What follows are apparently notes for a class re creating the short story. Never took such a class, so must be I was promoting a certain philosophy of feral writing. Oh! Oh! Wait. I got it. Trying to be an autodidact. I don’t teach, I share. – JDW
“Nothing is more precise than fiction.” – Jorge Luis Borges
The truer the story you tell, the less true it sounds. – Bai Xiao-Yi, The Explosion In The Parlor.
A short story should have no less meaning than a novel.
Every short story starts, not with the first line, but with the title.
Anatomy of a short story
1. Situation: an interesting person in difficulty.
2. Complication: person tries to solve difficulty, which leads to more/bigger difficulty.
3. Climax: crisis. Do or die. Turning point of action. Change of direction. Pressures reach boiling point. hero goes for broke, and wins or breaks.
4. Resolution: solving of the problem.
5. Anticlimax: as short as possible.
John O’Hara said, if you got the details wrong about character, you would get the character wrong.
You construct sentences to build a story and you build a story in which to store your sentences. A story is really linear. Always moving forward. Even a memoir. A story is a line of words which we’ve chosen to break into chinks of text we call pages. But great writing is a straight line which snakes along a plot.
A sentence can go along forever and ever and forever and ever and forever and ever,too. Sometimes. If done properly.
“One does not get many pages… before falling under the spell of [Patrick] O’Brien’s prose, which is coiling and uncoiling, spare, elegantly paced, quietly witty, punctuated by colons at every turn. His control is extraordinary….
“The second sentence in The Commodore runs to 128 perfectly handled words; on the next page a mighty specimen unwinds gracefully to an astounding 206 words without sacrificing a jot of lucidity. Throughout the book these great linguistic serpents emerge for our inspection and delight.” – Katherine A. Powers, The Atlantic Monthly (7/95)
Sentences can be great linguistic serpents. And critics can sometimes say something valuable, worth remembering.
Spare, elegantly paced, quietly witty prose is a good thing.
Jack Kerouac refused to revise. Truman Capote quipped that the prototypical Beat’s fiction was not writing but typing.
Kerouac didn’t revise per se, but he did rewrite again and again the same material.
To learn how to write, I recommend A Hunger Artist by Daniel Stern. “Enough… and not one bit more. That’s what counts… and then, even a little less.”
Flannery O’Connor told of the time she lent some stories to a country lady who lived down the road. When she returned them, the country lady said, “Well, them stories just gone and shown you how some folks would do.”
O’Connor said, when you write stories that is where you must start, by showing how some specific individuals will behave, will do in spite of everything.
Stories should be about people and their behavior in specific situations.
So many artists want to turn caterpillars into butterflies. Too easy, too normal. Me, I want to transform butterflies into caterpillars and make the transformation seem ineluctible (Whatever that means).
How to write a mystery? Decide on a crime. Get inside the head of whichever character most interests you. Most folks choose the detective, almost nobody picks the victim. I usually side with the perpetrator. A mystery is about conflict, a struggle involving the people touched by the crime. Your characters should function at maximum effectiveness. Who wants to read about a dumb detective? He can’t solve the crime. Or a stupid killer? He can’t elude capture. The suspense comes when someone bright seeks to outwit another bright person. Character and conflict.
Concentrate on character. Character is destiny, the ancient Greeks said. Let your characters live their own plot.
Stories need to be about people. Or critters. Or robots. But, whatever, they people your tale.
Re series, the most interesting characters grow in each succeeding story.
Chekov tells us, if a gun is hanging on the wall in the first scene of a play, it must be fired before the play ends. Recall the opening of the movie Blue Velvet? The young man stops on his way into town, he bends down to pick up a rock which he throws, just for the heck of it. On his way back from town, he stops again to pick up another rock. And he finds a human ear in the grass. And so the story goes.
Alice Adams’ offers this slightly dyslexic formula: ABDCE.
Action – start with a bang.
Background – why the bang.
