feel compellingly caught up with the execution of a particular character's agenda.

It is the task of the writer to make the reader feel the intensity of the characters and their involvements with the issues of the story. Anything else is predictable.

Even if you are not a fan or fancier of the suspense-based thriller, it is worth critically reading at least one novel by Harlan Coben, comparing it will one by Lee Child and Nelson Demille. Couldn't hurt to read Annie Proulx's The Shipping News, which presents yet other variations on the theme of surprise and unpredictability, then consider Louise Erdrich's A Plague of Doves.

Dealing with predictability in story provides another set of reasons to consider and absorb acting techniques from the likes of such actor coaches as Stella Adler, Sanford Meizner, and Uta Hagen, wherein actors learn where to find within themselves the emotions, gestures, and visions of surprise. In this sense, surprise is the discovery the character makes about himself/herself in times of weal and woe--discovery that before our eyes transforms the predictable into the truly remarkable.

dramatic

2009-07-09T10:56:00.000-07:00

dramatic--having the inherent suggestion and quality of story; implicit content of elements that produce conflict, interaction, goal search, revelation and reversal; a narrative that contains one or more characters in pursuit of an agenda or embarking on an internal or geographical journey; a quest which will involve reversal, frustration, and competitive exterior forces.

A successful dramatic narrative reflects the goals and intent of characters set against the counterpoint of the writer's personal goals at the time of writing. Thus stories may reflect an attitude of cynicism, pragmatism, sadness, bitterness, expansive optimism, and transcendental anticipation. Differing readerships will be particularly drawn to one of these qualities or perhaps even a combination of them. You might liken the physics concept of water, seeking to find its original level, to the literary concept of story: readers seek to find their target level. One thing all stories have in common is a voice or governing personality. It properly should be the goal of the writer to seek its own level, which becomes the pressures informing the voice, timbre, and intensity of its persona.

On a basic level, to say of a work that it is dramatic is to say of it that it is act-able, performable, readable. On a more nuanced level, to say of a work that it is dramatic implies that the work has skillfully designed ventures of men and women engaged in dealings with the enormous varieties present in life. If these dealings appear piled on or contrived, the landscape in which they appear may be spoken of as melodramatic, exaggerated, even operatic. Thus does balance come into the equation of which dramatic is an integral part.

Sarcasm Writ Large

2009-07-08T10:13:00.000-07:00

sarcasm--pointed and exaggerated irony, intending to derail or deflect a status quo; a blistering overstatement of intentional underplay of a character's self-interest or agenda.

Arguably the most difficult emotion to convey in writing because of its heavy reliance on context, sarcasm found one of its most enduring modern spokespersons in Dorothy Parker. In a review of a book, she said, "This is not a book to be set aside lightly. It should be hurled across the room with great force."

Look at it this way:

The humorist pokes fun at himself.

The ironist pokes fun at the human condition.

The satirist is a moralist without the clerical collar.

The sarcasm maven wants to elevate his own status at the expense of yours.

Proceed accordingly.

A current sarcasm maven worth watching (because of his superb control) is Stephen Colbert. His targets are well articulated, his irony extends from verbal acuity to a perfected tone (see Dead pan delivery) and impeccable sense of timing. So deft is Mr. Colbert and, thus, worth study, that on many occasions even his targets of opportunity are convinced he is arguing on his side. Few persons are as repelled by his on-stage persona as they are by the persona and likes of Don Rickles.

Hint: Even if you find sarcasm attractive, spend some time crafting irony before you proceed into the print and digital worlds.

Tradition

2009-07-07T20:44:00.000-07:00

tradition--a system of customs, rituals, practices; a long-standing literary apparatus for passing myth, history, and cultural beliefs from one generation to the next; a genre or platform for presenting story or coded cultural lessons and information.

Story is carefully arranged dramatic information, arranged to have maximum effect on the hearer and then, as language became written, then printed, to have the added effect of being transcendental. Quite a daunting gulp to lay on a writer, nevertheless it is so; story is the dramatized version of traditional information and social behavior options. People tell stories to instruct; people read stories to learn or to be transported to places and situations they have not themselves experienced.

Story in the aggregate is a record of evolved cultural tradition. Many stories that frightened us in our childhood amuse us in our adulthood or dotage. Story is the process by which tradition undergoes evolution, both in content and form. Just as music may be placed in time by an assessment of its tonality, story may be a reflection of cultural growth by close observation of the traditions it extends and perhaps even breaks. Short stories have evolved more radically than novels, but such novels as Annie Proulx's The Shipping News have stretched the traditions of style, place, and internal rhythm; novels such as John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men have stretched the traditions of theme, place, and the moody sense of life's purpose.

Tim O'Brien broke a number of narrative traditions in The Things They (the they being U.S. servicemen in Viet Nam) Carried, while Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler broke the traditions of place, motive, language, and construction in the novel of mystery and suspense.

Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones broke the tradition and convention in which a principal character could not, once dead, be the narrator of a long form story. Susy Salmon, protagonist of Bones is dead by the second paragraph.

It is no guarantee, but a story that somehow pushes the envelope of tradition to the breaking point is more likely to be remembered. That said, story construction is of paramount importance; so are characters, motives, point of view, and voice. When they are altered merely for the sake of alteration, nothing is gained or served. When traditions fall in the service of providing a memorable story, reader, writer, and characters are served.

