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If fate has compelled you in a gray and miserable direction, so that you are witness to things you should not know, or have done things you should not have done, then there is a room waiting down in the Hall of Justice. It is is not a pleasant room. It is small and ugly, and in it sits an ugly table and some ugly chairs. The walls and floors seem deliberately misaligned, stained with the oil of human sweat, and the lighting flickers forever out of sync. It is an ugly room, poorly ventilated, in which people tell ugly truths. Since nothing goes on here but such talk, the accumulated ugliness can do nothing but accumulate further. Once you've been in such a room, you never leave it, because it is but an entryway to other such rooms, and even if by some mischance you walk free into the outer light you carry this room still inside your heart. Any unexpected thing, a glance from a stranger, a footfall on pavement, a jingle of keys, will bring you back, so that every other place seems an illusion, and you are faced again with this dirty ceiling, these dirty walls. (Stansberry, Il Duce 107)

In Domenic Stansberry's The Last Days of Il Duce, Nick begins his noir tale of doom from jail. "Three people I used to know are dead," Nick tells us. "Two of them I loved…" (5). It is he, we learn later, who delivered the satchel for the hit on his brother, his lover Marie who arranged it. Like Oedipus, Nick's caught in the world's desire to doom him, to make him a partner in crimes, and the role he's being asked to play lies beyond his capacity to comprehend it. Such is Fate, a powerful force in the world—and an equally potent force in a writer's arsenal.

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Character is destiny—that's the mantra of most workshops. Such emphasis on the force of one's will devalues and ignores the world's desires. Fate—the power of the world to make you into what it wants —exerts its force through parents, genetics, setting, chance, and the like. In Stansberry's Il Duce, everything—North Beach, the old Italians, Chinatown, they mysteries of his own workings—gets infused with a desire, an intent, that drives the narrative in some way. Imagine thinking that the wind desired to knock you over, that the sun wanted to burn you, the gods to teach you a lesson. Pre-determinacy. That's what many people associate with Fate. It's so much more. The setting exerts a force on characters. "There had been," Stansberry writes, "green space between the graves then, an open meadow between the Italians and nearby Colma Cemetery. In the years since that time, the meadow had filled with graves, and the boundaries between the Italians and everyone else had disappeared" (40). In the noir world, the setting exerts a force, and here it desires erasure; yet the only way the world finds fulfillment for its wishes is to find someone willing to carry out such a wish. To fight against this world—to reach those "imaginary other places, little paradises, where Marie and [Nick] might escape" (110), Nick acts, and each action brings him closer to the doom the world desires for him. The fascism of the past perhaps works to emphasize this control place exerts upon characters.

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The idea of being "chosen" elevates the character's plight into a near-tragic realm. The world has picked Nick; he's arrested the gods' attention. Only he's been destined for doom. The question arises, "Why Nick?" What's he got. Nick cannot let go of things, of Marie, of an idealized view of his brother, of the past, of the nature of his brother's death, of the role Micaeli has played in it all. This quality of Nick's attracts our attention. He persists; the truth gnaws at him; he has to know. Yet, the doom that results creates repulsion. Maybe it's better not to know. But how can that be? Isn't truth something we all value? By linking him to these deeper questions of existence, action, and individual power, Fate gives Nick his "narrative imperative" that answers the question, "What makes him worthy of my attention?"

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The hero's fight against Fate actually adds uncertainty—rather than certainty—to the story. That we all die's a certainty in the world that's news to no one, but he how and when is the realm of story—especially how each of us faces it and how we become complicit in the world's design to erase us. By continually alluding to Fate and by beginning his story at the end, Stansberry puts the focus where it needs to be—the how and when rather than on the what. Consider the following descriptions of the two murders Nick commits:

 

"He moved anyway. Or I thought he moved. I pulled the trigger…" (154).

"Marie told me once that I had no nerve. That I let myself be carried away in the moment, but could not take action on my own. Even so, I pulled the trigger. I did it because I loved her, I tell myself now...though when I go back to that moment and remember and look down, it isn't my own hand pulling the trigger but someone else's, a moment out of another man's life" (165).

Notice the uncertainty of both "or I thought he moved" and "I tell myself now." Nothing's been more "fated" than Nick's obsessive love for Marie; it inheres in the world, in some wiring the gods have given him. It makes no sense, but there it is. Nick's act—this act to take action on his own—results, perhaps, in what the world wanted all along, more erasure, more destruction of boundaries, more graves replacing that green space. Its connection to what Marie told him, his lack of nerve, links the action to the world's conception of Nick, the particular traits it has given him.

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Against that force, there's action, but how can one ever be sure that one's actions belong to one's own Self? Are the killings of both Micaeli and Marie Nick's and Nick's alone. Does he own it? Does Oedipus own the act of killing his father and murdering his mother?

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I think not. What Fate makes us own is the consequence of action, the punishment, the way Sisyphus owns his rock, Oedipus his blindness, and Nick his cell. "I had known it all along," Nick says during his story. "I told myself. Or I should have known" (155). Fate exists in such a world, that world that's known all along but doesn't become clear until it's too late. At that moment, the world belongs to the character; at that moment, it's Nick's story.

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A lot of writers ignore Fate (at their own peril, of course). The big surprise at the end of many a story—that violent action—ends up feeling like a cop-out. By introducing the end at the beginning, a story can delve into the deeper issues of motivations, desires and both the complexity and uncertainty surrounding actions in this world. Nick's conflict with Fate elevates not only Nick's status, but the story itself. It gains a mythic sense, a sense that, although this is the way the world had to be, Nick did his part. And he did it heroically. And, in doing so, the world became his and his alone.

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So here's Friday's Flash Writing Prompt. Write in the style of noir. Make your character doomed by the very actions he/she thought would save him/her. It is Fate your character is up against, a world with an evil intent, to choose certain characters for doom, and yet that doom resides in their own characters, not in the world itself. It's a tricky thing. Try to have someone at some point call someone "Doll." I love that.