Some thoughts on writing a short story

Having recently finished a second stint as one of the judges of the Ringwood Publishing Short Story Competition, I thought I’d make a few observations on the stories I’ve read and perhaps give a few pointers for people looking to enter future competitions. 

Firstly, to everyone who entered the Ringwood competition, or who has entered any writing competition at any time, congratulations. Congratulations twice over. Once for conceiving, starting and finishing your story. And once more for having the courage to enter it for a competition. That isn’t easy, I know, and the sense of disappointment when you don’t win or get on a shortlist can be dispiriting. So well done, and thank you for sharing your work with us. Please don’t give up. 

Now, looking at the stories this time round, I have to be honest and say my first observation is that quite a high percentage of the stories entered weren’t ready. In many, there were simple punctuation, grammar or spelling mistakes which point to a story that hasn’t been fully edited. That alone isn’t enough to eliminate a good story from contention, but alongside those mistakes there were, in many instances, clear signs that the story needed more work. 

No story will be a finished article on the first write. Even the second write. Third write. Fourth, fifth, sixth. Short stories are an unforgiving medium because they allow for no wasted words, no longeurs, no unnecessary scenes or scene-setting. Get into your story immediately. Tell that story as concisely as you can. Then leave the story at the first moment you can safely escape, your story told, the point made. You can only do that when you’ve written and rewritten and rewritten it, removed every unnecessary word, distilled the plot to its essence, left nothing but the hard, sharp form of the tale itself. 

There’s no doubt a high percentage of stories would be immediately improved by deleting the first two, three or even four paragraphs. So many stories began with a protagonist going somewhere, or preparing to do something. Nobody cares about that. Start when the action starts. 

Read your story aloud. How does it sound? Are the moments of tension tense, the moments of love tender, the moments of humour a relief? And, more importantly, does it sound like a story from your head, or is it like any other story you might read on the web? 

Years ago, when I was in Alex Keegan’s Bootcamp, an online writing forum, Alex used to do an exercise where he would take a paragraph each from up to ten stories by different members of Bootcamp and stitch them together. Naturally, the story made no sense, but what was notable was that although the plot was nonsense the voice was consistent throughout. In other words, we were all writing in the same way, with a generic voice (usually Raymond Carver’s), with nothing distinctive, no way of grabbing the reader and saying to them “listen to this, listen to me, this story is amazing.” 

Voice is such an important aspect of storytelling. It’s about the way your sentences work, the words you use, your tone, the rhythms of your sentences, the ebb and flow of emotion. Voice is the way you tell your story. No one else can write your story. You are unique and your story is unique so make it sound unique. 

When you do that you will start to see your story crystallise on the page. It will become specific, real, an imagined world made flesh. Your characters will be more than names, your locales will be more than streets or hills or enchanted glades. They will be Ash Harker, young and frightened and alone, travelled 5,000 miles in search of truth; they will be that street, Milnab Street, the street where you were born in your big brother’s bed; they will be the Knock hill, trees and heather and blaeberry bushes, stretching high over Crieff and nestling between the Grampians and the Ochils; they will be the enchanted glade where you fell in love, where your life truly began, where the wonders of the world were revealed. Everything in your story will be real. Specificity is everything. Without it there is no story, just words. 

Take chances. Be bold. Search for that perfect, beautiful phrase, one that nobody’s heard before, one that sings, soars, hits you in the solar plexus. Make mistakes. That’s okay. You’re still learning. Ray Bradbury said the first million words was your apprenticeship. I’d rather read something where the author’s tried too hard and it hasn’t come off than something where they’ve settled for the first description or action that came to mind. I want to go on a glorious adventure with you, my mind and yours perfectly in union. 

To end where we began: congratulations on your immense good fortune in being a writer. It’s a grand business, and I wish you all the very best of luck in making your writing wonderful. Hopefully, we can do it all again next year.

The use of description to establish character in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

Here is a fine piece of descriptive writing from One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey.