What's in a Name or Two or Six

2009-07-06T15:39:00.000-07:00

laundry list--a detailed list of characters, traits, attributions appended to a story; qualities, personalities, descriptions deployed at great length in a narrative; burdensome details of an individual, scene, or setting.

Laundry lists had their widest use during the times of Realism, where the things a character used or wore or noticed, the every day usage habits of the character, spoke volumes toward their authenticity. The temptation to double-down on adjectives or strenuously purposefully use duets of adverbs is great, particularly when the characters, places, and objects in a story have outstanding traits or features. The temptation to describe a character's movements in small, precise steps, also flares up, particularly if, in a particular scene, the character is performing under the influence of a particularly controlling emotion. The solution is to use as much of the laundry list as possible in the early drafts; this will insure a vivid picture of the individuals and events in which they are engaged. The second part of the solution is to remember the frequent reaction of readers to the amount of information about whales in Moby-Dick, to remember that story is an expression of movement and of characters reacting to one another.

Remember also that story is evocation rather than description.

Simple Solutions to Big Problems

2009-07-05T09:47:00.000-07:00

newly wed housewife, the--a fitting trope for the insecure writer; an attitude in which the writer is overly concerned at the paucity of motivational and physical detail for dramatic action.

Think of the newly wed preparing her first meal for company, then try to superimpose the image on the vision of a writer wondering if the intent and details of a story are clear enough in definition. Likely result: a control-freak attitude toward description. The exact moment an activity or intent begins. A Vogue Magazine description of what the characters are wearing. A laundry list of adjectives and adverbs. Perhaps even an instance or two or six of authorial intrusion.

None of these tactics are fatal; F. Scott Fitzgerald employs them with great regularity (Tender Is the Night and The Great Gatsby), the difference being he gives them a dramatic context that has meaning beyond mere description. These tactics give a better sense of the world into which Fitzgerald has invited us to eavesdrop. Look also at the way his dialogue and narrative work, moving you at a comfortable pace from action to action, weighing each scene down with the tang of such emotions as apprehension, suspicion, jealousy, despair, need.

There is no problem with over-describing each action between characters, each setting, each nuance of each exchange of dialogue. This approach helps articulate the inevitability and authenticity of a story. The problem comes with allowing the prompts and attributions to remain when there is sufficient activity and attitude to reflect the drama that is under way.

Hint: cast your narrative and scenes toward the goal of an emotional presence, using verbs chosen for their personality, hinting at implied meanings, picking adverbs with great deliberation, avoiding the temptation to double up on adjectives, eschewing simile and metaphor that distract from the work at hand rather than illustrate it.

Chiropractic for MSS

2009-07-04T08:36:00.000-07:00

manipulation--an arrangement of dramatic elements to produce an emotional effect in a story; distortion or exaggeration of narrative events; the deliberate bending of perspective and/or time in a story; use of implication and subtlety to engage readers; use of a red herring to alert or divert readers' suspicions.

Writers are the literary equivalent of chiropractors, adjusting, kneading, articulating; they are looking for a design pattern to provide the best posture for a story. A basic approach to such adjusting is to rearrange the time sequence. Mystery writer and teacher Leonard Tourney is an advocate of "a slice of the crime," in which he advocates beginning a narrative with a crime being planned or executed by individuals we will meet later on in the text. James Joyce manipulated temporally in his Finnegan's Wake, beginning the huge, complexity of a novel with the last half of the opening sentence, then, hundreds of pages later, ending with the first half of the sentence. Tim Gautreau's The Missing, narratively acute and suspenseful from the opening line, actually manipulates dramatic convention in the sense of providing a double hit of backstory before the main issue is introduced.

In addition to time manipulation, the writer may perform narrative chiropractic with point of view, choosing first-, second- third-, omniscient, and multiple points of view, and in some cases venture into authorial intrusion to make commentary on the characters and their doings. This last approach is amply demonstrated in Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, and William M. Thackeray's Vanity Fair.

Characters, their motives and activities, may be manipulated to the extent of influencing the way other characters and readers will respond to them, and indeed, motives may be manipulated to provoke reader sympathy or antipathy.

Manipulation works best when it does not call attention to itself but seems the most natural presentation. Such control is exemplified in the entire presentation of Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernières.

The unthinkable

2009-07-03T13:51:00.000-07:00

unthinkable come to pass, the--a condition in story in which the worst-case-scenario in the mind of a character is played out; a crucial point in a story where the writer discovers the true site of mischief and energy; the meeting point where the worst fears of the writer and one or more characters meet--and circumstances up the ante.

It is more than a drug deal gone sour (No Country for Old Men) or the sudden resignation of one of the team of bank robbers (Dog Day Afternoon) or the protagonist of Vanity Fair thinking she had married her way into a modicum of respectability. Llewellyn Moss, while out hunting, chances upon the money in No Country, where things become even more unthinkably inevitable when Anton Chigurh enters the story. The two remaining bank robbers in Dog Day become enmeshed in a stand-off with the police, which was more or less expected. The unthinkable element was the revelation of why the bank was robbed in the first place. Thinking she has achieved some measure of respectability and security in her marriage to the equivalent of a low-echelon civil servant, Becky Sharp is given the following proposal: "Come back and be my wife," Sir Pitt pleads. "Birth be hanged. You're as good a lady as ever I see....I'm an old man but a good'n. I'm good for twenty years. I'll make you happy, zee if I don't. You shall do what you like; spend what you like; and 'av it all your own way. I'll make you a zettlement. I'll do everything reg'lar.." At which point "the old man fell down on his knees and leered at her like a satyr."

