Sometimes a Cigar is Just a Cigar…Even in Fiction
In my last post I mentioned theatre, which got me thinking about something over the last few days.
As an actor, I’ve worked with directors and acting coaches who insist that everything one does on stage must be motivated. Motivated is a huge concept in acting. So huge in fact it’s often misapplied: seen as the philosopher’s stone, by which every moment on stage is justified.
Motivation is certainly important, but as as Freud is alleged to have said once, “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” In other words, if you accept the attribution, Freud is saying, “even I sometimes see something that doesn’t represent genitalia, and you know how fond I am genitalia symbolism!”
All right, I oversimplified that, and I also was a bit of a smart ass in doing so. Yet there is an underlying truth in it; some things just happen, some objects just exist, and so on. There doesn’t have to be an intrinsic, hidden meaning behind everything.
Take my acting example. If I am portraying a character giving a speech while sitting at a table, I may at some point gesticulate by wiping my hand across that table at some point. The type of director’s I mentioned at the start of this post would want to know why I decided to do that. Answering that it was simply a random gesture that came forth organically from the character I am creating is not acceptable to such people. If I cannot explain why i glided my hand to the right instead of the left, or what it was about the particular word I was saying at the exact moment I made the gesture, I haven’t justified the movement at all.
In short, I find this approach to be, well, bogus. While theater is not a hyper-realistic recreation of everyday life, we should be able to recognize, both as actor and as audience, a degree of normalcy in most characters and plays. This means that people, going throughout the course of their day, do not always have a direct, discernible motivation for every action they take. Sometimes we rap our fingers on a table, click our teeth, or play with a rubber band while we’re thinking. Each of these actions can of course be motivated by a very specific desire or emotion or characterization, but sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Life, in other words, is filled with unmotivated actions and moments. People are alive, and their brains generally go a million miles a minutes. Running our fingers along the edge of a table, or leaning back in our chairs while taking is often just a by-product of complex, self-aware, conscious lifeforms going about their day.
I have the same view as an author of fiction.
Like theatre, fiction cannot be expected to be an exact realistic transcription of how humans in any situation behave in life. Events move faster in fiction. Pages of things like , “Um, well, ya know, ahh” are excised from our dialogue in fiction, even though most people will fall back on these semi-conscious verbal crutches many times through a day. When character’s do talk, it might be a highly stylized literary type of speech, depending on what you’re writing.
Fiction, even realistic fiction, is not on the exact same plane as actual life. Yet, in most cases that are not experimental or absurdist in nature, fiction should be a reasonable facsimile of life in the real world. This means that sometimes our characters, just to seem alive, just tap their fingers on tables, kick a piece of trash across the road while walking, and in general do the little, unmotivated things I mentioned before.
“Every single letter, word, phrase and sentence must matter in your fiction,” we’re told. “If your story can be told without even the slightest mention of something, get rid of that something. Kill your darlings!”
Yes, all right, I get your meta-point; don’t waste words or your reader’s time. Fair enough. But I can’t off the top of my head think of any novel that would have collapsed without its mention of someone blowing the steam off of their tea in one moment, or a description a a tiny bird that flies by, never to be seen or mentioned again in the rest of the pages. Yet such moments abound in much fiction. Why? I don’t want to speak for other authors, but my guess is that they don’t exist because the structural integrity of their entire manuscript depends on mentioning that “my father whistled as he painted.” My guess is that such moments exist because they give depth, and make scenes more natural.
People just do…stuff. Yes, kill your darlings to some extent, because you can’t have a whole chapter describing how grandma took her coffee. (Though people write that way, anyway.) But not every little thing that doesn’t reveal character or move the plot forward is extraneous, though that’s often the sage wisdom we find on writer pages. It’s important to me that people view the characters in most of my fiction as people, who do “people things,” and that is the reason they lean against the telephone pole while they explain something, or crumple a soon-to-be-forgotten napkin in such a manner. It’s life. The little things that come about as a result of being what humans are. That to me is enough of a reason to include those small touches, in proportion to the things that do move the plot of reveal character.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Whether Freud really said it, or whether it applied to genitalia doesn’t matter. What matters is that we remember to apply this to our writing, even as we set out to kill all those darlings.
Why a Community Theater?
Someone once asked me why I set my upcoming novel, Flowers of Dionysus in a community theater. I began to tell them several of the things I have mentioned here on the blog and in other venues; I wanted to explore what the arts in general and theater in particular can do for audiences and people in the show alike. I want to share the magic that can descend on a dedicated group of artists, resulting in a presentation that is greater than the sum of its parts. I wanted people to know how heartbreaking it can all be, as well.
