Past Perfect, Present Tense
Page 13
Before I began writing, I knew that Grandma would marry Charlie. It was only in the third draft that I discovered the repetition of “I do” that draws the story together to hand over to the reader.
Be too proud to show anybody, including a teacher, your rough drafts. Real writing isn’t e-mail.
And another hint at the heart of the matter:
HINT #4:
A STORY IS ONLY AS STRONG AS THE VOICES TELLING IT
And I’m tempted to add: The only voice a story never needs is the author’s. Characters need to speak for themselves in their own distinct voices. This isn’t television. Characters aren’t identified by sight, but by sound. Particularly in a short story, every word they speak needs to sound like the speaker and move the story along.
Young voices and old, foreign and familiar, voices from the past and the present. Charlotte’s ripe, old-fashioned British accent in “Waiting for Sebastian.” In “Shotgun Cheatham’s Last Night Above Ground,” Mrs. Wilcox’s ungrammatical cry: “The dead is walking, and Mrs. Dowdel’s gunning for me!” Then at the end of the scene Grandma Dowdel’s deadpan: “Time you kids was in bed.”
In another world entirely, in “Fluffy the Gangbuster,” a cat and dog converse across a slight language (and intellectual) barrier. Fluffy hisses, “I’m scared. See me tremble . . . I’m puss shaking in my boots.” She’s inspired by the cat character in Richard Adams’s Watership Down. Grover the dog demonstrates his lower intellect by saying “like” too often.
Then there’s the title character of “The Most Important Night of Melanie’s Life.” The extreme difference in how she speaks to her brothers and how she speaks to the all-too-heavenly hunk, Ben, tells us what we need to know about her. “Like make my day, right?”
Writers are collectors of voices, and writing is the art of listening. And we need the vocabulary to give our characters the gift of speech. Learn five new words a day.
And only one more hint. Too many hints might keep you from your own writing:
HINT #5:
A STORY IS A QUESTION ABOUT CHANGE
The story answers the question: How does a character change? This involves plot: the sequence of events, a tight thread in short fiction. It involves a careful blend of word and deed. A story that’s all talk is a chat room. A story that’s all action is a video game.
At the end of “Priscilla and the Wimps” Monk Klutter is literally in a different place. Word and deed—and Priscilla—have brought him here. This is the simplest story in the collection, pared to essentials, because I was told to make it short.
“Shadows” is probably the most complex of all these stories. It depends upon an elaborate back story about why a girl is being brought up in that old house by two not-quite aunts, and the unspoken motives of those aunts. By means of closely pruned details, we move through her coming-of-age until she learns enough truth to leave.
Movement. Always movement because life itself too often seems to stand still, especially when you’re young. At the end of “The Electric Summer,” a farm girl who has seen the world’s fair wonders how she can just go home now, to things as they were.
“You won’t have to, you and the boys,” her mother says. “It’s your century. It can take you wherever you want to go . . . I’ll keep you back if I can. But I’ll let you go if I must.”
Those are maybe the most loving lines in this collection, in a story that ends at a new beginning, as stories do. Stories end in the dawning hope that there’s a lot of life yet to be lived, especially if your characters are young, and your readers are too.
Finally, more than a hint. When we’re not writing, we’re thinking about writing. And we’re writing a lot, in scraps of stolen time other people don’t notice they have. After all, we have all these lives we need to be living. And we write and write, to see how the story ends.
“I write,” William Faulkner said, “when the spirit moves. And it moves every day.”
I conclude with those words from a master of the form because nobody but a reader ever became a writer.
*Cornhill Magazine, July 1899
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