by Jean Roberta

“You’re a writer. You’ll write about this some day. The more experience you get, the more you have to write about.”

This is the consoling remark I get from someone close to me every time I fall into a hole in the road. One of the worst aspects of disappointment, of course, is that it is always at least partly one’s own fault. I won’t accept the diagnosis that I was completely responsible for the trainwreck of my first marriage (there were two people in that relationship), but in hindsight, I could see numerous warning signs that I ignored at the time because I didn’t want to see them.

At the time this post appears on the Erotic Readers and Writers blog, I am supposed to be in New Orleans, attending the annual Saints and Sinners literary conference for gay/lesbian/bi/trans/queer/questioning/not-entirely-straight writers. The last time I went to S&S was in 2007, shortly after Hurricane Katrina. In 2013, I intended to bring my female spouse along to show her the sights, and to stay in the same picturesque inn in the French Quarter where I stayed last time, which has been renovated since then. (I was afraid of that. In 2007, I assumed the hole in the bathroom wall was part of what kept the price low. I didn’t mind, since the plumbing, the TV, and the air conditioning all worked.)

For several weeks, I planned our trip. I made up a budget and printed out the conference program with my name on it to bring to the office of the Dean of Arts in the university where I teach, so I could get pre-approval for reimbursement of my expenses after my return. (I would have to submit receipts.) Spouse got us a good deal on air fare through a site named The Flight Hub.

Then I thought about checking my Canadian passport. It was expired. (At one time, I also had a U.S. passport which I allowed to lapse for reasons I won’t go into here.) I phoned several Canadian and U.S. government agencies, including Homeland Security in the U.S. As though this body had been expecting my call, I was forwarded to a recorded message that said that Canadian citizens with expired passports are not allowed on U.S. soil. Crossing the “undefended border” was never like this before.

I was relieved to find out that I could (theoretically) get an “emergency passport” in less than a day. On the day we were to board a plane, I told Spouse I had to go to the passport office. She tried to explain that we didn’t have time for that since we had a plane to catch. I pointed out that I would have to miss that plane, but she could travel without me. (Her Canadian passport is up to date.) She said no.

At the passport office, I was aghast at how much ID I had to provide besides my expired passport. Since I had a Canadian passport in my hands, I argued, why couldn’t I just get it renewed like a library card? Apparently this is not how bureaucracy works. When the official who was “helping” me learned that I was a naturalized Canadian citizen (born in the U.S.A. – oh the irony), I was told to provide the certificate (a small laminated card) that was given to me when I got my Canadian citizenship in 1974. “Surely you jest,” I said. “I’m not even sure where that is.”

“You have to show it to us,” said the official. Spouse and I rushed home in a car with our suitcases in the back seat. By a miracle, I found that card in the same bureau drawer where I kept my expired passport. We rushed back to the passport office.

Then I was told that I had to provide documentation to support my request for an emergency passport. I would have to reschedule our flights, since the flight I had just missed no longer counted. I rushed home and phoned The Flight Hub. Someone there told me that Spouse and I were “no shows” for our original flight, therefore we would have to start over, and pay for new flights. I explained my situation. I was told to phone the airline (United), which I did. A helpful woman there actually found new flights for us, but then she said unfortunately, I would have to call The Flight Hub to get the original price. There I spoke to the evening supervisor, Natasha as I’ll call her (with an accent from somewhere in eastern Europe). Natasha seemed able to work miracles. She said she would arrange for our new flights at no extra charge.

Natasha put me on hold while she contacted United, where she was put on hold. At some point, Natasha was so concerned about me that she asked me if I was hearing music on my end of the phone line. I said yes, I’m hearing old Broadway show tunes from the 1940s. She seemed glad, and asked me to be patient and not hang up. I hung on.

Natasha sounded delighted when she told me that everything was arranged: Spouse and I had new flights. She sent the information to Spouse’s email. Spouse was out with her son, shopping for a car. With Natasha on the line, I called Spouse on her cell phone to ask for the new password for her email addy. She gave it to me.

I found the email with our flight information, thanked Natasha, printed out the itinerary, then called a taxi to rush me to the passport office. While I waited, I called the taxi office again and was told I would just have to wait. I wondered if I could get to the office faster on foot, but realized that I would then miss the taxi. At length, I got to the passport office just in time to find the door locked. “No!” I said to a woman who was waiting on a chair in the hallway.

“There are people inside,” she said. “Knock on the door and they might let you in.”

I knocked, then knocked again. The door was opened by a grey-haired woman in a uniform who looked like a retired military officer. (These are often employed as civil servants in Canada.) “The office is closed,” she said.

While Officer No-Go kept trying to close the door, I held it open so I could explain my situation. “You’ll have to come back in the morning,” she said. My new flight was to leave at 6:50 a.m., before regular business hours.

Spouse and her son picked me up. Son was exhilarated because he had just signed a lease for his first car. I was distracted.

At home, I phoned every Canadian government phone number that might possibly have a live person on the other end. No luck.

Spouse and I missed our rescheduled flight. Bob (as I’ll call him), the day supervisor from Flight Hub, phoned to ask why we were “no shows” for the second time. (Note that this was the same guy who originally told me I would have to start over and pay for new flights.) I explained. This time, Bob sounded sympathetic. I told him I was giving up. I didn’t want to repeat the process of the day before.

In that case, said Bob, Spouse and I could get reimbursement from our travel insurance. I told him I had spoken to them already, and we were not covered for this type of emergency (expired passport). Bob assured me that I only had to tell the folks at the Royal Bank of Canada (providers of travel insurance) that I had to cancel our flights for “personal reasons” not involving my “passport story.” I would have to provide documentation. I didn’t see any point in arguing with Bob.

While I was speaking to him, someone from the passport office phoned me to say that I could have my emergency passport in an hour to ninety minutes, but only if I had proof of an upcoming flight.

I said I no longer had an emergency. I had missed the conference, and I would wait the usual two weeks for a passport.

I sent email messages to everyone who needed to know that I would not be attending Saints and Sinners this year.

So now you know why I am not posting this from New Orleans. Today I co-signed for Stepson’s new car while he reminded me several times that I should have renewed my passport weeks ago. (“Smug” could be defined as the attitude of a grown child who has a reason to lecture a parent about responsibility.)

Stepson also reminded me that I could write about all this. All life experience can be considered a blessing for a writer. Be that as it may, next time I need to rush to a government office or an airport, I expect Stepson to give me a ride.
—————————-

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