Development – how the bang became inevitable
Climax – what the bang meant.
Ending – the echo.
Four bangs and an echo. Call that the vigilante fiction method.
1. vivid opening
2. one or more developments
3. solid ending.
A well-told joke is just another story. Most jokes have a three act structure. There’s the setup, which establishes a frame of reference. There’s the buildup, which draws your listener into the tale. Then there’s the punchline, the payoff, your listener’s reward for giving you his attention.
First of all, you have to attract attention.
One of my favorite openers comes from Elmer Kelton’s Lonesome Ride To Pecos. “Cautiously watching the dust settle, Deputy Hayes holstered his smoking six-shooter and walked to the fallen and dying man.”
Most writers, this is the end of the story. Kelton starts with, if not a bang, certainly the echo. The dust is still settling, the dying man ain’t dead yet.
Look at the information Kelton has already provided. We meet the main character and we learn Hayes is a cautious lawman willing to kill a man if he has to. We know his job, his rank. We can assume, unless he’s a drygulching bushwhacker, he’s handy with his gun. The reader is already creating an image in his mind by the time he gets to the second line.
1. get your hero up a tree.
2. surround tree with hungry beasts.
3. help hero escape.
Think in scenes, i.e. short pieces.
your first scene should make your reader want to read the next scene.
Think of a short story as three scenes.
1. Beginning,
2. middle,
3. end.
The job of a middle is to build toward and deliver crisis.
a short short story is a single scene.
a string of scenes does not make a story.
after the big scene, the story should be changed, and the characters meaningfully affected by what’s happened.
There is no story without change.
Do you want to get out of a story or do you want to stay in? What about your reader?
“Everybody’s strength is their own story.” – Sherman Alexie
Memorist: Tease your reader with just enough detail to give your story an appearance of confessional consequence.
begin in the middle of things
General rules for now.
3,000 words or less.
story goes in a straight line. A story is a series of aimed sentences. Pointed.
Time elapsed? No longer than a season, usually a few hours or days.
Each scene must make story move forward by employing conflict & resolution.
Each scene should be complete
Short stories have to do quite often with the sudden crisis, where a character reacts, instead of acting. The situation becomes larger than the character. The situation predates the character. Reactions are not really choices or decisions, but instinctive responses. Such responses tell us about all humans not simply one individual.
“The novel is, spatially, like an estate; the very short story is like an efficiency on the twenty-third floor.” – Charles Baxter, Sudden Fiction International.
What the detail is to the world of facts, the moment is to the flow of time.- Charles Baxter, SFI
Length is not always seriousness; sometimes it simply has to do with how much information a story requires. – Baxter again.
The short story doesn’t try to understand, or comfort, or explain. It violates and betrays. It is the art of treachery, of gossip. It doesn’t hold its tongue, despite its pretense to silence. It implies all the more because it says so little. It reveals the flaw in beauty, and where the shoe pinches.” – Daniel Boulanger, SFI.
“Barriers are breaking down, the distinctions getting harder to defend. I don’t just mean that fiction is often a way of telling truths that nonfiction can no longer tell, or that reality itself is a construct – a fiction – though these notions are a part of it. I mean also that the writer need no longer feel obliged to listen to the categories…and that one can mix ‘poetry’ and ‘prose,’ ‘narrative’ and ‘argument,’ ‘story’ and ‘essay,’ at will, enjoying all the time – and this seems to me the real secret – the process of writing as writing, the text itself as landscape, as story, whatever other story one is telling or landscape one is writing about….
Find out where the epic poems, the great omniscient narratives have gone – explain where the glue went – and you may have found the seedbed of the short-short story, in the rediscovery of human experience as the vast collection of sudden fictions that it always was.”
-David Brooks, SFI.
I wanted to be Jack Kerouac, ended up being Neal Cassady.
One of my more well-to-do friends lives on Poverty Lane. There’s a Doug on the porch. And at Starvation Creek, there’s nowhere to eat.
Something to think about.