Jonah and plot structure

I got to read the book of Jonah at this year's Holy Saturday services. It's a short book, maybe a five-minute read, even aloud, and it offers some some great insights into story structure.

The book is in four chapters. There's little or no ordinary world, and the story opens with the call to adventure.

God tells Jonah to go into Ninevah, "that great city," and prophesy. Jonah heads for Tarshish (Spain -- the end of the world), because he doesn't want to do it. Now there is a refusal of the call. In fact, in this story, he enters his special world -- the ocean voyage -- trying to avoid the adventure that's set out before him, and Act IIA (chapter 1 of the book) is what happens when he does that. (Note to self: if I ever want to have the character spend the first part of Act II trying to escape from the adventure, it can work.)

Well, that attempt to escape doesn't work, and the sailors end up having to toss Jonah overboard to save their own lives. In chapter 2, he gets swallowed by the "big fish" and has his "belly of the whale" experience.

In hero's journey and screenplay story structure, the "belly of the whale" is not the climax, but rather the midpoint. It's a place in the story where there's a change in context (Larry Brooks) -- a plot twist, the arrival of a new bit of information for the characters or the audience. In the belly of the whale, Jonah accepts his mission of going to Ninevah.

In hero's journey language (see Christopher Vogler's The Writers Journey), it's the Ordeal , the place where the character meets death. It might have a near-death experience, a symbolic death, a death of dreams or of ambitions; the audience may be led to believe the character died. This point in Jonah's story has given the name for this point in the story.

Michael Hauge (Writing Screenplays That Sell and Selling Your Story in 60 Seconds) relates the midpoint to the place where the protagonist loses his "identity," a false self or an incomplete version of the self. In Shrek, for example, Shrek's identity is the bravado that protects his inner vulnerability. At the midpoint Jonah accepts the fact that he is a prophet with a mission and begins actiing like it.

In chapter 3, Jonah goes to Ninevah, "that great city" and persuades the people to repent. The king calls on everybody to fast, including the the cattle, and repent from their wicked ways. Jonah's mission is successful, and he prevents them from being destroyed.

Jonah spends chapter 4 whining because God didn't actually destroy Ninevah (injured pride is the issue, it seems). He sits outside the city and asks to die. God makes a plant grow up to shelter him from the heat, and then the next morning the plant dies. Jonah complains again that he'd rather die than live under such conditions, and God replies that here's Jonah complaining about the death of a plant but not caring about the 120,000 people of Ninevah and (in a concluding line that stands out as both funny and profound) "also much cattle."

So chapter 3 contains the climax (though without the details that would make for suspenseful reading, in a modern sense), and chapter 4 is his return with the boon. Also in chapter 4, Jonah drifts back into his identity one last time, and God corrects him. The story doesn't say anything about his return to his home or what he brought with him, but the inclusion of this story in the Scriptures is itself proof of the boon -- which apparently includes the information that God loves all peoples and "even much cattle."

Now, the story of Jonah comes up literally constantly in the hymnography of the Church. Jonah's song in the belly of the whale is called for at every day's matins, and the hymnography refers incessantly to Jonah's "belly of the whale" experience as a parallel for Christ's death and resurrection.

Rabbit trail: If you want to know where Flannery O'Connor (The Complete Stories and Flannery O'Connor : Collected Works, among others) gets off having such bizarre and unorthodox characters as Christ figures, just take a look at Jonah. But back to the point.

Now, I don't want to go into, right here, how Christ's life is the prototype for the hero's journey, so let me just assert it and go on. But the Scriptures tell a number of hero's journeys. One is the story of mankind; another is the story of Christ himself. But here's the thing. For Christ's story (and maybe for man's story, too, but I'm not finished thinking about this), the death and resurrection are the midpoint, not the climax. The thing is, we don't know the climax. Beyond the indications from Scripture, we have only guesses and speculations about the harrowing of sheol, about breaking down the bars of death, about what Christ meant when he told the myrrhbearer not to touch him because he had not ascended to his father, about what the Ascension actually entailed.

But this isn't about the climax; it's about Jonah and the belly of the whale, and I'm done talking about that.

Word count, April 23

Word count Tuesday, zero, zip, zingo. Bad me!

