Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular

by L Rust Hills

  Ending

  Similarly, the ending of the modern short story doesn't require a long summary of what happened "afterwards." The novel, though, as usual presents a slightly different case. After having spent so long with the characters, the reader of a novel has become so interested in them, almost fond of them as acquaintance, that he is not adverse to a long "afterward" or "conclusion" that tells how they married, settled down at Milltown Manor and raised children and grew old together. The contemporary novel, of course, doesn't go in for this much, but one feels somehow that it should: after six hundred pages and a long weekend with these people, the reader feels he has a right to know the outcome in full, the details of what happened to them finally. One resents a novel ending with just a suggestion of the outcome.

  But the purposes of a short story are different, and the effects to be achieved are different. The short story need only tell us what happened in the story itself, need only make clear the slight movement which has taken place. A lot of modern short stories don't seem to have much of an end at all, really, not in terms of old-fashioned plotting—and this is a great subject of complaint by careless readers. Whatever "resolution" occurs at the end is not so likely these days to be brought about by some final development of the plotting as it is by the introduction of some thematic note: a new image or symbol (of, say, hopefulness or despair), or by a bit of dialogue or description indicative of a new attitude. Perhaps, for instance, the boy in the story lifts his head at the sound of an airplane flying overhead; perhaps the girl turns down a blind date; perhaps a leaf falls, as the first hint of autumn—any manner of such small thing, even if apparently irrelevant, will serve for the careful reader and the scrupulous writer as a suitable and even sufficient ending for a story, so long as its connection with the story is, upon analysis and thought, clear.

  The contemporary short story writer need make no more "explanations" in his endings than in his beginnings. But the one unforgivable sin in writing is to be deliberately obscure. The freedom of the modern short story writer from the need to be explicit or obvious was hard-won—it was achieved at the cost of alienating all but the few readers capable of understanding and appreciating the form. While it is the obligation of the contemporary writer to exploit this freedom, it is absurd for him to take advantage of it.

  Sequence and Causality

  Sequential causality is generally considered to be very important in plotting. It is often thought to be the difference between a simple story, which just presents events as arranged in their time sequence, and a true plot, in which one scene prepares for and leads into and causes the scene that comes after it.

  If, for instance, we see Martin, alone and restless in his apartment, work himself up to a state of wild, desperate, irresponsible frenzy, then we will be anxious to read on and see what the effect of this frenzy will be when he confronts Miranda early the next morning. And if he behaves wildly and foolishly in his scene with Miranda, we are better able to accept such behavior, we are more convinced of its reality, because we have previously seen the cause of it. There is a back-and-forth action here, of both cause and effect, that works very nicely for the writer. Any technique that keeps a reader both convinced and interested in reading more is obviously very useful.

  But it's probably more useful, actually, in a novel than it is in a short story. Many short stories have only a single scene, and even when there are more, one doesn't seem to get the one-thing-leads-to-another, back-and-forth-forever pattern of narrative of a novel. In a short story, a scene somehow relates more to the rest of the story than it does to just the scene adjacent to it. What I mean is that episodes and incidents will all be interrelated thematically and symbolically, as much as causally. The emphasis is often less on the narrative as such than it is on how the narrative functions with the rest of the story.

  Certainly in a piece of short fiction where the narrative is important—one thinks of something as long and circumstantial as Conrad's Heart of Darkness, for instance—one incident will perhaps cause a second one and the second one will be rendered so as to make us look ahead to a third. And yet no episode or scene is in there for its own sake—neither just for its own dramatic value, nor to serve as the "cause" of the next sequence. Each incident can be shown to be related to the whole symbolic structure of the story. It is not a simple "and then" relationship, or even an "and so" relationship. Yet each is a part of the narrative. It is this double use of scene and episode which distinguishes literature from "literary" writing on the one hand, and from simple "storytelling" or even "good plotting" on the other.

  The Frame, as against the Flashback

  The differences between the two techniques known as the "flashback" and the "frame" show more of what I'm trying to say about how plot structure involves more than causal sequentiality. The flashback usually has an explanatory-expositional function; the frame has an integral relation to the whole of the story. They are two entirely different methods, not just the inside and outside of one another.

  Everyone knows, from the movies, what a flashback is. The screen ripples over, music ripples up, and we drop back in time for a sequence of action that "explains" why a character is the way he is or gives the "background" of the situation that exists "now" in the movie.