I realised I still had my eyes shut. I had shut them when I put my face to the screen, like I was scared to look outside. Now I had to open them. I looked out the window and saw for the first time how the hospital was out in the country. The moon was low in the sky over the pastureland: the face of it was scarred and scuffed where it had just torn up out of the snarl of scrub oak and madrone trees on the horizon. The stars up close to the moon were pale; they got brighter and braver the farther they got out of the circle of light ruled by the giant moon. It called to mind how I noticed the exact same thing when I was off on a hunt with Papa and the uncles and I lay rolled in blankets Grandma had woven, lying off a piece from where the men hunkered around the fire as they passed a quart jar of cacturs liquor in a silent circle. I watched that big Oregon prairie moon above me put all the stars around it to shame. I kept awake watching, to see if the moon ever got dimmer or if the stars got brighter, till the dew commenced to drift onto my cheeks and I had to pull a blanket over my head.

As an example of how to integrate descriptive writing into narrative, this cannot be beaten. The narrator is Chief Bromden, an inmate in an asylum who is doubly cloistered by the perception in his head that the world is under the control of ‘The Combine’, which controls thoughts and actions in secrecy. Not long before this passage, there is a harrowing scene in which the Chief describes the impenetrable fog which he thinks The Combine brings down on the world in order to go about its business. This, then, is a man wholly confined. And yet, of course, he is a countryman, used to freedom and open spaces. It is a tragic situation he has found himself in.

And so, in this passage, we get the first inkling of the Chief looking outward once more. He notices for the first time the rural location of the hospital and gives a vivid description of it. This seamlessly leads him into a reminiscence of a happy experience from his childhood. The shift is beautifully handled – a moment of relaxation in the present, releasing repressed memories of the past. In this way, description of landscape is being used specifically to build character and character development. It is beautifully handled.

The passage continues, and it is worth quoting at length because it is superbly done:

Something moved on the grounds down beneath my window – cast a long spider of shadow out across the grass as it ran out of sight behind a hedge. When it ran back to where I could get a better look, I saw it was a dog, a young, gangly mongrel slipped off from home to find out about things went on after dark. He was sniffing digger squirrel holes, not with a notion to go digging after one but just to get an idea what they were up to at this hour. He’d run his muzzle down a hole, butt up in the air and tail going, then dash off to another. The moon glistened around him on the wet grass, and when he ran he left tracks like dabs of dark paint spattered across the blue shine of the lawn. Galloping from one particularly interesting hole to the next, he became so took with what was coming off – the moon up there, the night, the breeze full of smells so wild makes a young boy drunk – that he had to lie down on his back and roll. He twisted and thrashed around like a fish, back bowed and belly up, and when he got to his feet and shook himself a spray came off him in the moon like silver scales.

He sniffed all the holes over again one quick one, to get the smells down good, then suddenly froze still with one paw lifted and his head tilted, listening. I listened too, but I couldn’t hear anything except the popping of the window shade. I listened for a long time. Then, from a long way off, I heard a high, laughing gabble, faint and coming closer. Canada honkers going south for the winter. I remembered all the hunting and belly-crawling I’d ever done trying to kill a honker, and that I never got one.

I tried to look where the dog was looking to see if I could find the flock, but it was too dark. The honking came closer and closer till it seemed like they must be flying right through the dorm, right over my head. Then they crossed the moon – a black, weaving necklace, drawn into a V by that lead goose. For an instant that lead goose was right in the centre of that circle, bigger than the others, a black cross opening and closing, then he pulled his V out of sight into the sky once more.

I listened to them fade away till all I could hear was my memory of the sound. The dog could still hear them a long time after me. He was still standing with his paw up; he hadn’t moved or barked when they flew over. When he couldn’t hear them any more either, he commenced to lope off in the direction they had gone, towards the highway, loping steady and solemn like he had an appointment. I held my breath and I could hear the flap of his big paws on the grass as he loped: then I could hear a car speed up out of a turn. The headlights loomed over the rise and peered ahead down the highway. I watched the dog and the car making for the same spot of pavement.