For an opportunist such as Becky Sharp, how is this the unthinkable come to pass? "Rebecca started back, a picture of consternation. In the course of this history, we have never seen her lose her presence of mind; but she did now." Author Thackeray reminds us how the tears now forming in her eyes were some of the most genuine she ever wept. "'Oh, Sir Pitt!' she said. 'Oh, sir-I-I'm married already."

You would not want to be around at dinner time, when her husband came home, with a sporty kiss and a "Hey, Babycakes, what's for dinner?"

Invention begins in story after the unthinkable has come.

Design for Living

2009-07-02T16:27:00.000-07:00

design--a dramatic plan or structure; a deliberate manipulation of dramatic elements with the intent of producing a story; a plot or story arc intended to generate a lasting and memorable effect on the reader.

Design is, in this sense, a noun; it may also be used as a verb in which case it becomes the act of producing a plot line or arrangement of significant dramatic elements that lead to a satisfying conclusion. Plot-driven stories are those in which the design may become predictable, even though the emotional effects such as suspense, tension, horror, anticipation, dread, longing, etc may vary. The better of the plot-driven stories, say those of Harlan Coben or Lee Child, implicitly offer a design of sufficient complexity and issues at stake to lure the reader's attention away from the design while producing one or more of the previously listed emotions. In many ways, such stories are the equivalent of Navajo rugs, intricate, colorfully patterned, pleasing to experience. Character-driven stories are designed to provide emotional responses as well as moral, intellectual, and aesthetic challenges. Richard Powers's The Echo Maker, while superbly plotted, brings characters on stage with issues that actually call their very sense of self into question, luring the reader well past the notion of mere formula or suspense and into self-examination that could produce uncomfortable feelings.

A conventional approach for producing both types of pattern, the more geometrically structured as well as the more open-ended design begins with confronting a single character with a choice of behavior or the need to make some choice within a narrow time frame. On a more plot-oriented design, a character may be given a choice between serving out a long prison term or accepting a life-threatening assignment as a ticket to forgiveness for the crime that landed the character in prison. As well, a character may be confronted head-on with the need to chose allegiance between two feuding factions. One possible approach for beginning a character-driven story is to present the lead character with the need to find out some highly relevant information from his own past or from the past of family, a quest that will lead to the discovery of some unspeakable information. Jay Gatz, later to become Jay Gatsby, began a quest to find his former love, Daisy Buchannan, a quest that brought Gatsby into the midst of a complex pattern or love, betrayal, and social collision.

Particularly in a longer short story, a novella, or a novel, changing points of view in rendering the narrative will have a measurable effect on the dramatic design.

A Call to Action

2009-07-01T15:55:00.000-07:00

actioning--an interpretive concept for actors, also useful for providing writers with structural insights; a technique for establishing authentic spontaneity in a character's response to a stimulus, whether from another character, a dramatic condition, or an inanimate object.

Actioning implies finding an action for a particular event in a story. This means translating agenda or goal or perhaps fear or revulsion at every opportunity, resorting to mood as a secondary tool. Once this concept is understood by the writer to the point where it becomes muscle memory, the characters will emerge from a story with greater clarity and purpose. The concept involves knowing in addition to who the character is, what that character wants, what that character is willing to do or not do to attain the goal, and how the character feels about all the other characters in the story.

Hint: For writers, dialogue is also part of actioning.

This last attitude--how characters feel about each other-- is of particular importance when the character speaks to another. Does that character admire, distrust, resent, possibly even hate the other character? And what are the social boundaries surrounding their relationship. Suppose Mary can't stand her mother-in-law? How would she, in a family gathering, inquire if her mother-in-law wanted tea? And suppose the mother-in-law thinks her son could/should have done better in his choice of a wife. How would she respond? "What ever led you to think I drank tea?" Nice, maybe. What about, "This time, remember the lemon." Or, "I'll get it, myself."

Dialogue is not conversation, it is an exchange of dramatic action. A simple line of dialog such as "I'm not hungry" may be read in a number of contexts. Your character should not say "I'm not hungry" (a perfectly plausible thing to say under many circumstances) unless, being said, it hovers between the speaker and the hearer...and the reader with a meaning that extends well beyond,"I don't require food." For instance, suppose the speaker of that "I'm not hungry" line is met with the response, "But I went to great effort to make this for you." Ah, now the light is beginning to dawn.

Added hint: Think verbs at your characters. He wants. She lusts. He envies. She detests.

The writer has the advantage over the actor of being able to use mood in narrative, but to action-ize narrative, imagine the character thinking thoughts at as well as to a particular character or group. I should tell them all, she thought, to take their offer of a vice-presidency and shove it. Thinking that, what does she do next? That's actioning. That's also story.

In much of today's modern theatrical productions, the director and cast meet early in rehearsal to action the script, creating the bonding chemistry among the cast that will inform their interpretations of the lines before them, and making it easier for the director to block out each scene, defining where each character should be. Even for writers who like to proceed with no game plan, detailing the feelings for each character to all the others is a floatation jacked for a sea of chaos.

