by Marge Piercy
Now while the tale of the buttonholer’s Aunt Edna and her repeating husband may be flat as old seltzer to you, your own Aunt Edna is someone else again. Family stories are a rich mother lode of goodies to mine, whether you are writing memoir or fiction. All those stories told to you as a kid or overheard while the adults were gossiping are made of gold and someday you will probably use at least some of them. If you can get people in your family to gossip again to renew your acquaintance with those tales, that can be useful, but it’s the way that you remember them that counts. Maybe you got the stories mixed up. Years ago I conflated two stories I had heard about men in my then partner’s place of business. I turned them in my head into one man and wrote about him. The product was good, but it came from misunderstanding. Finally that doesn’t matter, if the way you remember it is what speaks to you, means something about foibles or forgiveness or the role of accident or the terrible cost of revenge. Whatever made those stories stick in your brain like golden burrs, they are yours and you need them.
In many ways, short stories have more in common with poems than they do with novels. I cannot imagine a phrase sticking in my mind (say, Passing headlights lit the rain spangles in her hair) and writing a novel. Novels require more of an architectural sense, a theme, strong and well-understood major characters, a well defined setting. But poems and short fiction could easily be ignited by such a phrase and proceed from there. Anything can spark a poem or a short story. I remember one poem that came from mishearing a phrase in a Talking Heads song, realizing I had changed it, and then taking the new phrase I had invented and writing a poem with it.
You mine your own life as well as those of people around you for incidents that might make a good short story. Years after the fact, I found a story in a small event of betrayal from a teacher I had trusted in high school—two decades afterward when I could see his point of view as well as my own resentment. I could make a good story of it because I no longer wanted to confront him, strangle him, turn him to dust. That’s why Wordsworth recommended emotion recollected in tranquility. If you are still so angry at someone you want to hurt them with your story, you will seldom produce a story worth the time and effort of anyone else to read.
Often writers who haven’t read much in the way of contemporary short stories have the notion that a story is supposed to end with a surprise, a twist, an ironic coda. They probably read O’Henry in high school. While Maupassant and O’Henry wrote in that manner, the modern short story issues out of Chekhov and is not as concerned with plot as it is with character or ambience. It may well have a plot, as Hemingway’s fine short stories tend to. The most primitive short story is the tale. Once upon a time there lived a prince, but he was very poor and lacked everything a prince should have. Tales often have little character development. Often there are stock characters we are to take on face value—the kind old lady with the magic potion, the evil step-mother, the talking horse or cat who will serve as a helper. How can Puss in Boots talk? Because he is Puss in Boots—that’s all the answer you will get.
In some of James Tiptree, Jr.’s short stories (James Tiptree, Jr. was the pen name of Alice Bradley Sheldon, who felt her science fiction would be best served with a male face on it), it is the situation and what happens because of it that forms the meat of the story—a spaceship of aliens arrives, but they are all women. How do the government and the media react?
A little tale well told often can work because of the narrator’s strong voice. We read on just as we listen when a raconteur is telling us a story. The voice, the language, the style are far more important to catching and holding our interest than the stuff of the tale itself. But a good tale told by a fine narrator (Twain’s jumping frog) will always get our attention.
A short story might present to the reader an unusual character. But however unique Eudora Welty’s characters may strike us as being, they are firmly embedded in a place, in a social context. They have a past that impinges on the present; they have relationships and opinions and desires. Characters are most interesting to us when they are not stationary but rather in some kind of motion, internal, external or, preferably, both. Simple eccentricity may suffice for a dinner party anecdote, but it will not hold the reader’s attention in a short story.
Many stories center on a particular slot of time in the life of a protagonist—anything from the moment before and the moment during a traffic accident to a family meal, a power breakfast or a business luncheon, a walk on the beach with an ex, a shift at work—a fireman’s shift or a plumber’s day. It might be a weekend getaway for a family in trouble or it might be the first weekend together of a tentative couple.
Most short stories use a single viewpoint. It’s cleaner and less complicated. We know whose head we are in and, after all, we have a limited amount of time to spend looking out through their eyes and trying on their clothes and walking in their shoes. Occasionally you may find a story that alternates viewpoints—say, the experiences of each member of the couple who are trying out that ski weekend together. Occasionally you may find a story in which the viewpoint keeps shifting, following a particular arc of events. Perhaps you are writing a series of vignettes centered around the particularly hideous vase that is given as a present in situations requiring a gift where none is truly heartfelt. The vase makes its way from anniversary present in honor of a miserable marriage to a gift to a hated mother-in-law to the wedding of a former lover, and so on. Each character introduced should be linked to the one before and the one coming up next. It’s a bit artificial, but it has been done countless times with various objects.
But basically you are going to write a short story in one viewpoint. It might be that of your protagonist or it might be someone more peripherally involved. The viewpoint character may be viewing a disaster happening to someone else, as in the story “Rose,” by Andre Dubus, in which a man tells the heartbreaking story of a woman who frequents his neighborhood tavern. If you want humor in a disastrous situation—a wedding that is mismanaged from beginning to end—you may want the distancing of someone who is neither the bride nor groom nor other partner. The most common choice is that of the major character, but that’s a decision you need to make and make correctly for the story you are relating.
