I’m going to introduce you to the most viscerally powerful short story I’ve
ever read. Flat out. But – first I need you do a couple of things.

For your own safety, I mean.

From this moment on you should be sitting in an easy chair or maybe laying down
is even better. Padding. So you won’t hurt yourself.

A glass of water nearby. Maybe a small waste can and a roll of paper towels
would also be prudent. Last, if possible, a spouse or a reliable friend who doesn’t panic easily. Do not have someone read it to you aloud while driving a
car or operating heavy machinery.

We will assume you have done these things and proceed.  Attend.

The last person recorded to have fainted during a public reading of
“Guts” was on May 28, 2007 at the public library of Victoria, British
Columbia in Canada. Strictly speaking he didn’t faint as a result of the story
but as a consequence of running for the exit, fainting in mid stride and
hitting his head on the way to the floor. He was one of five who dropped during
that reading. In Milan Italy a professional actor read the translation aloud in
excellent Italian and entire rows went down as though they’d been machine
gunned. Thus far a total of 73 people have officially fainted during public
readings of “Guts” at least until people stopped counting. That’s
what stories can do for you folks.

Damn I wish I’d written it.

Stop reading this, I’m talking to you there, go to the link I’m going to give
you and read “Guts”. It only takes a few minutes, its not a long
story at all. In fact here’s how it begins.

“Inhale.
Take in as much air as you can.
This story should last about as long as you can hold your breath, and then just
a little bit longer. So listen as fast as you can.”
            From “Guts” Chuck Palahniuk

Here is the link to “Guts” a short story by my literary hero Chuck
Palahniuk. You can read it for free. Off you go, now. Come back after you pull
yourself together.

http://chuckpalahniuk.net/features/shorts/guts

From this moment on the blog will be divided into two camps. The readers with
“Guts’, and the “Guts” virgins.

The readers are those who obediently went to the link and followed through and
survived more or less intact. The virgins are those who did not take it
seriously and didn’t check it out at all or those who did and found
themselves unable to finish it. I fall into both camps. The first time I read
it I couldn’t finish it. I thought I was tough. I was not. I went back and
finished it the second time, both times cringing in my seat, chewing my thumb
and laughing my ass off insanely at the funny parts.

Now you Guts virgins – go back and read it. Please.  Go on. Get outta here. You’re
missing a thing of hideous beauty. Come back when you know something. You will
note that I have not told you anything about the story premise or what it’s
about. Nor will I. But I would like to talk about the “Palahniuk Effect”,
how the great man does what he does so well.

The genre Palahniuk writes in and maybe some of us also write in without
knowing it had a name, is “transgressive fiction”, written in a Minimalist style. This is a kissing cousin of
pulp fiction which walks a fine line on what is forbidden in commercial fiction
and often cheerfully vaults over it. This would include stories that are
potentially offensive either on a moral level such as “Lolita”, which on its
surface after all is a sexual affair between a man and a twelve year old girl he nightly rapes, or
a publishable level such as “Guts” (The first time it was submitted to Playboy
magazine it was refused as “too disturbing”. When the editor attended a reading
at Union Square Library in New York during which a man was carted off in an
ambulance, he reconsidered his position. It appeared in Playboy in 2004). Transgressive
Fiction can also include gay erotica, BDSM stories, flagellation and so on. It
concerns characters who feel confined by the moral conventions of society and
in the course of the story break out by doing luridly illicit or in the case of
“Guts”, incredibly dumb things.

“Guts” is told from the first person POV in a very specific way.
Palahniuk has several essays on writing which have lately gotten attention in the ERWA writers forum.. He has a lot to say about the crafting of
“Guts”. Any story opens with a particular problem for the writer,
which is the early establishing of authority with the reader. This is connected
with the “suspension of disbelief ”. The reader has to trust where you’re
leading them, no matter how weird or revolting it is, and be willing to give your characters
the benefit of the doubt. This is especially true in the case of the first
person point of view, with all of its intimacy offered to the reader right up
front in the voice of the narrator. Palahniuk explains that this can be done by
either heart or head.

To establish authority by heart means to speak of yourself in a way that speaks
straight to the reader, without putting on airs. You might do this by revealing
early on something that doesn’t make you look all that good. Something which is
more of the honest fool then the hero. You have to establish this as quickly as
possible, in the first few sentences.

For instance this is how Mark Twain starts off Huckleberry Finn:

“You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr.
Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly.”

The reader likes Huckberry’s voice. He sounds like a straight forward kid.

Or this, from the opening of Phillip Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint”:

“She was so deeply embedded in my consciousness that for the first year of
school I seem to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in
disguise”.

He sounds like a dubious character, but someone worth knowing. You wonder what
the deal is with his mother too.

By showing your warts early on you are
being vulnerable, holding out your hand to a certain trust and intimacy with
the reader. You don’t have to be a good person or even a very nice person. Just
somebody worth knowing.

The other way is “establishing authority” with the head. This is in fact the
way Palahniuk starts out “Guts”. Now that I think of it, this is also the way
in which I have introduced this blog entry. This is usually done by listing a
series of details, either technical or emotional details that show the reader
your narrator has been where he/she describes and knows what they’re talking
about from experience and knowledge.  
This is generally easier to do than the heart method, especially if you
are using a dislikeable narrator. 
Palahniuk admits most of his stories begin with the head method, in part
because he almost always uses first person present narration and most of his
first person narrators are dislikeable people. 
For example, this is the opening paragraph of his novel “Snuff” in which
a former porn star eventually commits suicide by way of exhaustive marathon
sex:

“ . . . One dude stood all afternoon at the buffet wearing
just his boxers, licking the orange dust off barbecued  potato chips. 
Next to him, a dude was scooping into the onion dip and licking the dip
off the chip.  The same soggy chip, scoop
after scoop.  Dudes have a million ways
of peeing on what they claim as their own.”

          “Snuff”  Chuck Palahniuk

There are two things in that paragraph that are standard for
Palahniuk.  The story is begun with the
head method in what will eventually be a dislikeable but intriguing narrator
(the maybe-maybe not son of the aforesaid porn star who is there in line with the other dudes to meet her for the first time) and he “buries the I”.  You don’t see the word “I” appear in the paragraph
at all.  One of his rules which is
certainly true is that when writing in first person present, which is a
standard for erotica and other forms of transgressive fiction, don’t let the
narrator babble on endlessly about him/her self and their precious feelings.  The reader will feel like she’s on a bad
date.  Like any narrator he should direct
attention towards the story and minimally to himself only when it regards his
action in the story.  You will also find
this is true of “Guts” which is first person present but you hear very little
reference from the narrator to himself until the final scene of the story.