Word count Wednesday, 1,000, bringing the book total to 14, 400. The added words were all in the same scene where the story went its own way Monday, and now I've "discovered" that my characters are distant relatives of characters in another book I'm working on. This is either a fictionally appropriate and literarily fun thing that will enrich both stories or a complete, dead-end rabbit trail. I think it may be the former; I feel it's likely the latter. I'll fix it later? Or I'll dump it all in disgust?

Words of wisdom

It's 6:45ish here in the land of sun and snow, where you have to ask whether that white stuff on the ground is the current form of spring shower (I blame global warming) or a drift of cherry blossoms -- anyway this would make great weather for my book, but it's fall, and Oregon fall is nothing like this -- but I'm meandering again --

Anyway, to begin again, it's 6:50ish Pacific Daylight Time, and I haven't started my daily word count (it's next up, really), but I have a word of wisdom from Patrick McLean of The Seanachai podcast. He, too, is working on a novel, and he observes that you have two good hours per day; the rest is paperwork.

He's a sparse podcaster -- having another life, which he details in the linked podcast. And if you like, I recommend his "Collections." And A Round on Werner is a story I haven't been able to delete from iTunes, because I listen to it every now and then for a slightly different take on the world.

I'll update with a word count later.

Word count, April 21

Word count as of Monday, April 21 -- 1,000 for the day, and 13,400 for the project. I took Sunday off, and I think a day off once a week will do me good.

It was a hard thousand words, and I almost quit for the day after 500. The story took off on its own, and my protagonist took an action I expected to happen after the halfway mark. I think I'll give it its head for the time being and see where it goes. I can always add more to Act IIA or shuffle the scenes around, if this gut-level impulse turns out to be a rabbit trail.

Word count, April 19

Word count as of Saturday, April 19 -- 1,125 for the day, and 12,300 for the project. I haven't made up my recent slackery, but progress continues.

A police interview gave an opportunity for backstory, but I haven't made nearly the deft use of it that Robert Penn Warren did. Still, as I keep reminding myself, I am exploring the territory; I am exploring the territory.

Weather symbolism entered, a placeholder, I hope, for something better, which I'll fix later.

Word count, April 18

Word count as of Friday, April 18 -- only 650 for the day, but past 11,000 for the project.

Very bad writing, which is still better than no writing. My protagonist crossed the threshold into the special world.

I need to know a lot more about murder prosecution. I've got to do some field trips to the Oregon Supreme Court to see murder trial transcripts and I need to pay a visit to the Office Indigent Defense, who are the state's public defenders.

Word count, progress update

At Christopher Vogler's workshop last weekend, he told about how he strengthened his resolve to finish his book, The Writer's Journey. It helped him, he said, to make the announcement outward -- to tell family and friends that he had decided to complete it -- and to make the announcement inward.

He compared the latter to shouting down a deep well in the center of himself, "I'm going to finish this book." He said that there are segments of the well that are out of alignment -- they are the places where we know why we don't want to, where we see what outcomes we fear, and so we don't necessarily get the message all along the well without some effort.

I've been working on my present project since last September. I've been futzing with the plot, mapping the second act so that I can get through the swamp, and I think I've reached a point where I can start the process of making a road through the journey.

I had written most of the first act -- the Ordinary World -- when I realized I needed to do some reworking, and I haven't been a complete slacker, only a partial one, and arguably going more or less along with it, though I might go a few days or even a week at times before getting back to it.

But I've decided to dive into that well. I've got 10K words written (counting what I've done this week), and if I write a thousand words a day, I should have a solid first draft in less than 90 days. A thousand words a day of first draft takes only about an hour or an hour and a half, because it require me to put my editor brain to sleep in the backseat and just write, write, write.

So I want to post progress reports on my mainstream women's fiction, to help me say accountable to myself and the world.

Monday -- 1,056 words
Tuesday -- 1,034 words
Wednesday -- 968 words
Thursday -- 150 words (I had work and stuff and didn't get to write until I was too tired to write)
Friday -- now has a 2,000-word goal.

A weekend with Christopher Vogler

I've been a fan of Christopher Vogler since, I don't know, the '90s, maybe. The second edition of his classic storytelling handbook, The Writers Journey, has been on my bookshelf for a long time. I had been thinking it was probably time to update, but wasn't sure.

