On Writing

by Randy Koch

The Arrangement

“Fifteen,” LuAnn said from the front step of The Rack, a dim 3.2 joint where high schoolers hung out to smoke and shoot eight ball. “But just for you guys.” She leered at the five junior high boys standing on the sidewalk in front of her and then looked over their heads at the cars cruising Main Street . Friday night and with the Berton Theater closed since last November, cheap entertainment was scarce. “Don't even think about a freebie for your pimply little buddies out back either. No goddam two-for-ones. This ain't Tuesday at your mommas' grocery.”

The boys looked at her—the black bangs hanging in her eyes, dark with mascara; beside her nose the brownish-red mole that looked like a drop of maple stain on white pine; the long fingernails on her left hand as she brought the cigarette to her mouth. She was seventeen, would be a senior at Blue Earth High when school started again in the fall, but she looked older. When she took the cigarette from her lips, the boys stood mesmerized by the smoke curling like smooth, grayish-white water inside her mouth.

She blew it out in a stream over their heads. “Well?” she said. “Shit or get off the pot. I got things to do.” She dropped the half-smoked cigarette on the cement and twisted it out with the toe of her sandal.

Dean, the tallest of the five boys, turned to the others as they huddled in a small circle. He slid his wallet from his back pocket. “Three apiece,” he said and pulled out some bills. “Everybody in.”

Mark, a stocky eighth grader with ears that stuck out, pulled a dollar from one front pocket and some change from the other. He counted out the coins, put them with the bill, stole a look between the other boys at LuAnn, and handed the money to Dean. “Here,” he said, his voice cracking. “I'm in.”

“Me, too.” Lyle snickered, pushed the money at Dean, and jabbed the scrawny kid next to him in the ribs with his elbow. “C'mon, dork. What're you waiting for? You gonna chicken out on us?” He clucked like a banty hen.

John, wearing lace-up farm boots and a plaid, short-sleeve shirt, glared at Lyle. “Shut up,” he said. “Don't rush me.” He held three ones in front of him and looked up at Dean. “What if we get caught? What if she—”

“Geez, we won't get caught,” Lyle hissed. “And even if we did, so what?” He ripped the money out of John's fingers and handed it to Dean. “Dumb ass,” he sneered.

Between John and Dean stood Gerald, who glanced over his shoulder at LuAnn, then back at Lyle, and finally up at Dean. Without a word, he handed the money over, pushed his hands in his back pockets, and watched the other boys.

Dean turned back to LuAnn. “Okay, we got it,” he said and held up the money.

“Finally,” she said and reached for it.

“Nope.” Dean pulled it back. “After.”

“You little shits,” she hissed. She turned and pushed open the door to The Rack.

“Okay, wait.” Dean fingered the money. “Five before and the rest after.” He held out five ones.” Fine,” she said. “But no touch. Or else .”

“Or else what?” Dean said.

Slowly, LuAnn reached toward the money but instead gently, and with a smile, took his wrist, turned his hand over, and drew the bills out with her other hand. She set her nails against the soft flesh on the inside of his wrist. “Or else,” she said and pushed her nails into his skin.

Dean cringed. “Cripe,” he said, his eyes suddenly wide. He yanked his arm out of her grip and looked at his wrist. Blood seeped out of the three nail marks.

She laughed. “Ten minutes. In the alley behind Sanger's.” She turned and went inside.

Mr. Klein set the paper down on the desk. He looked at the twelve students sitting in a circle around him and tried to gauge their reaction.

Some continued to stare at the last page; others flipped back to the two previous pages as if trying to figure something out.

“In medias res,” he said. “Which means?” He waited for an answer.

Carla looked up. She wore a white Puma t-shirt, black shorts, and Reebok cross-trainers. Her brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail. “In the middle of things,” she said.

“Right,” Mr. Klein said. “Where good fiction always starts—after things have already happened. But the implication is that those things occurred before the events of the story being related and, as a result, aren't included.” He patted the pages on his desk with the palm of his hand. “Is that what we have here?”

Several students nodded.

“Okay,” Mr. Klein continued, “so how much of a story do we have here? What exactly is this?”

“Well, it's not the whole story,” Steve blurted out. His hair sprang in tight, brown curls from his scalp, and his long, thin legs—crossed at the ankles—sprawled out in front of him.

“How do you know?”

Steve sat up and looked at Mr. Klein. “Because all we have are some characters making a deal. We don't know why they're making the deal, and we don't know how the deal turns out. Aside from reaching some sort of agreement about money, there's no real resolution.”

