the same--but different

Yesterday I visited my mother and her sister for our weekly lunch (ham and cheese sandwiches on fresh bread). Afterwards, Mom and I got talking about writing, and we again visited the topic of genre, which I might define casually as the family to which a particular work belongs.

Does genre really matter to the writer? Or is it a thing of interest only to critics or to those who are selling the work--such as bookstores who need to know what shelf to stock a book on? To the extent that genres are patterns, are they not formulaic, and therefore uncreative? Isn't writing to a genre simply a paint-by-numbers approach?

I'm not an expert on genre--I'm just learning all this myself--but my first gut response is: no, writing to genre is not necessarily uncreative. It can be uncreative, perhaps, if the genre conventions are very strict.

But even here I'm not sure. I was thinking about the old-time romance plot, in which the poor, unassuming, beautiful, and principled maiden becomes the seemingly impossible love-object of a wealthy, powerful, handsome, and forbidding man. After a couple of more or less standard plot complications, they wind up married happily ever after. If you don't happen to be a fan of this genre, then these romance stories quickly become stale and repetitive, and their fantasy elements, so removed from real life, start to cloy.

But are the stale and cloying aspects of these stories the fault of the genre? Or merely the skill of the storyteller? The romance premise that I described above is essentially that used in Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, a book still in print and therefore, by definition, a classic. I haven't read the book, but the famous BBC miniseries based on it, starring Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle, remains one of my favorite pieces of filmed entertainment.

Why? I think because Jane Austen makes me believe it. Her skill in crafting the situation and the characters defeats my skepticism and resistance to being drawn in. The characters are not stale types stamped out of a mold; they seem more like vibrant, actual people. The liveliness of the characters makes their feelings and their values matter. The story comes alive.

To me this says that the story itself--the genre--is alive and well. It triggers real interest and emotions in the audience; it speaks to us. I suspect that its durability is due to the fact that it is saying something profound on many different levels. Unconsciously, we read it or view it on all those levels, and from this comes the feeling of being fulfilled or satisfied by the story.

As T. S. Eliot put it:

When forced to work within a strict framework the imagination is taxed to the utmost--and will produce its richest ideas. Given total freedom the work is likely to sprawl.

Not just in storytelling, but all through knowledge and in life itself the mystery of Same and Different confronts us. We recognize Different things as being the Same, and the Same things as being Different. In some strange way, the more strongly you emphasize Sameness, the more poignant and powerful become the Differences that arise.

Genre tells us how to make our story the Same, so we can find interesting, powerful ways to make it Different. It tells us where on the great family tree of stories we are. For no matter how unique, individualistic, or even solitary we are, we are still somewhere on a family tree. Like it or not, you've got parents, maybe siblings and cousins. You can deny it--but why?

It's better to acknowledge who you are and where you're from, and work from there.

story peaks

Yesterday I reached a (minor) milestone in the progress of the book by finally hammering out the sequence of story-events that I've been working on. These story-events constitute a mini-climax within the work as a whole--what is known as an "act turning-point" in storytelling jargon.

By writing in "acts" you show that you understand storytelling; by reading or watching a story composed in acts the audience feels confident in the powers of the writer, and also that the work is one thing--a unified whole.

For, interestingly and perhaps counterintuitively, it is exactly the decomposition of a thing into relatively autonomous parts that makes it a whole--a distinct thing. The human body, for example, is not just a mass of cells, and still less a stew of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. It is made up entirely of subunits which are relatively whole in their own right: organs. The heart, for example, is integral with the rest of the body but is also a distinct organ with its own clear functions and inner rules of operation. In the term coined by Arthur Koestler in The Ghost in the Machine, it is a holon: a part that is also a whole.

In a complex hierarchical system, in order for a higher-level whole to operate smoothly, all (or anyway most) of its component subwholes have to be running smoothly: doing their jobs without taxing the higher-level holons above them. When this is not happening, for whatever reason, there is a failure of efficiency and of health (a word that comes from the same source as whole), and the organism is diseased. If your pancreas is not running smoothly, you have some form of diabetes. If your thyroid is not running properly, you have some kind of metabolic disorder.

In a story, the acts are the highest-level "organs" making up the story as a whole: the equivalent of its brain, heart, and liver. And like these vital organs, acts too are complex things made up of subwholes of their own. In a movie script the next-lower subwhole is called a sequence, and a similar level exists for prose writing--often roughly at the level of the chapter in a novel. The next-lower subwhole below the sequence is the scene. Each scene too is composed of distinct subunits, which Robert McKee calls beats. These, according to him, are the elementary units of a story: the individual intentional actions that cause a story to move forward.

So, having now plotted out my act-climax in some detail (and having resolved many story and character issues to do so), I feel like someone who has scaled a mountain-peak. But it's just one peak in a range--and not the highest one. That still lies ahead of me. And the difficulty I've had in scaling this one gives me pause about tackling the big one.

But I'm committed now.

tunneling from both ends

Still at it. That is, still working my way through the difficulties of my story.

I have spent a huge amount of time (even by my own slow standards) fiddling with this part. But experience has taught me that there's no use in pushing on with a piece of writing if you're not clear on what you're doing. That is tantamount to trying to fix a problem using the wrong tools.

From the point of view of this blog, one difficulty is in how to describe this slow, searching process--how to make it seem interesting, or at least comprehensible.

An image that springs to mind is that of building a tunnel. Often tunnels are built by digging from opposite sides of the mountain and trying to meet in the middle. This is no doubt done in order to halve the construction time by putting two full excavation crews to work at once.

In a similar way, I build story by digging from "both ends": that is, by imagining the result or end-state I want to reach, and also by imagining the motives and actions of the characters en route to that end-state. Changes to the end-state mean making changes to those motives and actions. Changes of motive and action lead to different end-states.

"End-state" means not just the ending of the story as a whole, but also the end of each segment: each chapter, each scene. In a work that has been planned, outlined, each of these will have its story purpose, and therefore the end-state that needs to be reached. But getting characters to go there can be difficult.

Why? After all, the characters just do what I tell them, don't they? Why not just send them to the destination and get the whole thing written quickly?

It's about believability. Stories in which characters move smoothly as though on rails to obviously contrived end-states smack of author convenience, the evidence of which is a feeling of bending the rules of reality every which way to get there. I've talked about these things before. These are those scenes in which the hero's fetters are done up poorly, enabling him to wriggle free; or the building has large ventilation-ducts suitable for crawling through; and so on. There's a sense of "let's just get through this part so we can get to the exciting stuff ahead".

Contrivances like these ruin my enjoyment of a story. I don't mind a few--every story needs some help at times to keep going--but as they pile up, I sense writer laziness and a work written in the belief that credibility doesn't matter, or, worse, that the audience is too dumb to notice or care.

If your hero is tied up, and you need him out of his bonds, how do you get him out? If you resort to the old "luckily, they weren't tied up very well" trick, then you're lazy in my opinion. You don't care about your story very much.

How might I handle it? If I don't have any creative way of untying those knots, I might simply have the hero struggle with them, and not succeed in untying them. In story terms, that's what's known as a barrier: the hero tries something, and it doesn't work. A rule of thumb in storytelling is: always make things tougher for the hero than he expects. (It's OK to surprise him on the upside sometimes--especially when he's expecting things to be very difficult.) Now, whatever he does next, he has to do it tied up. He'll have to get creative with a future opportunity.

Or I might try to avoid having him tied up. Why create problems for oneself? Don't use the old "tying up" formula: use something else. Maybe he escapes--and, sprinting free, triggers an old leg-hold trap in the woods, and is caught that way...

If I decided he had to be tied up after all, then I would have to examine the details of his situation: tied up how? Where? By whom? I'd have to visit the character(s) doing the tying up: how motivated are they? How knowledgeable? What materials do they have? How much time? What is their attitude to what they're doing? By looking at how the bad guy approaches the task, I'm digging my tunnel from the front: how would I do the job, if I were he?

In doing this, I might hit on an idea for how the hero will escape. Once I have this, I need to start designing my scene so as to make this work. That's digging my tunnel from the back.

I find I need to shift from front to back, back to front, again and again, working through a story problem in steps. Maybe my idea is to have the bad guy leave behind a tool that the hero will use. That too is a story convenience, of course--unless the hero makes it happen. Hero might see bad guy set down the tool for a moment, then hit on the strategy of trying to "make" him forget it. Now the escape task shifts to a new arena: how the hero tries to manipulate the bad guy's attention, even as he is being tied up. A story subproblem opens up, with its own features--another little tunnel within the tunnel.

A story is not complete until every one of those problems and subproblems has been solved to my skeptical satisfaction. I need to believe that every single character is always acting in some way that I myself might act in the same circumstances. This requires imaginative effort, and not being satisfied with easy answers--things I've seen before.

It's hard. But when you do the work, it really pays off. If you want to create a really good story, set yourself and your characters tough problems, then think hard about how to solve them. If you keep at it, the answers do come.

Just as in civil engineering, in writing this method of tunneling from both ends speeds things up tremendously--even if it doesn't feel fast.

notes on finishing Aristotle

I've just finished keying notes from Aristotle's Poetics. This short work is still probably the best overall guide to writing dramatic works, whether as prose or as script. Aristotle focuses on storytelling, which he sees as the core of the poetic art. Art, to him, means "imitation": when we see art we must be reminded of life in some way. In Shakespeare's terms, it is the mirror held up to nature.