I picked up a copy last week so that I could get it signed when he spoke to the Oregon Writers Colony annual spring conference at the Sylvia Beach Hotel and the Newport Performing Arts Center in Newport last weekend.

It's mostly the same handbook that it's been -- his streamlined approach to Joseph Campbell's popularizing of The Hero's Journey for storytellers of all kinds. He's been a screenplay consultant for Disney Studios and all around Hollywood, but the principles work for novels also.

He's also added sections on catharsis, polarity, how the body signals whether the story is working, and the importance of trusting the path.

I haven't read those sections yet, however, because I got to page xvii of the introduction and ran across a concept that has revolutionized my approach to my own novel in progress. Here's what it is. He describes the story as existing in four movements, and each movement has its own motivation and goal. For example, in Act I, the hero wants to escape his boring life. He crosses the threshold at the beginning of Act II, and now in Act IIA, he wants to become familiar with the new world. In Act IIB, he is trying to escape from the special world, and in Act III, he brings back the knowledge or the gift that he acquired there.

As I lay in bed thinking about how that applied to various plots, I realized I was describing Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

More to the point of my story, it also worked with All the King's Men, which I've been comparing everything to over the past few weeks. Jack Burden's motivation -- and very profoundly inner motivations at that -- go through a metamorphosis that fits that description very well. In fact, divided along that pattern, it works out to a sort of thesis-antithesis-synthesis -- which was exactly the insight I needed to get through the Second Act Swamp.

It's hard to get through to the new appendices in a book when one sentence in the introduction has you mulling the concept for a week. It's like getting a bag of all-day suckers for Halloween.

Anyway Christopher Vogler is an affable, supportive teacher, and he's talking about a return engagement in the summer of 2009.

And for another look at story structure -- same concepts, different terminology -- check out this workshop by Vogler's fellow Hollywood screenwriting consultant Michael Hauge, July 12-13. See you there.

What does my character want?

I don't think I'm the only novice novelist who has trouble coming up with where the character is at the beginning of the story and what she wants before she has the piano dropped on her head at the end of the first act.

My characters have been criticized (with justification) as being too passive. Readers have said that they had a hard time identifying with them -- a classic sign that their motivation is not clear enough.

I was mulling over this little problem today in light of my story in progress, currently called Murderer's Mom. I have a good set of problems for my protagonist (the "murderer's mom" of the title), but I'm having a hard time getting the events to fall into their structural inevitability. If my plot were a box, it would rattle.

And then I thought, how do you know what anybody really wants? Isn't it by what they do? The woman who works in the garden all the time wants, perhaps, to see her botannical design come to fruition, or else she wants the experience of the sun and damp and the smell of dirt on her hands. A man who wants to be a writer, writes. A woman who wants to live in an orderly dwelling might keep her house spotlessly clean, or perhaps spend all her time at the office, where she has control over her environment and the tasks that she needs to do. There are more possible manifestations than goals, but everybody wants something, and everybody's efforts to get it reveal what it is.

But more than that, and here's what gave me some new insights into my character's character, everybody who wants something, who makes choices to bring that something about, also shows it by not doing something else. The woman who works in her garden but doesn't keep her house very clean is saying something about what is and is not important to her. The man who has all the time in the world for his son but none for his daughter is saying something about his relationship with his son and with himself, as well as with his daughter. The man who turns down a well-paying job in order to become a cab driver is saying something about what he considers important and what he doesn't.

So here's my resolution. Every character worksheet (I have a dozen of them, and they are continually morphing) should have a line on it about what the character doesn't do and why.

Another backstory technique -- alternating chapters

Adding to yesterday's thoughts on backstory, Cory Doctorow's podcast novel, Eastern Standard Tribe, uses a different method of revealing backstory.

Like Warren, he starts his novel in medias res and goes backward, after setting the hook, to establish a little about who his character is and why he's there.

A couple of differences, though. Doctorow opens the story at the character's crisis -- or the Inmost Cave in Hero's Journey lingo -- the character's darkest moment. His backstory begins at the beginning of the plot; he even leaves off the Ordinary World and begins with the first plot point, or the Entry into the New World (the traffic accident with the future girlfriend). Eastern Standard Tribe is a lighter novel than All the King's Men, and I'm sure Doctorow would be the first to point out that he's not a U.S. Poet Laureate writing a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. But there's a difference in audience as well, and Doctorow's futuristic tale of a man considering the value of smarts versus happiness has an edgy, post-modern feel to it, without so completely abandoning tiresome forms that he gives up the entire concept of story.