A perfectly ordinary workday or Sunday morning can be the focus of a short story. There need not be anything extraordinary happening, although there can be. “My God, Ruthie, there’s a tiger in the vegetable garden.” That will certainly get our attention, but where you go from there had better be convincing. Drama occurs whenever there is conflict or tension or unfulfilled desire. Simply watching a spouse chew cereal can arouse a towering rage in a partner who is already fed up. There can be powerful angst or festering resentment at that breakfast table. Every so often you read in the paper about someone murdering a family member over a TV program or a taco eaten that was being saved for lunch. Money is always good for a struggle. Sex withheld or demanded or unsatisfactory or just plain boring causes a lot of friction. Sometimes you need only get two characters together and let them go at it. Much of what they will be angry or upset about will not be the matter of what they say to each other. They may argue about who left the milk out when they are really arguing about whether one loves the other any longer.
So a particular time slot can be an organizing factor for a story. The setting can also be an important factor in a short story. We are on a plane during heavy turbulence when a passenger gets out of his seat and begins screaming. Now this is only interesting if we have established something else going on. The protagonist is flying out for a crucial job interview. She needs the money badly, but she really doesn’t want to do that type of work. She actually enjoys teaching and would much rather do that. Somehow the crazy passenger and the other passengers’ responses and our protagonist’s actions or failure to take action will relate to her dilemma.
An event may serve as the foundation for a story. Again, the event is not the story but the setting for the story—a setting, yes,
but at best a very active setting, one that channels, interferes with, facilitates the action of the story. The event could be a birthday party, a wedding, a funeral, a celebration, a retirement party, a political meeting or town meeting, a demonstration, a hearing, a trial, a fundraiser, a bake sale, a shower, the visit of relatives from Poland or San Diego, a recital, a soccer match, a dance. Sometimes a story is about what does not happen rather than what does.
A young woman spends an inordinate amount of time and money she does not have for an outfit to wear to a fundraiser for a local animal shelter where she is hoping to hook up with a young man she is convinced is interested in her as much as she is in him. It is how this does not happen that is the meat of the story—whether it is because she has been misreading his cues, because he turns out to be someone she doesn’t want to become involved with, or because she flubs the occasion so totally that she alienates him or makes a fool of herself. The events of the fund raiser should help precipitate what happens and what does not happen.
James Joyce called the moment of insight that a short story may deliver an “epiphany.” It is a moment of Aha! for the character or for the reader. The protagonist may never understand what we grasp, or may do so. But whatever you do, do not call attention to that moment of enlightenment or understanding by labeling it or explaining it. It has to happen from the events in the story and not from your explanation. It might be a moment of sublime connection. It might be a totally cynical moment in which everything turns to crap. It might be a moment of personal insight: I am not the person I thought I was. Things are not going to be as I expected. It might be an insight into a relationship that the protagonist is in or has been in—the sudden feeling that all along the protagonist was fooling herself about the nature of the connection—or a terrible sense of loss over something easily discarded or broken off. There is a precipitating incident and that is the crux of the story.
Beware, in the story of an epiphany, that the character does not change immediately. We all have insights that perhaps should change our lives but that at the most modify our usual behavior a tiny amount. His friend, Bob, with whom Jake has strongly identified for years, drops dead suddenly of a heart attack just as as they are rising from their standard Saturday afternoon barbeque. Jake recognizes in that moment that since they have the same habits and lead very similar lives, this may be his fate. Now he may resolve to change his life completely, but he is unlikely to stop drinking with his friends at the bar where they always meet after work, or to begin working on the triathlon. He sees his fate and might make some modification of behavior, but a complete change of lifestyle is unlikely. Scrooge may change completely, although some of us may suspect that within a year he will be back pinching his pennies until they bend, but don’t rely on that. Nobody is going to believe it these days.
Some stories come from taking someone and sending them through a quest or journey—the basic Joseph Campbell myth distilled into a short fiction. It might be physical. It might be emotional. It might be spiritual. But the protagonist goes from A to B or at least attempts to go from A to B, even if B is not defined or understood beforehand. There are obstacles. There are interruptions. But in a short story, there cannot be too many of these. I think in general the quest is best pursued in a novel or a novella, at least.
Perhaps Charley goes in search of the strange, or perhaps the strange comes in search of Charley. There is a knock at the door. Someone comes into the tidy house of Charley’s life. The nanny arrives, and she is not at all what the couple expected. Mary Pop-pins or the seductive young woman who turns the house and the marriage upside down or simply a judgmental outsider who forces the protagonist to see her or his life in a different and perhaps disturbing way. The salesman comes to the door selling love potions. The fortuneteller beckons the young woman into her tent at the fair and gives her images of a totally different future. The hitchhiker changes the fate of everyone in the car. An intruder creates a crisis for a family—an escaped convict, a fugitive, a lost child, a runaway, a battered wife—even a stray dog or a deer caught in a shed.