Now as Lynne Connally pointed out in the writer’s forum you have to take this advice a little critically.  Romance readers want the feelings and thoughts gushed out as copiously and as purplely as possible.   More literary style erotic fiction tends to be the emotionally distant style Palahniuk is advising.  Take it for what it’s worth.

The next is the establishment of pattern and motif.
“Guts” is in some ways a long detailed list. It is a story in three
acts, giving the details of three scenes or events of increasing . . . effect .
“Guts” is also based on true stories. Palahniuk swears it. So it must
be true.  I guess.  Palahniuk explains in the back story
commentary that he acquired these stories over time while researching his novel
“Choke”. He could have assembled them in any pattern, but arranged them in an
ascending order. The motif of the story is actually based on the theme of
holding the breath which begins the story. Holding the breath is a metaphor for
things that exist between family members that are too awful or ridiculous to
talk about, and waiting in suspense for those things to be revealed. This is
the recurring pattern that keeps resounding after each event is described.
Let’s talk about that description.

He has established trust, if not sympathy, between the narrator and the reader.
The events unfold. The sensory description, which is also a critical element to
erotica writing, is based on the minimal depiction of a single ultra-realistic
detail. The kind of detail only the narrator would know. That carefully chosen
detail is a note that brings the side elements into the light. Palahniuk
advises “When a normal person has a headache, they take aspirin. When a writer
has a headache, he takes notes.” You try to find a way of conveying the
experience of a headache, not just the bland statement that a headache exists.
You don’t say the beer was delicious. You describe the beer as malty and bitter
and cold. The reader decides if that’s delicious or not, not you. If you are
describing a desperate man crossing an unlit railroad yard in the dead of
night, a man who is compulsively afraid of the dark – and I have written that
story – you don’t say “It was dark.” Hell. We know that. Instead you describe
the man dropping to the ground in a fit. Digging his fingernails in the dirt,
until they hurt. Biting the dirt with his teeth and weeping shamefully.
Describe how it feels to suffocate with brainless panic and then seeing just in
front of his eyes the moonlight glinting off a single piece of broken bottle
glass.

Moonlight.

Glass.

Specifically from a bottle.

One piece.

That makes it feel dark, and feel is what you want. Palahniuk says the line
that seemed to send most of the fainters spiraling to the floor is the one with
the words “corn and peanuts”. That’s a very specific detail known only to the
narrator until he reveals it in a way that brings the scene home and viscerally nails it.

Now, if the image of corn and peanuts isn’t turning you green at this moment,
and maybe for the rest of your life, it’s because you’re a Guts-Virgin.

Come over here, little virgin.

Come over here. Gonna tighten’ up your wig for you.

Come sit close to me, baby. No. More close. Touching close.

Trust me.

Now. What we’re gonna do. It’s all up to you. Won’t make you do nuthin’ you
don’t want. Good?

Let’s see that little mouse you got, sweetie.

Oh. Oh isn’t that beautiful. Your mama gave you the sweetest beautiful mouse.
Look what you’ve been hiding from me all this time.

How is that mouse . . . There. Isn’t that nice? You like that?

Put your finger there on the left button. Just keep it there like that ‘till I
say.

That’s the way. Feel nice? You like that? You bet you like it. Bet your mouse
like that. Bet your mama like that.

See that down there? No, lower down. See that?

Well, that’s my URL. Ever seen one of those before? Yeah? You’re not so
innocent like you look.

What you’re gonna do for me is put your little pointer there, baby, right there
and give my URL a nice little squeeze. That’s how it’s done. Move it right down
there. Do it just for me. Then I’ll know you love me good, sugar.

You’re going good. Oh that’s sweet how you do that. Oh that’s so good. I can
watch you move your mouse all night long. You’re going so good at this already
and you think you like it now, sweetie, you gonna love it later.

Don’t stop here. Down there’s where all the action is. Put your little pointer
right down there. Oh, that’s the way. Hold it there.

http://chuckpalahniuk.net/features/shorts/guts

Now.

Click.

C. Sanchez-Garcia

There is an early problem
with choosing to write a story in first person present – nobody wants to hear
it.

Most erotica readers are women,
they just are, and hearing the word “I” over and over reminds a woman
too much of a really bad date.  It can
raise the specter of a self absorbed person boasting and bragging to impress you.  Unless of course that is the tone you want
which is a rare thing but not impossible. 
“Slowly I raised my right hand and I placed the cigarette between
my pouting but not unmanly lips as I was thinking of Ashley’s outrageous
nipples and I shifted nervously from my left foot to my right foot and I arched
my chiseled, masculine brows as I felt the squeeze of my legendary spam spear
swell in my virile and aching loins.  I groaned.” 

So help me Jesus.

Nevertheless, writing in the
first person present is the most commonly chosen form for popular erotic short
fiction and there are good reasons for it. 
The first person present potentially at least, conveys authority and
authenticity.  It conveys immediate
character and personality and can, potentially at least, convey the most intimate
experience of that most intimate of human acts. 
Like the ghost of Christmas Present it invites the reader to get to know
you better. 

First person present, done
well has the quality of afterglow pillow talk. 
Of late night confessions over a kitchen table.  The pot of tea gone cold, the radio
whispering as your mother reaches her fingers across the toast and jelly to
touch your hand.  “There’s something
you’re old enough now to know.  Your
father, well he’s not your father.  Not
your real father.  Well.  There.”

So your challenge will
always be how to win your reader over to what your character is offering.  So much of writing is about seducing your
reader and a person knows when they’re being seduced.  How will you seduce?

One of the early creative decisions
you’ll have to make is if the first person narrator is also the Deciding
Character or telling the story of the deciding character from memory, something
called “Apostolic Fiction”.  (RE: Jesus
never told his autobiography, it was told by his followers about him after the
event.)  Examples of apostolic fiction
could be “Shane” or “The Great Gatsby” in which Nick narrates the past story of
his friend Jay Gatsby.  The Deciding
Character is Jay Gatsby, but the story is told by someone else.  In apostolic fiction an unreliable narrator
can twist and bend the story to protect himself or to glorify his hero or to
lie outright.  It can also be a way of
telling a story from another viewpoint, say a white settler telling the story
of an Indian he knew personally.