Design

2009-06-30T08:24:00.000-07:00

design--a structural plan for a story; a pattern of dramatic events; an attempt to determine order and significance to a set of motives and agendas; a unifying plan of behavior and response among characters in a story.

However episodic, picaresque, generational, or other loosely structured narratives, story is informed by design. Reading a given story is analogous to opening a surprise package, attempting to guess from the wrapping what the contents are. True enough, many stories are begun with nothing more than a concept or incident which the writer follows just as the opener of the surprise packages tugs at the wrapping, sifts through the insulating material, then withdraws the prize. Through revision and rewriting, the writer begins to see the potential for design, then begins to grasp how the design leads to discovery, first the writer's and then the reader's.

F. Scott Fitzgerald did not see the final design for The Great Gatsby until the work had been set in type, then presented to him for proofing. Somewhere in the process of finding typos and making the AAs (author alterations) so typical of the writing personality and so abhorrent to the publisher personality, Fitzgerald was seized with the notion of elevating Mr. Nick Carraway to the position of principal narrator, thereby giving Fitzgerald the needed leeway to dramatize the closeness he felt with Gatsby and at the same time provide the nuanced perspective of what Gatsby's rise and fall meant on an even more epic scale.

The antic satirical vision of Christopher Moore has on many occasions begun with a what-if concept, in which Moore invents a character he plunks into a well-known cultural event. His design moves like a glob of ketchup dripping from a tightly packed hamburger onto a clean white shirt, spreading, radiating outward. In Fool, he begins with the ensemble cast of King Lear, introduces a character of his own devising, and sets forth to design with and around the consequences.

Arguably outstanding amid a steady output of stunningly different novels, Joseph Wambaugh's The Secrets of Harry Bright begins with the after effects of an airline tragedy, presented with the intriguing and authenticity-on-steroids discovery that triggers a maze of events leading to the satisfying discovery.

"No River Wide," the first story in Robert Boswell's collection, The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards, is a chronicle of the friendship between two women, but only a writer of Boswell's expansive vision and technique could have designed such a complex design. Reading the story, we cannot help ratifying Boswell's choice of design as being the most effective, just as Fitzgerald's choice of Nick Carraway to narrate Gatsby was the most effective.

Hint: The ultimate design for a novel or short story is often discovered in the revision process, one small part of which is the question the writer must answer: Is this story told in the most effective way?

chaos

2009-06-29T08:41:00.000-07:00

chaos--a dramatic condition in which there is no apparent order; a character behaving without a plan or design; a multifarious state of being in which there is no seeming thread that connects individuals or events.

Chaos is the world without story, its purpose random and unstructured. The writer enters the landscape of chaos, imposes a structure or plan, then steps back to watch the characters as they respond to attempts at design. Chaos is also the world without specific individuals being assigned starring roles; as it continues to unfold, the condition of chaos levels the playing field of agenda so that all agendas are of equal importance. When beginning a story, the writer chooses a landscape, which may be pure invention or fantasy or extrapolated speculative fiction but which nevertheless becomes a tangible place for the reader. The writer then adds characters, whose goals help define their prominence and focus.

Story, plot, design--they are all a purposeful rearranging of furniture, the feng shui equivalent of drama, allowing some procession or orbit of event, the totality of which eases the passage of energy from the beginning point to the resolution. Chaos appears at first to be all the distractions a character or group of characters may face, but as the reader grows interested in the characters, chaos morphs into "things that could go wrong," which is a sort of reverse feng shui, a negative energy that arrives in unanticipated increments.

Chaos is a series of laundry list events, awaiting the writer's hand to organize them in some form.

Catalyst

2009-06-28T10:07:00.000-07:00

catalyst--a character, social unit, or organization in a story that causes a change to take place; an event that transfers energy to the point of shifting dramatic inertia from stasis or status quo; a story point that tilts the landscape toward a point of no return.

Characters frequently self-catalyze to get themselves out of a perceived rut; they change jobs,move to different cities, join the Peace Corps, abort or switch romantic relationships, adopt dogs or cats. Characters also accept opportunities which seem to them to be steps advancing toward some long-cherished goal. Catalysts are often neutral but, depending on the nature of the character responding to them, can be seen as Cosmic, Fate-driven, and certainly Golden Opportunities and Lucky Breaks. As such, the character responding to the catalyst will see some guiding hand or throughline in an essentially chaos-filled universe.

A catalyst represents a dramatic unit of energy, which may come from a chance meeting, an unanticipated discovery on Craig's List, or a connection between elements not usually associated. Remember Ishmael, as early as the first paragraph of Moby-Dick, wanting--needing--some catalytic agent: "Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can." Luck of the draw for Ishmael was choosing The Pequod, nevertheless, his wanting a catalyst to change his humors drew him into an adventure of a lifetime.

Many characters have resident within them the first cousin to hidden agenda, the secret desire. When a character becomes aware of a catalyst that could bring about advancement to achieving the secret desire, you'll have created a conflict of wrenching intensity.