The dog was almost to the rail fence at the edge of the grounds when I felt somebody slip up behind me. Two people. I didn’t turn, but I knew it was the black boy named Geever and the nurse with the birthmark and the crucifix. I heard a whir of fear start up in my head. The black boy took my arm and pulled me round. ‘I’ll get ‘im,’ he says.

‘It’s chilly at the window there, Mr Bromden,’ the nurse tells me. ‘Don’t you think we’d better climb back into our nice toasty bed?’

‘He cain’t hear,’ the black boy tells her. ‘I’ll take him. He’s always untying his sheet and roaming ‘round.’

There is an astonishing poignancy to this. We have this man, physically trapped in an asylum and mentally enclosed by his own irrational fears, and it is counterpointed by, firstly, the flighty dog, then the skein of geese and finally by a car – all of them free, going about their own business unhindered. Meanwhile, the Chief describes all of this in exquisite detail – ‘blue shine of the lawn’, the ‘black, weaving necklace’ of geese, the steady and solemn lope of the dog. Be clear, whatever the Chief’s current situation, here is a man at ease with nature.

And then the reality, perhaps portended by the arrival of that car – humanity, modern progress – and the Chief becomes aware of a presence behind him. The ‘whir of fear’ starts up in his head. His reverie is over, his moment of freedom finished. The black boy and the nurse deal with him gently enough, but consider the nurse’s words, her patronising use of the first person plural, the childish description of a ‘toasty bed’. This to a man who could conjure such magical descriptions, who demonstrates a remarkable sensitivity to nature, but the nurse blithely assumes that there is nothing happening in his brain, that he is some sort of zombie wandering the ward aimlessly and staring vacantly into space. And the scene concludes chillingly, with that reminder of the Chief’s situation, the sheet that has to be tied around him nightly to confine him to his bed. It is clear that the Chief may have found a solitary, fleeting moment of escape, but it was a chimera. He is unable to comprehend our world. But we, to our shame, are equally unable to comprehend his. A more poignant description of mental illness it would be hard to find.

Katherine Mansfield - how to write an opening

 

The opening of Katherine Mansfield's wonderful story, The Doll's House, is worthy of analysis. Here it is:

When dear old Mrs. Hay went back to town after staying with the Burnells she sent the children a doll's house. It was so big that the carter and Pat carried it into the courtyard, and there it stayed, propped up on two wooden boxes beside the feed-room door. No harm could come of it; it was summer. And perhaps the smell of paint would have gone off by the time it had to be taken in. For, really, the smell of paint coming from that doll's house ("Sweet of old Mrs. Hay, of course; most sweet and generous!") -- but the smell of paint was quite enough to make any one seriously ill, in Aunt Beryl's opinion. Even before the sacking was taken off. And when it was . . .

There stood the doll's house, a dark, oily, spinach green, picked out with bright yellow. Its two solid little chimneys, glued on to the roof, were painted red and white, and the door, gleaming with yellow varnish, was like a little slab of toffee. Four windows, real windows, were divided into panes by a broad streak of green. There was actually a tiny porch, too, painted yellow, with big lumps of congealed paint hanging along the edge.

But perfect, perfect little house! Who could possibly mind the smell? It was part of the joy, part of the newness.

"Open it quickly, some one!"

The hook at the side was stuck fast. Pat pried it open with his pen- knife, and the whole house-front swung back, and -- there you were, gazing at one and the same moment into the drawing-room and dining-room, the kitchen and two bedrooms. That is the way for a house to open! Why don't all houses open like that? How much more exciting than peering through the slit of a door into a mean little hall with a hat-stand and two umbrellas! That is -- isn't it? -- what you long to know about a house when you put your hand on the knocker. Perhaps it is the way God opens houses at dead of night when He is taking a quiet turn with an angel. . . .

The point of view in the opening paragraph is interesting: it is omnisicent third person – an external narrator telling us the story. But it is also closely told from the point of view of Aunt Beryl. “Dear old Mrs Hay” and “Sweet of old Mrs Hay” could almost be her speaking. This is an example of the Uncle Charles Principle, where the voice becomes so linked to a specific character it begins to take on characteristics of that person. The fact that the opening is so closely linked to Aunt Beryl alerts the reader to the fact that she will be a key person in the story.