“Good,” Mr. Klein said. “So all we have here is a scene. The question is, ‘Where's the rest of the story—before or after this scene?'”

“Probably after,” Karen suggested, “since everything seems to be moving toward a confrontation or climax behind Sanger's.”

Mario leaned forward in his desk and frowned at Karen on the other side of Carla. “Why couldn't this scene be the climax? Maybe in the scenes that come before this one we find out what the boys want from LuAnn, and the conflict is internal. Maybe it's not a question of whether or not they'll be able to go through with the deal but whether or not all of the boys have the courage to simply face LuAnn and make the deal. Then this scene would resolve that conflict.”

“Or,” Steve said, smiling, “maybe it's a sort of perverse love story of a senior infatuated with an eighth grader, and the fingernails and blood symbolize how she's finally gotten under his skin.” He smirked.

Mr. Klein frowned. “Regardless of how we answer the question,” he said, “we're talking about a sequence of causally related events. Which, of course, is simply...?”

“Plot,” several students said at the same time.

“Exactly.” Mr. Klein stood up and walked to the blackboard. “But remember: plot isn't form or structure.” He picked up a piece of chalk and began to write. “Plot is—”

“A devious plan,” Steve whispered to Carla. “Like the Joker's plot to dest roy Batman.”

“A space in a cemetery,” Carla replied. “Where they'd plant the Joker when the plot failed.”

“How you locate points on a graph in algebra,” Brian said without looking at them. On the back of one of the pages, he had drawn a spacecraft hovering over a city, the craft's ominous shadow darkening the skyline.

Steve looked at Carla, and then they both turned to Brian. “Geek,” they mouthed at the same time and smiled.

“—what happens.” Mr. Klein turned to the students. “But form is the order in which the writer presents events to the reader. What order are the LuAnn-and-Dean events in?”

“In order of time,” Brian said, looking up from his drawing. “Chronological order.”

“Right,” Mr. Klein said. “This is the most common though not the only form for stories. The advantage of chronological order is that it most resembles real life. It's conventional, usually easy to follow, and implies that the interest for the reader is in the characters and what happens to them or what they do.” He walked back to the board and wrote CHRONOLOGICAL in block letters. “But as writers, we have other choices, too. Right?”

“Sure,” Brian said. “You could present the story backwards scene by scene. Like the movie Memento , where the main character loses his short-term mem—”

“Or that Seinfeld episode,” Steve blurted out. “It starts with the last scene—after a wedding in India, or something—and backtracks to the first scene. It's weird, but it's still funny.”

Mr. Klein wrote “REVERSE CHRONOLOGICAL” on the board and then turned to the class. “But the question, of course, is why? What effect or purpose is achieved by telling a story backwards that can't be achieved equally well or better by telling it in normal order?

“By presenting a story in chronological order,” he continued, “the reader is taken from cause to effect, cause to effect, and with a good story, the inevitable question from the reader—given each subsequent event—is, ‘But what happened next?' Interest results from the suspense built up around a character or characters that we've come to care about. It's like a deductive argument in which all the details build to an inevitable conclusion. Of course, in a well presented story the conclusion should first come as a surprise and only after further reflection or re-examination does the inevitability become fully evident.

“However,” Mr. Klein went on, “if a story told in reverse chronological order is going to work, it has to get its momentum from a different source. Beginning with the thing we normally look forward to or expect later is like a wedding procession led by the bride, a meal begun with dessert, or the front door of a new house that opens onto the master bedroom. Since we're starting at the end, we already know how things turn out. Consequently, the reader or viewer of the story needs to be driven by a desire to know something—not ‘What happened next?' but ‘What caused this to happen next?' The challenges are several and great—how to make causes more interesting than effects, how to make induction intriguing, how to create a situation or point of view that makes the reverse order relevant and necessary and valuable because using unconventional structure for the sake of being unconventional is boring and self indulgent. Structure in fiction always depends on purpose—such as suspense, on emphasis, or on point of view.”

“So why did you choose chronological order for your story?” Karen asked as she lifted her pencil from her notebook and set the end against her dimpled chin.

“I don't think I have,” he said and stood behind his desk. He leaned over the back of his chair with both hands on the top of the backrest. “This is only one scene. I still haven't decided whether scenes that chronologically come before this will appear before it in the story or whether scenes that occur after this one will follow it. And, of course, those aren't my only options. How else might I arrange it?”