I didn’t get that far with this person, though. They clarified their question. They wanted to know why I set the novel in a community or amateur theater. Why not put it on Broadway, or in a fictionalized professional company? Wouldn’t that have been more interesting or exciting?
Not necessarily, I told them.
To begin with, yes, “write what you know,” when taken literally means I have a leg to stand on when it comes to community theater, as I have been in it many times over years. Yet even if I had been in mostly professional theater in my life, I would have set my novel in the Little Dionysus Playhouse, the theater of my creation.
Wonderful things can happen on all levels of theater, from a tiny black box tucked away in a small college, to the Kennedy Center in D.C. When the combination of passion, dedication, talent and audience connection is present, everyone is exhilarated, on, off and behind the stage.
Yet, if I may say so myself, there is a certain element present in volunteer, community or amateur theater that you don’t find in professional or unionized productions with big budgets. It’s the element of personal choice to participate.
Of course professional actors choose their projects much of the time. But if you are a true professional actor, feeding yourself by way of performing regular in shows, you are probably going to be open to taking jobs that in a perfect world you may decline. Maybe you aren’t thrilled with the idea of appearing for two nights only in that experimental piece about gravy going up at the converted subway station. But, like anyone else, you have a job to do, it won’t kill you, and you have a car payment coming up. This will work until the next chance to be in something more in line with your particular tastes comes along.
On the community level, everyone is choose to be there on the day, the week, the eight weeks of your average rehearsal schedule. This doesn’t make them lesser actors or lesser techies by default, but it does mean they have more freedom of movement. They may audition for a role, but they have the luxury of choosing when and for what they wish to try out. Or they can choose not to be in anything at all for two years. By calculating their free time, and considering the other personal desires and requirements their life places on them, volunteer/community actors bring a whole different set of considerations to the table. All actors can be artists, but community actors can afford not to be as needed, and come back to it when their passion is at high tide. If paying your rent depends on your performing in something regularly, that’s not the case.
That free will to mix the creation of art into the other components and priorities of one’s life for the selected period of time provides for some interesting character and plot possibilities in fiction. That scenario provides a cornucopia of potential motivations for a character to be in a community production. The story I wanted to tell in Flowers of Dionysus worked much better with this type of commitment to the arts. How and why does each character come to be a part of the production depicted in the novel? I enjoyed exploring that.
Plus, having it be on the community level gave me, the author, a bit more freedom as well. There are things my characters could get away with as volunteer actors that professional actors could not without being fired. I wanted the freedom to delve into eccentricities and attitudes (not all of them positive) within theatre in a more open manner than setting the story in a professional company would have allowed. The considerations and boundaries are so different.
Also, though I’m reluctant to use the word “suspense,” there is more of it when setting a story in a community theatre. Things are a bit more fragile in an amateur production. On Broadway, if they guy playing Javert comes down with the flu, mechanics are in place to replace him, and the show continues without major incident. In community productions it can be a scramble when the third torchbearer with three lines gets the flu the night before opening. Maybe not the stuff of thrillers, but I like artistry mixed with a little bit of fear and finger crossing at times.
I did not set the novel in a community theatre because I think community actors are lesser artists than professionals. No because I think they are greater by default. The often ignored truth is that you will find terrible professional actors and geniuses in community theatre. You artistry and craft is not determined by how much or if you get paid to do it. Your love for what you do, and a desire to move people when doing it determines such things. I wanted that truth at the center of this particular story, without having to navigate the unique challenges of a professional theater setting.
“Farewell” to My Characters?
I’ve been in many stage plays over the years. Some were good, some were bad. Yet in most cases, there’s an image I associate with the ending of such productions.
In most cases, on my level of theater, the actors help to tear down the set and clean up the venue after the last performance of a show. Then, about nine times out of ten there is cast party to celebrate the show. Unfortunately this is usually on a Sunday evening, and for most that is just not a optimum party time. Full attendance at this cast party is rare, because people need to get home and get ready for whatever their Monday is. For those that do come, there is always the hurried, awkward farewell to everyone when someone leaves. Eight weeks together on most night with such people getting ready to do a show to the best of your ability. (If you’re with a cast that gives a damn, that is.) Ups, downs, success, failures, meals, arguments, confusion, chaos and all such things shared in usually close quarters. Then, a burger and a piece of cake at someone’s house, and bingo, it’s all over. You’ll see most of those people again, but it will never be the exact same chemistry as it was for the production you just closed.
There’s a bit of a hole there, as you might imagine.