But then there is an ellipsis (…) which clearly separates this paragraph from the next one. And now the second and third paragraphs are more closely linked to the children. The doll’s house is described in loving detail. “Perfect little house! Who could possibly mind the smell?” This is a totally different POV from the first paragraph. Compare the constant references to paint (and even glue and varnish) with the staid distaste for the smell in that opening paragraph. Could a greater distinction be made between these opposing viewpoints?

And then in paragraph five we have “there you are”, which has the effect of drawing the reader into the story. But which point of view are we drawn into? Aunt Beryl’s or the children’s? It is the children’s, of course, and in this way the reader becomes complicit in their excitement.

In the space of very few words, Mansfield has brilliantly established the tension in the story –  the doll's house – and the source of conflict – Aunt Beryl. This opening is rich in description. There is strong characterisation of both Aunt Beryl and the – as yet unnamed but clearly excited – children. But there is clearly a distinction between the reactions of Aunt Beryl and the children, and it is clear that this is where the tension will develop in the story. It is also clear, from that fifth paragraph, where the reader's sympathies are expected to lie.

The economy is exemplary. A brilliant piece of writing.

Remarkably, Katherine Mansfield was dissatisfied with her short stories. She said: "I've been a selective camera, and . . . my slices of life have been partial, misleading, and a little malicious. Further, they have had no other purpose than to record my attitude which in itself stood in need of change if it was to become active instead of passive." I think she is being unnecessarily hard on herself here. While many of her stories end in great unhappiness, there is nothing malicious in them. On the contrary, the stories are designed to allow us, the impartial readers and observers of these people’s misfortunes, to assess what might be done to remedy those misfortunes. They are, then, entirely hopeful and honest endeavours.

Shortly before her death (at the very early of 34, from tuberculosis), she wrote witheringly of her friends in London who:

have come to an agreement not to grow any more, to stay just so – all clipped and pruned and tight. As for taking risks, making mistakes, changing their opinions, being in the wrong, committing themselves, losing themselves, being human beings in fact –no, a thousand times!

And this, it seems to me, is the key to her work. There is a serious and earnest searching for something in these stories, some understanding of what it is to be human, to be alive, to be in love.

Ken Kesey on writing

In a fascinating article by Carolyn Know-Quinn, she describes a collaborative writing class conducted by Ken Kesey and students from the University of Oregon in 1990. The collaboration lasted an entire academic year – three terms – and culminated in the publication of a novel, Caverns, published by Viking in 1990.

Kesey’s view is that he wanted to teach writing, not re-writing.

“You teach wrestling by having guys get out and wrestle. You teach basketball by having them play basketball, and you teach writing by having them sit and write. Writing and rewriting are different things. A lot of college people learn how to rewrite well, but not how to write well. I've had an interesting thought lately. You don't become Isaac Stern to make a recording. You become Isaac Stern to play the violin. You don't learn to write just to publish. You learn to write so that you can write; you can feel it flowing through you.”

And so, rather than students all working on their own material and coming to class to read and discuss it, Kesey’s class was completely hands-on. They started with character. Each student was asked to describe a character on card, looking at his needs, motivations etc. From there, once the characters were agreed, the plot began to emerge, and they started to write it, together. They wrote, edited, re-wrote, edited, then finally, in the third term, performed it. Classes were three hours long, and work was done on a computer with a large screen so that people could see it. Kesey explains:

This is how, as a professional, I can teach stuff. I couldn't teach writing without doing it. I have to be writing this stuff. People have to be looking over your shoulder [at the monitor] as you do this, as you see that this phrase here is redundant and this is bad. Outside of the context of the thing, general abstractions don't work, unless you've got something specific for it to go on.

It’s a fascinating approach, I have to say, and I can’t help feeling it would work especially well with particular groups, like disengaged young men and students on alternative key stage 4. The collaborative, participative nature would perhaps help pull them in. Certainly food for thought.