Short version: it works for what he's doing. Like Warren, he anchors his story in time and refers back to the story present as often as he needs to for the audience to remain oriented and involved. Like Warren, he faces the danger of losing audience interest because of the technique he's chosen, but he overcomes the danger though effective use of action, dialogue, scene, and characterization to open the backstory. One other factor working in his favor is the shortness of the work; it's easier for the attention-deprived reader (of whom I am first) to keep coming back, because the novel's very lightness promises that it won't be hard to pick up the thread again. (Contrast my tendency to set aside Umberto Eco novels, even ones I love, for months before picking them up and finishing them.)

Both Warren and Doctorow use an ironic touch that points out the incongruities of life. The humor helps in Warren's case to wash out any tinge of purple and in Doctorow's case to maintain a breezy, engaging style.

It's worth noting that both have first-person narrators, who receive the reader's permission to tell the story any way they please, as long as the writer, in his persona as narrator, keeps it interesting and keeps us unconfused. Both succeed. For the student of backstory, it's a good contrast to explore.

Backstory and the Call to Adventure

Something remarkable about All the King's Men (earlier post on the subject here).

Between the Call to Adventure in disk 4, maybe, of 18 (here's a brief overview of the Hero's Journey and the stages; The Writers Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers is Christopher Vogler's indispensable handbook on using the monomyth in fiction and screenplay writing) and the Entry into the New World, which happens in disk 8 -- that is, between Willie Stark's demand that Jack Burden find something on the upright old judge and Jack Burden's first attempt to do so -- is roughly a quarter of the story.

That's not a measure of the passage of the plot, because Jack says that he begins the assignment the very next day. In the interim, the author gives backstory on all the relevant characters. It's the right place, because the reader has already been hooked into the story by the three disks on the drive to Willie's home in rural Louisiana, 1936, and in fact, the backstory sets the hook deeper. We know now why it's important to Willie (the Huey Long character) and Jack (the first-person protagonist) to destroy the judge. More, it reveals the stakes -- what's the worst that can happen if it all goes wrong? And Jack tells us just at the edge of the threshold, on disk 4, that it all does go wrong; almost everybody is dead by the time the narrator gets around to telling the tale.

But it's hard, as anyone will know who's ever tried to do it or has read with any sympathy an inexpert author's attempt to carry it off, to lay in a quarter of a novel in backstory without losing the way back to the present time. The writer is playing huge risks with the reader's sympathy (for the characters) and attention (many a book has been left on the table when the reader says, "Who? What? I give up"). It's easy for a writer to fall into a kind of, "Sit down and listen up. It's going to be good for you. This is what you need to know so you can get to the good part of the story." And readers (of whom I am first) are inclined to refuse anything that's good for us. If it doesn't taste like chocolate (or at least avocado), I'm off to look for something tastier.

Warren pulls it off by putting it in scene and dialogue and characterization that never feels like "description." I don't think he could have pulled it off without Jack Burden being the narrator. Warren anchors the flashbacks and flashforwards several times by returning to that day in 1936. The day becomes a sort of direction pole set up in the story, so that when we circle back, we know where and when we are. But his technique has the words, "Professional writer at work. Do not try this at home," written all over it.

On the other hand why not try it at home? A striving storyteller doesn't crash a car. He just fills pages with fiction that's too hard for him. But if you want to see an expert driver take a sport SUV through the slopes of the Andes, past volcanoes and roaring rivers and breath-stealing chasms, rent, buy, or check out this book.

Election-season reading

Election season is a lot like Lent. It's a clash of ideals and pragmatics, where all the vices come out on display, partly because of the fierce effort to, at best, keep them at bay and, at worst, to hide them from the view of others. It's a time when people on one side of the aisle are tempted to uncharitable judgments against people on the other side of the aisle -- or, for that matter, their own side of the aisle.

Elections, like Lent, bring out the best and the worst in us. The best -- an honest and frequently sacrificial effort to bring good government to the people, as our Church calls us to pray several times a day:

Have mercy, O Lord, upon our president, and all in civil authority, and save them, together with the armed forces of our country. Give them peace and continual victory over injustice and evil in all places. May they keep Your holy Church secure, that all Your people may live calm and ordered lives in Your sight, in true faith and prayer, with godly deeds.