Hint: Make a list of ten favored characters in ten favored books. Identify the catalyst that propelled them into action. Now you have a profile of your own favorite types of catalyst which you can enhance by putting one of them to work in your next story. Adventurous sort that you are, you can also reach within yourself as so many fine actors do, where you will identify a catalyst that is contrary to your standard preference. From such adventures come interesting characters, doing interesting--and perhaps scary--things.

The Dramatic Trinity, Conscience, Ego, and Need

2009-06-27T13:45:00.000-07:00

ego--the essential nature of a character; how a character acts, think, feels about himself; the part of the character that reacts to and interacts with the world of reality.

The ego is the self, out in the causal world, reacting and interacting, planning, attempting to be effective in personal, professional, artistic, and moral relations. In combination with conscience (see) and needs (see), it is a helpful way to define a character, attributing respective sizes and shapes to each with the total combination representing the entire character. A statistically normal character would have equal triads of each aspect, a warning flag for the writer to look elsewhere for an individual of dramatic interest. Dramatic characters tend to have large ego and extreme needs at the expense of conscience.

Assign a given character a score of 100 points to be divided among this dramatic trinity. A character with an enormous conscience, say a 60 or 80 would accordingly have to give up ego and needs points. How would a large conscience effect the ego of your 20- or 30-point ego, and what would be left over for needs?

Try ranking some of your favorite iconic characters, dividing up their 100 points among the three spheres of individuality, then see how helpful this guideline is when it comes time to assess your own creations.

It All Depends

2009-06-26T10:13:00.000-07:00

contingency--an event that has potential for occurring; a possibility without being a definite certainty; something liable to take place as a consequence of a previous action.

The behavior of a character in a story is contingent on 1) that character's reaction to another character, 2) one or more events in a character's past, 3) a character pursuing an agenda, 4) a character suffering a reversal. Contingency is the excitement of story, mixed with ambiguity and plot design to create a simultaneous atmosphere of causality and uncertainty in any given narrative. A splendid example of contingency in operation is Iris Murdoch's first novel, Under the Net, the net in the title mischievously referring to the net of language and the potentials therein for misunderstanding. One of the lead characters, Jake Donaghue, is writer who has just written a novel, The Silencer, from which comes this contingency-describing quote, "All theorizing is flight. We must be ruled by the situation itself and this is unutterably particular. Indeed it is something to which we can never get close enough, however hard we may try as it were to crawl under the net." Many of Jake's actions ironically reflect his being driven from place to place by his inability to interpret facts and choices presented through the reactions of other characters.

Some modern critics have made names for themselves by linking closure with contingency, a useful way for a writer of stories to link the payoff of a story with the writer's personal take on the zeitgeist or ambiance of a historical time. For examples of this useful equation at work, consider Thomas Pyncheon's huge romp of a historical venture, Mason & Dixon, Joan Didion's The Last Thing He Wanted, and Philip Roth's American Pastoral, each of which has a historical overview against which characters are driven to choices that are defined by contemporary forces.

It may also be argued that science fiction and the subgenre of fantasy dealing with alternate universes are providing a contingency for readers as well as for the characters. Contingency ranks high as a forceful factor in the writer's mind because it allows the writer to simultaneously deal with the structured necessity of drama and the seemingly anomalous plausible surprise offered by the very ways and means contingency is used. Although tightly plotted, Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials Trilogy provides contingencies that further define the various characters and their goals, bringing the tension of impending crisis into collision with delightful surprise in the crucible of dramatic event.

In the framework of contingency, Moby-Dick reflects a search for the nineteenth-century American psyche, and in Mark Twain's often neglected Pudd'nhead Wilson, the author literally and figuratively reverses black and white.

Hint: the message of contingency is to keep presenting characters with junctures, points at which they will have to make choices. These points of choice are where the contingency-based story begins.

Power Play

2009-06-25T11:41:00.000-07:00

shift of power--a dramatic point where one character or group achieves a strategic advantage; a moment in a story when a character breaks free of a previously held obligation, belief, loyalty, or romantic attraction; an awareness by a character of a change in status which results in his being a peer or superior to other characters.

There is an inherent aura of strength in a character pursuing a purposeful goal. The reader anticipates and is not surprised to see said character responding to setback and reversal. When the character purposeful character suffers a loss of power, loses control, there is a tangible shift of emotion. What will those, formerly subordinates of the character in focus, do in response? It all depends, you say. Depends on the kind of person the character was before the loss of power. Will it be sympathy, a desire to punish, to humiliate? Perhaps it will even be a concerted attempt to help the disposed character regain lost power.

Look what happened to Edmond Dantes; his entire story arc is a shifting of power base to the point where, before events that led him to becoming the Count of Monte Cristo, he was determined to starve himself to death. Look at Mr. Martin, after the shift of power he effected in James Thurber's short story, "The Cat-Bird Seat."

Family Matters

2009-06-24T08:42:00.000-07:00

family history--a chronicle of causal familial events that helped shape a character; the cultural environmental forces in which a character evolves; generational behavior and the attitudes in which such behavior is viewed from within the family and from external sources.

Family is such a splendid launching pad for the definition of a character, giving traditions to be applauded as well as traditions to be shunned. A character may become a victim of such tradition or a beneficiary, not to forget a martyr. If a character is informed, "All our family did their undergraduate work at Yale," and the character had hoped instead to attend The Rhode Island School of Design, might not there be a howl of conflict raised? And what about the implication that the family did undergraduate work at Yale, suggesting that graduate school venue may be an option, but graduate school itself was more a directive?

