Category Archives: Storytelling

Rules Writers Break

In the movie “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl,” several pirate characters throughout the movie mention the Pirate Code in reverent tones.  Late in the film, Captain Barbossa reveals, “the Code is more what you’d call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules.”

Today I’ll discuss writing rules your grade school teachers taught you, and whether following them is something you must do, or should do. When teaching young children, it is often best to give them black-and-white rule sets.  That’s a lot easier to understand than wishy-washy grayness, the actual messiness of the real world.

However, if you aim to be a writer of fiction for the modern marketplace, it’s time to let go of some of those rules.  If, as you write, your mind’s eye sees your teacher from long ago admonishing you to follow one of the rules below, try deliberately violating the rule even as your teacher watches.  Steady practice at this should make the visions of your teacher go away.

  • Always use complete sentences.  Not only did your teacher tell you that one, but word processing software often alerts you when you’ve created a sentence fragment.  It’s fine as a general rule, but there are times when your story requires a sentence or thought to be emphasized, to stand out.  An occasional fragment is okay when used deliberately for such a purpose.
  • Don’t begin sentences with ‘And’ or ‘But.’  Your teacher might have extended this rule to all connecting words—conjunctions—which also include ‘or’ and ‘yet.’  Traditional English sentences require that such words, when used, connect two clauses.  Again, if your second clause needs special emphasis, go ahead and set it apart with a separate sentence.  But remember to use conjunctions properly when you do, according to their meanings.
  • Never end a sentence with a preposition.  This is an ancient rule imposed by grammarians who wanted to make English more like Latin.  The rule is long discredited now, or should be.  No one buried it with more flare than Winston Churchill when he wrote, “This is the type of errant pedantry up with which I will not put.”
  • Always use proper paragraph form.  By this your teacher meant paragraphs should have topic sentences, then sentences that build on or substantiate the topic sentence, and then a concluding sentence.  Therefore, by that rule, you would never have a paragraph consisting of just one sentence.  In fiction writing you can throw that rule out.  Just tell your story.  Paragraphs are useful to break up the text, to give white space so the reader catches a breath now and then.  Paragraphs also help to group like thoughts together.  A one-sentence paragraph now and then for emphasis is permitted.
  • Don’t use long sentences.  Many people confuse these with run-on sentences, which are different, and it’s still a good rule not to use them.  The thing about long sentences is, your reader could become lost and confused wading through all the ‘ands,’ ‘buts,’ em dashes, commas, and semicolons.  Use a long sentence (over, say, forty words) if you need to, but do it for effect and make it easy to read.
  • Never split an infinitive.  Stated differently, the rule is to never split an infinitive.  This rule, too, once created controversy but the battle is pretty much over.  You may now split with impunity.  Go with what sounds right to you.

If you are still in grade school, follow the rules presented by your teacher, (knowing you can break some of them later when your grades are no longer at stake).  For the rest of you, remember your main job as a writer of fiction is to move your reader emotionally.  If the story demands it, go ahead and break some of these rules.  Like the Pirate Code, they’re more what you’d call guidelines.  Take it from that one-time pirate and noted rule-breaker…

                                                         Poseidon’s Scribe

December 9, 2012Permalink

Sorry, New Rule. You Can’t Do That!

In the original Star Trek TV series, there’s an episode where Captain Kirk invents a card game called Fizzbin in which he makes up the rules as he goes along.  The comic strip Calvin and Hobbes featured a game called Calvinball which may never be played by the same rules twice.

If you’re a writer of fiction, you might consider yourself to be playing such a game, too.  According to W. Somerset Maugham, “There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”  With apologies to the famous novelist, I’d say the game has too many rules to memorize and they change with time, according to the tastes of readers.  Only by playing the game well can you can make money selling books.

You might try to emulate great writers of the past and imitate their writing styles, in an effort to achieve success.  Bad idea.  The rules were different in their time.  Let’s cover some of those former rules.

1.  Take all the time you need to create a vivid description, to ‘paint’  with words.  Writers of the 19th Century and earlier used extensive portrayals to convey the appearance of a scene or character, multi-paragraph descriptions abounding in adjectives.  That worked well in an era without movies or TV, but readers won’t wade through such long-winded descriptions today.

2.  Adverbs exist for a reason; use them.  Authors once used adverbs with abandon. Adverbs modify adjectives or verbs and often end in ‘ly’ like ‘crazily.’  These days it’s considered lazy to use too many adverbs, a sign you didn’t take time to select a powerful enough verb.