The worst -- a naked grab for power. The problem is -- and here's the reason so many good people want to hide under their pillows until it all goes away -- it's hard from the inside to see where public service has become a power grab, and it's hard from the outside to see when what appears to be a naked power grab might be a sincere act of public service. And vice versa.

So when I was browsing through my county library and found a copy of Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men on CD, I picked it up because, having lived in Louisiana, I knew a little about Huey Long, because Robert Penn Warren had been a poet laureate of the United States and I was interested in how a poet would handle a novel, and because I had been comparing the populist governor and aspiring president to a certain candidate in the current race.

The reading has been even better than I anticipated. Warren, the poet, catches the rhythm of southern speech without even a tinge of purple. He shows the process of good intentions for public service turned to a naked grab for power. The reader, Michael Emerson, does the voices like someone who has lived all his life in Louisiana.

For a look at the political process that's uplifted just by the art of telling, as well as the reality that very little really changes from cycle to cycle (of course, the stakes are higher than we think; it's just that they're always higher than we think), I highly recommend this one.

UPDATE: OK, I'm stunned. The Michael Emerson who reads the book as if he's never been outside of Louisiana is the same Michael Emerson, born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, who plays the creepy Ben Linus on Lost. I've moved beyond impressed at his acting ability to awestruck.

A Novel Start Seminar: How to Disappear Completely

I think I mentioned before I dropped off the face of the earth that I wanted to think through what makes a good beginning for a novel. And as a case in point, I thought Myke Bartlett's How to Disappear Completely: The Terrible Business of Salmon and Dusk was almost a textbook in hooking the reader and not letting up until the very end.

Now, How to Disappear is a podcast novel, which makes it almost a separate genre -- not quite as different as a film or a complete audio drama, but still an experience of the ear more than the eye. And what Bartlett brings to the genre is considerable -- a British accent, a flair for voices, the perfect music for bumpers and transitions. So it's fun to listen to. But bad audio can ruin a good story more easily than good audio can save a bad story, and How to Disappear is a good story.

Briefly, it's a sort of urban fantasy/noir detective with romance. And it's about parallel worlds -- an arena that has appealed to me ever since I fell in love with Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz as a kid.

So how does Bartlett create a world so engaging that I can't stop listening to the story? That I record on CD and then "read" three times in a row, twice for entertainment and once for technique? The answer is the magic of the basics: characters you care about what happens to in situations that make you wonder how it will all turn out. A flair for detail and surprising situations. It doesn't hurt that his detectives are time travelers and that they seem to wander a territory like Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere.

By the way, when I went looking for the website, I learned that the next in the Kilbey Salmon series, My Chalk Outline, has begun.

Thought for the day

Writing a novel is like climbing stairs carrying a huge armload of laundry -- socks, underwear, sheets and towels, clothes for children and adults -- all the while wearing (among other things) high heels and tiara.

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What's Going On?: The game

A black man and a black woman stand on a street corner in inner but not Downtown Portland. She is talking with animated, but not wild gestures. (This is where her racial background is relevant; blacks tend to use bigger gestures than people of, for example, northern European descent.)

I had the length of the stoplight to ask, Is she angry? At the man she's talking to? What's their relationship? What's his reaction?

By the time I got my last glimpse, I had concluded that she was talking about something that angered her at the time, but now was an entertaining story. She had a residue of anger, but it was not directed at the man she was talking to. She knew the man, but he was a neighbor, a co-worker whom she had happened to run into, not a husband, brother, anything close like that. The man was enjoying the story.

But because I had been reading How to Read a Person Like a Book, I could take a little extra time and ask what I was basing the conclusions on.

First, the relationship. They stood at a 45-degree angle to each other, "open" to others joining the conversation, and their foreheads were not tense. The man had his ear turned attentively to the woman, and he was smiling slightly.

The anger was in the gestures, forceful, chopping motions, not arm-waving. Movements that if she had been angry at the man would have had her poking him in the chest. But she deflected them downward at the last instant. The object of her anger was absent.