A story does not have to follow a continuous narrative. You might decide to write a short story about a marriage in which you give moments over a fifteen-year period. They are a single take at at a single instant, but incidents and moments that are suggestive and reveal the tensions and the direction the relationship is taking. I can imagine a story about a house in which there are the moments of occupation and desertion, of moving in and moving out of renovation and decay. There are many ways to structure a story. A series of quick takes over time is one of those ways.
One thing to beware of in any short story is too much: too many incidents involving your protagonist that make essentially the same point; too many minor characters; too many settings; too much of anything, including “fine” writing. Keep it clean. Keep it directed. A first person voice in a novel can launch into riffs and digressions that, if well done, can charm the reader and give us insight into the speaker and the world of that speaker. But in a short story such digressions are usually fatal. Decide early on how many characters you actually need. Don’t put anyone in “because they were actually there” or because you think they’re a cute or fascinating character. Again, the novel has space for exploration of cul-de-sacs and scenic viewing areas, but the short story does not. Keep to the number of characters you truly need. The short story is a little box into which nothing that does not function should be placed. Not a great metaphor, but you get the point. Keep out what isn’t essential.
Another type of short story is the parody. Maybe you are really fed up with a particular writer—you’ve had it up to here with the writer of the moment who is the darling of all the critics (this year) or the endless admirers of Dashiell Hammett or the later Doris Lessing leaden science fiction novels. Writing an entire novel of parody is a lot of time to put into what is essentially lighthearted but trenchant literary criticism. You may even be parodying a television series. Whatever it is, a short story is the perfect length for making your point. There is no point parodying something few people have seen or read, but anything common to the canon or to pop culture is fodder for good parody.
I have warned you about cramming too much into a short story, but there is also the problem of too little. We see stories in which nothing happens in a boring manner. Three college buddies are drinking together and talking of How Life Sucks and they can’t get paid for doing anything they want and they can’t get laid. Now such a story sometimes attempts to make a point by dragging in a one-legged, blind orphan to show them how lucky they are or how plucky she is, or maybe they just go on and on philosophizing in a manner that that the author thought full of depth and insight. Either way, it isn’t life that sucks, but the story certainly does. If you want insight in your story, build it in—don’t have Joe tell Harry about the bright continuum that is all of sentient and nonsentient life.
Now in general I stopped being willing to put up with epistolary storytelling about the time I finished reading Richardson’s Clarissa, but there are always writers who can breathe fresh life into a tired form. For some years now e-mail has replaced the long-awaited arrival of the postman. There has to be a strong voice and you have to be willing to put up with narration all the way, rather than the creation of scenes we usually insist on. A classic example of the form is “Address Unknown” by Kressmann Taylor, a story consisting of the letters exchanged between two business partners, an American Jew and a German-born Aryan who returns to Weimar Germany.
Most short stories are basically realistic, but they don’t have to be. Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” is one of the most famous and successful short stories ever written, but you won’t find a lot of your acquaintances waking up as cockroaches (however many had families who made them feel like lower forms of life). You must establish character strongly and quickly and you must create a setting and situation we believe in, even if it is on Beta Omicron 4 and in a hive of paper wasps or suburbia where James Thurb
er’s character looks out and sees a unicorn in the garden one morning. William Gibson’s “The Gernsback Continuum” is the story of a photographer who penetrates “a fine membrane, a membrane of probability” and finds himself living in the future that was projected by designers and media futurists of the late1930s, where fleets of zeppelins whiz overhead and people eat by means of pills containing all they require. This is an example of a short story that begins with an idea: What if you took all those long exploded projections of the future and made them real and put a confused contemporary into that world? Because the protagonist is believable and the world is vividly created, the story, although idea-driven, works.
Characters have to have pasts as well as current desires, fears, angers, habits, hobbies. We can be given the past in an image that has a brief memory attached to it. When Gwen saw the hammer Bernie had set on the window sill, a wave of cold slid through her. Her father’s large hand grasped the hammer and swung it over her mother’s small pale hand. Or we can do a full flashback. When Gwen saw the hammer Bernie had set on the window sill, she felt a chill creep through her. She was in the kitchen of the third floor apartment in the triple-decker in Dorchester where she had spent her first ten years. She smelled bacon scorching on the stove and toast burning. Her father, huge as a house to her, had a hammer in his hand. He had been driving nails into a loose doorjamb. Now he was screaming at her mother, who had let breakfast go in her fear and cowered in the chair, her hands clutching a napkin on the table. And so forth.
You have to decide how important it is to set the full scene in a flashback or whether you simply want an image to jog an instant’s memory. It depends on the pacing of your story and on how important what you are transmitting in the flashback is to the reader. But do not, in a short story, get bogged down in flashbacks. I read an unsuccessful story recently in which there were flashbacks inside of flashbacks, like endless parentheses enclosing other parentheses. I could not follow the story or get any sense of forward momentum. With every step forward, we seemed to slip three steps back.