3.  Demonstrate your skill as an author in your narrative paragraphs; dialogue only interferes with that.  At one time, fiction was mostly narration, with occasional dialogue.  We’re now in an age of character-driven stories, and readers want characters to talk more.  No long, boring narrative paragraphs, and less narration overall.

4.  Incorporate a rather dull character who needs everything explained to him (even things he already knows); that’s a clever way to explain things to the reader. There was an era when authors could use this technique even if it strained the conversation a bit.  These days, that’s no longer tolerated and there’s even a term for it–As You Know, Bob or AYKB.  AYKB’s are tempting, an easy trap to fall into even if you make every effort to avoid them.

5.  Bring the narrator in as an entity the reader can trust, as one who helps foreshadow future events.  In a bygone past, writers could have the narrator speak directly to the reader.  And now, Gentle Reader, let us discover what Annabel must be thinking about this latest development.  That voice could be used to foreshadow future events in an ominous tone.  Little did Frank know, but his secure life would soon be altered forever.  Understand, it’s still okay to use foreshadowing, but do it with subtlety, and not with the narrator speaking to the reader.  Today that’s referred to as narrative intrusion.

6.  Find clever new ways to express your ideas.  As centuries of writers did this, many of the word combinations they used were so good the first time, they got used again, and re-used many times over.  And became clichés.  Now you don’t get to use those clichés, unless you add some twist on them.  Go think of your own clever word combo that might become a future cliché.  This rule didn’t change, but sorry, you can’t use the same tired clichés.

7.  Ease into your story by introducing the reader to the setting, time period, and major characters before any action occurs.  Readers in those times had nothing to compete with books for entertainment, and had the time to curl up near the fire and read a cozy story by its light.  Times are different.  You must grab your reader by the throat with a first sentence or paragraph that demands attention.  It’s called a hook, and stories without a good one stay un-bought.

So, are you up for a game like Fizzbin or Calvinball?  May the best writer win!  Unfortunately, the game’s rules aren’t known by you or—

                                                                    Poseidon’s Scribe

 

November 25, 2012Permalink

Conveying a Sense of Wonder

One of the things that drew me into fiction as a child was the sense of wonder I experienced when reading certain fiction, notably that of Jules Verne, Arthur C. Clarke and later science fiction writers.  The question is, how does a writer evoke that in readers?

First, let’s try to define it.  The book Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction defines it this way:  “a feeling of awakening or awe triggered by an expansion of one’s awareness of what is possible or by confrontation with the vastness of space and time, as brought on by reading science fiction.”

Although often associated with science fiction, that emotion needn’t be.  Rachel Carson’s book The Sense of Wonder was about sharing a love of nature with a child.

I like the associate with childhood.  To children the natural world is new, and they experience that sense of wonder more often.  Then it fades as we age and it takes more than mere nature to astonish us.  Here’s an example of that fading-with-adulthood phenomenon.  How many times have you heard the finale of the William Tell Overture (the Lone Ranger theme) by Gioachino Rossini?  Ho hum, right?  But do you remember the thrill of that first time you heard it?  Can you image what audiences of 1829 felt the first time that finale ever played, anywhere?

Up until Jules Verne and authors who followed him, adults most often experienced the sense of wonder in religious contexts, or in fantasy literature.  Through his writing Verne showed the world what engineers and scientists of the time were bringing about—a better understanding of the natural world, and the amazing things man might do to achieve his ends.  Verne showed readers something new and vast, and it had nothing to do with God or dragons, but with people.

Arthur C. Clarke was another science fiction author who captured the sense of wonder better than most.  He carried the science far beyond Verne did, and showed a future humanity achieving, through engineering, the capabilities of gods or wizards.  It was Clarke who said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

For writers seeking to induce the sense of wonder in their readers, then, how do you do it?  I think there are four elements involved:

  • A “thing” that is new in some way, or an old thing in a new context
  • A powerful description of that thing, emphasizing its newness
  • One or more characters confronting the thing
  • A depiction of the awe felt by one or more of the characters.  How does the thing make the character feel?  Again, you’re striving to recreate in words the amazement a child feels for something new.

If you do this well, if your characters are compelling, if the thing is truly worthy of awe and you’ve described it and your characters’ impressions well, then your readers will feel the wonder of it right along with the characters.

In my fiction, I strive to create this sense of wonder, most often in association with technology.  Many of my stories are historical, so the characters see something outside their experience, but not necessarily beyond that of modern readers.  I confront my characters with such things as a flying trireme, a clockwork lion, a giant mechanical elephant, a steam-powered oared galley in the 1st Century, and steam-powered human limbs (coming soon).