Reading body language is for me at the core of people watching, and for a writer it can be an asset in characterization. If the author wants a character to reveal something without saying it, he can say it in movement. It's all part of "show, don't tell," and if, for example, a the writer wants to reveal that a child is afraid of her mother, she can flinch when another woman reaches out to stroke her hair. She can tend to stay to the side and behind adults.

Attraction, revulsion, desire, skepticism, boredom. We're always talking, even when we don't say anything. And we're always reading, if we pay attention, even if we haven't made use of a book to verbalize results.

Just for fun, check out a couple of paintings, Breaking Home Ties and Nighthawks and ask the questions: Who are they? Where are they coming from and where are they going? What is their relationship? How do they feel? And how do you know what you know?

And then at the mall or on the street corner, the game continues, and characters say more than they ever could in words.

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I'm reading a book

More thoughts on my most recent post about entering fictional worlds.

When I -- and probably a lot of people -- am reading a book and not in the story's world, I'm evaluating. It might be grammar, story structure, character, whether the "facts" of the story are believable, whatever. The critical sense is antithetical to the dream state. And when new writers show somebody their story, they sometimes get critiqued on a lot of things that wouldn't be noticed if the reader had been in the story world. And it's not so much that the noted critiques are wrong, but if the new writer were to fix all these little critiques without addressing the world problem, then the next read will bring more of the same level of critiques, often telling the writer to change back the things he just fixed. If the story works, the critiquer wakes from the dream after some block of pages and says, "Oh, that's right. I'm supposed to be critiquing this."

But one reader's dream state is another's crock of mush. Although many of the Da Vinci Code's kajillion readers experienced that dream state, my memory of that book is white pages wrapped by a red cover. Ho hum. My memory of A Suitable Boy is sprawling Indian landscapes, Hindu festivals, the Ganges River, a Mumbay cemetery in the rain. Yes, also words on a page, but clear memories of things I've seen only through those pages.

At the same time, take a writer like Umberto Eco. I love his books. I love his writing. And though I often lose myself in the world, frequently, he kicks me out with a sentence that makes me want to walk around the block and think about how the world is organized. I had to start marking the text of Baudolino with referents to his thoughts about the nature of truth and lies, what's real, and the "reality" of story. Eco reminds me that I'm "reading a book," and I don't mind it. It's part of what I enjoy about him.

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On beginning a novel

I've been thinking a lot lately about stories about crossing over into other worlds. It's a staple of the fantasy genre -- if the character is not born in this alternative universe, he has to get there somehow, whether it's by falling down a rabbit hole, stepping through a magical post in the train station, finding an opening in the back of a wardrobe or an invisible door into the London Underground. In fact, there are too many such stories to mention, and I'd like to try to understand what they mean.

But I think one thing that is true about these doors into elsewhere is that they're a metaphor for the story itself. What every storyteller does, when we do our task, is draw the reader/viewer/listener into this other world -- whether past or future, a locale exotic or mundane, set among the glittering wealthy or the seamy underside. The story reader is in a sort of dream state. He doesn't see what's around him but instead sees Hogwarts or Middle Earth or a space odyssey or Edwardian England, sees them so clearly, in fact, that he remembers them as if they happened to him, as if they are happening to him.

It's why overwhelmed and overworked agents and publishers can tell in a page or two -- or even a sentence or two -- whether they're going to be interested.

The author has to drag the reader, kicking and screaming if necessary, into the story. He does that by creating a world and giving the reader a reason to stay and see what's going to happen next.

The world is created by the texture of sensory details and the incantation of language. The world is the basis, but the question holds a reader in an ill-drawn world better than a well-drawn world with no story.

The question comes from characters -- who want something, need something, face trouble of some kind; and the magic world promises that the answer waits around the next corner. But behind that answer waits an even bigger question, and so on and so on until the questions are answered.

When the dream breaks, when the reader wakes and thinks, "Ah, it's only a dream," and the story, the world, is imperiled. When the reader observes, "Oh, yes. I'm reading a book," it may bring about the end of the unwinding of the story in that person's universe.

Of course readers "know" they're reading a book, and I'm not literally asking them to lose touch with reality (although I've missed an occasional bus stop because I forgot about the world I was supposed to be navigating). But back to the practical implications for the author.

Every word, every detail from the beginning of page 1 should conspire to envelop the reader in the story. The text has to be real, sensory, emotionally evocative. The characters must be there from the beginning, with their fears, their danger, their terrible trouble.