For Aristotle, the highest form of poetry was tragedy: serious poetry intended to be acted out on stage. In order to gain the fullest audience involvement, the characters need to be "better" than we are, at least in certain respects. Why? Because the key emotions of tragedy, according to Aristotle, are pity and terror. It is to experience these vicariously that an audience watches tragedy, and they are evoked by seeing superior people undergoing misfortune. When a good person suffers, we feel pity; whereas when a bad person suffers, we feel satisfaction.

It felt a bit strange to read these things, put so bluntly by the great philosopher, and yet he hit the nail on the head. We see it all the time in movies: the bad guy does mean things, and gets his just deserts in the end. The good guy, or girl, braver and more noble than we are, suffers, and we feel pained about that. It's politically incorrect to rate people on a quality scale, and yet that is what popular art does all the time as a matter of course. (For the record: I'm no friend of political correctness--quite the reverse.)

According to Aristotle, comedies are stories about people who are worse than we are. And this is true also: think of the TV sitcom, the staple story of which is about the flaw of one of its characters. Out of jealousy, social climbing, greed, lust, or other motives, a character does ridiculous things, and we laugh. "Ha ha, what a schmuck." The typical sitcom episode ends with the character being chastened, and apologizing for his behavior: all is restored to equilibrium until the next episode.

It gets me wondering though about more modern dramas, that depict gangsters and low-lifes (say) in heroic dramatic roles. Usually gangster heroes (such as those played by, say, James Cagney) were seen as popular heroes by many--admirable rebels against corrupt or unjust government forces. Or some, such as Vito Corleone in The Godfather, are relatively good: he may be a greedy, violent, vengeful, ignorant criminal, but he has principles or a code of honor that his foes lack. He's better than they are.

But then we get to the "grunge" phenomenon of the 1990s: movies like Pulp Fiction and Trainspotting, populated almost exclusively by the dregs of society: criminal lumpenproletarians who lack redeeming qualities. Both movies were more or less comedic in tone, at least in many places, and so were perhaps conforming to Aristotle's scheme in that way. But I found most of the characters in both those movies revolting, and I cared less about what happened to them than about whether I was about to be subjected to yet more disgusting scenes. I wouldn't want to see either movie again, although I thought there was much cleverness and ingenuity in Pulp Fiction.

But in general I regard shows like that as a measure of the aberrant times we're in. I think about George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, how people in that future dystopia attend movies to watch the women and children of their "enemies" being killed, and laugh at them. In many ways, we're there now.

Still, I'll rely on Aristotle. All spiritual training involves the cultivation of virtue--and not just the relative "virtue" of being less cowardly or brutal than one's enemies. The challenge of being human remains the same. And as Gandhi recommended that one should be the change one wants to see in the world, so I think I should create the stories I want to read.

So that's what I'm doing.

have a plan

Yesterday I had my weekly lunch with Mom--ham-and-cheese sandwiches at her dining-table while looking out at the milky-green water of Cove Cliff. We talk about many things: psychology, astrology, family, and of course writing (the supposed topic of the lunch symposium). Yesterday we touched on the topic of structure as an important part of creative writing.

We agree on its importance, but many people are skeptical. "Structure" sounds so dry, so...uncreative. Architects and engineers concern themselves with structure: they're making things that have to stand up in the physical world. But creative writers, channeling the Muse, spew free and original ideas on the page, going where their creative spirits take them, discovering images and writing them down...right?

Maybe for a very short piece such an approach could produce something readable. But a longer work, like a bridge or a convention center, has to stand up under its own strength. It's sustaining itself not against gravity and wind-shear, but against the wandering attention of the reader. Why should a reader stick with you?

In his Poetics, Aristotle determined that the most important element of a tragedy (the highest form of poetry, in his view) was plot, or "what happens". (More exactly, plot is "what happens" plus the arrangement or order of what happens.) It forms the structure of a story. Note that plotting has nothing directly to do with writing at all. You could devise a plot using pictures or some other symbolic system. Words are convenient for this, but not necessary.

Plotting is a selection and ordering of events. A good storyteller is someone who does this in a way that is compelling and that generates strong emotional responses in the audience. In theory it could be done entirely in one's head, without the use of words or any other symbols at all--just the arrangement of mental images, like a dream. Committing the story to words is a purely secondary task, as well as a secondary talent. As Robert McKee points out, many people have literary ability--the ability to write good prose. Few have story ability--the ability to imagine and arrange events in an interesting and meaningful way.

Speaking for myself, I find that my writing is easiest and best when I'm describing an event that has actually happened. When I write a scene that has happened in actual life (or in a dream), the characters, setting, and specific actions and dialogue are all taken care of. They've already happened, and I just need to select from among the details and choose how to describe them. There is much more in any real-life scene than could ever be described, so I have a cornucopia of choice. The choices I make put my stamp on the scene: I give it a particular meaning by choosing as I do.

In a simple real-life story, the relationship of the scenes to each other is also more or less a given. You start at the beginning and go on to the end. The structure and content of the scenes has been given you by life; now you really do just have to write it down.

But for fictional works, the writer has to come up with all the material that is supplied by life in the case of a nonfiction story. You have to think up the characters, the setting, and the specific actions and dialogue for each scene, as well as a sequence of scenes that lead to an interesting punch at the end. (In real life, this "interesting punch" already exists--and is presumably the reason you've chosen to tell the story in the first place.)

That's a lot of creative work--and it's creative work of different types.

For the past several months I've been reworking the detailed structure of my story. It's time-consuming and creatively difficult. But before my very eyes I see it leading to a better result. I'm organizing the content of a sequence of chapters, and doing this by way of bullet-points in Word. In the past I've used index cards for this purpose, but I'm experimenting with this even more convenient method (although I do miss the physicalness of the index cards, the heft of a growing deck of scenes that are gradually cohering into a story). I scan down my growing list of bullets, playing out scenes or steps in my mind, like a movie. When I hit a gap, or a step that doesn't feel like a strong, logical result of the previous step, I go back to my notes and start imagining.

"How would this character respond?" I ask myself. Well, that depends--what exactly is this character trying to achieve here? And why? The questions open up backward into the motivational world behind the story. They force me to examine the inner workings of my story-world, to confront the areas that are as yet unimagined, uncreated.

The goal is to create a fictional world that feels as close as possible to my real world: a place in which actual events in an actual world already exist, and my task as a writer is simply to find the words to describe them. In my experience this makes a story much more fun both to write and to read. I'm not fussing around trying to figure out how to describe a guy's fedora at the same time I'm trying to figure out who he is and what he wants in life. If you really figure out who he is and what he wants, you might also discover whether he really even wears a fedora.

Robert McKee says it, J. K. Rowling says it to would-be writer kids, Strunk and White say it in The Elements of Style, and now Paul Vitols says it: before you write, have a plan. Diving in and hoping for the best means harder work and a poorer result.

And who needs that?

genre science

My mother and I are having weekly meetings about storytelling. She makes lunch for us and for my aunt Jackie, now also retired, then we crack the books. She's hoping I can teach her something about the art of story--and I hope so too.

It's not a planned course. I'm feeling my way along intuitively, trying to pass on things that I think make sense. I feel much doubt, because I wouldn't necessarily wish my own methods on another person (even if my methods finally turn out to work!). And yet, those are the only methods I know at first hand.

Our text is Robert McKee's Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting. Since 1990 I have tried to absorb and apply his ideas to my own writing. As he stresses in the book, he does not provide a formula for how to write stories, but rather lays out the principles for what makes a story good, along with diagnostic tools to help when one's own work is having trouble. When I read Aristotle's Poetics, I saw that McKee is mostly interpreting and adapting Aristotle's ideas to modern storytelling. Which suits me find, since not only is the Poetics a fantastic short course in how stories work, but my own mind naturally gravitates to an Aristotelian orderliness and keenness on accurately identifying first principles.

As McKee says, the first thing you need to do in telling your story is to work out what genre you're in. Are you writing a mystery? A love story? A fantasy? The word genre is related to genus, and I explained it to Mom as being like the species of animal you've got. You need to know whether your story is an ostrich, a crocodile, or a bison, before you can know what its component parts are supposed to be.

Once you know that, you can address the structure of your story--its skeleton. An ostrich skeleton and a crocodile skeleton are not the same. You need to know what it is you're creating. McKee is emphatic that writers need to do personal research into the genre of their story--to find other works in the genre and do their own cross-analysis of them, identifying their parts. What characters and situations are always present? What kinds of settings are used, and how do they affect the action? What are the basic themes or ideas of the stories? McKee says that you should study both successes and failures in your genre, to gain conscious knowledge of its workings--to gain a better knowledge of the genre than your audience subliminally has.

As McKee points out, there is not much good study material out there on genre. Plus, genres themselves keep evolving and combining. We have medieval whodunits and corporate thrillers and sci-fi erotica. As far as I know, a single book, Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding, spawned the whole genre of "chick lit" which overran the fiction sections of bookstores like mountain pine beetle. It is (or was) popular because it touched a chord in an audience. It spoke to its readers. If you seek to write chick lit, you would have to study Bridget Jones and other works to find out exactly what makes them tick--why, in other words, they appeal to readers (and presumably first of all to yourself).