But the “last goodbye” I bid when a show closes is not to the cast or crew. It’s to the character I played. It’s not a complex thing. It almost always happens on my way home after the cast party. My drive home from the cast party is what I consider the last “official” action of a production I’m in, since when I left home that morning, the show was still on. And during this drive I often have an image in my head of the character I played in the show standing on the stage alone, and the vanishing, or fading away back into my imagination; their job complete. That’s when a production ends for me.
Sometimes this fading is sad. Sometimes it’s closer to neutral. And yes, a few times, I’ve been relieved when the character waves or nods goodbye to me and is on his way. Yet whatever I felt about the character or the show, that moment represents a “period” at the end of the sentence. I may play that character again in the future, (though this has not happen in my career yet) but it will not be the same. I will have changed, the cast mates will have changed and so on. A different version of the character will bid me goodbye after the show is over. That’s just the way it is.
Now, as the release of my novel, Flowers of Dionysus approaches, I have been wondering what saying goodbye to my characters will be like in this context, for surely it will not be the same as it is when I part with a character I played on stage.
It’s different for a novel than with short stories. At least so far it has been. In short stories, I can appreciate and like the characters I create, no doubt. But for me at least, my short fiction tends to be about the scenario and how characters react to it. We learn what we need to learn, but a short story is a passing glance from a slow moving or temporarily stopped train. The novel is being on that train. And I have been on this train fro several years now.
And of course maybe future novels will not feel like this to me upon their completion. I probably cannot take this long from now on to finish a novel as I did for this one. Still, there is a greater potential investment in characters in novels one writes than in short fiction.
But back to the departure of characters.
First off, I feel that right now in regards to the novel, I’m about to get in the car and drive home from the cast party. Though all edits are done, and the formatting for e-publishing is as good as complete and a cover is selected and the date is known, I still consider myself officially “writing” the novel in a way. The characters are in a sense still under my control, despite the fact that there will be no further major editing of the manuscript. (Nor minor edits, if I can help it.) Yet, until I push the button that makes the novel available for purchase, the characters feel like they are in my sphere or influence in a spiritual, if not literal sense.
The more I think of it, the more it may be the opposite of what I experience at the end of a play. In that case, as I said, everything is over, and the character goes away in a sense. But with a novel, one could argue that the characters are just about to exist fully for the first time! For when my novel is published, that will be that. I will remain the creator, but from then on out, the characters will belong to the reader. Whether 10 or 10,000 people eventually read my novel, those I have written into the novel, Matt, Centauri, Tanya and so on will spread through the imaginations of my readers like food coloring in a cup of warm water; they will swirl and sink and float and dance in endless unpredictable patterns within the minds and hearts of those that read about them. Their pasts, futures, clothing, the way they move about will differ depending on who is envisioning them. As an author I have described a good portion of what they are about, but I can never cover every moment and every nuance. My readers will fill that in.
So, when that happens, my job as author and creator is concluded. But unlike when my job as an actor in a play has concluded, the characters I created will only just begin their journeys: their many journeys.
I suppose in a sense the characters in the novel are packing their metaphorical bags these days, as they prepare to exist outside the imagination and drafts and files and muses of their author. They bustle about like a group on the final day the hostel is open, gathering stuff, looking for their hairbrush, making calls and getting ready to go. And I run the hostel.
Each of the characters are probably too busy to give me the full fledged, dramatic exit that the characters I play on stage have time to give me on my ride home from the cast party. The novel characters have a lot to prepare for after all…splitting into so many imagined versions of themselves and all, waiting to take up residence in the hearts and minds of readers. They may cast me a glance, or a smile or a wave in a quick moment though. Besides, like I said, they are not vanishing. A novel is forever in a way a play cannot be.
But it’s cool. Both they know and I know I am the author. There’s a mutual respect and gratitude there, even as they go out into the world. I’m content with that, I think. Any author should be, I dare say.
Memorial Day (Repost)
On this solemn day, i wanted to simply repost what I said last Memorial Day here on the blog. I haven’t seen quite as much “Barbecue Shaming” to coin a phrase this year as I have in years past. Nevertheless, I think it’s important to keep in mind the relative innocence of hosting cookouts and barbecues on a day like this. So, enjoy this post from last year. –Ty
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“I find myself each year resenting the reminders that are all over the internet that Memorial Day is “not National Barbecue Day”.
It’s condescending. I don’t need reminded of what today is.