The following are some items of advice I've gleaned from years of unsuccessful noveling. If they can be of help to anyone else, that's great. At worst, they will be a reminder to me of what to look for on the next draft.

Don't start with the character's name. The reader has no reference for it, no emotional content, so it's just squiggles on the page. Let us be curious about the person's name before we get it.

That's why it works so much better to start with a flyover concept: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife” (Pride and Prejudice). "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" (Anna Karenina). "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice" (One Hundred Years of Solitude). Not only is it broadly true -- or at least debatable -- but it hits at the depth of our own experience (OK, most people haven't faced a firing squad or remembered the day we discovered ice, but we can identify with our childhood memories coming back to us at the hour of our death -- a nice twofer by Marquez). Not everybody can write one of the greatest sentences in literary history, but we all can aim high.

Marquez's twofer above captures a character in trouble. It's been a while since I read One Hundred Years of Solitude, but I don't thing he got back to Col. Aureliano Buendia's facing the firing squad for another hundred or more pages. I didn't care. I was hooked into the world that I can still see when I remember it.

The character needs a goal or a problem or a goal and then a problem or a problem added to a goal complicated by another problem. If everything's OK, why do you need me along? the reader thinks, and goes back to the television -- or real life.

Not an exhaustive list, but it's all I know right now. Maybe I'll get back to it later, when I learn some more.

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A garden of music

One of my favorite places in the world is the Portland Chinese Garden. It's a block surrounded by some of the busiest streets in Portland. On one side is an office building; on another a single-room-occupancy hotel; just a couple of blocks away are the downtown post office and the train station. And in this garden is a paradise -- a place of calm quiet, still water, an ever-changing landscape of growing, blooming, dying, and rebirthing plants, with a tea house where hours can pass without my ever noticing them.

On a day last week, we heard jazz pianist Randy Porter play there. There were maybe a hundred or more people sitting in chairs around the garden and the music drifted out across the water, where the locuses bloomed huge and pink on tall stems. The garden seemed small for the first time, with the office building across the street forming a backdrop to the "Flowers Bathing in Spring Rain" pavillion (fortunately, August in Portland is not a time of spring rain). My husband and I remembered long walks in our former neighborhood in Lake Oswego, when we would walk by a house on our street and hear astonishingly beautiful piano music being played, which we later learned (after we moved) actually was Randy Porter.

So it was a evening of great music in my favorite garden, with a chance to round out our Porter collection and catch up on the old neighborhood with Randy's wife, who ran the CD sales table.

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A speculation on Transfiguration (reprise)

In honor of tomorrow's Feast, I've dug out a 2005 speculation on the Transfiguration. It starts with a metaphor and ends with "What if" and meanders through time, literature, heaven and earth, and the Communion of the Saints to arrive at the meeting of Christ, Moses and Elijah on Mount Tabor. It's quite long, and if it's not comprehensible, I'll give you your money back. Here goes.

The Kingdom of Heaven is like a man reading a book.

Time in the book marches according to its own inexorable rhythm, and the reader may experience it sequentially, page by page, in his imagination coming to the events one by one as the characters do. But when he closes the book, all of the book time is contained between the two covers. The reader exists on the same plane as the Author of the book, but the reader is not the author, and the author knows the book and the characters and the backstory and the motivations in ways that the reader can only begin to appreciate.

Within the book, the characters experience their own day-to-day reality. In post-modern novels, characters may speculate about the author, and even about readers, but even in those explorations of the boundary between the book world and the reader's world, the protagonist can never turn and look the reader in the eye.

That's the book as we know it, in our feeble and childish attempts to imitate the work of our own Author.

The cosmos is an unimaginably enormous book, and time exists within the book, from the big bang to black holes. (I almost said the "universe is an unimaginably enormous book," but I changed it to "the cosmos," because I think the universe is the raw material, and the cosmos is the story, but that's a diversion.)

Our reality, as characters, is as limited and insubstantial as is the reality of David Copperfield compared to the living, breathing, suffering, learning human being reading about him. The difference is that, unlike Dickens, our Author was able to give us free will and complexity far beyond what writers can give their characters (although novelists will insist that their characters frequently surprise them), and our Author was able to make the boundary between the reader and the book crossable.

