In-Class 5-minute Stories

1. Characters: a carpenter and a salesman who remain unnamed as do their professions; Setting: A busy street; 3 specific words; Song title (Repeat it as a phrase 3 times in the story); Something bad has just happened to one of them before this scene. Write it.
2. Write a list of a) red things, b) things more embarrassing than nudity, c) things you could never imagine yourself doing, d) the most striking smells you can think of. Choose several from each list and use them in a story about a character in a post office.
3. Characters: Someone menacing from your past. Setting: Where shouldn’t this person be? Other: Who else is here? Write a 5-minute story from this person’s perspective as a 10-year-old. Write a second story about this character at age 65.
4. Write a story about something going terribly wrong at a meal. Don’t mention what that something is.
5. Write the paragraph that would appear in a piece of fiction just before the discovery of a body.

Discussion of Readings

• 1) Openings to various short stories (handout), 2) Microfictions (handout), 3) Judy Budnitz “Dog Days”

Notes on FICTION

During Week 4 we briefly discussed some of our anxieties, expectations, and excitement about entering the Fiction unit, and we will continue to explore these as we begin writing fiction. Remember: your first job in fiction is to a) convince your reader that the events you recount really happened, or b) persuade your reader they might have happened, or c) engage your reader’s interest in the patent absurdity of the lie of their happening. A good story depends on the level of detail that imbues your stories. You must, as authors, know everything there is to know, and all details (those conveyed and those underneath/around the world of your story) must remain consistent; the lifeblood of fiction is in the detail. The more you know about your characters, setting, situation—the more constraints there are—the easier it becomes to decide what can/will happen in your story. For example, know what’s in your character’s pockets, what she ate for breakfast, what she dreamed; if action takes place in a room, know, too, what is outside that room, down the hall or parked in the street, even if it never makes it into your story. Don’t create archetypes, caricatures, or characters who serve as mouthpieces for ideas—create living, breathing characters with whom you sit down for meals so that they can tell you about who they are. Listen to them. Know your own beliefs about what makes a good story and what it should do. As we make our way through what feels like a fictional/surreal time right now, it may seem irrelevant to work on fictional stories. But maybe this is an opportunity for temporary distraction from the news, to let your imaginations run elsewhere, to immerse your reader in a world far from this one, or to replicate this one in a way that tilts ever so slightly towards the invented one; after all, the best stories can feel almost too real.

Here are some thoughts about craft:

• Anecdote vs. Story: How is anecdote different from story? Do they read the same? What makes a plot? Here’s something to help clarify: The king died, and then the queen died (= story); The king died, and then the queen died of grief (= plot). Note that plot must have causality. So how do you develop an arc without predictability; how do you infuse emotional involvement? Even a circular story, one in which the situation at the end may be the same as at the beginning, must lead the reader to understand it better at the end. Even vignettes can represent/hold tension; something has to shift. Plot is a series of imaginary events designed to create anticipation at a high pitch in the form of anxiety (conflict/mystery) or curiosity (puzzlement); as you build the series, you build the plot. As CS Forester writes, there are two kinds of writers: “those who invent a character and then look for something for him to do, and those who invent a situation and then look for a character to put in it.” Consider also Madame deStael’s wisdom on the value of concision: “If I had more time, I should have written you a short letter.” Compression involves packing things carefully in a suitcase instead of throwing it all in. This is a good lesson for storymaking. John L’Heureux’s definition of a story is that it is about “a single moment in a character’s life that culminates in a defining choice after which nothing will be the same again.” 
• Characters:
  • Here’s what they need: strong motivation; flaws and imperfections; to know more than you know; to make decisions and take responsibilities; to want something; to hope for something.
  • How do you get to the point where your characters rebel, where they speak for themselves? Spend a lot of time getting to know them, loosen your author(itative) reins, listen to them as they tell you who they are. They are not two-dimensional. Don’t push them around like chess pieces to fit some preconceived plot. Create characters worth knowing.
  • Graham Greene: “The moment when a character does or says something you hadn’t thought about—at that moment, he’s alive”
  • William Faulkner, when asked how he wrote Sound & Fury, said he followed Caddy around and wrote down what she did: “It begins with a character usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does”
  • Realness: How to make characters real? When we remember the stories we love, we remember the characters living within them; they are the heart of fiction, and become as real and palpable as anyone we’ve met…and they never die. Cultivate tenderness for your characters; live with them intimately, as they need constant attention, and you can never know too much about them (their secrets, regrets, desires, fears).
  • Think WITH characters, not ABOUT them.
  • Flat vs. Round characters: as EM Forster writes, there’s a difference “between those fictional personages seen from the outside who act with the predictable consistency of caricatures, and those whose complexities or teeming inner lives we come to know.
  • Action: Characters become fully realized when they interact in a social context; if you leave a character alone too long, you better come up with an interaction. Fiction depends on characters acting and reacting, like a movie not like a photograph. Actions must depict states of mind (psychological intent). Central characters must act, not simply be acted upon. Animate your characters, get them moving and behaving and invite the reader to watch. In the words of Mark Twain: “don’t tell us that the old lady screamed; bring her onstage and let her scream.” And Ernest J. Gaines writes: “Every story should begin with a character in the middle of an LA freeway. He moves, or the story is over.” And Elizabeth Bowen writes: “The action of a character should be unpredictable before it has been shown, inevitable when it has been shown.”
  • Origins: Where do characters come from? Like journalists, you must study your subjects (strangers in the real world) closely. Knowledge = affection => stories. Characters can derive from parts of yourselves, or from observations of people you know. “Borrow” the stories of others. 
• Viewpoints. Point-of-view depends on how much you want the reader to see and in what detail. Here are a few options.
  • Omniscience: enter any character’s mind (wide-angle lens); access to exterior world of story and into mind of characters
  • Limited Omniscience: only enter 1 character’s mind; access to thoughts/feelings
  • Detached: cannot enter any one’s mind; float as invisible present observer, (camera eye); narrator disappears but we see/hear events as they occur
  • Single-character: told entirely through 1 character’s perceptions (portrait lens); draw reader into strong identity w/character; employ distancing devices (story told as memoir, speak in 1^st/2^nd POV to reader in direct address, invented narrator, story within story); play with the double “I” of 2 time periods (1. When the story takes place; 2. When the story is being narrated).
  • Multiple character: series of single character episodes strung together, each w/different viewpoint character (read Faulkner as example)
• Dialogue: When to use it? How to write indirect vs. active dialogue? When must conversation be used to create scene, to add personality to character without the mediation of a narrator, to emphasize important moments in their immediacy, to create subtext (and therefore underlying meaning)? Remember: dialogue in stories is not real speech and cannot represent the idle banter of real life. In real life, people say a lot but don’t mean much, and you don’t want your stories filled with emptiness.
• Openings:
  • Marianne Moore: “if you can’t catch the reader’s attention at the start and hold it, there’s no use going on.”
  • Flannery O’Connor: “if you start with a real personality, a real character, then something is bound to happen; and you don’t have to know before you begin. In fact, it may be better if you don’t know what before you begin. You ought to be able to discover something from your stories.”
  • Tolstoy: “All happy families are alike, but an unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”
  • Openings are important and difficult because they must: a) stand on their own (every other part of the story has preceding parts to lean on); b) establish character, setting, mood, tone, situation; c) provoke interest, and curiosity; d) suggest conflict; e) start the movement of plot. Your 1^st sentence = narrative hook. The opening tells something about the entire story (at the least, let’s the reader know what kind of story it will be). See all of Flannery O’Connor’s openings—each is filled with all the details you need, clues for the entire story.
  • If you’re writing a story and are confused about the end, go back to the beginning
  • Someone once said the definition of a PLOT is: get your hero up a tree, throw rocks at her, throw bigger rocks at her, then get her down.
  • A good beginning is full of intimation (here are characters w/something remarkable to tell us) & assurance (something compelling/surprising/unusual is about to happen).
  • Don’t promise what you can’t deliver
  • Don’t initiate conflict you can’t resolve
  • Don’t load a gun you won’t fire
  • Don’t introduce a story—just jump in
  • Don’t begin with a long description without establishing a POV. Ex. It was a dark and stormy night on the heath. The wind screamed through the heather. Thunder resounded off the nearby cliffs. VS. The man pulled the jacket over his head, but the wind-driven rain beat against his face. He wondered how far he had yet to go to reach the doctor’s house. He waited for a stroke of lightening, saw the house over the second hill, stepped carefully. (The latter establishes: pov, voice, tone, theme, character, setting.)

I will be in touch soon with a revised plan for the remainder of our semester.

Until then, I hope you’re able to create space and time to write each day, though I understand the challenges of being productive right now. Be easy on yourselves, be patient. Practice self-care, and explore how writing might be part of this care…