Personally, I'm fascinated by the phenomenon of genre. It seems clear to me that the word is applied to different things--to settings, such as Western; to themes, such as "revenge story"; and to styles, such as satire. "Genre science" (if I can call it that) is still at that early stage in which things are still not differentiated clearly, like a big drawer in which socks are mixed in with shirts, neckties, and longjohns. It needs sorting out, and I for one would be interested in helping with that task. I'd like to become a genre scientist.

I was struck when I read Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale by his discovery that the basic structure of the fairy tale is quite invariant, if you look at it deeply enough. I suspect that all our story genres are similar in this respect, and that this invariance must express something deep about how our minds and emotions work. In short: the genres are expressions of our mythology.

Of course, it says something about my nature that whenever I look around me, I see only research projects...

working girls (and boys)

Second mug of coffee draining down to the last cool swallows. We were up promptly after the alarm went off at 5:30, Kimmie wanting to turn over a new leaf and give herself more time in the mornings so she can leave punctually for work. Through my closed venetian blinds I can make out the bluish darkness still outside.

First thing for me, after I make the coffee, is to open up my big fat copy of Microsoft Windows XP Inside Out by Ed Bott, Carl Siechert, and Craig Stinson--an excellent resource. Sitting here at my PC, highlighter in hand, I make my way slowly through it, day by day learning more about the operating system I'm using.

Since Windows XP was first released in 2001, hundreds of fixes and improvements have been made to it. Most of these were bundled into two major updates, known collectively as Service Packs 1 and 2.

Well, I'm starting to think of the work I'm doing on The Mission now as my own Service Pack. Marooned on the sandbar of chapter 30, I'm finding that I want to circle back and look over the work as a whole. Recently most of my notes have been in a document I set up to write ideas for draft 2 of the book as a whole. I've been displeased and dissatisfied with aspects of what I'm writing, and I want to address these problems so that I don't finish my draft with those lame, arbitrary things left in it.

The specific problem, I believe, is arbitrariness. Everything in a story, from story events to points of characterization to specific images, should be organic: should belong to the story and help communicate its meaning. This is not easy to achieve, and requires careful, deliberate, and skilled effort.

On Saturday night Kimmie and I watched the 1988 movie Working Girl, starring Melanie Griffith and Harrison Ford (the movie actually bills Harrison Ford and Sigourney Weaver as the stars--an artifact of their greater contractual muscle and higher fees). The movie was written by Kevin Wade and directed by Mike Nichols (of The Graduate fame). It was about the 4th time I'd seen the movie, and I continued to find more in it to appreciate. One of things I appreciated about it this time was the unity of its elements.

For example, when Tess McGill (Griffith) is making her way to Manhattan via the Staten Island Ferry during the opening credit sequence, we learn that it's her birthday. Her friend Cyn (Joan Cusack) gives ger a tiny cake and sings "Happy Birthday". Her "birth" is being celebrated: and Tess, without yet knowning it, is indeed on a journey of birth to a new life. Soon she's working for a new boss, Katharine (Sigourney Weaver), a successful, ambitious, and supremely self-confident woman, who, it turns out, is also having a birthday--a week later than Tess's. They're both turning 30--a pivotal age--but Katharine is actually younger than Tess, and has apparently achieved vastly more. They are twins and mutual shadows: Tess is blonde, working-class, and struggling to gain a toehold in the business world; Katharine is brunette, of patrician stock, and seems to have had wealth and success hand-delivered to her.

With the birthdays come gifts. Tess receives sexy lingerie from her boyfriend Mick (Alec Baldwin)--yet another gift that she can't wear outside their apartment. Katharine, for her part, is showered with gifts when she breaks her leg in a skiing accident (including a near-life-size plush gorilla--a funny inside allusion to Weaver's earlier role as gorilla researcher Dian Fossey). But the more important gifts come from Tess's new associate and would-be lover Jack (Harrison Ford). When, now impersonating a high-powered deal-maker, Tess shows up at a meeting without a proper briefcase, claiming that she's "lost" hers, Jack gives her a beautiful briefcase, classic symbol of the businessperson. With this he sends the message, "you're one of us."

At the end of the movie, when Tess and Jack have gotten together and she has indeed made it as a wheeler-dealer, he gives her a final gift: a metal lunchbox, packed with lunch and other tenderly considerate goodies. The lunchbox is emblematic of her origins, and with this Jack is telling her that he accepts and loves her for who she is. As a high-powered executive she can carry a lunchbox so she doesn't forget where she came from--so she doesn't lose what is most important about herself.

My point is that these choices were made deliberately and carefully, most likely by Kevin Wade, the writer. They are not arbitrary. The result is that the movie feels unified--it feels as though everything in it belongs.

That's where I want to get to with my own story. But (big surprise) it's not easy. You need to know your world and your characters before you can really make meaningful, non-arbitrary choices. And knowing anything, I find, takes time.

Still, what else am I doing with my life?

surprise me

Robert McKee recommends that the storyteller pay attention to the way other people tell stories, not just in formal media like movies and novels, but in everyday life. For, he asserts, most human communication is storytelling, and we can find storytelling ability of all different grades and levels in our own immediate environment.

In my experience, it's true that most communication is storytelling. Think about any conversation. Usually there is some topic of discussion, typically something personal like, "A customer was incredibly rude to me today." After that topic sentence, a story follows--an anecdote of what happened, proving the assertion that a customer was indeed incredibly rude.

The story will usually have features that heighten the point being made, such as descriptions of the teller's exceptional efforts to be calm and reasonable, and to put the best possible construction on the customer's statements and actions. But no: it is revealed that the customer was indeed a jerk, and an injustice was perpetrated on the teller. With a final contemptuous insult, the Rude Customer leaves the store. The end.

Often, then, someone else will jump in on the topic of Rude People, and start narrating his own anecdote--how he, or someone he saw, was also a victim of gratuitous rudeness. In order to keep the conversation at least slightly interesting, this story will have to be different enough from the first one: either a greater level of rudeness, or a different type of rudeness.

Most people do not tell stories very well. For one thing, I think it's a sign of storytelling weakness to start with the them or moral of a story--like the aforementioned "a customer was rude to me today". The relegates your story to being a mere illustration of a point you've already made, and which the listener might well be prepared to take on credit, without having it proved in a story. This might even be a bit patronizing, unless the rudeness in question was really outside the bounds of normal experience--as though you were saying, "I expect you don't believe me, so I'll prove it to you."

In a story like this, the only surprise is usually in discovering the specific act or acts of rudeness mentioned at the top, which usually is not much of a surprise. A better storyteller always delivers a bigger surprise.

In storytelling, surprise is all. The storyteller's duty to the audience is to deliver surprises--the bigger, the better; the more numerous, the better.
How do you surprise people? You lead them to expect something--then give them something else.

This is always possible, for we must always use expectation to manage our lives. We are aware of patterns in life, and make use of this knowledge in order to get things done. We develop expectations, which usually work. The storyteller makes use of this tendency to deliver surprises.

In the rudeness anecdote, one way to help it along would be not to "telegraph" its intent by announcing at the beginning what your message is. The more skilled storyteller will simply start narrating the story--and will do so in a way that leads our expectations. The story might start with the entry of an elderly man who is handsome and well-dressed, making a favorable impression. Then he swears at the storyteller, snapping the image, surprising the storyteller at the time, and now the listeners later. The "message" of the story comes out not at the beginning, but at the climax: "people can be surprisingly and gratuitously rude!" or "I was the victim of unprovoked rudeness!"

That's a simple example. Notice how more talented storytellers are able to disguise where the story is headed, to deflect attention from certain things that turn out to be important. This is exactly the same way that magicians create their illusions--by directing attention away from where the surprise is being built.

I invite you to listen to yourself and others telling stories over the next day or so. What are the stories like? What is their message? How engaging and well-told are they? How might they be improved? What makes the better ones better?

For the would-be professional storyteller, this should be an ongoing task.

making it believable

Plotting is fiddly. I spent my (admittedly abbreviated) writing-time yesterday continuing to tinker with the creation and arrangement of events in the chapter I'm working on. It always strikes me as strange how difficult it can be to find a sequence of events that later will seem natural and inevitable.

This is how it struck me even when plotting stories for The Odyssey. How do you decide what happens in a story? There aren't really any rules; as a writer, a storyteller, you apparently have infinite choice. How about this? How about that? How do you choose?

The story must flow to my own satisfaction. I have to believe it before I can ask anyone else to believe it; and I'm a pretty skeptical person. The more you know of the world, and the more you know of people, the less likely it is you'll be ready to swallow something that doesn't seem realistic.

I find myself easily put off by implausibilities in a drama. I very much enjoyed the first season of 24, starring Kiefer Sutherland, but found myself smiling wryly at the seamless interoperability of all the different computer systems--how the antiterrorism team could speedily link into civilian data systems and whatnot and get the information they wanted. Anyone who's ever seen a computer being used knows that this is pure fantasy; you're lucky if things that have been designed to work together actually do. I would have been much more pulled in to the show if the high-tech, expensive information systems worked only very intermittently. I would have felt more that I was watching a real story unfold, and less like I was watching actors play with make-believe props.