One of the greatest war
novels in modern literature is “The Boat” (“Das Boot”) authored by Lothar
Gunther-Buckheim, a German journalist who was assigned by Josef Goebbels to go
on two U Boat patrols to provide material for propaganda articles.  After the fall of Nazi Germany Buckheim wrote
the novel Das Boot in first person present, which seems to be a common standard
in German fiction.  Although the Deciding
Character is “The Old Man”, the U Boat’s Captain, the story is told by the
journalist assigned to the crew to write about the U Boat experience.  Apostalic fiction. As a device it gives a sense of intimacy and
immediacy while at the same time allowing a view from all over the boat without
being limited only to where the Captain is at any moment.  The narrator can move freely with a journalist’s
sharp eye for detail and still paint realistic scenes of great tension, such as
the sounds of a British merchant ship sinking followed by a depth charge attack
by a destroyer:

“Damned slow running
time.  I’d already given up.” The
Commander’s voice is back to its usual dark growl.  The breaking and cracking, roaring and
tearing show no sign of coming to an end.

“Now there’s a couple of
boats you can write off for good.”

Then a shattering blow
knocks me off my feet.  In the nick of
time I catch hold of a pipe to break my fall. 
There’s a crash of breaking glass.

I pull myself upright,
automatically stagger forward a couple of steps, jostle against someone,
collide with a hard corner and collapse into the hatch frame.

This is it!  The reckoning!  Mustn’t let yourself go!  

The hatch frame almost
bucks me out.  An enormous detonation
tries to shatter my eardrums.  Then blow
after blow, as if the sea were a mass of huge powder kegs being set off in
quick succession.

The narrator’s authority comes
from the war experience Buckheim’s had of actually being in a U Boat
during a depth charge attack.  That
authenticity is how he overcomes the problem of listening to that “I” over and
over and earning the attention of the reader with his knowledge of the
experience he’s writing about.  The word “I”
is used only twice, only when it can’t be avoided or replaced.  Everything else is about the scene and the
emotional experience around him. 

In the opening paragraphs of
your story you can choose to establish your narrator’s authority with the
reader either by appealing to the insider’s knowledge your character has of the
experience he’s describing, or appeal to the heart by presenting a character
with a certain self deprecating honesty. 
Again, think of it as a date.  You
might warm up to a date who is capable of laughing at himself and seems to
speak openly and honestly regarding his hopes and faults.  This is especially important if you are
presenting a narrator who is dislikeable. 
The reader doesn’t have to like your narrator.  But they should be curious about them.  They should want to care about what is about
to happen to them.

Think carefully of that last
sentence.  It’s the soul of short
fiction.  The secret of horror fiction,
erotic or romantic fiction, any fiction that attempts to create a visceral experience is that we must care about the Deciding Character.  We don’t have to like them.  Truly. 
But we have to care about them.

From my own poor stuff, I
can offer two stories told in first person present by dislikeable
narrators.  Here is the voice of Nixie, a
vampire girl originally from Bavaria, who as the story opens is on her way to retrieve
her mortal lover who has abandoned and fled from her.  She is tracking him by scent in this opening
paragraph from “The Lady and the Unicorn”

Blood has a
range of taste, as scent has a range of aromas.  Blood has a high level
taste and an under taste.  It is a blending of elements like music. 
This is also the way of scent.  The under aroma tells you there is a trail
and betrays to you the direction.  If the scent becomes fresher you are
following the creature that produced it, so you must use the under scent to
know which direction is older and which is newer.  It is as though the air
were filled with singing voices and you are picking out from the choir the
sound of a single voice. The high scent will tell you the individual, the
condition of the individual, if it is injured or sick, horny or filled with
fear.  It will tell you how to catch him, where he is likely to run
to.  To acquire the high scent the animal, or myself, must pause to
commune with the air and pay attention.  Close the eyes. Hold the nose
still and just so.  Let the night air speak. It is the same with the
deep taste of blood, except that scent is on the move, and if you are
tasting the blood—well.  It is no longer on the move.  

https://erotica-readers.com/GD/TC-EF/The_Lady_and_The_Unicorn.htm

This is attempting authority
with the reader through the character’s knowledge.  Nixie sounds like she knows what she’s
talking about.  She doesn’t brag.  She hardly refers to herself at all.  She never tries to convince you how dangerous
she is, but by the end of the paragraph she doesn’t have to.

Here is another very
dislikeable narrator, Mack Daddy, a professional sex gladiator in “The Peanut
Butter Shot” published in “Mammoth Book of Erotica VOL 11”: 

They used to wrap tape
around your hands to keep you from busting your knuckles up against the bones
of somebody’s face. Me, it’s the opposite. I have to wear special gloves when
I’m not in the ring. These gloves, they go for about $12,300, something like
that, dermatologically custom made. The insurance pays for them, so like I give
a shit, but that’s what they go for. I’ve got real warm soft hands. Women tell
me they’re softer than a baby’s hands. My champion hands are insured by
management for about $567,000. My tongue’s insured too, definitely, so I can’t
drink anything hot or cold or eat spicy, which sucks but it’s the job.  My tongue and hands are my weapons.

The old prize fighters
would bust your nose or your ribs.  A
punch to the kidney that would make you piss blood for a couple days.  We sex fighters, we bust your will to
live.  We take away your will to be
free.  People look naked to us.  We see inside your mind.    You just think you know what you want,
bitch.  I know what you really want,
because that’s how I get you.  That’s how
I take you down.  I look at you bitch – I
know what you want way better than you do. 
I know it even before you know it. 
That’s because I see you.  I see
you like God sees you.

His voice is the opposite of
Nixie.  Aggressive, violent, expressing
himself in short punchy sentences like jabs to the face; bragging like a young
athlete full of himself.

As a general thing
establishing your character by knowledge is easier than by heart.  But heart is better if you can manage
it. 

The other thing that is
quickly brought out in their voices is their Governing Characteristic.  Listening to Nixie or Mack Daddy you get a
sense of what drives them and of what makes them peculiar.  Writing in first person, give your narrator a
distinctive voice, not by speech dialects (“Aw shuckin’  lil’ lady yawl sure do got some kinda helluva
bodacious tits on ya’, yessiree.”) but by attitude.  If you want them to sound like they come from
somewhere, or as in Nixie’s case if they speak English as a foreign language,
don’t do it so much in goofy spelling but in syntax and sound, establishing
personality by the words you choose and how you arrange them.  Listen to the well-spelled parlor room
formality and 19th century syntax in the narrator’s voice in Charles
Portis’ “True Grit”:

““People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could
leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father’s blood but it did
not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day. I
was just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name Tom Chaney shot
my father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robbed him of his life and his
horse and $150 in cash money plus two California gold pieces that he carried in
his trouser band.”