I’m opposed to the mutually exclusive tone of those reminders. Are we incapable of having a barbecue and respecting the fallen at the same time? A day off is a rare thing for some people, so why can’t they enjoy it? Are we expected to fast and sit in a dark room all day because it is Memorial Day? Or on that day do we opt to partake in the pleasures and rights for which so many died in service to this country? Maybe people barbecue on this day off in tribute to those who will never again go to a barbecue and enjoy life. And even if that isn’t their direct motivation for firing up the grill on Memorial Day, I choose to believe most of the fallen would not be offended that someone opted to eat outside today and maybe even enjoy themselves.
Having a barbecue on Memorial Day is not dancing on somebody’s grave, yet that’s the impression some of the memes give off.
Speaking of graves, I’m offended at how often the “Just in case you forgot…” messages are accompanied by some picture, usually of a woman, draped over a coffin or a tombstone, or laying on top of a grave with a blanket. I can’t say nobody has ever done this, as people handle grief in their own way. But to begin with, how verifiable are most of those images? Do we know it really is somebody’s widow and that there’s anybody in that coffin? Furthermore does it matter? If it’s not authentic, it’s pretty screwed up to stage something like that in order to make some quick point. And it’s even worse if the photos are authentic. Who the hell is taking that picture, and making it available to the world? Who with a camera says, “I want to make sure I get a shot of this.”
But far worse than taking the picture is using it. Posting pictures of wailing widows and devastated children, authentic or not, and captioning them with a mini-sermon about having a barbecue is more offensive to me, and certainly more exploitative of the day than any picnic can be. Are we honoring the dead with those memes, or are we seeking acknowledgment of our own “honor” by sensationalizing on the backs of such images?
I do not need to be shocked into understanding Memorial Day. Nobody needs to, in fact. Those who are going to honor Memorial Day are going to even in the midst of a barbecue, and those who are not will not be convinced to change their minds because of some meme.
People are free to honor the fallen and respect this day in whatever way they choose. I myself choose the subtle, introspective route. And while I take that route I may be at a fun event or have a burger, it’s true. You or others may opt to be more quiet and somber all day long. It’s all acceptable. But let’s cool it with the judging of others with these framed guilt trips that we can fire off at the push of a button to our social media connections.
As a writer, I’m well aware of some of the things for which many people have died in service to the Constitution. Every word I write is a testament to that understanding, even if it isn’t on the forefront of my mind at any given moment. It’s a sacred right, to be allowed such self-expression as I partake in each day; it is a right that would not exist if not for the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of lives over the years. I know it without the memes. I knew it before memes existed.
I also know of loss, as my father died when I was seven. He wasn’t in the service, but beyond a certain point, died is died, and I’m all too aware each day of what that can do to a family. Your annual retweet on the last Monday in May won’t reinforce that, believe me. It’s always there.
So, here’s to Memorial Day. Enjoy it with prayer or with beer and burgers. Or of course both at the same time if you like. Both are part of living in a free nation. Part of being alive in a free nation. And we, and the nation are alive because a lot of people are dead today.
See? I do know.”
(Originally appeared here.)
One Month Until Launch
To announce the one-month countdown to the launch of my novel, Flowers of Dionysus on June 21st, I’d like to share with you the cover I’ll be using for the e-book version.
This charming cover was designed and produced by my friend and fellow author/self publisher, J. Lea Lopez. She also helped out with line editing for the final draft, as well as the cover of my short story collection. Thank You For Ten. Much thanks goes out to her. Do visit her pages, and read her stuff, and so on.
I have a few small techie things to take care with the novel, but for the most part, this is the last big step before the launch, showing you this cover. With this reveal, it all becomes rather “official” for lack of a better term. I’ve talked about the writing, editing, theme, characters and overall journey I’ve taken with this novel over the years. I’ll probably post some interesting lines from it on Twitter over the next four weeks, but for the most part there isn’t much else to share leading up to things. The die is cast now, and in some ways it’s weird, and in other ways a relief.
Theatre to me, even when it has not been of great quality has almost always had a certain magic to it. Just read my other blog to learn more about that. I wrote this story, about passionate, sometimes silly people doing their best to create theatre because I wanted to explore and share that magic. I wanted those who have been in theatre to shake their head in recognition, and those who never have to experience some element of what theatre can open up in our worlds and in our hearts, especially when nobody is paid to do it. This novel, which is in many ways a fantasy nonetheless is deeply grounded in a true sense deep within me, or what the performing arts, and art in general can do for people and for the world. The supernatural elements may be somewhat more visible within my novel than in real life, but I assure you such things do in fact exist, in some form or another, within the actual world of the theatre. I hope if you are reading this post, you will take part in what I hope is a fun journey into such a world but buying and reading Flowers of Dionysus.
Ty Unglebower 