I think a lot about the craft of writing. The poem, the essay, the
short story and the novel each have their own internal rules, all of
which are to be broken if a writer wants to achieve something new.
Lately, my obsession has become short form. The short story has all the
same requisites as a novel: voice, characters, arc. But because it’s
short form, everything must be compressed.
You don’t have hundreds of pages at your disposal, maybe only a dozen
at most. So you haven’t got the time to paint a sweeping landscape or
people a multi-generational cast of characters. You may not even have
enough space to get through a single day. Short story writing is about
choices.
Not that I know much about the matter. Only three of my short stories have been published
and I have enough rejection letters to paper a small whale. But I try
anyway. I read and listen. And as soon I think I’ve figured it out, I
hear the admonishing words of John Gardner in The Art of Fiction (p.3):
When [a writer] begins to be persuaded that certain
things must never be done in fiction and certain other things must
always be done, one has entered the first stage of aesthetic arthritis,
the disease that ends up in pedantic rigidity and the atrophy of
intuition.
Yikes. What then is a writer to do? Luckily Gardner gives all of us writers an out.
Every true work of art – and thus every attempt at art
(since things meant to be similar must submit to one standard) – must be
judged primarily, though not exclusively, by its own laws.
So what sorts of laws are there?
beginning, middle and ending
A great deal of the art of the short story is to do with exits and entrances – when you jump in; when and how do you dismount.
That’s a great description by Sam Leith
on the craft of short story writing and all its predicaments. Where
should the story start? When is it over? Which arc bridges the beginning
and its end?
Lydia Davis writes stories so short that some are no longer than a
few lines. So that’s two, maybe three pen strokes to create a whole
world, characters and action. Like this one from the collection Can’t and Won’t (p. 235):
My Childhood Friend
Who is this old man walking along looking a little grim with a wool cap on his head?
But when I call out to him and he turns around, he doesn’t know me at
first, either – this old woman smiling foolishly at him in her winter
coat.
Other stories from Can’t and Won’t don’t sound like stories
at all to me. They could be better described as vignettes, prose poems
or sometimes just a gag. But given that Davis is one of the icons of our time, it’s hard to quibble with how she chooses to break the rules. As my writer friend Megin put it:
She’s one of those who give me permission to do what I
want/need. I was so surprised when I first read her, what could
constitute a story. If she’s allowed to do it, why can’t I?
Maybe it’s just me, but I like more tension in my fiction. Oddly
enough, I don’t care whether that tension is resolved. In fact, I have a
particular weakness for short stories with an ambiguous ending.
When does it end?
Let’s take “The Night in Question” by Tobias Wolff. I heard it on The New Yorker fiction podcast as read out loud by Akhil Sharma.
It’s a classic story inside a story. Frances has spent most of her
childhood protecting Frank from their abusive father. Now an adult,
Frank has found God. He tells his sister about a sermon he heard.
A father gets an unexpected call to work the night shift and, because
he’s alone that night, he takes his young son along. His job is to
raise the movable bridge for water traffic and lower it to allow cars
and trains to pass. There’s a train on the way when the father realizes
his son is missing. He knows that the boy has gone into the machine room
to play among the crunching, grinding, unforgiving cogs and gears.
Should the father lower the bridge, thus saving the lives of all those
on board the speeding train, or does he leave the bridge open to save
the life of his son?
We never find out. Frances refuses to hear the end of Frank’s story.
All she wants to know is, if it were me, you would save me, wouldn’t you
Frank?
Wolff doesn’t tell us the answer to that question either. And that’s
what’s so wonderful about his ending. There is a finite number of ways
this story could go. You could plot it out yourself with a dotted line
like the one the roadrunner draws just before Wile E. Coyote
gets clobbered.
Drive It Off the Cliff
Another great example of an open ending is “Herman and Margaret” by Vi Khi Nao, first published in Glimmer Train,
issue no. 90. Herman is a war veteran, now missing a leg, his wife and
any more reason to live. He’s en route to Hoover Dam in his wheelchair
where he intends to throw himself off the edge. Margaret has the same
plan though she’s traveling by RV, all 489 pounds of her.
Herman and Margaret arrive at their chosen departure point.
Improbably, they meet. Tenderly, they fall in love. Life has suddenly
become worth living. Tomorrow will be another day. But before dawn can
come, Margaret must pee.
In the dark, she cannot see, but she steps just far
enough from Herman, lifts her dress, and pees. And, then, without
realizing it, she walks right off the edge and into the abyss.
light at the end of the tunnel
John Gardner says (p. 194):
The novel’s denouement … is not simply the end of the story but the story’s fulfillment.
When I attended the Paris Writers Workshop in 2014, Lan Samantha Chang was the leader of the fiction workshop. She described the function
of an ending in a way that has stuck with me ever since, a grain of
sand inside the oyster of my mind. She said that an ending should send
light all the way back to the beginning.
Note: The Sense of an Ending was first published by Karen Kao on her blog Shanghai Noir.