That’s an
amazing opening paragraph.  You have the Deciding Character.  You have the
inciting event.  You have the time and
the place, the desire and the problem.  There
is great personality in that voice.  If
you read only that paragraph, you’d have a sense of a brave, righteous girl with
a problem to solve and the ferocious tenacity to do it and you’d be about
right.  This is also a perfect example of
establishing authority by heart, listening to the quirky and engaging sound of
the woman’s voice as she recalls the events of her childhood invites you to
care about her story.

What about a
character who is insane?  You can
introduce the character’s Governing Characteristic by an obsession he
repeatedly returns to, a kind of chorus that sounds several times.  In Brett Easton Ellis’ novel “American
Psycho”, Patrick Bateman is a yuppie Wall Street investment broker during the
Reagan era, and incidentally a vicious homicidal maniac who is obsessed with his
social status at all times.  He shows his
Governing Characteristic to us by the way he obsessively lists what every
person he meets is wearing or carrying and often even how much money it costs:

It’s cold
for April and Price walks briskly down the street towards Evelyn’s brownstone
whistling “If I Were a Rich Man” and swinging his Tumi leather attaché
case.  A figure with slicked back hair
and horn rimmed Peeples glasses  approaches
in the distance, wearing a beige double-breasted wool-gabardine Cerruti 1881
suit and carrying the same Tumi leather attaché case from D. F., Sanders that
Price has, and Timothy wonders aloud, “Is it Victor Powell?  It can’t be.”

Bateman does
this over and over with each person he meets until it almost drives you crazy
and then you begin to understand – he’s crazy.

So that exhausts
my thoughts for what they’re worth on first person present.  Until next time, do well.

In this entry I propose to tie together the elements explained in the previous posts on narrative arc and character arc:

The Elements of Short Story Structure

https://erotica-readers.com/confessions-of-craft-freak-elements-of/

The Exterior Elements of Character

https://erotica-readers.com/entry-three-exterior-elements-of/

The Interior Elements of Character

https://erotica-readers.com/entry-4-interior-elements-of-character/

You’ll also discover that I like checklists very much:

Why Doing Crits at ERA-Storytime is good for the Soul

Norman Mailer once said that for beginning writers, and that’s pretty much who we are for the most part, reading the great writers, the giants, won’t do you much good.  They’re good to be aware of, but you won’t learn much from their technique because they’re over your head.  He said you’ll learn the most from writers on your own level, because you’ll understand them and the good and klutzy moments in their work will be clear to you and you’ll be able to observe and absorb it in your work, and I have found this to be true.  Studying the work of your peers, people who write better than you do, but not too much, and people who write worse than you do, but not too much, will help you see your own work more clearly and the elements of story craft better.

Rules are good for you, at least until you master them.  Great artists and story tellers like Picasso and Alfred Hitchcock, were famous for destroying the rules but first they mastered them.  They understood the rules intimately enough to break them artfully, not simply rebel against them.  If you write poetry, reading Ashley’s presentations here of traditional verse form and rhyme is very valuable, because playing within a tight frame work makes you think harder.  It’s cuts sloppiness which can lead to beauty.  Story craft is that way too, and your peers are the ones who will show it to you when its working well or falling apart for them.

First Do No Harm

One of ERWA’s most prolific and respected contributors was a guy named Mike Kimera.  His emails were always signed “What you read is not what I wrote.”  I didn’t know what that was supposed to mean until I started posting stories and discovered that some people read better than others.  Being a good reader is as demanding as being a good writer.  Not all stories bear close reading, but part of being a competent critter is about reading what has been actually written and not skimming over it.

As a general thing in Storytime I only critique short stories, because short stories are what I write and what I cherish and know a little about.   It’s my respect for local writers I don’t do crits on poems, or quickies, because I usually don’t write them and don’t feel competent to speak on them.  I don’t crit gay erotica for the same reason.  I wish I had a novel in me, because that’s where the money is, but short stories are what the story fairy gives me.

People advise against being intrusive, against saying how you would do the story if it were yours.  I disagree, you can be intrusive if you have something useful to say.  Just be respectful.  Everybody’s story is their baby.  If you’re reading:

1. Show a helpful and respectful attitude.
2. Read anything you intend to review in its entirety.
3. Remember what Mike Kimera said.  It will help you to begin the crit with a small bare bones synopsis of the story to help you understand it and to prove that you’ve made the effort of reading what was presented.
4. Make notes on a notebook or the back of the envelope that capture your immediate responses , or highlight sentences  to go back to.  Usually a nit or clumsy sentence I highlight in yellow, a sentence of beauty that is a gift to read I highlight in enthusiastic purple.  I comment on these sentences towards the end of my crit.
5. Take your time with a crit, don’t rush.  When you rush you read badly which is disrespectful to the story.  Respect the story.
6. If you can’t respect the story, if you think its truly awful, be kind and go crit something else.  It’s not meant for you.  Kindness and respect over all.
7. Take your notes and impressions and shoot for a review of 250 – 800 words.
8. If the author has a specific agenda, understand it and address your comments to it.  A good author should know what they’re trying to do by this stage anyway.

My Little Yellow Notebook

There’s this little hard bound yellow notebook I’ve been keeping with me for years.  I type stuff up and print it and paste it the pages.  It includes a lot of lists, from how to do crits, to how to clean the toilet.  These are lists written in a kind of verbal shorthand I wrote for myself without expecting to show them to anyone, but maybe you’ll find some of them useful.  Here is the list I keep handy when I do a crit for something in ERA Storytime:

ERWA  Standard Critique

• Write a synopsis, show how characters interact with the plot, not just events.  Do this as a gesture of respect to prove you read and understand the story.
• Is there a unique premise and a designing principle?  Could there be?
• First the lather, then the razor.  What is good about the story? (If you can’t find anything, you’re not the one to review it)
• What is flawed but improvable?
  • Plot / Story Arc
  • POV chosen, and voice
    1. If first person present is there a personality behind the voice?
  • Character Arc:
    1. What does deciding character want?
    2. Do we care?
    3. How does he/she go after it?
    4. What are the obstacles?
    5. Is there a moral change or revelation?  Could there be?
• How is the description?  The unpacking of details?
• Dialogue:  a natural sound with beats.  (a word about “beats”.  People don’t just talk, they do things while they talk and this enables you to break up the dialogue.  “I don’t get you,” he said.  He lit a cigarette and waved it at her.  “You keep changing your mind.”)
• When told in First person;
  • Submerge the “I”
  • Give the narrator a unique voice
• Does it begin at the strongest place?
• Does it end at the strongest place?
• Are there thought verbs or lazy descriptions of emotion or sensation?
• Minimize attribution adverbs
• Minimize expository dialogue and narrative.

