No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put at just the right place.
—Isaac Babel, “Guy de Maupassant”
A convincing lie is, in its own way, a tiny, perfect narrative.
—William Boyd, “A Short History of the Short Story”
This week we’re linking to the Willesden Herald of Willesden, London. Why? Because they run an annual short story competition, and Stephen Moran took the time about a year and a half ago to explain in great detail exactly what you can do to lose a short story competition.
This is priceless information. Read it and take notes.
Even more than that, though, at the bottom of the page Moran included “A few interesting links” to three works every fiction writer should throw themself into headfirst and wallow in until they become part of their body chemistry: by William Boyd, Raymond Carver, and Jack Kerouac.
Boyd tracks a history of the short story from Walter Scott and defines a handful of short story types being written today: event-plot, Chekhovian, cryptic/lucid, poetic/mythic, mini-novel. Be aware that, although he’s dismissive of Virginia Woolf’s stories, she did in fact do much to loosen the bonds of the short story from formal prescription. Also be aware that, although he claims Chekhov completely re-imagined the short story without plot, this is a clever bit of subterfuge—Chekov’s stories have plots. Even Woolf’s stories, weird as they are, have obscure little plots. They’re just not arranged the way previous short story plots had been up to that point.
Understand that when Raymond Carver says he and Flannery O’Connor didn’t plan their stories—and Boyd says Chekhov “abandoned manipulated plot”—they’re talking about highly-accomplished authors who had already studied structure intently. They didn’t mean: “Don’t learn structure. You’re too special.” They just meant the short story form can take a certain amount of spinning madly across the sun—so long as the writer knows how to keep the reader with them in their spins. Notice Edgar Allan Poe’s restriction in the acknowledged first definition of a short story: “In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design.” Even in 1837 Poe already knew there must be—in the writer’s mind, at least—a story there to tell.
“No tricks,” Carver says, and I would like all aspiring writers to carve this into something directly in front of their keyboards, like their monitor screens. Don’t save up information for your climax. Don’t pretend you don’t know something about your characters that you actually know. Don’t think you’re fooling anybody. Every time a writer imagines they’re cleverly planting a mystery in the beginning of the novel that’s not a mystery, to be revealed like a magician whipping a handkerchief off a top hat at the end, the reader figures it out long before that and then the novel has no more tension. Never rely on your reader’s stupidity for tension. You don’t want that stupid of readers.
(Okay, don’t wallow in the Kerouac, either. He didn’t write short stories, anyway, and his hyper-intense focus on himself and his own internal experience of life, while a fascinating take on conventional fiction, has been from the beginning hideously misunderstood by faux “writers” just looking for an excuse to focus on themselves without the benefit of fiction, spawning generations of narcissists who don’t write fiction and never have, but continue to insist on putting words on paper, drinking themselves blind, and smoking themselves stoopid because that’s what their hero Jack did. If the neighbor kid jumped off a bridge, would you do it, too? Apparently—YES.)
The short story is. . .well, short. Which makes it good practice grounds for serious writers. Use Boyd’s definitions of different story forms to practice—write stories in each form, write the same story in every form, write with plans and without. I don’t mean do one of these. I mean do all of them.
Write, write, write.
You’re a writer.