Then there is the matter of character decisions. When these become too contrived or foolhardy, you have "idiot plot"--a story based on decisions that no thinking adult would actually do. These are the scenes in which the lone woman agrees to meet with the villain on a dark road at night and so on. I remember watching E.T. when it came out. The scene in which the little boy, wanting to catch a glimpse of the unknown creature, parks himself out in the yard at night on a chaise longue with a flashlight, was one I could not believe. It's too flipping scary--it's not how real nine-year-olds behave.

I recall too a hole in a movie I recently watched again, and which I regard as basically good: Tin Men, a show about aluminum-siding salesmen in Baltimore in 1959, starring Danny De Vito, Richard Dreyfuss, and Barbara Hershey. This time it hit me that Richard Dreyfuss, in the course of seducing Barbara Hershey, tells her that his wife has just died (he's never been married). Later, they move in together--but we never see her learning that his "widower" line was a lie. Even if she was indeed able to swallow this, we would have to see Dreyfuss talk his way out of it.

Then there's the integrity of the setting itself. I recall my mother's criticism of Melrose Place after she's seen an episode: "That's not how people in offices behave." Indeed not. The scenes could be believed only by those who had either never had a job, or were naive enough to think that people working in "glamor" jobs such as fashion photography or publishing never concern themselves with practical things. The sets may as well have been painted backdrops against which the audience could watch attractive people betray each other (the purpose of the show, as far as I know).

Movies, TV, and even novels are full of devices that clearly are unreal--cars that start too easily, unlocked doors, ventilation ducts you can crawl though. All these things erode the credibility of a story. They mark places, in my opinion, where the writer could not be bothered to imagine things properly. The writer reached for a cliche, slothfully thinking that it would be accepted because it had already been accepted so many times before.

I can't stand that. For me, a scene must ring true in every detail--in setting and in character. Cheating with these things for the "sake of the story" does not work. All you're doing is making your story bad. There may be reasons for doing so--time constraints, the network is ordering you to, or you just can't be bothered--but don't kid yourself that it doesn't matter to the quality of the product.

the gestating virgin

Yesterday I finally had time to take up cudgels again for writing my book. It was one of my least-favorite kinds of writing sessions: one in which I struggle to recollect the threads of what I'm working on. Eventually I realized that, after my break of several days, I just could not remember what my thoughts and intentions were with respect to my current chapter (30). Nothing for it but to go back and read the (highlighted portions of) my Word notes.

The notes document for chapter 30 now runs to 35 pages. When chapter notes get long like this, I become anxious. Admittedly, the first 13 pages of notes are mostly extracts from research texts. That still means over 20 pages of actual cogitation-and-creation notes.

Mind you, the overall quality of these notes is high (take my word for it). In my effort to understand what drives my characters, I must dig. And dig, and dig.

"Oh, pshaw!" you might say. "A character's motivation is just whatever you make it. Decide on one, and go! Don't talk in that quaint way about 'discovering' the motives of a character, as though he were a real person. You've said yourself that characters aren't real people."

Yes, true. I've been skeptical of this kind of talk from writers, which is finally a form of pathetic fallacy, I think. I remember reading a nonfiction work by the novelist John Fowles, in which he described working on The French Lieutenant's Woman. He said that when he was writing a scene for his character Charles, he had the strong feeling that Charles wanted to diverge from his path and go down to knock on the cottage door of the heroine. Fowles declared that it was a real, definite feeling of intent coming from the character--that was how he experienced it.

Yeah, right, I thought.

I was already a writer myself by then, and not had any such experience--at least, nothing so definite. Of course, I never had a very clear idea of what the hell I was doing in any case. But my suspicions about this Frankensteinian moment of the composite character suddenly rising from the laboratory bench are backed up by Robert McKee in his Story:

Research from memory, imagination, and fact is often followed by a phenomenon that authors love to describe in mystical terms: Characters suddenly spring to life and of their own free will make choices and take actions that create Turning Points that twist, build, and turn again until the writer can hardly type fast enough to keep up with the outpourings.

This "virgin birth" is a charming self-deception writers love to indulge in, but the sudden impression that the story is writing itself simply marks the moment when a writer's knowledge of the subject has reached the saturation point. The writer becomes the god of his little universe and is amazed by what seems to be spontaneous creation, but is in fact the reward for hard work.

To discover what drives a character, you need to know his world, for that is what he is responding to. It's an ecological task: to understand how the animal functions within its environment, for the two go together. The cheetah is an animal of the African savanna; it can't function in the Arctic or in the Arabian desert. It is what it is, and behaves as it behaves, because of the environment in which it exists.

Finding this level of authority for a remote historical period is, of course, difficult. But I find, as I keep at it, that insights do come. Gradually, gradually, my main characters start emerging from the fog of potentiality into the clear outline of specificness. As I learn--or decide--something definite about my world, my characters acquire something toward which they can have an attitude, and thus define themselves.

In fairness to myself, I've made a lot of progress in the last month in understanding more about my world. While the historian and the archaeologist have to refrain from making positive statements beyond what the evidence permits, and so leave their picture of the world frustratingly vague, the storyteller must commit. Nothing can be a maybe; the finished picture will be the result of countless definite choices.

My finished world will be in high-definition, and so will my characters. And look how long it took us to get high-definition TV.

more on novel openings

Yesterday I visited my mother for our weekly lunch--two days early, since she has a doctor's appointment on Thursday. As usual, we talked about books and writing, and looked at some novel openings.

A few themes are starting to emerge from these researches. Less-than-excellent openings tend to have flaws (in my opinion) that fall into certain categories. Of course, what constitutes a flaw might vary according to who is doing the reading. I have determined that my supreme value in fiction-writing (and narrative nonfiction-writing) is story: the flow of events which the work depicts or describes. I believe that all other aspects of writing--description, tone, characterization--are subordinate to story, and should be structured so as to help the story along.

Of course this is only a general rule; there is plenty of room for exceptions.)

Yesterday Mom and I agreed that we mainly liked the opening of Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence. But the opening sentence and paragraph themselves are actually rather bland and uninteresting:

Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen sat one morning in the window-bay of their father's house in Beldover, working and talking. Ursula was stitching a piece of brightly-coloured embroidery, and Gudrun was drawing upon a board which she held on her knee. They were mostly silent, talking as their thoughts strayed through their minds.

As I observed to Mom yesterday, this is written almost like a screenplay: a quick bit of scene-setting, which in this case if feels like the writer wants to get out of the way so he can dive into what interests him. The setting does not suggest any special tension or interest in the scene.

Contrast the opening of Kim by Rudyard Kipling:

He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam-Zammah on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher--the Wonder House, as the natives call the Lahore Museum. Who hold Zam-Zammah, that "fire-breathing dragon," hold the Punjab; for the great green-bronze piece is always first of the conqueror's loot.

This opener is, admittedly, chewy reading: too many foreign terms for my taste, all at once. (Zam-Zammah is apparently Persian, meaning something like "conqueror of all".) The prose itself is unrhythmic and reads a bit like a police or military report; the narrator's reference to the cannon as "her" suggests his military background. But right in the first sentence there is tension, since "he" (who will turn out to be Kim) is sitting astride the gun--an unusual posture--"in defiance of municipal orders". And Kim's "holding" of the gun implies that he "holds" the entire Punjab--he has made himself a conqueror. All in the first two sentences.

By comparison, two sisters sitting "working and talking" is flaccid. But Lawrence moves quickly on to a dialogue between the sisters, about their attitudes to marriage, which shows them to have conflicting views. Gudrun can't believe that Ursula is not interested in marriage, and presses her to admit that she is, at heart. It's an interesting conflict that characterizes the two girls distinctly right away. This admittedly gentle conflict has the feeling of story: it's action under tension that feels like it's going somewhere.

Of yesterday's crop, though, I would probably award the palm to A Buyer's Market, book 2 in Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time series:

The last time I saw any examples of Mr. Deacon's work was at a sale, held obscurely in the neighbourhood of Euston Road, many years after his death. The canvases were none of them familiar, but they recalled especially, with all kind of other things, dinner at the Walpole-Wilsons', reviving with a jerk that phase of early life. They made me think of long-forgotten conflicts and compromises between the imagination and the will, reason and feeling, power and sensuality; together with many more specifically personal sensations, experienced in the past, of pleasure and of pain. Outside, the spring weather was cool and sunny: Mr. Deacon's favourite season of the year. Within doors, propped against three sides of a washstand, the oil-paintings seemed, for some reason, appropriate to those surroundings, dusty, though not displeasing; even suggesting, in their way, the kind of home Mr. Deacon favoured for himself and his belongings: the sitting-room over the shop, for example, informal, not too permanent, more than a trifle decayed. His haunts, I remembered, had bordered on these northern confines of London.

The narrator strolls into his story; no lurid shockers, no desperate attention-grabbers here. The narrator is treating us as adults, capable of mature perception and reflection, able to appreciate the subtleties of memory and association, and the way objects and sensations can awaken powerful feelings from the past. The intelligence and perceptiveness of the narrator inclines us to extend him credit, and trust that his discussion of the unknown artist Mr. Deacon is leading somewhere significant. If you have something important to say, you don't need to rush.