One of the first things worth noticing after you’ve read it all the way through is if it begins at the right place.  Does the opening scene introduce you to the action, setting and maybe the protagonist quickly enough to catch your interest?  That’s why “hookers” or first lines are so important and often so memorable.  Ray Bradbury, one of my heroes, once said that he would routinely peel off the first page (he used paper and typewriter) and throw it away and begin the story from the top of the second page.  I’ve done that.  It works.

* * * * *

Deeper Critiques and the Treasure of a Good First (“Beta”) Reader

Stephen King’s first reader is his wife Tabby, a novelist also. She sees all of his stuff before anybody else does. He makes the case, which I think is true, that every writer writes for one person. Mark Twain claimed he wrote stories for his sister, even after she died. King writes stories to impress his wife Tabby. When he finished the first polished draft of the novel “From a Buick 8” he gave her the print out to read while they were driving cross country through Pennsylvania. He was driving and kept looking over at her while she read, watching anxiously, weaving around on the road, hungry for her every frown and chuckle. Finally she looked up and yelled at him “Watch the road before you get us all killed! Stop being so goddamned needy!”

We writers are a needy lot.  But praise doesn’t always take you where you need to go.  This is why reading well is so important, because it will give you credibility if you have to tell hard things.

My long suffering First Reader is and continues to be Lisabet Sarai, the George Martin to my erstwhile Paul McCartney.  I was reading her stories long before I ever tried my hand at writing them.  When I saw her name on ERWA I was writhing with shyness when I asked her privately if she could give me some pointers on something I’d written.  She did and I made my very first sale.  That’s what a good First Reader can do for you folks.  But you have to be willing to listen and at least hear them out.  That requires trust and a willingness to leave your ego at the door. That’s the part I was good at.  When I send her something, I bite my nails waiting to hear back from her about what a fantastic literary genius I am, and how the world has been waiting breathlessly, if not thanklessly for this, my latest heartbreakingly gorgeous work.  Is it a major or a minor masterpiece?

I keep thinking I’ve gotten over that stage, but I know I haven’t.  I don’t know if anybody ever does.  Then the response comes back from Lisabet, no, not quite at the minor masterpiece stage yet.  Far from it in fact.  The feeling for a needy writer can be a little bit like hearing a parent on your door step criticizing one of your kids, or maybe a cop.   But it’s important.  Wine and coffee tasters have a phrase “cleansing the palate”.  After tasting something so much, your tongue loses its sensitivity and then you need some space or a second opinion.  You don’t have to do everything your First Reader tells you, but you should definitely listen, especially if this is someone who understands what you’re trying to do.

Sometimes when I’m trying to understand a complex narrative arc, either my own or someone else’s, I make a “clothesline”, my invention.  I make a clothesline by drawing a line across a piece of paper and start pinning the scenes in sequential order to get a high level view of how this beast is supposed to hang together.

If someone trusts you enough with their stuff to ask you to be an early test reader, you should feel honored and be ready to read like a lit student.  Here is a general checklist that covers most points for a serious critique:

DEEP CRIT Standard:

Scene Critique

• Does the scene pull you along with:
  • Character development
  • Increasing pressure on the hero
  • Set up for the next scene
  • Is it a scene and not narrative summary
  • Does the scene start and end in the strongest places
  • Would the story be any better or weaker without the scene?
  • Is the hero behaving actively or passively?

Character Arc Critique

• The hero by definition is the deciding character
• Present the character’s unique governing characteristic
• We are interested in a character who wants something specific badly
• A hero must be active towards his situation, not passive
• His attack on obstacles should be associated with his governing characteristic
• A character arc presents moral change based on response to obstacles of increasing tension.
• Readers care about motives, not traits
• What is the hero’s weakness?
• Empathize, not sympathize
• Who is the opponent?  How does the opponent mirror the hero?
• If more than one character, hero should be an integrated part of a character web.
• Does the hero connect to the world around him?
• Is the character complex, multi layered or contradictory?
• Avoid lazy descriptions of emotions

Description Critique

• Avoid lazy descriptions of emotions or sensations
• Resist the urge to explain
• Are the scene details the ones your characters would most notice?
• Are they in proportion to what is needed?
• Watch out for excessive  – ing and – ly verbs, he said sagely.
• Break up large narrative passages when possible

Voice and Dialogue Critique

• • At some point in your process read the dialogue out loud to yourself
  • Break up the dialogue with beats
  • Can you picture the conversation?
  • Does the dialogue reveal character or move the story along?
  • Can interior monologues be dropped into their own paragraphs without attributions?
  • Be conservative about “verb thoughts”  (Kenny wondered why nobody liked him)
  • Be conservative about a lot of expository dialogue

Point of view and Description Critique

• • Avoid lazy descriptions of emotions or sensations
  • Does the POV reveal character?
  • Does the first person point of view speak with a unique voice
  • Does the POV match the correct level of intimacy with the reader?
  • Is there excessive narrative summary that could be made into a scene?
  • Avoid lazy descriptions (“Her orgasm felt wonderful.”  No.  Describe what a wonderful orgasm feels like right when it’s happening to you.   If you’ve forgotten what a wonderful orgasm feels like, get your notebook and go find out.  When ordinary people have a headache they take aspirin.  When you have a headache – you take notes.)
  • If using first person present POV “bury the I”, that is don’t let the speaker go on drawing attention to himself.  “I drew on my cigarette and waved my left hand and then my right hand  helplessly as I contemplated my aching heart.”

In this entry I propose:

To define a Deciding Character holistically

To define what makes a unique character arc

Describe the “Iceberg Theory”

Describing the desire arc

As in previous entries I want to caution that what I’m
writing about is within a certain context. 
Seat of the pantsers shouldn’t think about these things initially, but
write their passion and then go back and consult these ideas during the
rewriting phase, all the more necessary with spontaneously delivered first
drafts.  These are also ideas that can
help you make sense of the characters in movies, stories and novels that have
actually moved you and projected a strong sense of personality.