Is there anything to this “sense of wonder” stuff, in your opinion?  Have you experienced that feeling from reading fiction?  Have you tried writing it into your fiction?  Leave a comment and let me know.  Wondering about the answer to these and other questions, I’m—

                                                           Poseidon’s Scribe

November 18, 2012Permalink

Novels-in-Verse

If writing prose is getting boring,

If each new tale keeps getting worse,

To send your reader’s thoughts a’soaring,

Just try a novel writ in verse.

Verse novel it is called quite often.

Your muse’s heart you’ll have to soften,

For writing thus will take more time,

To work in meters, feet, and rhyme.

Free verse or Onegin-type stanza,

(Much like the blog you’re reading now.)

Done right, your readers will say “Wow!”

Your novel’s sales, a big bonanza.

Do other authors do it? Yes!

Like Margaret Wild and Karen Hesse.

 

When is Verse Novel form most useful?

When characters are more than few,

And besides—to be quite truthful—

When tale’s got many points of view.

When characters stir up commotion,

And in their heads is much emotion,

When using prose would seem far worst,

Each scene a momentary burst.

It’s quite in style for younger readers;

Verse Novels now are catching on;

For poetry, another dawn?

So, you might join this movement’s leaders,

Craft verse among that happy tribe!

Rhythmically Yours—

                                                 Poseidon’s Scribe

 

 

September 2, 2012Permalink

A Mystery to Me

Do you love reading mysteries?  Ever think of writing one?

The genre was invented by Edgar Allan Poe and popularized by Arthur Conan Doyle in his Sherlock Holmes stories.  It remains a popular genre with a devoted readership.

The mystery genre is hard to define.  All fiction involves an element of mystery, since there’s always a conflict and the reader doesn’t know how the protagonist will resolve that conflict.  Here we’ll speak of stories where the focus is on the puzzling aspects of the conflict, which is often a crime or some unexplained phenomena.  In addition, the sleuth in the story uses attention to detail and deductive logic to solve the mystery.

In your mystery story, make sure the mystery itself is something important, something the reader will care about.  That’s why there are so many murder mysteries, and so few involving a missing 99¢ comb.

Before writing your story, develop various timelines or storylines:

1.  First is the actual timeline of events in which the real perpetrator commits the act.  This must be logical and in accordance with various character’s motivations.  As author, you’ll be the only one who knows this one.

2.a., 2.b, 2.c, etc.  You may need a series of fake timelines, in each of which one of the other suspects could commit the act.  These need not be completely logical or reflect character motivations exactly, but at first your sleuth won’t know that.

3.  A timeline pieced together by your sleuth, formed through evidence and logical deduction.

4.  You might even have a separate timeline that is revealed to the reader.  However, Timeline 4 usually matches Timeline 3.

Most mysteries involve the commission of a crime.  To do so, a criminal must have means, motive, and opportunity (MMO).  The challenge for the sleuth is that either (1) several people seem to have all three, or (2) nobody seems to have all three.  Of the three necessary parts of MMO, motive is often the first part presented to the reader.

Among frequent readers of the genre it’s considered unfair to (1) withhold evidence from the reader that the sleuth knows, including specialized skills or knowledge, or (2) have the sleuth confront the guilty suspect with insufficient evidence (that wouldn’t gain a conviction in court) but still the criminal breaks down and confesses.

Your writing challenge is to present the reader with all the evidence needed to solve the mystery, but to make the puzzle difficult enough that the reader would rather just read to the end to see how the sleuth cracks the case.  Bear in mind the necessary evidence need not be emphasized in your story, just present.  It could be buried in the middle of a paragraph.  Or you could distract the reader’s attention with some dramatic action that happens to include a piece of evidence easy to gloss over.

The genre has been so well explored, it’s difficult to think of mysteries that haven’t been done.  For example, I wish you luck in thinking up a new version of the locked-room mystery, where a crime is committed in a sealed enclosure where the only entries are locked from the inside.

For that reason, writers of mysteries these days seem to be focusing on the character of the sleuth, or the setting.  In today’s market, the way to set your mystery apart is to have a very compelling sleuth.  The minimum attributes for this character are: (1) attention to detail, and (2) an ability to deduce a chain of events from disparate facts.  Or you could have two sleuths working together, each of which has one of these traits.

Another way to distinguish your mysteries from others is to use a historical or unusual setting.  Depending on how far back a time you choose, it could present a real challenge for your sleuth due to the lack of modern crime investigation technologies.

Did this blog entry inspire you to write a mystery story?  Leave me a comment and let me know about it.  Just make sure the answer to whodunit isn’t–

                                                        Poseidon’s Scribe

 

July 8, 2012Permalink

What Happens Next?