“What about going back and forth?” Steve suggested. “Like in that firefighter movie, Ladder 49 . It starts with part of the climactic scene, but before it ends, it cuts back to a scene earlier in the character's life. At the beginning of the movie Joaquin Phoenix is trapped in this burning building, but before we find out if he's rescued, we cut back to a scene that shows him first joining the ladder company. Then, the movie switches back and forth between the two, and eventually the past catches up with the present.”

“ The English Patient is like that,” Carla said. “It starts with the burned man being cared for by this nurse and then moves back in time as we find out how he got burned and how everything happened.”

Mr. Klein nodded. “Many stories work like this—weaving together the past and the present, often because a character is remembering how he or she came to be there. And once the past converges with the present—both of which have been presented chronologically—the initial scene is also resolved, and we're back to a traditional, chronological structure. Because part of the climax is given away at the beginning, some of the suspense has been lost, which means that the source of interest has to be more than just causality. Usually it's because we care about a character that has a legitimate need to remember or relate the past. Steve, is that what happens in Ladder 49 ?”

“Sort of,” he said. “It's just that most of the stuff about the past shows Phoenix and the other firefighters either drinking too much or pulling practical jokes on each other. Even when he meets his future wife, it's really just a stunt. It's hard to care about a character like that. Every time we moved into the past, I felt like the director or the screenwriter was trying to convince me to like Phoenix's character, but usually I didn't. The whole thing felt forced, insincere, like an argument gone wrong.”

“That's why it's so important to think about form, structure, arrangement.” Mr. Klein went back to the board and wrote MODIFIED OR MERGING CHRONOLOGICAL. “If it's done only for the sake of doing something unconventional, it'll probably fail because it'll feel self conscious, contrived. Without a natural, necessary connection between form and character or form and point of view, this sort of structure”—he tapped the piece of chalk on the new words written on the board—“won't work. It's got to enhance the story as it does in Ondaatje's The English Patient .”

Carla nodded.

“Or in Vargas Llosa's Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter .”

“Who?” Mario asked.

“Mario Vargas Llosa,” Mr. Klein repeated and wrote the author's name on the board. “His is a little different, however, because while it, too, has two plot lines, both moving forward through time, Llosa's are parallel, both occurring in the story's present. Not like Ladder 49 where one is in the present and the other in the past. What Aunt Julia and Ladder have in common, of course, is that eventually the two lines of the story converge, and there's a logical and causal connection between them.”

Voices in the hall outside the classroom moved past the door in the back of the room. Beyond the small glass in the door walked three young women, one pushing the dark hair out of her eyes.

Mr. Klein glanced at his watch, the face on the inside of his left wrist. “We only have about ten minutes, so let me suggest a couple other things.” He went back to the board and wrote OTHER ARRANGEMENTS and then below it CHARACTER-BASED. “Sometimes stories are structured around something other than or in addition to time. Take Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine , for example. While it's basically chronological, covering events from the 1930's into the 1980's, some scenes recur, presented first from one character's point of view and later from another's. Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez's The Dirty Girls Social Club work in a similar fashion. Sometimes the organization reflects the narrator's psychological state.”

He wrote PSYCHOLOGICAL on the board. “Faulkner's short story ‘A Rose for Emily' falls into this category. Or it could be based on some other external pattern.” Again he wrote on the board, this time BORROWED ORDER. “Like Primo Levi's memoir The Periodic Table , which is structured around chemical elements, or Bill Holm's Coming Home Crazy , which is an alphabetical memoir, or Wil liam Least Heat-Moon's Blue Highways , which is chronological and geographical. They're all stories, but each author settled on something different as the organizing principle.” He paused and looked at the students. “Questions?” he asked.

Carla raised her hand. “So what are you going to do?” She zipped open her backpack and pushed her notebook inside.

Mr. Klein set the chalk in the rail below the board. “What do you mean?” He walked back to his desk and sat down.

“With your story. How are you going to put it together?” She pointed at the blackboard.

“It depends on how it turns out,” he said, “on what happens.”

Carla looked at him. “You mean you don't know?”

“I do,” he said as he reached under the desk for his briefcase, “but I'm not sure if LuAnn and Dean will agree.”

The students paused and looked at him strangely.

He smiled. “Don't worry. We'll talk about listening to your characters and how characters drive stories next time.” He glanced at his watch. “Time. See you Thursday.”

The students rose, the room filling with their voices and laughter and the scuffing of feet. Then the door opened and they filed out into the hall filled with people going both directions.

Mr. Klein watched them go and, without thinking, pushed his fingers under his watch and ran them over the three small scars on the inside of his wrist.