When you think of erotic love, when you think of your current
lover, ask yourself why you love that person. 
You could name traits.  You like
men who are tall and handsome.  You like a
woman with  big boobs and an assertive
sexual response.  You like a dominant
male.  You like a man who’s funny and
knows how to listen.  You like this and
you like that.

Nevertheless the world is full of women with big tits.  Full of men with big bank rolls and dominant
personalities.  They have not won your
heart in the way your lover has, who very likely doesn’t have many or any of
the traits you’d ascribe to a character.  What you have is empathy.  You know him
or her. You know the way a room feels different when they’re in it.  Sometimes when a man is away, a woman likes
to sleep in his T shirt because it smells like him.

In the real world, what causes us to fall in love has little
to do with traits initially and more often to do with an undefinable chemistry we’re barely aware of.  Or very often love begins from a personal
history, a man or a woman who has shown their loyalty by standing by you during
hard times.  There is an intangible moral
core at the heart of every great love or even a great friendship.  There is also this sense between a reader and
a well crafted character, an indefinable sense. 
You don’t have to like the character. 
But you need a sense of recognizing them, not of liking them but of finding
your humanity in them. 

In the most ancient stories and myths, characters were all
about action.  We didn’t know them so
well as people.  They were barely people
at all.  Shakespeare changed all that
with characters that were powerful and complex and had a way of sticking in the
imagination.  Shakespeare did this by
several innovations that we would take for granted today.  He introduced moral argument and connected it
to the soul of the character.  He would
leave out a key trait on purpose and leave in it’s place a contradiction that
made the character mysterious.  A
character wasn’t just about action in Shakespeare’s best plays.  The main character struggled with moral evolution.  The character felt the seeds of moral change
at the beginning of the story, the audience had a sense that “something is
about to happen here” and the character made moral decisions until by the end of the story this person
was profoundly changed.  King Lear starts
out as an old man full of illusions, arrogant, vain, insensitive to the personalities
of the people around him except as they reflect himself.  By the end of the play, he is destroyed in
every way, he is broken and impoverished and finally insane, but he has
acquired soulfulness.  He has acquired
through his suffering a genuine empathy for others he would not have had at the
beginning, and the beauty is that it all seems so natural. His progression
makes perfect sense.  Macbeth, Thane of
Cawdor starts out as a noble and ambitious warrior, brave and loyal to his king.  But he makes these moral choices that change
him, until by the end of the story he is a monster, friendless and hated.  And unforgettable.  The best characters are not about traits,
which are exterior elements of character, like clothes or wealth.  Like ourselves in our own moral journeys in
this world, the best characters are about change. 

This implies that once you are ready to rewrite or overhaul
your story, or if you write by careful planning, the real birth of your
character comes when you have found the moral argument, hidden in the core of
your story’s Designing Principle.  You
don’t need to find this in the first draft, but to write a solid story, a story
with soul, you need to find it by the final draft.  And you may have to overhaul it many times,
trying different approaches to the same premise before you discover what it
really is you’re trying to say.  I think
any story has the potential to be a great story, I think the problem is that we
stop exploring it too early. 

We know ourselves in this world, define ourselves by our
moral values, are often baffled by our own actions. Our moral values are shaped by contingency colliding with our
humanity and the decisions we make.  This
is how nature creates the infinite variety of human personality in this
world.  In our fiction craft this is the
line where the geometry of the narrative arc connects with the geometry of the
character arc.  Moral decisions.  Self-revelation leading to a final moral
change.

There are many ways of approaching erotic fiction and
romantic fiction.  The school I’m coming
from doesn’t care how two people
fuck.  Here we care why.

The interior geometry of the story, the character arc is
defined by:

1.  The moral argument
at the core of the story

2.  The desire line of
the character – I want, therefore I am.

3.  Put Together –
this is who I am now.

In his book on craft “Anatomy of Story”, John
Truby defines what he calls the seven key steps of story structure as:

1.  Weakness and Need

2.  Desire

3.  Opponent (not
necessarily a person)

4.  Plan

5.  Battle

6.  Self-Revelation

7.  New Equilibrium

Truby advises starting the character arc by first defining to yourself the moral
change at the end of the character
arc, which would be about right after the big “come to death” moment where
things have gone very badly and the protagonist makes a life changing
Self-Revelation.  Knowing who he will become you can always go back to the beginning and trace
out the set up that leads to this big change. 
This seems difficult to me, but if you don’t mind planning ahead its
plausible.  In my experience I often
don’t know what the moral self-revelation is until the second or third
overhaul, but once you’ve arrived at it you can always go back and rebuild a
clean path to it.  At the end it should
have an organic feel to it; not strained.  It should feel as though things could not have
turned out any other way. 

The setup should introduce the protagonist as a thinking
person with the depth to experience self change.  The protagonist is hiding something inside
that is hurting him or herself.

When the Self revelation appears, it should strike quickly with dramatic
force, a burst of emotion for the protagonist and the reader.  It should introduce the protagonist to a new
insight and a new understanding of who he is.  For instance with Spider Man, it would be that moment when the face of the man who killed his Uncle Ben is revealed as the man he could have stopped a few hours before but didn’t.  His reason for being Spider Man radically changes from that instant.  This is typical of modern heroes and villains who very often are born and defined from a specific trauma.

This doesn’t have to be confined to the hero, the opponent,
who could also be the hero/heroines lover can also experience self-revelation.

The Iceberg Theory of Writing

Hemingway had this literary theory he said guided his
creative process, which is that the most important things were under the surface.  He called it his “iceberg” method.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iceberg_Theory

As a general thing, one of the major prose differences
between popular fiction, and 90% of erotica and romance is popular fiction, and
so called literary fiction is this theory of omission.  Popular fiction tends to be explicit in describing emotions, physical sensations and key events up front, everything you need to know is
laid right out for you. Literacy short fiction, like poetry, attempts to push a lot of key
elements of the narrative and the character arc off stage and out of sight so
that the reader has a sense of something not being said.  The omission shines through and forces the
intuitive understanding of what is not being said.  When you have to figure it out yourself, when
you have to intuit the physical sensation or emotion, then your imagination owns it
personally. It’s something you’ve discovered for yourself.  Hemingway’s theory was that the omitted parts, carefully chosen, could strengthen the
story and help the reader to feel more than they understood.  Like poetry it pushes you to feel the story
as a whole, including the intuitive parts taking place off stage. 

