Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular

by L Rust Hills

  Undoubtedly the fiction writer has to begin scenes and develop them and end them, but his problems in this regard are seldom those of the dramatist. Consider:

  Martin spent a restless night and was at Miranda's door early next morning. She seemed reluctant to let him in and listened dubiously as he explained...

  At this point the fiction writer can launch into direct address or can continue in indirect discourse (by adding a "that" after "explained"), paraphrasing the conversation, with analysis and explanation of his characters' motivations and emotions, until he has reached a point where direct dialogue will seem interesting and useful to him. He can render what he wants, he can summarize what he wants. The poor playwright has no such freedom: he must do the whole scene in dialogue. In fact, he must do most everything in dialogue. Thus, most of the playwright's theories about "plot structure" and "dramatic action" are solutions to problems the fiction writer doesn't even have. The fiction writer can learn what he wants from these theories, of course, but he must remember he has troubles of his own. The ability to construct interesting and effective scenes is to some extent God-given in a fiction writer—depending for the most part on his "ear" for writing good dialogue—and there's very little advice about the structure of scenes that's going to help him.

  Plot Structure

  As to the overall plot structure of his story, the beginning writer will find that a lot of theorizing about this has been done for him. Structural formulas abound. The ending of a story, for instance, which is simply the ending, if you think of a story as composed of a beginning, a middle, and an ending, is thought of as the resolution, if the story is considered as having initiation, complication, and resolution. It is the solution, if the action of a story is problem and solution; it is the decision, if a story is conflict and decision; the repose, if it is tension and repose; the satisfaction, if it is suspense and satisfaction; the answer, if it is question and answer; the revelation, if it is mystery and revelation. A story can be thought of as moving through complexity to unity, through complication to simplicity; through confusion to order. There seems to be no limit to the formulas for the movement of fiction that can be devised: anyone can make up his own quite easily. If any one of them really means anything, then it would seem they must all mean the same thing—which strikes me as a frightening thought.

  If one or another of these formulations is of some help to some particular writer in regard to some particular story, that's fine—it's always fine to have found something useful to say to a fiction writer. But none of them accurately describes the necessary structure of the contemporary literary short story because in such a story there is no necessary structure. And that applies to even the most basic idea of all: that a short story should have a beginning, middle, and end.

  In discussing almost anything at all, it is logical enough to divide it up into its parts as a first step—this book has done that with the various aspects of the short story as a whole (always, however, stressing the actual unity of the "parts"). And narrative structure has always been divided up into the three thoroughly natural parts: the beginning, the middle, and the end. Initiation, complication, and resolution are the terms that most clearly indicate the roles traditionally ascribed to the three parts. The beginning, or initiation, acquaints the reader with the situation in general: usually it will introduce the characters, describe their background and so on, will describe the place and time of the events, and will suggest the basic lines of the conflict—what all the trouble is going to be about. The middle, or complication, is supposed to describe all this trouble: it is here that the incidents of the action are dramatized into scenes, each scene in theory rising above the one that came before in dramatic intensity until after a number of crises a climax is reached—variously referred to as "turning point" or "dénouement" or "key moment" or whatever—this point marking the end of the middle and the beginning of the end. The end, or resolution, is supposed to make clear all the consequences of the action: perhaps as well it will point out the moral of the story, perhaps it will tell what finally happened to all the characters in the story, now that it is over, and it will knit up any of the loose ends of the plotting.

  If it can't be denied that, shortened or adapted, this is the pattern of action in a good deal of fiction, for better or for worse, it must be maintained in turn that very little of what's most interesting nowadays in short story writing really conforms to the initiation-complication-resolution formulation. It may be useful to a reader to divide a story up into its beginning and middle and end so as to study it and its author's methods, and it may even be useful to a writer to divide his plot line this way too, so as to sort out the materials of his narrative. But this is all somewhat different from specifying that a short story must have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

  A short story, in theory, and putting exceptions aside, should probably be as much of a oneness as possible; and probably it is something of a fault in a short story if there is an obvious separation between its beginning, its middle, and its end. Insofar as these traditional divisions mean anything at all in the modern short story, the beginning or "initiation" into the situation can often be marked off (as is actually done in literature courses, with a pencil, at the instructor's request) with as few as five or ten lines; the "ending" may be just as brief, and often is implicit in little more than a descriptive phrase or in a line of dialogue or in a bit of imagery. As we have seen, it is probably good to begin and end a story as near the middle as possible.