There's much more to be said about these things--but I have to get on with my day!

bones, muscles, skin: the anatomy of story

Yesterday I was talking about the idea of using the technique of writing a "story treatment"--a document once routinely used in screenwriting--for novels. I mused about perhaps drafting a sample section of story treatment for an existing novel, and I haven't forgotten that; I'd like to try it.

I'm thinking now of the preceding stage: the "step-outline", in which you develop the bare bones of the story, perhaps on index-cards. I had already used index-cards as a way of helping myself plot stories for many years by 1990, when I first came upon a set of notes of one of Robert McKee's storytelling workshops. (A workshop student, typing furiously on a laptop, had taken excellent notes, a copy of which had been obtained by a CBC executive who had also attended the workshop. I was a struggling writer with two mortgages and couldn't afford the workshop. She took pity on me and let me have a copy of the bootlegged notes--I was after all trying to write a series for them. And Robert, if you're reading this, don't worry: I have since bought a hardcover copy of your book, and was delighted to do so!) They were a revelation. How eagerly I read through the photocopied pages of typed notes.

McKee's method changed my approach to using index-cards, and I immediately put his ideas to work in drafting a novel I had been working on called Truth of the Python, about a Vancouver hypnotherapist who inadvertently regresses a bed-wetting client to a past life--as the Greek philosopher Pythagoras. Mckee's methodology made this a much more purposeful exercise: I isolated my main plot and subplots, and gave each an act structure.

I still have those index-cards (or most of them)--I just pulled them from a file in my cabinet. I see I developed three separate stacks. One is a "master stack" of 4 x 6" cards that contain only the act turning-points of the plot and each subplot, of which I had five. The plots are labeled A through F, and each act has a number--so A1, A2, B1, B2, etc.

Then there is a stack of 3 x 5" index cards containing the individual scenes (this stack appears to be incomplete, alas), filling in the steps between the major turning-points on the 4 x 6 cards.

Finally, I have another, separate stack of 3 x 5 cards devoted to "thematic" developments in the story. These cards represent the idea-content or the significance of the story developments to my protagonist, Philip Dozier. I can't quite tell now exactly how I used these "theme" cards. Each one contains some assertions written longhand in pencil, along with a page-reference at the bottom-left corner (I think these are references to my binder of notes), and a sequential number in red pencil in the bottom-right corner. There are 37 of these cards.

For example, card 5 contains the story question for the book as a whole--the A-line question, which I phrased as "Will Philip find meaning in his life?" The card goes on to discuss the implications of the "inciting incident", or the scene that kicks off the story. (In this scene, Philip regresses his client, Greg Brodie, to a distant past life as Pythagoras, but also discovers that he, Philip, apparently had a role in that remote time as well, and the whole session is crowned with the appearance, through Greg, of an apparently all-knowing "discarnate" entity that calls itself Khepra.) Card 6 makes the comment, "Phil thinks he wants 'meaning', but in truth he seeks life: the sustenance of the heart."

Weird? Perhaps. My aim was to take my ethereal, spiritual idea, and turn it into a dramatic story, with a proper act-structure and cliff-hanging turning-points. It pretty much worked, and indeed I was able to get representation for this book at A P Watt, a prestigious London agency. The "index-card" approach had stood me in good stead.

I developed the method further with my next effort: a novel called Observer that I started writing in 1994. This was a space-age murder mystery, also set in Vancouver, that had my protagonist, a financially independent loner named Connell Smith, investigating the killing of a local software entrepreneur. In this work I prepared the drafting by writing the whole story on index-cards first, winding up with a stack of 90 4 x 6 cards, which I have in front of me now.

I recall crafting and recrafting this stack, moving between it and my notes binder. As I developed the story, I would draft cards, changing them, throwing them out, inserting new ones as I went. As the stack developed, I would periodically sit down with it and go through the stack sequentially, visualizing the story unfolding. As I turned each card, I would feel a sense of "yes!" and move on to the next card. As soon as I hit a problem, a feeling that what I was reading did not really flow, or push the action to a new level, I would get to work on identifying the problem and solving it. Rejig some cards, add one or two, and start again.

While plotting this story, because it was a mystery, I also developed another set of cards, yellow 3 x 5 ones, on which I recorded the protagonist's evolving theory of the murder. This way I, the author, who knew who did it and why, could keep track of the working theory in the mind of the protagonist and of the reader. Each new story event would cause that evolving theory to change.

Card 1 (theory 1), for example, is "sabotage/revenge by a disgruntled employee". (The victim, Rick Matthews, was found shot to death in his office in Richmond, B.C.) Card 2 is "sabotage by competitors". Card 3 is "sabotage by vencaps/investors in order to grab more of Mattrix (Rick's company) cheaply". And so on, until the climax of the story, when the full truth comes out. I found this method very helpful, for I could always, when working on any given part of the book, check to see what the current theory of the killing was. (Plus, of course, I had to come up with all these different theories of the murder--whew!)

I divided the story into chapters, and gave each chapter its own header-card, with the chapter number, as well as a word signifying its key event, and a phrase expressing the significance of the event. For example, the header-card for chapter 1 has the word "murder", and the phrase, "the trauma of loss"--the significance of the event for my hero, who was heavily invested in the victim's company. Chapter 2 is labeled "conspiracy" and "Connell decides to sleuth the crime for himself".

My story, as always, was weird--but it did flow. I do believe in and recommend the method.

Sometime over the past day, maybe in the dead of night again (although I did not spend much time awake last night), I thought of the story-development documents in terms of the parts of the body. The step-outline is the skeleton. The treatment is the organs and muscles. The actual draft is the skin and hair.

Note that in order to live, we need all of those things. And just because the skin and hair is all you see as an end-user, it doesn't mean that you can do without the other, structural elements. The skin and hair, of course, lie over them.

So, yes, maybe a story treatment for my next novel.

a story treatment for novels?

Yesterday I spent more time working at making explicit the ideas in chapter 30 of my work. As I mentioned two days ago, I see this as the basic activity of writing: turning implicit or latent knowledge and experience into explicit, named concepts: words.

In my case, this means a lot of writing before I get to my "writing"--actually drafting the chapter. My hope is that all this prewriting forms a rich compost from which the garden of the eventual prose can grow.

Robert McKee, in his screenwriting textbook Story, teaches an approach to writing in which you start with a step-outline, which is the bare outline of the plot. I used to do this on index cards; now I try to achieve it on the PC (the index cards may still be the better method). McKee's description:

If, hypothetically and optimistically, a screenplay can be written from first idea to last draft in six months, these writers typically spend the first four of those six months writing on stacks of three-by-five cards: a stack for each act--three, four, perhaps more.

There: four out of six months of writing time should be devoted to the step-outline, fully two-thirds of the storytelling effort. In my opinion, it should probably be the same in fiction-writing. One difficulty is that a novel, which is longer than a screenplay, requires a correspondingly longer period on the step-outline phase, and it is a test of the writer's commitment and nerve to see whether he or she can sit facing only a stack of index cards for a year or so. I did with this book--longer than a year, more like two--and I still think I moved on hastily, afraid of spending any more time outlining. But you pay later for any haste at this stage: first of all in a more difficult writing task, and finally in a weaker end-product--a stiff penalty for wanting to force the pace.

The next phase in McKee's method is to draft the story treatment: a prose version of the step-outline in which each scene is described. The term treatment is used in filmmaking to describe a variety of documents that range from a story synopsis to a narrative 30 or 40 pages long. As far as I know, they're not often written anymore except as a sales document to help pitch a movie idea. They're not used as writing tools by the writers themselves.

But McKee sees a story treatment as a key step in the writing process, whether or not the treatment is ever seen by anyone but the writer. At the treatment stage the writer works out logistical and motivational problems with the story. You discover things that don't work the way you'd thought. More particularly, I've found that in expanding on a terse line for a scene there are often difficult problems that I was more or less avoiding, semiconsciously.

One of the most important purposes of the treatment is to work out the subtext of each scene: what each character's true feelings and motives are. These are made explicit in the treatment. And, very importantly, the treatment contains no dialogue. It's tempting for any writer, but especially a screenwriter, to move on to the fun part of writing dialogue, but until the scene-work is complete you do not know your characters or their motives well enough to write dialogue. Only when the treatment has been fully worked out is the writer in a position to write a draft of the screenplay.

What I'm wondering is whether there's a place for story treatments in fiction-writing. I'm not sure, because a novel is not so deliberately spare and dialogue-intensive as a screenplay. And yet the imortant points still apply: knowing your characters and the subtext of each scene. A treatment for a novel would be a strange document, and long. It would be a "talking about" the story, again with no dialogue, and with some provision for filling in the sections of "telling", in which the writer talks about things instead of showing them directly with action. It would make, in effect, a particularly weird first draft.

But it may very well be worth it: a kind of technical first draft, not unlike a technical dress rehearsal for a stage production, in which the technical aspects of the show are worked out and finalized. Since any decent work of writing goes through multiple drafts anyway, it might be just the thing.

Maybe I'll try drafting a sample piece of treatment for an exising novel, to see what this would look like.

art imitates life

I'm reading--indeed, am close to finishing--Aristotle's Poetics. The text runs only 46 pages, plus notes. In that brief space he says a great deal.