This kind of writing, as well as poetry craft, boils
down to a creative decision of how you want to present the interior world of your
character.  Do you want to lay it all
out, or reveal through what is not being said?

Turning to my own poor stuff for an example, this week at the Oh Get a Grip blog my offering from today
is a short vignette which happens to be written in this iceberg style, if you’d
like to see an example of Hemingway’s idea in application.  The week’s theme is “Sex and Punishment” and
my story is called

“The Well:  A Story of
Sex and Punishment” 

(If you think you already know what this story is going to be about –
you’re wrong.)

But you can read it here:

http://ohgetagrip.blogspot.com/

The other most universal element of character in a well
structured short story is the desire line. 
A protagonist in short fiction should have one specific desire line.
More than one and things can get muddled and lose their dramatic power, because
the narrative drive is powered by the clarity of the Deciding Character’s
specific desire and need.  As obstacles
to fulfilling the desire appear, as personal weaknesses are revealed, the pressure on the protagonist is increased
as his intensity of desire increases. 
Consequently the desire has to be specific enough that the reader will
know if the desire has been satisfied or not. 
Suppose you say the heroines desire to is find true love. What
is true love?  How would she know it if
she found it?  Why is she even looking for it?  You should be able to
define the desire clearly in a sentence. 
The desire should at some point become personified in something
substantial and pursuable, Hitchcock’s “Mcguffin”, which may be an object or a
person.  It should coalesce as quickly as
possible from an abstraction into a thing that can be acted upon.   And when the self revelation has appeared
and the desire is reached or relinquished in defeat  the story should be quickly wrapped
up.  Part of good theater is knowing when
to take your bow and get your butt off the stage.

Speaking of which – see you next month.

Next Entry:  The Art of the Crit

Several terms used here are from the previous post “ENTRY TWO The Elements of Short Story Structure”

https://erotica-readers.com/confessions-of-craft-freak-elements-of/

In this entry, the first of two parts, I propose to present:

The Exterior Elements of Character Presentation as:
The Character World
The Character Web made of
The Deciding Character
The Ally
The Opponent
The Fake Ally
The Fake Opponent

A lot of what I will be pontificating on here comes from John Truby’s book “The Anatomy of Story”.  Truby was writing mainly for wanna-be screen writers of formula genre movies, but a lot of what he says is universal to popular plotted fiction in general, as well as astonishingly insightful.  Once you become familiar with his way of thinking you start to see it in practice in all your favorite movies.

As before I should offer up a note of caution here.  Writer’s have different ways of approaching new material.  Seat-of-the-Pantsers write the way people imagine writers of the Bible wrote, by divine dictation.  They start with a blank screen and start typing straight through until they reach the words “The End”. That was how my heroes Ray Bradbury and Robert E Howard wrote.  If you’re so gifted everything I’m saying applies not to that spontaneous ejaculation of sticky passion but to the rewriting which must absolutely follow.  (Rewriting will make you free to write badly. Rewriting is your friend.  Do not hate rewriting  Do not skip rewriting.) Others, notably Jules Verne and Edgar Allen Poe, calculated every detail, every note and event, the form of presentation, everything beforehand, so that by the time they dipped that first quill they were just scribbling what they’d already written out in their heads.  Paper and ink were more expensive in those days. If you’re that person, this stuff may help you plan better before you start typing.  If you do crits, it’ll help you do crits.

The Character World

The world of the story is the arena, the magic circle you’ve drawn where everything takes place.  In the best stories the story world is itself a kind of supporting character from which the Deciding Character emerges.  It shapes and interacts with him/her and gives them the ground of their unique identity.  Again – the Premise is the basic seed of the story, the Designing Principle is the unifying theme expressed in a single statement that makes your story unique from others in that genre.  There is a relationship between the interior space of the Deciding Character’s mental world and the exterior space and pacing of time he moves within.  This world grows organically from the Premise of the story as it interacts with the storyline and the Deciding Character’s governing characteristic.   Shakespeare’s Coriolanus was written to have Coriolanus lead an ancient Roman Army and then run for office, and in modern versions he leads a modern Nazi army, but his character can never exist outside the exterior world of war and interior world of self-destructive hubris. He is always a man of insatiable pride seeking glory in valor and violence to impress his mother whether you put him in Roman armor, a Nazi uniform or a gorilla suit.

For a personal example, I offer my plotted vampire story “The Lady and the Unicorn.”  The Premise is – a vampire girl sets out to retrieve her mortal lover who has fled from her.  The Designing Principle is – she will track him to a Gospel tent revival during which she accepts salvation and hopes but is not really sure that she has been miraculously healed of vampirism but still seeks to confront her lover and win him back.  So the Character World is the world of the night spent in a tent revival and the forest around it.  This is the world, unique to the story’s premise and designing principle, within which Nixie experiences the outcomes of the moral decisions she feels compelled to make as well as the catastrophic mistakes.  The feeling, if well written and presented, is that this story could not happen in any other place but this one.

The Character Web

The Deciding Character
Again – the Deciding Character, or protagonist, is the one who makes the decisions and whose character arc drives the action of the story.  She doesn’t have to be the narrator, she doesn’t have to be likable,  but she is the one who carries the energy of the story and the geometry of the narrative arc turns on her decisions.  As a general rule she should be active rather than passive.  She should be acting more than simply acted upon.  Motives are more important than traits, so she should be in pursuit of something and the decisions she makes to meet the obstacles on the way are influenced by a governing characteristic.  The governing characteristic is not the thing she is pursuing, it is a fundamental element of her character that defines her in her pursuit, like Coriolanus and his male vanity, or Nixie and her sense of exile from humanity.  Captain Ahab chases Moby Dick the white whale, not because he likes to kill whales, but because he is angry at God.  In literary erotica, the act of sex is exterior, sometimes it’s not even there.  Eroticism is an expression of the governing characteristic; eroticism is the mystery and the soul of what drives us to physical intimacy in all of its forms.  Eroticism is what we’re talking about.  How do you find a Deciding Character’s governing characteristic?

Consider this dialogue between Hannibal Lechter and Clarisse Starling in Thomas Harris’ “The Silence of the Lambs”:

“Read Marcus Aurelius.  The emperor counsels simplicity.  First principles.  Of each particular thing ask:  What is it in itself, in its own constitution?  What is its causal nature?”