  Essentially the same thing is done in a flashback or sequence of flashbacks in a novel. But here the transition into the flashback may be more difficult. I remember a terrible novel with a preposterous structure: it had a man climbing stairs to his waiting wife; every time he took a step there'd be a flashback; the final effect was not suspenseful, as the author had intended, but unintentionally comic. It's become something of a literary convention that the flashback in time be provoked by some sense perception—by the sight of ripply water, by the sound of an organ grinder, by the smell of a Gauloise, by the taste of down-home cookin'—that recalls to the character some perception in the past that was followed by the incident described in the flashback. This convention has produced some extraordinarily beautiful passages as well as many abysmal ones. The finest, of course, is the famous scene in Proust's Remembrance of Things Past in which the awakening memory—in this case evoked by the taste of tea and madeleines (a kind of cake) which reminds Marcel of his boyhood—is compared to the lovely gradual opening of a paper flower. There the metaphor is relevant to the meaning of the whole huge work, and central to its conception.

  Similarly, a frame structure will usually have a relation to the story's whole meaning. The method here is to set a story inside another story that enhances it, or the other way around—or both, ways is what I really mean, I guess. In the classic or cliché form of the frame, you have a group of characters discussing a matter until one of them says he'll tell a tale that seems to him relevant, the tale follows, then the group discusses it. This sounds dopy, I know; but it's the structure of "Heart of Darkness," and it's how James presents "The Turn of the Screw," except here the story is "front-framed" only, without the concluding discussion. In some frame stories—like Chekhov's "Gooseberries," for instance—the frame is longer than the story it encloses. The enclosed story illuminates the frame story in a case like this: there will always be some interaction between the two parts.

  One obvious function of the frame is to permit the author to create a "voice" for his narration (in case he wants to use any special language effects—dialect, for instance), a voice which can easily be that of an involved first-person narrator (on whom the effects of the action will be immediate and clear, and who can be made as naive or as sophisticated as best serves the author's purposes), a narrator who can be distinctly or faintly separated from the author himself. The advantages and disadvantages of such a method of narration have to do with techniques of point of view.

  But the frame construction is often used in other ways and for other reasons than simply to set up a narrator. In such cases the scenes of the frame may be used to provide some effect of contrast (two scenes of a placid, stolid man at home with his family may fra
me a narrative of his adventures with the OSS in Occupied France), or for some purpose of enhancement or introduction, or because of some thematic connection between the materials of the frame and the events of the narrative they enclose. A frame will usually thus have some purpose, will be for some effect, will have some connection with the story's whole meaning—no matter how oblique the connection may sometimes seem.

  Thus it is that a frame must be thought of as a part of the story—in a way that a picture frame may not be part of a picture—and hence will have not just a relation to the whole, but be an actual effective functioning segment of that whole. Insofar as any frame structure or the special positioning of flashback sequences contribute to or comprise any sort of thought-out plan or scheme in the arrangement of the narrative, they can be thought of as effective ways in which pattern in plotting is achieved.

  Pattern in Plot

  An author can so arrange the episodes of his narrative as to create a pattern.

  We are for the moment considering the narrative structure of the story as a sort of independent aspect upon which certain internal refinements can be wrought; but it will be immediately apparent that such refinements, in a successful story, will have an effective relation to the other aspects and will be of independent demonstrable value only if the pattern directly contributes to the story's whole meaning.

  What I mean by pattern in plot is the effect achieved by having the sequences of the action arranged in a way that establishes a certain "order" or "architecture"—of balance, or symmetry, even asymmetry—in the narrative structure. For example, two scenes might be "played against" one another: a graphic description, early in the story, of a man's wife dying of cancer "played against" or "balanced against" another graphic description, later in the story, of the man removing the innards of a deer he has shot in the North Woods, where he has gone in some search for renewal after her death. Two "strong" or "unpleasant" scenes such as these can counterbalance one another, can create a sense of architecture in the story. Again, I am omitting here any reference to the contribution made by such conjunction of scenes to any other aspects of the story: for instance, in this case there might be a connection to theme —the cruelty of Nature to Man and the cruelty of Man to Nature—or to characterization —any possible motivation of revenge in the man's act, for instance.

  Or two balanced scenes could stand one on each side of a central scene of primary importance, somehow "pointing" it for the reader. Or there could be, at stages, a series of similar sequences, each ascending in intensity of some quality (absurdity, for instance, or despair) to reach a climactic scene. Or a character may be seen alone in a scene at the beginning of a story and alone again at the end, in balanced scenes, so contrived for some special effect, admittedly, as well as for the simple symmetry of plot structure.

  The frame structure is of course useful in achieving pattern in plot. Whatever flashbacks are used in a plot may be so arranged as to make a pattern. Parallel scenes may be planned to happen to two different characters. Or two like characters may be provided with matched but entirely different scenes for some effect of contrast. Or three similar sequences may be played against one another in some sort of pyramidal structure. Or passages of description or commentary may be introduced periodically according to some pattern—for pattern is not entirely a matter of plot.