Families are social bands, dispensing tradition, learning, social and financial resources, all provided with varying degrees of love or complete lack of love. Characters may be assumed to have responded in some way--as actors in stage and film renditions respond continuously to one another--to their family origins, but also beyond their family influence in terms of wanting to break from family behavior and set out on a fresh set of responses.

Two widely differing examples of family effects on present-day characters are found in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, and Jim Harrison's Returning to Earth. Each has as a pivotal issue the impending death of a patriarch and its effects on the survivors. Told from the point of view of the outsider, Charles Ryder, Brideshead is essentially the story of the Flyte family, who own the Brideshead estate, their Catholicism, its effects on them and Charles Ryder, who has a close friendship with his Oxford classmate, Sebastian, and a romantic relationship with Sebastian's sister, Julia. Returning to Earth focuses on the approaching death of Donald, a middle-aged man of mixed Finnish and Chippewa heritage, terminally ill with Lou Gherig's disease. The narrative begins with Donald, who is dictating his story to his wife, Cynthia. Reminiscing on his connection with his Indian heritage, Donald recalls the influence of his father's cousin, Flower, on him. "Flower shook my brain like one of her many rattles hanging from the rafters of her tar paper shack." Each of these authors is remarkable in a specific way, deft in the ability to describe the reverberations of family into the dance the individual members has with life.

Injustice

2009-06-23T08:49:00.000-07:00

injustice--a character's sense of having been dealt with unfairly, a rip or tear in the fabric of social accord; a person or system inflicting on another individual or group of individuals a behavior or treatment extending beyond civility; encroaching on another person's or group's defined territory; any thoughtless or bullying oppression or harassment.

Injustice may be real or imagined. The actual victim may not feel the unjustified invasion but a close friend or family member, observing the circumstances, might see the occasion and then attempt to urge the actual victim into recognition of the injustice. What a splendid motivational force for fiction. Injustice may breed resentment, which in its turn motivates irony, which gives way to sarcasm, which becomes the catalyst for revenge. Injustice is a prized motivation because it so frequently begets dramatic action, which is, of course, the life's blood of story.

One of the more notable victims of injustice was Edmond Dantes of The Count of Monte Cristo fame. In Dumas's epic tale, Dantes becomes the victim of a conspiratorial web of injustice to the point of considering suicide in his helpless despair. Through a dramatic shift of power (see), Dantes is able to embark on a pattern of revenge which, once exacted, allows him the luxury of getting on with his life.

Another victim of injustice, the near-iconic Montresor of "A Cask of Amontillado," has suffered injuries (never specifically detailed but assumed to be countless humiliations) in the past but has now been insulted by Fortunato(also not detailed but through implication presented as sufficient to merit revenge). The story ends with Montressor having sufficiently played upon Montressor's overweening pride to the point of luring him into a fatal trap, during the course of which Montressor is given cause to cite his family's motto, “Nemo me impune lacessit,” (No one insults me with impunity)which is a tell of the outcome. Montressor's ultimate revenge for the injustice suffered appears to satisfy him, but since the story is narrated in first-person, it is possible to read it with the interpretation that this is merely one of many retellings of the story, that Montressor has literally been dining out on the tale for some years and that in doing so, he has become as overweening in his pride as he felt Fortunato to be in his.

Fiction abounds with characters setting forth to undo injustices. Happily, there is room for more.

Is it the real turtle soup or only the mock?

2009-06-22T09:24:00.000-07:00

imitation--a process followed by beginning and intermediate writers in which they sedulously copy the style, concept, and attitude of established writers whom they admire or whose success they envy.

Imitation is useful up to an educational point, but once that education is achieved, the writer needs to move on to the risky business of discovering the self that awaits. As the sale price of an individual hardcover title increases, it becomes particularly apparent that the reader is going to want to get originality, not imitation for the $26 price tag. Why would a reader want to spend $26 for an imitation of Annie Proulx when, for the same $26, the real thing could be had. The writer's best opportunity for finding an audience comes as a result of the risk taking that provides original voice and ideas of dramatic deployment. It is not only possible but admirable to learn from other writers, living or dead. The time comes, however, when this learning must be recast into the writer's own words and feelings.

Intermediate- and experienced-level writers, having discovered their voices, themes, and lines of dramatic attack run the risk of self-parody when they begin imitating themselves, the ideal being that each new project is a launching of the ship of discovery on the vast ocean of enthusiasm.

Victim of Fictional Circumstances

2009-06-21T11:15:00.000-07:00

victim--a character who is the recipient of a real or imagined injustice; an individual affected adversely; one whose agenda, health, plans, and general sense of well being is diverted or destroyed by an outside force.

Victims have real estate with a view on the literary landscape, seemingly standing in line to be first to claim the role. A victim, by definition has experienced (or believes he has experienced) some force of event that has derailed his aspirations and his hoped for rewards, allowing him in some cases to stop all developmental motion, take on the mantle of the martyr, and luxuriate in the misfortune. Other victims of birth or circumstance or both get up, brush off the dust, then get back to the business at hand.