The text, or the portion of it that has survived, is devoted mainly to tragic drama, which Aristotle regarded as the highest form of poetry yet devised. But despite the fact that his book is about poetry performed as live musical theater--which was how it was staged in ancient Greece--Aristotle's work is still highly relevant to the storyteller of today. This is because, among all the aspects of tragedy, the one he regarded as most important, and making the largest contribution to the power of a work, was the choice and arrangement of the events depicted: in other words, plotting.

As far as Aristotle was concerned, the tragic poet's number-one concern was storytelling. And while the Poetics was not intended as a handbook for writers, but rather as an analysis of an art form to help in understanding and assessing the quality of specific works, nonetheless it is of great potential benefit to crafters of story. Indeed, Aristotle's Poetics is, I see now, the main source of ideas for Robert McKee's teachings on storytelling. McKee's work is largely a matter of explaining, expanding, illustrating, and adapting Aristotle's ideas to the modern storytelling medium of filmmaking.

The ideas are excellent, and still have that quality of freshness and immediacy that all great and original thinking has, regardless of the passage of time (Aristotle died in 322 BC).

Aristotle starts off by saying that tragic poetry, like all other poetry (and indeed all other types of art), is an imitation--that is, an imitation of things in life. Malcolm chose the word imitation to translate the Greek mimesis, rather than the usual representation, because he feels that this is closer to the sense intended by Aristotle. Whereas a representation of something may not look like the thing represented--a dot on a map might represent a city, for example--an imitation is something intended to resemble the thing imitated. The aesthetic experience is the recognition of the thing imitated in the artist's imitation of it: the better the imitation or depiction, the greater the pleasure experienced by the viewer or audience.

I sense that this distinction is important. I think of how "modern" art arose in the 19th century, leading on to nonfigurative art by the turn of the 20th, when, in painting, not only imitation but also representation went out the window. With Abstract Expressionism, the notion that a painter was trying to depict some external visual object was abandoned; the aim was to "express" something within--to project outward the contents of the painter's psyche, perhaps the collective unconscious.

I believe that in fiction-writing and drama, the turn away from story was part of this same trend toward nonfigurative art. Artists and writers wanted to free themselves from the shackles of tradition and do things that were utterly new.

The art may have been unshackled and new, but how effective was it? Through study I have learned how to appreciate and enjoy some nonfigurative art. Once you've learned some of the underlying ideas, there is a certain mind-expanding pleasure in regarding the cubist works of Picasso, for instance. But I can't say that a cubist work like Picasso's "Still Life with Carafe and Candlestick" (1909) has ever struck me with the immediate, visceral sense of power and enjoyment that the painters of the animals on the cave-walls at Lascaux and Altamira were able to generate across a gulf of 30,000 years. And I feel sure that if Picasso's work survives 30,000 years, any proper enjoyment of it will require a guidebook--so we'd better hope one of those survives along with it.

Aristotle is saying that art imitates life, and that in viewing or appreciating such art, we experience the pleasure of recognition, which is at bottom the pleasure of learning. This does not mean that art is or should be didactic, but that in recognizing our world in the forms created by an artist, we necessarily learn about it. There's no need for art to preach; it's enough for it to exist.

So then: the function of art is to imitate life, and the writer's primary tool for such imitation is the sequence of the events of life: story. The difference between a good, well-told story and a feeble, poorly told one is the difference between a successful work of art and a failed one.

another one bites the dust

Yesterday, during my afternoon reading period, I started by reading the novel I had on the go (I always start my reading period with the novel if I'm reading one--which I'm usually not), in this case, The Jewel in the Crown by Paul Scott. I made in to page 124, then thought, "Nah, I think I'm done with this."

What made me decide to pack it in?

In a word: story. It's not that the story is bad--it's very good. But Scott prosecutes it much too slowly for my taste (and I can tolerate a very slow-moving story). My theory is that Scott, writing in the 1960s, was a victim of the 20th-century reaction against storytelling. With such literary masters as E. M. Forster and James Joyce inveighing against story and the "go-ahead plot", story became uncool--at best a distasteful chore for a serious novelist. Story was for lowbrow, commercial works of fiction.

Lawrence Durrell in his Alexandria Quartet certainly deviated from a straightforward narrative, telling his "story" by means of a kind of collage of images and scenes, which no doubt were thought to be more aesthetic than a lead-footed, sequential reportage of events. I myself, as a beginning writer, inspired by these writers, briefly experimented with a nonsequential approach to narrative in my second "serious" short story (the title of which I can't even remember). Then, inspired by Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, I sought to push the envelope of plotting by creating a story that was complex and farcical.

Those efforts eventually died a natural death, both for me and for other 20th-century rebels against story. When it comes down to it, any movement or idea that's based mainly on reaction or rebellion is necessarily short-lived, lacking any positive underlying purpose of its own. There's something of the juvenile in it, indulging in the luxury of criticizing those who have come before, without offering anything concretely better. One seeks to be avant-garde, different from one's teachers and predecessors. In my view, it amounts to a basic and relatively immature way of coping with what Harold Bloom calls "the anxiety of influence"--the fretful desire of the new writer to get out of the shade of his teachers.

So: Paul Scott. Part One, "Miss Crane", was pretty good from a story perspective--not bad, anyway, since he is narrating the life of an English spinster missionary in India, with tremendously sympathetic insight into her inner world as well as knowledge of the exotic world of India under the British Raj; plus he narrates the exciting event of riots in Mayapore in 1942, and what happens to Miss Crane when she is swept up in this social convulsion. The account is slow (taking us to page 85) but effective.

Part Two, "The MacGregor House", is more a collage of pieces written from the first-person point of view of at least three different individuals. Forty pages in, it has not told much story (we learn that Miss Crane caught pneumonia after her ordeal in the riots, and later burned herself in despair), but rather has given a great deal of backstory about the Indian character Lady Chatterjee and exposition about the stately MacGregor House where she lives. Yesterday, when I found myself reading a passage describing every fixture in the bathroom of the MacGregor House, I thought, "All right, enough already."

The intent, no doubt, is to steep the mind of the reader in the essence of what it's like to be there--to feel and smell the place. But I couldn't help thinking about Stephen King's advice to fiction writers: set a scene by giving three telling descriptive details--three, and only three. Why are we dwelling on this bathroom? Maybe something important is going to happen here, eventually, but do we really need a full page of description of it now?

Scott's ability to describe and evoke his world is powerful. In the midst of that bathroom description on page 119 is this image:

At the opposite end of the bathroom--fifteen paces on bare feet across lukewarm mosaic that is slightly uneven and impresses the soles with the not unpleasant sensation of walking over the atrophied honeycomb of some long forgotten species of giant bee--there is an old-fashioned marble-topped washstand...

The striking, far-fetched, and rhapsodic metaphor of the honeycomb might not be out of place in, say, Gravity's Rainbow, but in my opinion would be much more powerful as the passing thought of a character, say, Daphne Manners, the girl who stays at the house and uses the bathroom. It should be a thought flickering through her mind while she is on her way to doing something--preparing to go out on a date with the District Superintendent of Police Ronald Merrick, say. But Scott takes us on a long museum-tour through the house, with no story in process, which eventually strained my patience to the breaking point.

So there it is. Paul closes up another novel unfinished--a novel he has finished before, and admired before. It's not that I no longer admire it--it's just that, now, I can't seem to finish it.

bold ideas

Back to my regular morning notes today, after a detour yesterday into some administrative things and preparing some notes for a possible copywriting assignment. Today back to the oppressive stack of texts bearing down on me.

This morning I started keying notes from the two-volume abridged version of Arnold J. Toynbee's A Study of History that I received last week. Apparently an American historian, D. C. Somervell, passionate about Toynbee's monumental work, took it upon himself, for his own interest and amusement, to create a compressed version of it (a man after my own heart!). He wrote to Toynbee telling him about his work, and it turned into a publication project in its own right, coming out in 1947. I have the two-volume mass-market paperback edition, used, which came in its original slip-case. My copies were printed in 1971, and so I have the extra pleasure of reading a book from that period, that looks and feels like the paperbacks I handled when I first started reading seriously for myself.

I'm drawn to large, comprehensive systems of thought, so Toynbee is just the ticket with his theory of how civilizations come and go. I've only just started reading volume 1, but already I'm enjoying Toynbee's bold way of comparing the unfolding of history in different civilizations around the world (and am of course impressed with the erudition that allows him to make these comparisons--he seems to know all aspects of world history from antiquity on). There is something exciting about reading new, bold ideas, well thought out. Most books do not contain these. Most writers are not in a position to think of them, or to support them properly if they do think of them. Most nonfiction books present more or less "modest proposals" in a reasonable, conservative way. They're fine and valuable--but they're not the stuff of real intellectual excitement.

I admire a writer and thinker who takes the bull by the horns. A tough, thorny, intractable problem? That's okay--they jump in and go for it.