  Nor is it simply a matter of balance or symmetry: an author could pattern his plot, for any wild reason of his own, on the shape of a tree, or imitating the layout of a formal garden, or according to the episodes of the Cold War, or following the same sequence of episodes as Homer's Odyssey. Any pattern is possible, and it's equally possible that a story's plot have no pattern at all. Pattern in plot is probably not a matter for a beginning writer to concern himself with much, but he should certainly know that it exists.

  It would seem that the novel, with its complicated plot and many characters, with its subplots and subcharacters, offers a greater opportunity to achieve pattern in structure than the short story does. But the novelist nowadays usually has so heady a sense of freedom from any constraint of form that the craftsman who is the short story writer will as often as not be able to give him lessons in plot patterning.

  When pattern does exist in a novel—as it does in many of the great ones, but in by no means all—it is easy to demonstrate. The structure of Tolstoi's Anna Karenina, for instance, is diagrammed by teachers with a big X on the blackboard. The novel has two protagonists: the simple Levin and the sophisticated Anna. As Anna "falls" in stages through the novel to her eventual suicide under the wheels of the train, Levin "rises" gradually to his eventual salvation reaping the fields with his peasants. The two "cross" one another in the action of the book. Perhaps the most elaborate instance of pattern in a novel is Joyce's Ulysses, where the fact that each chapter is associated with a book of the Odyssey is only one of a fantastically intricate set of patterns. The Odyssey parallel creates marvelous effects with regard to theme, image, characterization, and all aspects of the book—all related to the whole basic conception of the work—for throughout there is an implicit ironic comparison between space salesman Leopold Bloom's day of wandering around Dublin and the epic years of voyaging by the ancient Greek hero Odysseus. It was once demonstrated to me that even Tom Jones, seemingly the most rambling and picaresque and easygoing of novels, was actually architecturally structured—two scenes at the inn are equidistant from the center, and so forth. But this pattern, if it exists, seems too purely architectural, seems irrelevant and nonfunctional, seems to have no relation to the other aspects of the book.

  For pattern to be of use and value it must be related harmoniously and effectively to the whole of the story as well as to the other parts. Pattern in fiction is seldom if ever "pure"; almost necessarily it will have an effect on other aspects of the story. Any patterned arrangement of sequences is certain to cause effects of contrast or parallelism not only in plot but also in character; pattern can point ironies in the theme; pattern can mark the stages in any change of mood, or the stages of any change in character; pattern may be involved in any shifts in point of view; and in fact, pattern will have interrelations in effect with all the other parts of a story.

  And this is of course why pattern must as well have an effective relation to the whole of the story; pattern "works" in a story only when it is related to the story's basic conception, the conception which determines the nature of all the story's aspects. There is an analogy to the extraordinary refinements of the Parthenon, which were hidden for many centuries. It wasn't until the Parthenon, always regarded as one of the world's most beautiful buildings, was measured and photographed that the "reasons" for its extreme beauty of proportion became apparent: the building wasn't built "squarely" at all; the base was raised in the middle and curved gently down at the four corners; the columns increased in diameter toward the corners (to "outline" or "frame" the composition) and were "tilted" inward (to turn the eye back inward). What had been thought square was actually barely perceptibly graduated so as in perspective to appear square, without the distortion inevitable when viewed from the ground, and so as to accord with the Greek ideal of organic unity in art. This sort of "hidden" refinement achieves a purpose, serves a function, is basic to the conception—and is not just an elaborate superimposed embellishment.

  Any pattern in plot that doesn't either "work" with the other aspects or relate directly to the story's whole central conception is merely artificial form, provides only synthetic structure. There is something lifeless, something of the dead hand of artistry-for-the-sake-of-artistry in any pattern or "balance" or "symmetry" or "rhythm" in plot structure that is not related to the rest of the story. Pattern of this sort is like rhyme and meter in a poem that have no relation to the poem as a whole. Pattern, whether artificial or relevant, is seldom noticed by the reader—except that he may have some vague appreciation of a feeling of "order" about the story. But, noticed or unnoticed, it is demonstrable; and if an integral part of the s
tory, it becomes another of the effective harmonies of interrelationships that one points to when demonstrating the story's excellence.

  Choice as Technique

  All decisions about plot in fiction—decisions about which portion of a character's life is to be represented (where to begin and end the story), decisions about which episodes are to be rendered in close view and which re-counted in long view and which presented in some degree of middle view, decisions about whatever pattern is imposed on (or grows out of) the narrative structure, decisions about any episodes that seem to be in conflict—indeed, the whole question of choice or selection in plotting will be made, first, according to the episode's relevance to movement of character. That is according to a central tenet of this book: that a short story tells of something that happened to someone. But there is another even more basic tenet: that the parts, or aspects, of a story work effectively together harmoniously to comprise the story's whole meaning.