What Constitutes a Short Story?
Review: The point I've tried to
make in Length
and Presentation is that a
writer should always have some awareness of what his/her short story
will look like as a physical object. A printed physical
object on paper pages.
Of course a short story is much more than a physical object. It
is
also, and primarily, an intellectual object. That is what
the rest of
this message will be about.
First, and most important, you have to understand that there cannot be,
not ever, a single rule that defines what a short story is or is not.
With that in mind, we can create a few temporary "rules" that might
help a beginner shape material into story.
The first six weeks of the Storyarts On Line Workshop are about choice
of material and point of view. The kind of activity encouraged in
the six week sequence suggests that you keep a journal in which you are
free to write fragments, images, exercises, and
other unstructured texts.
But material alone rarely makes a short story. Even good
material. A writer does more than record. A writer
shapes.
To put things simply (perhaps too simply) here is what we have to keep
in mind.
In a short story something happens.
Happens--because?
Happens--and the result is?
Happens--and it means?
Happens--to someone?
Happen--somewhere?
Happens--and is told by?
Happens--and is told how?
And so on. Obviously, none of this occurs in the order above--or
in any special order. It very often occurs all at
once. But if you think of
these things as matters you not only should address, but also should
WANT to address, then you will see why your story is going to get a
little bit longer than a page and a half.
Planning Ahead
You don't have to know how your story is going to end when you
start. Beginners are often better off NOT knowing how
things are going to end. Beginners tend to truncate their stories
when they know too much about where they are going.
The trick is to relax and have fun. Yes, have fun. Even in
a serious
story where the whole family is carted off and sold to the pirates,
have
fun.
Something Happens
Let's apply the "rule: of "something must happen" to one of the
exercises, say "An
object that belonged to your father."
Looking at
the exercises submitted to this list over the years, I see that all
sorts of things have happened, to the objects, to the fathers, to the
narrators. Some of these objects were destroyed or discarded,
others were kept as family treasures, others simply languish in closets
and
attics. Something always happens. Always. In a story,
even nothing
happening turns out to be something after all. ("The princess lived all
her life in a beautiful castle and nothing ever happened to her."
Guess what? That particular nothing amounts to something.)
Something happens. To whom? Where?
And the result is? And the meaning is? Is told by
whom? Is told how?
In nonfiction we know these things. We know father got that watch
from his father on the day he graduated high school. We know he
no longer wears it because his father is dead now, and well, why not
wear a watch that keeps time? We know father grew up in a
little town called Henry, that grandfather is buried there, that
the watch is now in his daughters house in
suburban Chicago. We know that father once had a girl friend in
Crown Point, and while this doesn't seem to be part of the story, it
does tell us a little more about father than that he was a merely a man
who owned a watch, so we are going to put it in. We also know
that the narrator has always wondered about certain things, and that
she has a husband of her own who refused to wear a watch. We know
that the narrator's mother actually bought the watch father now
wears. We know the grandmother had a cousin who was hit by a
train, and while we are not sure how to fit that in, this story is
supposed to be, dog gone it, at least ten pages long, so we might as
well put that in as well. In fact, everything we write reminds us
of something else we ought to put in. Sooner or later we get to
page ten or twelve and we wisely decide to end this thing before it
turns into a book that we are too lazy to write. So we end it. We
write, "The end." and if the reader wants to know why we
chose to end with the mother and the daughter sitting in the
coffee shop at the mall discussing the Atkins diet, the reader is just
going to have to figure it out for himself. And if all the images
are there, and clear, and if the sentences flow and are not clumsy or
crowded, and if the writing is not cluttered with a lot of fancy words
and phrases the author would never say aloud, guess what? The
reader will figure something out, and you will have a complete
story. It may not win the O Henry prize, it may not even be
fiction, but darn it, it will be a story, and you will have had the
satisfaction of writing it.
To be continued
paul pekin
storyarts
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