On a smaller scale I similarly enjoyed Morphology of the Folktale by the Russian scholar Vladimir Propp, which I recently finished reading. Writing in 1928, Propp was confronting the, to him, unsatisfactory state of knowledge of the fairy tale (for his work was really about fairy tales, not folktales). Fairy tales and folktales had been intensively collected and studied for close to 100 years when he took up the task, but there was as yet no generally agreed system of classifying them or analyzing their features. So he took the bull by the horns and came up with a structural analysis of the Russian fairy tale.

He made some amazing discoveries. One was that when a fairy tale is broken down into a series of what he called functions, or character actions, there is a fundamental unity of structure to all Russian fairy tales (and therefore, possibly, to all other kinds of fairy tale and stories in general). Despite a great seeming variety, the fairy tales present the same functions in the same order. In 1928 Propp had discovered a regularity to story structure that foreshadowed the idea of the "monomyth" presented by Joseph Campbell 20 years later in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. It behooves storytellers to be aware of these things.

Propp did what amounts to a genre analysis of the fairy tale--of the type recommended by Robert McKee for screenwriters (and storytellers generally). A genre is a structurally stable form that has been proven to work. Presumably it works because of some deep affinity with human experience and the human mind--some conformity with the way reality is. Propp says that a fairy tale commences with one of two possible situations: lack or villainy. Either someone does something hurtful or unjust to someone, or the hero becomes aware of a deficiency in his life, and sets out to rectify it.

So yes: bold ideas, bold thinking--keep 'em coming.

humanizing the character

After yesterday's post examining my quickie rewrite of scene 1 of The Da Vinci Code, I was talking with my mother, who'd read the post, and she was expressing how the character of Robert Langdon needs to be developed more, made to seem more real. To her he doesn't feel like an academic who is passionate about his subject--as presumably he must be in order to have written several books on it, and to have become famously associated with it.

When he is awakened by the ringing phone, she thought, he might even be thinking or have been dreaming about some problem or subject related to his work. Sure, I thought--why not? As a student of symbolism, he might very well get an idea or inspiration from a dream (I thought about the famous story of how the 19th-century German chemist Kekule solved the problem of the structure of benzene by dreaming of a ring of dancing elves, or some such). If Langdon were to awake excited by an idea arising from a dream, he might be eagerly groping for his bedside notepad to scribble it down before he forgets it.

Notice what this would do for his characterization. First, it would show him to be passionate about his field--he's doing it even in his sleep. Second, the problem or image itself could eventually plug in to the mystery of the main plot. A nagging puzzle that he brings into the story could relate to the story puzzle, and get its kickoff here, right at the top. Third, the fact that he might jot down a dream-image before answering a ringing phone at night tells us something powerful about his values: it's a choice he makes, and the choices that characters make are exactly what tell us about their nature--what is interesting about them. This guy is a symbology nerd who puts symbolism ahead of ringing phones.

So that's a good idea. Mom went on to imagine some other possible details, such as whether Langdon might not have his own bathrobe from home instead of using the hotel's silk one. That might be her own preference if she were in the hotel, and giving the character similar preferences helps to humanize him and make him more self-assertive on his environment: he's not just a passive user of stuff provided by others, he brings his own choices along with him. A comfy old bathrobe would be a piece of home you could take with you, and the prof might lounge in it while working at his laptop in the hotel room. Such a Langdon is starting to feel more real to me.

These ideas are things to help with the characterization of Robert Langdon--crucial if he is to be an interesting and believable character. But characterization, defined as the details by which a character manifests him- or herself, is not the highest or first job of character design. What the main character should really have are contradictions in his nature that create conflicts for him. I haven't read the actual novel, but the level of writing suggests to me that Brown does not design his characters at that level of depth. A paradoxical Robert Langdon might be, for instance, an expert student of religious symbolism who was also a passionate atheist. Such a person makes us wonder what makes him tick; it suggests complexity and personal history. He might find himself getting, almost against his will, into heated arguments with clerics and believers, attacking their naive faith even as he knows more about it than they do.

That's just an off-the-cuff example. A well-designed story brings out the contradictions in a character, and leads him to tough choices that put his values to the test. A writer can't even begin the task without a lot of self-knowledge. You need to know what your own contradictions are to be able to get inside someone else and feel theirs.

So my own rewrite was more of a technical exercise; I did not set out to rewrite the book or recreate the character, only to render scene 1 in a way that did not violate my sense of the characters' personhood, if I can put it that way. At the very least I need to be able to sense that I'm reading about people, and not just looking at words printed on a page. The task of deep character means going up the levels of story, getting into it at the level of theme, and that means taking on more and more "story responsibility"--assuming the burden of knowing what the story is ultimately about, why it is worth telling, and how these particular characters are the best for telling it. It's a heavy burden.

Still, it might be tempting to try a rewrite based on that more fully characterized Langdon. On the other hand, aren't I supposed to be doing some writing of my own at some point?

Da Vinci rewrite: postmortem

In the late 70s or early 80s the comedian and talk-show host Dick Cavett, in his autobiography, said that in his comedy career he always found it easy to write material for other comedians but hard to write material for himself. He could write a joke on any topic or theme, and put it in the style of the comedian concerned by getting into the persona of that comedian and letting the joke come out in that person's voice. Cavett gave off-the-cuff examples, "writing" jokes for Jack Benny and Bob Hope, maybe a couple of others. As a writer for Jack Parr on The Tonight Show, he could crack off his week's work in a couple of hours in one day. But when it came to writing material for himself, he agonized. What was his persona?

(I remember one of Cavett's own jokes: "When I was in college I got in some blind dates with some very unattractive girls. On this one date--you've heard of a face that could stop a clock? My date had stopped sundials.")

Well, I've had a faintly similar experience with my little rewrite job on scene 1 of The Da Vinci Code. When it's not your project it's easy to breeze through. One reason, I think, is that the decision to do the project in the first place has already been made; someone has assumed liability for the validity and value of the project. Someone has already answered the question, to his own satisfaction, "why this?" So the material is a given. The rewriter can relax and just play with what's already there.

So for me the rewrite was pure fun, not something I slaved over. I did my "thinking-through" the revision, such as it was, here in my blog, then just sat down and dashed something off yesterday.

By bedtime I had gone over it a couple of times and tweaked it a bit--the way I do with my own material, changing and deleting bits on each read-through. Can't resist. Maybe it would be useful to mention these tweaks, to give an idea of my thinking.

I remember only two (I think that's all there were). The first was down in the paragraph where I had Langdon saying "What's this about? Am I under arrest?" I deleted the first question and just had him ask the second--the one that counts.

The second tweak was in the bottom paragraph, where I had Langdon wonder about his family back in Cambridge, Massachusetts. That bugged me even as I was writing it--the inclusion of "Massachusetts", a purely expository addition, to let the reader know we're talking about the U.S. and not the U.K. It seemed pretty clear that Langdon was an American in any case, although of course he could, theoretically, be teaching at Cambridge in Britain (assuming he wants a pay cut!). But soon he will be talking with a cop, and it would quickly come out that he's a Harvard prof. So I cut "Massachusetts".

Looking over it this morning, the next thing that's bothering me is the way I introduce the character's name. I have nothing against--and everything for--simply giving the name early, as Brown does himself by making Langdon's name the first two words of chapter 1. But in this case I have the concierge addressing him by name in paragraph 5 (which I believe is motivated), so strictly speaking giving his name in paragraph 1 is not necessary: we're getting it twice on the same page. If I were to work it further, I would cut his name from paragraph 1 (using good old he), let his last name come out when the concierge calls, and let his first name be revealed in the interview with the cop. This way, exposition comes in a natural way, from the flow of motivated action--always preferable, even for a seemingly small and obvious thing like getting the name of your character to the reader. Don't get me wrong: I dislike "cute" efforts to conceal the character's name and bring it out in the action; but here I feel that its occurrence is soon enough and natural enough to make it work. Also, by holding back his name, it makes Langdon's sense of disorientation more immediate--maybe he doesn't remember his name at the moment. We're not just watching him, we're experiencing along with him.

Oh--I found another tweak I did. I broke out the sentence "Five sharp raps sounded on his door" into its own paragraph. It's more shocking that way--gives it the prominence it deserves.

Found another: In paragraph 19, "Hold on!" etc., I changed the word said to added for his line "Gotta put some clothes on." This to me gave a little more quality of afterthought to this line, as well as suggesting a quieter, sotto voce quality. It also provided a bit of variety from the workhorse said (although, again, I have nothing against said and usually dislike efforts at "elegant variation" in using other verbs for this one).

Looking over the rewrite now, I see the usual wordiness of a first(ish) draft, and would prune out more if I went through it again. I'm not totally happy with the exchange between Langdon and the concierge--there are a couple of nonsequitur-ish aspects that arose as a result of deleting and rejigging while I was drafting the material. They are subtle, not noticeable to others, perhaps. But part of the goal is to make it so that events and information are happening in a motivated, connected way, so that the right information is being delivered at the right time. Each character is responding to the situation as it has just unfolded to that moment. An example: I moved around Langdon's checking of the time, finally settling on putting it after the concierge's telling him that a policeman wants to speak with him. Notice how this feels natural? "A cop wants to talk with me--what the hell time is it?" The weirdness of the hour is an index of how serious the situation is. It works for me, anyway.

There: some real inner workings of the writer's mind in the act of writing. Speaking for myself, this is fun!