You've managed to engross us with your musings on the art and craft of writing once again, Karen. Your post takes us on a tour of Grand Hotel Literati with the concierge letting us peek into many rooms and glimpse guests emeshed in all kinds of writerly hanky panky - allowed and disallowed by house rules. In the end, I feel not so much enlightened, but inspired anew. I love to read tales and admonishments from writers more esteemed than myself, ever eager to learn something, or have my memory refreshed. Then I think about what W. Sommerset Maugham said, “There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” All the more reason to carry on! The End.
Veni, vidi...Wiki! Not long ago I had the all-time greatest Great Idea: one, born of total ignorance, that nearly tanked a novel. As you may have guessed from my opening line, my subject is Julius Caesar. But you might not have guessed from the title that my Great Idea entailed his being reborn as a penis. Don't laugh, please, I beg you. I saw no way around this, even though showing JC as a 'dick' might lead some to think that I've written a spoof. In fact, it's a serious thriller. Without giving the plot away, I can say this: I needed JC's ghost, today, remembering his nights with Cleopatra on her fabled golden barge. There was the heart of my book--a ghost trying for 2000 years to relive that lost boogie with Liz. And I'd begun to run with this when my memory corrected me: Mark Anthony, not JC, was on the barge with Cleo. And this was after JC's death. What the hell was I to do, lacking the good sense to check memory's 'facts
Barbara Hughes in the Sportswoman's Library (BL permission) The title of my book has been changed: That Spirit of Independence has become Stars to Steer By . It’s still a book of celebration, mentioning more than one hundred wonderful sea-women. And yes, they are all included because of their variously independent spirits. No change there. The title I chose myself was given me by a rebellious Solent racer called Barbara Hughes. She was racing slim, fast keelboats from the age of about 13 in 1885 and loved it: ‘It is the most delightful education in the world, the most interesting and healthful. It becomes so engrossing that you will not rest until you understand the whole thing and know the why and wherefore of all the different moves.’ Barbara was the 5th of 6 children so was usually subordinate to her father, brothers or older sisters. She wanted to be in charge of her own boat, competing on equal terms: ‘you should have it all in your own hands, with no one to say you “nay”, o
A young Ellison, at his Olympia SG 3 Alas, we seem to be losing all the great ones lately. Well, this is a common illusion when some beloved figure dies. Last week it was Harlan Ellison, who died June 28, just a week ago in his sleep at 84, after suffering a stroke in 2014. Ellison was probably the least known famous writer in the world. To me and a lot of writers who were his fans, he epitomized everything the brilliant, provocative, flamboyant, prolific, wild-eyed writer ought to be - and usually fall short of. Whatever one thinks of his prodigious body of work, one could not fail to admire his ferocity as a creative spirit and human being. "Born without an off-switch," his friends said. He went, Energizer-Bunny-like, fully until he stopped. Jewish by birth, atheist by self-proclamation, Ellison lived consistently by the three great moral questions of Rabbi Hillel the Elder : "If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? "If I am for myself alone, t
Imagine you’re a you ng journalist from The Times , reporting on the Hay literary festival. Nice job if you love books and writing – which journalists do, or they’d be doing something else – and you should enjoy it while you can, as literary festivals are sadly in their Götterdämmerung p eriod, what with no corporate sponsor being pure enough to be allowed to fund them, and grants from such lofty organisations as the Arts Council being extremely unlikely, owing to books being lamentably highbrow and middle class (not!). Anthony Horowitz By Edwardx - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=126308848 So there you are, listening to Anthony Horowitz speak on a panel on the subject of rewriting classics by dead authors in order to remove ‘offensive’ language ( as Puffin did last year with a new edition of Roald Dahl’s works ), and you hear him say he doesn’t approve of burglarising books. Yup, that’s what he said. Well, he must have said that, there’
Image Credit: Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos Opening lines must hook a reader so they read the rest of your story or article. I aim to write something which intrigues me, draft the rest, and as I do that, ideas occur to strength that first line. So I go back and do so. The act of writing something down in and of itself seems to trigger creativity to come up with more and better ideas. It’s a pity you can’t bottle that effect and bring it out when you need it! As I write a lot of flash fiction, where my maximum word count is 1000 words, the opening line carries even more weight. I see it as doing a lot of heavy lifting. Sometimes I will write circle stories where the closing line is a repetition of the opening one or is similar to it with, say, one minor change. That change has come about due to what happened in the story itself. I find, whatever I write, as long as I have something down to start me off, away I go happily. It can be finding the way into a piece whic
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You've managed to engross us with your musings on the art and craft of writing once again, Karen. Your post takes us on a tour of Grand Hotel Literati with the concierge letting us peek into many rooms and glimpse guests emeshed in all kinds of writerly hanky panky - allowed and disallowed by house rules.
In the end, I feel not so much enlightened, but inspired anew. I love to read tales and admonishments from writers more esteemed than myself, ever eager to learn something, or have my memory refreshed. Then I think about what W. Sommerset Maugham said,
“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”
All the more reason to carry on!
The End.