He or she who proclaims victimhood the loudest is likely suspect of malingering or playing on sympathy. Neither is attractive. A character is a victim as a consequence of having ventured something, taken a risk, hoped a hope. Such activity is not lost on the reader, who is now prepared to invest hard earned empathy in such a character, thus whatever the character who has suffered reversals does next has a marked influence on the reader.

There is a delicate balance to accepting one's fate; should one go meekly or with a fight? Should one wail loudly after reversal (such as, say, Silas Marner, when his miserly stash was stolen), or be the stoic? It helps to know the character in some detail before inflicting the status of victim on him; his response may well provide the exit strategy for the story. Does a setback enhance the character's forward inertia or diminish it?

A character who wishes to avenge victim status (See The Count of Monte Cristo, see also The Mayor of Casterbridge) is a good candidate for reader sympathy. Even Ahab, setting forth the hunt down the whale, though extreme, nevertheless excites our understanding and sympathy, even our grudging respect. A character who welcomes victim status as an excuse for avoiding future venture is an individual who will not have many rooters among the readership.

Hint: To stir up the potential of mischief for the sake of creating new stories, consider your take on Herman Melville's eponymous Bartleby, "pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn," then consider his inner core. Consider how you would portray him if you were an actor, and how you would move him forth as a character you had created. Is Bartleby a victim?

My heart's not in it

2009-06-20T13:34:00.000-07:00

internal conflict--a battle between two or more opposing forces within an individual, a culture, or a society; choices a character makes that impact his behavior in a story; the agony of moral choice written large as dramatic issue.

The key word in an internal conflict is but, which translates as "except for the fact;" but is the tin can tied as a prank to the rear bumper of a car, it is the conditional divide between the two warring forces that tug at the character. But is the fulcrum, the contingency with which the afflicted character lives. Sound dramatic principle dictates an internal conflict step forth in front rank characters, Mark Anthony the soldier and Mark Anthony the lover. Similarly there is Cleopatra struggling through the emotions of the lover and the duties and responsibility of the queen.

A protagonist may be a natural leader, except that he freezes in arguments; a scientist may be devoted to the pursuit of her research but feels compromised for once having managed the outcome of one of her more significant studies. Huckleberry Finn may admire and respect the runaway slave, Jim, but feels his conscience being conflicted because, after all, Jim was his master's property and Huck has effectively helped Jim escape from his rightful owner.

The conflict may be essentially internal,particularly in the short story, but it will have an effect on the way significant characters behave and in the way the reader feels.

Words fail me.Really. Some thoughts on Problem Words

2009-06-19T09:33:00.000-07:00

problem words--words that seem to enhance attributions but which actually muddy a given issue; descriptors intended to delineate but which instead blur; words meant to indicate an emphasis on degree of intensity; words which don't enhance the meaning for which they were used.

Problem words are the literary equivalent of hiring distant relatives; they mean well but ultimately do not understand what is expected of them. To say that John was quite annoying doesn't tell the reader much except that John exhibited qualities that were annoying to some undisclosed person or persons, and that whatever these qualities were, it is impossible to tell to whom or how his behavior caused annoyance; nothing is expressed or implied relative to the accuracy of the statement or its reflection on the reliability of the narrator. It is all right for John to in fact be annoying but the reader should have some relative sense of how this quality sets forth on its mission to annoy the beholder. Does John chew gum loudly? Does John tell racist or sexist jokes? Then there is the matter of the "quite." Does the "quite" mean "somewhat," "very," "considerably," or perhaps "intensely"?

Problem words and habit words dilute dramatic prose by injecting notes of vagueness and repetition into a narrative, venturing close to the verge of trespass into the terrains of cuteness, patronization, and affectation. Hint: You are in the literary equivalent of a police line-up, asked to identify miscreant problem words. Before you, in well-lit display, appear "rather," "very," "many," and "somewhat." You blink in recognition of your complicity in using all of them, then point an accusing finger.

Anton Chekhov @ Mt. Rushmore.com

2009-06-18T08:11:00.000-07:00

Chekhovian--similar to or evocative of the thrust of the plays and short stories of Anton Chekhov; materials linked by an underground or less visible causality than conventional drama; seemingly ambiguous narratives, informed by the emphasis on subtext and internal responses of a character; stories decidedly lacking the appearance of being plot-driven.

Chekhov is best known among writers for his assertion that a gun appearing conspicuously in Act 1 must be pointed and fired by Act 3, opening the door for discussions about foreshadowing and causality. It may also be regarded as a framework in which characters use the tools at hand. Many of Chekhov's stories deal with the inability of characters to communicate with one another until a) it is too late, b) a sudden insight emerges, and possibly c) the elephant in the living room becomes through previous events visible to one or more characters. This last possibility links James Joyce to Chekhov, just as Beethoven's fondness for Mozart linked those two in an apostolic succession that began with the admiration of each for Haydn.

Chekhov is apostolic and his major plays and later short stories invite investigation, particularly for such techniques as interior monologue, internal conflicts, and subtext. His work has inspired twentieth- and twenty-first century actors as well as writers, inspiring them to find non-verbal ways of expressing emotions and intent. If there were to be a literary equivalent of Mt. Rushmore, Chekhov would certainly qualify as an image along with Franz Kafka, and George Orwell, and with some debate, Miguel Cervantes. The names of all four have become adjectival forms in the literary language, Chekhovian associated with ambiguity, Kafkaesque with apparent conspiracy theory or dead-pan satire, Orwellian implying Big-Brother supervision, and Quixotic suggesting extravagant romanticism and idealism.