“That doesn’t mean anything to me.’

“What does he do, this man you seek?”

“He kills women – “

“No!  That is incidental.  What is the first and principal thing he does, what need does he serve by killing?”

“Anger, social resentment, sexual frus – “

“No!”

“What then?”

“He covets.  In fact, he covets the very thing you are.  It’s his nature to covet.”

When you are rewriting or defining a character to yourself, or if a character isn’t working imagine Dr. Lechter next to you saying “What does he do, your character?  What is his causal nature?”

“He’s a dom who ties up women – “

“No!  That is incidental. What need does he serve by tying them up?”

– and so on. Just don’t turn your back on him.

The Ally
The ally is the Deciding Character’s friend, often a sounding board for the Deciding Character’s big problem or the desire he’s chasing or the weakness that holds him back.  Usually their goals and desires are similar.  Their expositiory dialogues inform the reader of how the current situation came about and what needs to be done, the most extreme example being daytime soap operas where lover’s are constantly drowning themselves in expository dialogue to catch up the viewer on the story’s tangled events.

When the Deciding Character is dislikeable or difficult to connect with, an ally is sometimes used as the reader’s gateway to understanding them, typically in buddy stories where the ally is often chastising the Deciding Character for some offense.  A buddy can serve a double role as the Deciding Characters opponent and friend, speaking honestly and explaining things, in which case his or her personality will often be the opposite of the Deciding Character, such as the level headed servant Sancho Panza to his deranged and idealistic master Don Quixote, or the compassionate Dr. Watson to the coldly intellectual Sherlock Holmes.

The Opponent
The opponent, or the antagonist, is not necessarily the enemy.  In a love story the opponent can be the pursued lover.  Or it can be an idea or a situation the protagonist is up against.   The most compelling opponents tend to be active enemies of the hero.  An effective villain can’t be just a mustache twirler.  A good antagonist is as important as a good protagonist.  She should be a fully dimensional character with a governing characteristic of her own that mirrors the hero.  Think of the Joker and Batman.  Both wear disguises, personas that are born out of some past trauma.  They are fighting the same demons which they wear like personal totems.

A good villian should:

• mirror the heroes’ governing characteristic with a twist
• Should be pursuing the same object, or confronting the same problem as the hero
• Has a necessary presence, not just tacked on.
• Attacks or illuminates the weakness of the hero and forces a moral change.
• The Villain thinks she/he is right in what they do.  Villains have moral values in contrast to the heroes’ moral values, but they have reasons that make sense to them.
• Generally the opponent does not experience a moral change in the character arc, but some of the most memorable villains (Darth Vader, Dr. Octopus) do.

Supporting characters are a way of introducing us to the main character but also of casting a bright light on them through allowing us to see them through their eyes.  These include the Fake Opponent and the Fake Ally.

The Fake Opponent
A fake opponent is someone who at first appears to be an enemy, but later surprises us by helping the heroine.  The best example I know of is Hannibal Lechter again.  In his first meeting with agent Starling he ruthlessly dissects her personality, then humiliates her to tears because she has said something that insulted his intelligence.  He cannot stand disrespect, a governing characteristic that provokes him to homicidal violence.  When Starling is insulted by another inmate throwing semen on her, he calls her back and becomes her unofficial mentor.

And who is Clarisse Starling?  How are we introduced to her character and governing characteristic so that we can emotionally connect with her?  Indirectly through a supporting character – Lechter.  That’s what supporting characters are so very good at.  Think how much more powerful that is than the usual expository narration, probably droning in the opening paragraph that goes: “Clarisse Starling had joined the FBI as the fulfillment of her life’s dream and as a way of getting out of the poverty of West Virginia and making something of herself.”   Nonononono.

In the beginning of the movie we know nothing of agent Starling but its Dr. Lechter in his fit of insulted vanity, who explains her character to us:

“You’re so ambitious, aren’t you?  You know what you look like to me with your good bag and your cheap shoes?  You look like a rube.   A well scrubbed hustling rube.  With a little taste.  Good nutrition’s given you some length of bone, but you’re not more than one generation from poor white trash.  Are you Agent Starling?  And that accent you’ve tried so desperately to shed, pure West Virginia.  Who’s your father, dear, is he a coal miner?  Does he stink of the lamp?  And oh how quickly the boys found you.  All those tedious, sticky fumblings in the back seats of cars, while you could only dream of getting out, getting anywhere, getting all the way to the FBI.”

Lechter says it so much better than a page of narrative ever could.  When you introduce your protagonist to us see if someone else, maybe the villain, can do the job for you.

The Fake Ally
The fake ally can be the human equivalent of another plotting device sometimes called “the hidden gun”.  It’s an old rule that if you have a loaded gun on a table in the first scene it needs to be fired at somebody before the end of the story or it shouldn’t be there at all.  Very often the gun is fired long after you’ve forgotten it, making it a surprising twist.  A fake ally is clearly someone who seems to be the protagonist’s friend until at a critical moment he suddenly turns on the protagonist, maybe betraying him.  You can’t just do that without preparing the reader for that surprise.  You have to make a creative decision as to whether or not to leave only sneaky  little clues until the crucial moment or out and out inform the reader early on of this person’s true intentions, as Shakespeare does in Othello, with the Fake Ally Iago, one of the nastiest villains in fiction.  Almost as soon as he appears, Iago faces the audience and informs us frankly of his secret hatred of Othello and how he plans to spend the rest of the story dismantling the moor’s marriage and honor – which he does.  If you inform early on rather than keeping the Fake Ally as a surprise you could try making him a sympathetic character by enabling him to struggle internally with the betrayal he knows he must commit soon.  Maybe he will change his mind at the big moment and reveal himself as a Fake Opponent. Looked at from this viewpoint, Darth Vader when regarded in his entire six episode character arc is not actually an opponent but a Fake Opponent, as his internal struggle causes him to choose his son and destroy the emperor as the last heroic act of his life, transforming him in an instant from a cruel enemy to a tragic hero.

To sum all this up, the story is about a Deciding Character, and the character web around them is to provide a unique frame within which we come to know them and see them change in an evolving character arc.  A love story or an erotic story can present two Deciding Characters in interaction with each other, showing that we don’t change alone but in communion with each other and through each other, in which case there are two distinct desire lines.  Yet one should be driving the action a little more than the other.  Just like in our own all too troubled lives.

Next month:  “ENTRY 4 The Interior Elements of Character”