  Beginning

  Let's begin again with the beginning. It is certainly true that every story must have a beginning, in the sense of a first sentence with a capital letter, but the beginning of a modern literary story is not likely to do all the things that the books on writing say a beginning ought to do. "Capture the reader's attention," these books say; and readers are supposed to be immediately intrigued by a line of dialogue: " 'I've got a secret to tell you,' Miranda said to Martin"—that sort of thing. "Make dialogue work for you," these books say; and the writer is supposed to sneak a lot of the exposition—the explanation of what the situation is—into the opening dialogue:

  "You've been living in this one-room apartment on 75th Street between Columbus and Amsterdam avenues for two years now, Miranda," said Martin. "And this is the first time I've been here. How do you like it here?"

  "Oh, I'd like to move over to a better neighborhood on the East Side, where you live," answered Miranda. "But my salary at the law firm were we both work, me as a secretary and you as a rising young lawyer, is so small that I can't afford to move."

  "It certainly is lucky for me that I worked up the courage to speak to you at the water cooler at work," said Martin.

  "Yes, and we've had many good times together since, but always at lunch," answered Miranda. "And this is the first time we've ever had a date in the evening," she added.

  Such dialogue does provide an "initiation" into the situation, but it may seem to the reader more like an ordeal-by-fire. It's an exaggeration, of course. But even artfully done, dialogue thus concocted to carry exposition seldom rings true. "Planted" information almost always somehow breaks the normal rhythms and flow of conversation. Characters always seem to be telling one another what they both already know, just for the reader's benefit. If information is to be imparted from one character to another, there has to be some reason for it, some request or demand on one character's part for an explanation from another—and this situation cannot really exist at the beginning of a story. Such a situation certainly can exist toward the end or in the middle of a story, where not only some third character in the story but the reader as well may be interested in how two people from such different backgrounds as Martin and Miranda ever came to meet in the first place, and presumably such information could be conveyed there more convincingly. But by and large, beginning writers cannot be told too often: Forget "making dialogue work for you"; keep exposition out of dialogue; it's hard enough to make dialogue work for itself.


  As was the cause with scenes, much of this bad advice about "handling exposition" in opening dialogue derives from "rules" for playwriting that fail to take into consideration the many alternative techniques available to the fiction writer. Playwrights (or at any rate, the people who theorize about playwriting) always apparently assumed (and perhaps in this particular case they were right) that your average theatergoer couldn't be counted on to read his program notes:

  ACT I, Scene 1—Friday night. Miranda Sleezick's one- room apartment on New York's West Side

  and hence it seemed to them necessary to drop into the dialogue the facts that it's Friday night, and that it's New York's West Side, and probably even that it's a one-room apartment. Everything that's done in a play has to be done in dialogue, of course. But playwrights no longer use such corny old bits of exposition business as the gossipy cook explaining all about the family to a new serving maid as they set the table for a dinner party, or the monologue phone conversation in which the heroine explains her problems to her girl friend while purportedly asking her help.

  The whole exposition business is outmoded now, even for the theater. Faced with a lot of exposition, a modern playwright is just as likely as not to have one of his characters step forward and tell the audience directly what it needs to know. And playwrights realize that the cost of seats being what it is, audiences nowadays have to stay in them through the first act at least, and that if an audience is a bit puzzled they're more likely to pay close attention to what's going on than if they're given a lot of information in the beginning that they could easily infer as the action develops. A bit of puzzlement, in fact, as to just what's happening and where, can often make a play seem, in the beginning, at least, rather better than it actually is—more "literary" and avant-garde certainly, but also more mysterious and suspenseful.

  Deliberately withheld information, as a dramatic device, is at least as old as Oedipus Rex, but it was Ibsen who showed playwrights how to refine it almost to a formula: how to hold back any account of what happened years ago — a recounting of which no matter how artfully handled would have bored his audience in the beginning—until the very last act, creating great suspense, the absence of exposition becoming really an effective part of the plotting, so that the plot turns on the unrevealed information, so that when the explanation comes, it is not a part of the initiation, but actually achieves the resolution. Dramatists since have developed withholding information to a fine art, making a secret not only of what happened in the past but also of what's happening on stage at the present; and in many successful modern plays — such at T. S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, for instance—it's never explained to the audience even at the end what the situation is, or was.

  Thus the fiction writer need feel no real need to create a beginning for his story, an "initiation" into it. Let him launch right in and tell it, beginning as near the middle as possible. And if he does feel that the reader needs immediately to know certain facts about his characters, his locale, the situation—then let him recount these facts as straightforwardly as possible, without resorting to lame strategems of "hiding" them in dialogue. The contemporary reader can intuit a remarkable amount: he can pick up the situation just as he reads along; he can learn about the characters and their appearance along the way, incidentally and from time to time; he can imagine what the apartment looks like all on his own, until the author has some real reason to describe it to him, a reason relating to the story as a whole rather than just to the plot. A reader is always more willing to guess than to be bored: if he is puzzled, he is at the same time intrigued. Lack of exposition can create a sort of low-grade tension and suspense. The reader's desire to find out "What is the explanation of all this?" can drive him along nearly as well as the old "What will happen next?"