Da Vinci scene 1, take 2

After my critique of the opening scene of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code over the past couple of posts, I have decided to stump up some prose of my own as an alternative. I've just sketched in a rewrite of the first part of the scene, using the principles that I've mentioned in the previous posts.

Curious?

If you want to refresh your mind as to how the real book opens, check this post first.

Here's what I came up with:

A telephone was ringing--tinny, strange. Robert Langdon, dragged from a deep sleep, felt a spike of alarm in the cavelike darkness.

Where the hell am I?

The room was hot and still; he smelled stale cigarette-smoke. Paris. Yes: Hotel Ritz. Relieved to remember where he was, but not liking the dark, he fumbled for the bedside lamp and switched it on, snatching up the telephone handset as he sank back into the massive bed.

"Hello?" he croaked.

"Mr. Langdon? I'm very sorry to disturb you." It was the concierge, the short guy with dyed hair. His English was excellent. "There is a policeman here who wants to speak with you."

"What?" said Langdon. He glanced at the bedside clock: 12:32 A.M.

"I told him to wait until tomorrow, but he says it is urgent."

"What?"

"I don't know what it's about," said the concierge. "He wouldn’t say."

As though searching for an answer, Langdon looked dumbly around the pretentious opulence of his Louis XVI room: its heavy drapes, its frescoed walls.

Five sharp raps sounded on his door.

Langdon jerked involuntarily, an instinct to run away. He remembered stories of how the Gestapo would always show up in the middle of the night. He could see why. His heart thumped, his mind was blank.

"Am I under arrest?" he said.

"Oh no Mr. Langdon," said the concierge, "I don’t think so."

You don't think so? thought Langdon.

"It's very rude of them to disturb a guest at this hour," said the concierge. "We'll be filing a complaint."

Great, thought Langdon, you can keep me posted on that in my jail cell.

There were three more raps at the door.

"Hold on!" said Langdon, now feeling anger. To no one in particular he added, "Gotta put some clothes on." Then, sarcastically, into the phone: "Thanks for calling."

He hung up and swung his legs out of bed. The four-poster, too big for the room, sagged and creaked so much that Louis XVI had probably slept in it himself. No doubt his hosts, the American University in Paris, thought they were treating him well. A surge of adrenaline was making him tremble. Wanting to stop that before he opened the door, he took his time pulling on some underpants and putting on the hotel's monogrammed jacquard bathrobe.

Breathe deeply. Think. What have I done or seen in Paris that could possibly be of interest to the police?

Then another, much worse thought came: what if this was about his family back in Cambridge? Had his son crashed that goddamn motorcycle? Langdon strode to the door, no longer caring whether he trembled or not.

I think that instead of going to a flashback of Langdon's lecture, I would let backstory emerge in his interview with the cop. That seems a natural place for us to find out Langdon's job and what he's doing in Paris, and what he was up to today. Since the reader shares some of the same curiosity as the cop, the writer can use that to answer questions in the reader's mind.

It's not perfect--but I think it's better.

Da Vinci, scene 1

Let's dig deeper into chapter 1, scene 1, of Dan Brown's mighty bestseller, The Da Vinci Code (I picked up Mom's discarded copy at her house yesterday).

In my last post I looked at the first sentence:

Robert Langdon awoke slowly.

Now let's read on from there:

A telephone was ringing in the darkness--a tinny, unfamiliar ring. He fumbled for the bedside lamp and turned it on. Squinting at his surroundings he saw a plush Renaissance bedroom with Louis XVI furniture, hand-frescoed walls, and a colossal mahogany four-poster bed.

Where the hell am I?

The jacquard bathrobe hanging on his bedpost bore the monogram: HOTEL RITZ PARIS.

Slowly, the fog began to lift.

Langdon picked up the receiver. "Hello?"

"Monsieur Langdon?" a man's voice said. "I hope I have not awoken you?"

Dazed, Langdon looked at the bedside clock. It was 12:32 A.M. He had been asleep only an hour, but he felt like the dead.

"This is the concierge, monsieur. I apologize for this intrusion, but you have a visitor. He insists it is urgent."

Langdon still felt fuzzy. A visitor? His eyes focused now on a crumpled flyer on his bedside table.

THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY OF PARIS
proudly presents
an evening with Robert Langdon
Professor of Religious Symbology,
Harvard University

Langdon groaned. Tonight's lecture--a slide show about pagan symbolism hidden in the stones of Chartres Cathedral--had probably ruffled some conservative feathers in the audience. Most likely, some religious scholar had trailed him home to pick a fight.

"I'm sorry," Langdon said, "but I'm very tired and--"

"Mais, monsieur," the concierge pressed, lowering his voice to an urgent whisper. "Your guest is an important man."

Langdon had little doubt. His books on religious paintings and cult symbology had made him a reluctant celebrity in the art world, and last year Langdon's visibility had increased a hundredfold after his involvement in a widely publicized incident at the Vatican. Since then, the stream of self-important historians and art buffs arriving at his door had seemed never-ending.

"If you would be so kind," Langdon said, doing his best to remain polite, "could you take the man's name and number, and tell him I'll try to call him before I leave Paris on Tuesday? Thank you." He hung up before the concierge could protest.

That takes us to the end of the first scene, just before Langdon starts reminiscing about the past year and the past day. After the flashback scene, we return to Langdon's hotel room, and a pounding on his door by what turns out to be a police officer, Lieutenant Jerome Collet of the Direction Centrale Police Judiciaire.

Not having read the book, I can only assess the scene on its own content. The story function of the scene is to rouse the protagonist from his everyday life by having a new problem impinge on him. In that sense, it's exactly the right place to start: right as the story launches. The scene conflict is between the concierge, who is trying to prepare Langdon for the arrival of the cop, and Langdon, who doesn't want to be disturbed.

That conflict idea, while okay, feels a bit underpowered, considering who the players are in the scene. Since the police are here as part of what appears to be an investigation (a man linked to Langdon has apparently committed suicide), I expect they have the legal power to question Langdon if they want to--that is, they don't need his permission. In any case, scene 3 starts with the cop pounding on Langdon's door, so his effort to put off the concierge looks and is ineffectual.

The concierge's behavior and dialogue are, to me, not very plausible. His opening remark that he hopes he has not awoken Langdon seems weak and insincere. He's waking Langdon because the cops are making him wake Langdon--it's not his fault, it's theirs, and if I were the concierge I would make sure Langdon understood that up front. Instead we have a concierge who is strangely mysterious about who is visiting. He seems overawed by the policeman and refers to him cryptically, in an urgent whisper, as "an important man." Huh?

In my opinion, it appears that the backstory to this scene was not worked out. The writer did not think through the motivations, backgrounds, and actions of the characters involved. If I were writing the scene, I might start by imagining my concierge. He is probably on the same floor as Langdon, attending to the guests on that floor, he works at a posh hotel, and is very probably a snob, used to seeing famous people come and go, and helping them with various personal matters. He's probably territorial about protecting the privacy of his guests, and would resent a cop coming up and using the law to override his authority here. To him the cop is not an "important man"--his guests are important men: Bill Gates, Vladimir Putin, Justin Timberlake. This is just some cop throwing his weight around. The people tipping him--and tipping big--don't want to be bugged, least of all at 12:32 a.m. His job is to get rid of pesky, officious plebs like the cop.

Therefore, in my backstory, I imagine that the concierge has already fought the first battle with the cop--and lost. He would certainly make it plain to Langdon that any inconvenience and annoyance are 100% the fault of the cop, that he did his best to prevent this rude intrusion. He might not do this in a crude, obvious way, but that would be his attitude, and it would color his dialogue. If the concierge has no further role in the story, that will probably be enough for him: he will have enough color and attitude for a good minor character.

Langdon himself, as the protagonist, needs lots of attitude as well. He shouldn't merely be a generic professor who's peevish about some of the effects of becoming famous. He should have passions, issues, problems--things on his mind while his career carries on. If he's being woken up, why not use the opportunity to learn more about him? What if he were waking from a dream about his wife, who has recently divorced him? How about waking to the memory that he's just been diagnosed with heart disease? Something to start suggesting a person and not just a name and a job.

For the purposes of this scene, I would want to figure out how Langdon feels about being in France--does he come here a lot? Can he speak French? Does he travel well, or is it a chore--does he miss his home? If he doesn't speak French, does he notice the attitude of the local French people toward him regarding this fact? (I recall being in Paris and watching an American traveler approach an information table staffed by a young woman. The traveler simply started talking in English. The woman responded in excellent English, but she was coolly polite. When I approached I first asked, in French, permission to speak English, and got a much warmer reception.) The concierge may be subtly patronizing toward those who do not speak French. How observant is Langdon? Is he used to staying in posh hotels? How does he feel about it? I would want to know these things--and show them--if I were writing the scene.

All these questions and issues form part of the backstory of the scene--the story before the story. The writer needs to know what attitude each character has toward each of the other characters in a scene. The concierge, to the cop, might be arrogant, resentful, and minimally compliant. To Langdon he might be ingratiating, self-justifying, and subtly patronizing. The cop might be self-assured and ironic with the concierge, and to Langdon be polite, apologetic, and slightly intimidating.

You get the idea. I'll have more to say on this scene--but that's enough for today.