I love short stories because they are concentrated boxing rings of human experience. I’ve been thinking about what it is that makes me love some short stories and what it is that leaves me uninvolved and un-interested in others.
Here are some of the elements (that can be applied to either short stories or longer work) I’ve come up with to consider in my own fiction writing through workshops and critiques. These elements, and many more, will bring problems to the writer. But if you want to avoid problems, you probably shouldn’t be a writer.
Be dumb
Being smart is sort of like being an airplane pilot who flies above life’s details. This pilot glosses over all the good stuff, keeps things at a distance. Being dumb means getting close to life with vivid, compelling detail, including place and whatever anchors us to the story. Place defines, confines and gives boundaries. Being dumb is the heartbeat of art.
Enter without knocking
Like Chekhov says. Everything important, including characters, is compressed in real time. It’s front loaded into the first paragraph. Delete the throat-clearing and the backstory. These are boring turn-offs.
A reason for everything
Everyone and everything must have a reason to be in a story.
Details
Vivid detail is always vital and relevant.
Show vs. Tell
We all know about this chestnut. But why does showing do the job better? Telling is summary and takes the reader out of the story by draining the mystery. Anything that can be articulated isn’t the story; it’s just more information. When a writer tells (rather than shows) the writer is guiding the reader, which a form of authoritarianism ; the the reader isn’t the one doing the work. You want the reader to be free to think for herself.
Scene
Take us through the drama scene by scene. The moment has to be real. Stories aren’t about something. They are the thing itself. Never gloss over intense scenes. Stay with them, slow down. Deepen.
Stay in the boxing ring
When things get uncomfortable, the writer can’t avert her eyes, even when the character wants to avoid a scene. Stories avoid scene by moving into backstory, throat-clearing, piling on narrative. These are dead stories.
Backstory
All new writers struggle with what to do with backstory. The truth is, backstory is a type of back-peddling, of backing off, backing out, backing down. It breaks the forward momentum. Stay in there. Overcome the inertia. Invest in forward motion. You do that by never letting backstory in. This forces you to solve problems in the present and makes the story more immediate and vigorous. Backstory, on the other hand, keeps the writer in an expository cocoon rather than writing in scene. Backstory is only a secondary intensity. It’s flat prose, flat character, flat everything: Everything is off-stage. When you leave the ring, you leave a blurred sense of time and place as well as disturbances in point of view. Another way to protect yourself is indulging in narrative. A little narrative goes a long way, so limit it in your work.
Be sadistic
We are trained to be polite and to avoid conflict, so as writers we keep a silent contract: “I won’t hurt you if you don’t hurt me.” It’s always safer to avoid conflict in real life; it’s deadly in writing fiction. Fiction begs for risk and danger. A fiction writer is sadistic to her characters. Writing fiction runs against all instinct for self-preservation. It forces us to go into dark places.
Backstory diffuses all of that. It’s really hard to stay in the boxing ring, but you have to force yourself to stay there. Do not climb away, do not back out, do not sign the silent contract. Do you have the balls to stay in?
Passivity
Writers are, by nature, watchers, but a narrator or character who watches something is the gateway drug to passivity. We all suffer from passivity. But passivity has a deleterious effect on art that produces a lack of tension, depth, and variety. When a character/narrator is passive, so is the whole story. The character/narrator and the story must be active. Solution: Find a suitable vent for the story to take it out of its passivity. The story has to press down on its narrator/character until she has no choice but to actively make a choice. There we have the seed for conflict.
{Part 2 in due time}