  What the beginning of a short story should do, what the beginnings of most successful modern short stories do usually do, is begin to state the theme of the story right from the very first line. This can be done by a bit of descriptive writing designed as well to establish the setting or the mood, or even by a line of dialogue, or in fact in any way that a short story is normally begun.

  If the beginning writer will look again at the short stories he most admires and give them a bit of thought, he'll undoubtedly find that the first sentence or two has implicit in it some statement or metaphor or image of the story's whole meaning.

  Irwin Shaw's "The Dry Rock," for instance, which is a story about how impossible it is to make a stand on a point of principle in the urgent, urban life, begins

  "We're late," Helen said, as the cab stopped at a light.

  Or, Mark Schorer's beautiful story, "Boy in the Summer Sun," which is about a youthful love affair which has lasted long but is now about to end, begins

  Unalloyed, summer had lingered miraculously into late September without a suggestion that autumn was at hand.

  The word "unalloyed," so startling as the first word of a story, introduces a system of imagery from metallurgy that runs throughout the story—undetectable until you study it, but effective nonetheless in the way it relates to the end of a "golden" time of summer and youth and love.

  Or, Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," to refer to that short masterpiece again, which is about age and the fear of death, begins

  It was late and everyone had left the cafe except an old man who sat in the shadow the leaves of the tree made against the electric light.

  Throughout the story there is to be a thread of imagery associating life with light and death with dark, and the old man sitting in the shadow establishes this in the very first sentence.

  These three examples are from a single college textbook anthology, and the beginning writer should look on his own for similar examples where the first sentence of the story—and the last line too—may have implicit in it what the story as a whole is about. It is not always the case, of course, and this early intimation may not be noticed consciously by the reader the first time he reads a story, or perhaps not ever, for that matter. And the writer himself may not have been aware as he wrote his first sentence of its relevance to the whole of his story. But this is one of the ways in which the reader is prepared, however unconsciously, to accept the inevitability of the action which follows. And it is evidence again of the organic oneness of the short story, that it often will have the whole implicit in even its very opening part.

  Middle

  "Complication" and "development" are two terms supposed to have reference to the role of the middle of a piece of fiction. The first is another formula term inherited from the drama and as used here applies to the plotting, not to the theme. The word has little relevance to the modern short story, for the plot—the episodes of the action—of a short story seldom get that complicated, or certainly shouldn't. Complexity or ambiguity of theme is another matter entirely—and there of course the short story yields to no other form in potential subtlety. And as for "development," what is meant is development, first, of the situation presented by the beginning, and development, second, of tension or suspense or "reader interest" of one sort or another by a rising pattern of action, each successive scene exceeding the one before it in complication or excitement or in tension or suspense or whatever.

  This pattern of rising to a climax and then descending was once thought basic to the writing of plays. A German novelist once diagrammed it; "Freytag's Pyramid," so-called, follows:

  I love diagrams, God knows, but Art seems to abhor them the way Nature's said to abhor vacuums. A pattern of rising action like this can really only apply to such a genre as farce, where each episode is supposed to "top" the one before in outrageous goings-on if the author is going to get any laughs whatsoever, and perhaps it would maintain also for melodrama, where "excitement" or "thrills" for the reader is all the effect the writer can expect to achieve. And the pattern of ascending action is of course traditional in pornography. But for the literary work of art, where the final effect i
s so much simpler yet so much more subtle, such a pattern of "rising" action is only one of a number of possible patterns.

  What the middle of a short story might do, if there is a middle, and, I guess, even if a story doesn't have a beginning or ending as such, it more or less has to have a middle —what this putative middle might do is end with the moment of movement of character. This is analogous to the ideal plot structure of a novel, which supposedly runs through a number of "crises"—a "crisis" being defined as a turn in the action that affects the life of one or more of the major characters in some way — to a final culminating crisis or "climax"—which climax is thought to occur properly at the end of the middle, at the beginning of the end. A short story, chances are, won't have anything like that many crises—most likely, only one, and a subtle one at that. But perhaps this crisis — or "dynamic moment" or "moment of movement" or whatever we call it—should in fact appear "ideally" at the end of the middle and the beginning of the end. It seems as likely a place as any other.