The Bible tells many stories of those boundary crossings. Enoch, Moses and Elijah are among those of the Old Testament who disappeared from the earth after a lifetime of "walking with God." They left the book.

Other prophets received communication from God, messages from the Author to His characters, telling them what was required to survive the book. What it takes, basically, is that we act in the knowledge that the book is not all there is. "Character is what you do when nobody's looking," goes the old saw; but the reader knows the protagonist's agonizing decision, and it matters whether the protagonist chooses right or wrong. Someone is always watching.

And then ("then" in book time), the Author did an extraordinary thing. He became subject to the rules of his own book. Not as king and commander -- "Hmm, I think I'll write in a couple of legions of angels to get me out of this mess" -- but subject to the conditions his characters face. In the Garden of Gesthemene, we see a divine crisis and what a lovely irony, what a dazzling nested narrative that 2,000 years later (in book time) we "watch" Christ's agony in the garden, preserved in a book. Another rabbit trail. I'll go on.

The Communion of the Saints, the "great cloud of witnesses," is made up of those who have survived the book -- past, present and future in book time. I don't know how or even if time operates outside the book, but I'm quite sure that it's not the same. They pray for us, within the book, because they experience our agonizing crises with us. We pray for them -- that is for those within the book -- because even though we are within the book, we understand that there is a reality outside the book, and so we can agonize in the crisis of our grandparents 80 years ago. And of course, the Author generates the book, and the characters experience it, but don't know how many drafts it has gone through -- or is going through now -- to arrive at the proper form.

OK, I think I've arrived at the Feast of Transfiguration. The story is that Jesus took his disciples Peter, James and John up Mount Tabor, where they saw him clothed in light, and they saw Elijah and Moses talking with him. Luke says they were talking about his death, "which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem."

Now at the vespers for the Feast of Transfiguration, there are three appointed Old Testament readings: Exodus 24:12-18; Exodus 33:11-23, 34:4-6, 8; and 1 Kings 19:3-9, 11-13, 15-16. They are accounts of Moses' and Elijah's face-to-face encounters with God. In the first reading, God calls Moses to Mount Sinai to receive the Tablets of the Law. There's a huge brightness on the mountain, like a devouring fire, and Moses is in the midst of it. In the second reading, Moses asks to see God's face, and God hides him in the cleft of a rock and shows him his back, because no one can see God's face and live. In the third reading, Elijah goes to Mount Horeb, and there's a wind and an earthquake and a fire and a still small voice, and the Lord was in the still, small voice.

At last I'm arriving at my speculation: What if the disciples were witnessing the conversations between God and Moses and between God and Elijah that were recorded in the Old Testament. What if, in both of those events, the prophets went outside time, outside the book and met Christ, who had also crossed the boundary of the book.

The Lord was about to lead the Israelites into their new land, and Moses wonders if they should go on. It was a time of crisis. God responds by saying "I will make all My goodness pass before thee."

Elijah has just destroyed the prophets of Baal, and Jezebel has him in the crosshairs. He wonders if he should go on. We're not told what the still, small voice said, but it was enough to strengthen Elijah.

Luke says they talked about Christ's death that "he was to accomplish," which means they talked about it not as a defeat but as a victory. What better way to encourage the faint-hearted prophets than to show them how their struggle fits into the grand scale of things?

It could have happened that way. It's certainly recorded that God breached the barrier between the cosmos and the greater world beyond the book. So what if the accounts could be three views of the same encounter?

What if?

When genres collide

I know it's been done from science fiction to western (as in the television series Firefly and Molly Gloss's The Dazzle of Day). But Steve Ely's introduction to "Cloud Dragon Skies" talked about how often science fiction is about meeting the unknown, which is also the focus of all stories of exploration, colonization and making a life far from the home civilization, which also describes westerns.

Given that backdrop, when I listened to this 1955 podcast of an episode from the western, Fort Laramie, from Vintage Radio, I thought, just for fun, I would pretend I was listening to science fiction. For a long time, I've liked science fiction and not much liked westerns. Now, I think maybe there's no difference. Past, future, this world, that planet, Native Americans, Native Martians, colonists living in fear and danger from the others and from their own people, good and bad guys on both sides. Try it on the next western you see -- whether this one or some other. I'd be interested in your thoughts.

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