Hint: Major things to be learned from Chekhov: 1) let the reader work at the story to adduce its meaning, 2) give the reader sufficient but not extensive tools.

Sarah Palin, the Madam Bovary of Alaska

2009-06-17T08:32:00.000-07:00

Bovary, Emma--a memorable, iconic character; a prime example of the way causality and determinism trigger responses in a front-rant character; a person who became disenchanted with her life, then attempted to effect change.

Emma is everything you could want in a character. She has a vision, which she seeks at accelerated levels to achieve; she has a mounting sense of frustration because her stratagems do not produce their intended goals; she has a growing sense of dislike for her husband, Charles, because of the fact that he, of all those with whom she has contact, wants nothing more than to please her. The fabric of life is Emma's romantic vision. Emma's behavior and attitudes comprise Charles Bovary's romantic vision. They are coevals in an existential train wreck.

Compare and contrast Emma Bovary with Mr. Stephens of Kazuo Ishiguro's remarkable The Remains of the Day: Each means no harm to others. Although each causes some collateral damage along the way, Emma is an absolute disaster in the totality of her effect, bringing her feckless husband to the state of utter inability to cope with life, while Mr. Stephens, although unintentionally breaking Miss Kenton's heart, has mostly damaged himself. He is, in fact, Charles Bovary writ larger than Bovary himself. Emma has romantic visions of enhanced social position and the exciting life she imagines will result from that position. Stephens has the romantic notion of achieving the enhanced plateau of being one of the best butlers ever. In fact, Stephens has served Lord Darlington, a conspicuous supporter of Hitler in the pre-World War II years, and who now, at the beginning of the novel, is reduced to serving a status-conscious American. Both Emma Bovary and Stephens are extreme examples of naive narrator, each intelligent enough to see beyond the surfaces apparent to them but each is resolutely unwilling to do so.

As Mark Twain notably did with his parodic treatment of Walter Scott-type romanticism and chivalry in such works as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Tom Sawyer, Detective, and Huckleberry Finn, Emma Bovary's creator, Gustav Flaubert, took Emma's reading habits as a vehicle he rode into the literary sunset. Emma's early readings only seemed to whet her appetite for the things she considered to be missing from her life. In a real sense, the more she read, the more her sense of reality was shunted off to the side, allowing the vast interior of her fantasy life to expand to the point where it overrode any possibility that reality would survive. In a fitting irony, Emma Bovary identified herself with Anna Karenina, pursuing suicide as the appropriate way out of the nightmare of circumstance she had created for herself. But here, too, Emma was betrayed by illusion. Anna Karenina's death was over in a brief moment. The drama of Emma's death was painful and protracted.

For more reasons than exquisiteness of character delineation, Madam Bovary is consistently cited as one of the five or ten major novels in any language at any time, but the complexity, inner struggles, and outer agenda inherent in Emma Bovary make her a tempting height to aspire when bringing a character onto a page in a story. Flaubert is famously remembered as saying that Emma Bovary is he. He might as well have said Emma Bovary is story.

The Best Schemed Lays

2009-06-16T09:34:00.000-07:00

complacency--a feeling of smug sureness and being in control; a dramatic fulcrum for characters who are about to be tipped into the froth of story either by action or inaction; a delineation between characters who believe they have sufficiency to suit their needs and characters who are hungry for change.

When the reader encounters a complacent character, said reader receives the literary equivalent of Blue-Screen-of-Death computer warnings; something earthshaking is about to happen, be it a palace revolt, or the reply to an innocently voiced "Hey, what's for dinner tonight?" being met with a "Get your own damned dinner because I'm outta here for good."

Into the story come those commandos Jealousy, Guilt, and Grief, their faces blackened, their knit watch caps pulled down low, invading and occupying the terrain, driving the circumstances and responses. Complacency is metaphorically the best laid schemes of which Robert Burns wrote, and we know what comes after that, they "gang aft aglay," and do so big time.

Show us a complacent character, F. Scott Fitzgerald might have written in his longish short story, "The Rich Boy," and I'll show you a story in the making. A complacent character is astride his or her high horse, vulnerable to the low-hanging branch. A complacent character might ride that high horse into thinking to make a romantic conquest or achieve a dramatic promotion in professional or academic status, only to be met with the reality of the leveling effects of falling unselfishly in love or being forced to recognize that there are others of equal or perhaps higher qualifications.

Hint: take an interesting male or female character. In one paragraph, establish him or her as being on the cusp of an easy achievement of a relatively significant goal, say chairman of a department or starring role in a stage play of extraordinary range. Paragraph two presents the character striding into the crucible. Paragraph three presents the enthusiastic response the respective characters are accustomed to experiencing. Paragraph four introduces the surprise of reality: in recognition of the male's good work, the dean is keeping the male character on, serving as a minor assistant to the new department chair; the woman is eagerly recruited to play the role of the maid to the female lead. Now the story progresses.

Additional hint: a universal theme is the awareness that life is not fair. (See, for instance, the last few lines of Shirley Jackson's short story, "The Lottery.") How about a story in which a complacent character (as opposed to a truly competent or talented individual) wins. How about it?