Back in May, I promised to discuss suspense, and I’ve kept you in it long enough.  First, in defining the term, we learn that it means (1) the state of being suspended, (2) a mental uncertainty or anxiety, and (3) the state of being undecided or doubtful.

Definitions (2) and (3) may seem to have the most significance for us here, but I like the image of definition (1).  Imagine a character who is physically suspended over the ground at some great height.  There is a danger he may fall and get hurt or killed.  Neither the reader nor the character knows if the fall will happen or not.  However, at the moment there exists both the danger that he will fall and the hope that he will either not fall or that the fall will somehow not harm him.

The danger leads to the character feeling fear.  If the character has been previously introduced to the reader as a sympathetic one and the reader has come to care about him, then the reader will share both the uncertainty and the character’s fear of the fall.

The danger need not involve falling from a height, of course, but can be any real danger to the character, including emotional danger.  The feeling of suspense arises from not knowing whether the outcome will be good or bad and the feeling is more intense if the reader sympathizes with or pities the character.

In his book Poetics, Aristotle explained suspense the same way we have, with the concepts of a looming danger, a ray of hope, an uncertainty of outcome, and the audience’s (reader’s) caring about the character.  We’re not exactly plowing new ground here; suspense is a timeless idea.

We can bring in definition (3) of the word “suspense” by giving our character a choice of actions to take.  He does not know which choice will make the danger greater or which will cause a hoped-for positive outcome.  Since he does not know, he is uncertain and doubtful about which choice to make.

Most fiction involves suspense to some degree, but so-called suspense novels are chock full of that emotion.  What techniques does a writer of such novels use to ratchet up suspense?

  • Create in the reader’s mind an intense sympathy for the character.  Establish the character as real, human, and vulnerable.
  • Introduce a danger with high stakes.  It must be plausible and full of dire consequences for the character should the danger be realized.
  • Set up the situation so the negative outcome is far more likely than the positive one.  Make the odds nearly (but not) impossible.  Ensure Aristotle’s “ray of hope” is laser-thin.
  • Give the character a set of choices that all seem bad.
  • Provide the reader with knowledge of some fact the character doesn’t know, perhaps some fact about one or more of the choices being faced.  You might think this would lessen uncertainty and doubt, and thus reduce suspense.  But note that it doesn’t lessen the character’s uncertainty and it actually increases the reader’s sympathy for the character; it makes the reader want to shout, “No!  Don’t do that!”
  • Introduce a time limit, a race against the clock.  This forces the character to make one of the choices without enough time to fully analyze chances and consequences.
  • Conclude each chapter (or short story break) with some enticement to keep reading.
  • Bring in unexpected complications that worsen the danger, tighten the timeline, or narrow the ray of hope still further.
  • Keep the tension high for as long as possible.  In other words, delay the events that will resolve the suspenseful situation as long as you can, but stop short of the point where the reader gets bored and stops caring.

Do you think you can write in a suspenseful way?  What difficulties do you see in doing so?  I welcome comments on the topic. And for those of you wondering who wrote this blog entry, you may call me…I’m known as…(suspense building)…wait for it…

                                                                     Poseidon’s Scribe

January 15, 2012Permalink

Show and Tell

Did you have Show-and-Tell in elementary school, where you brought in some object of interest, showed it to the class, and told them all about it?  The shown object gave something for the class to look at while listening to the speaker’s narration about it.  The whole process wouldn’t have worked as well if it were just Show or just Tell, would it?

Today I’m tackling the age-old caution given to writers to “Show, don’t Tell,” which I briefly mentioned here.  As with many of my blog topics, I’ll write about it as if I’m an expert, though I still struggle with the concept in my own fiction.  First let’s define terms.  In writing, “Show” means to convey to the reader a sense of being inside a character, experiencing what the character is going through, portraying the character’s senses, thoughts, and feelings.  “Tell” means to describe or inform in narrator fashion, mainly using facts much like a journalist would use his “who-what-when-where-why-how” model.

In Showing, you really engage the reader.  Remember that the purpose of storytelling is not just to convey information, but to create a reaction in the reader, to entertain (and I mean that in the broad sense, not the comedic sense).  Showing does that in a way Telling never can.  Think of the best stories you ever read.  Chances are you felt a part of the story as you read along, and that made you care about the characters and about the outcome.  Unfortunately, Showing typically takes more words.  It’s very hard to be blunt while Showing.

On the other hand, Telling can be very compact.  You can convey a lot of information with very few words.  However, Telling is often boring.  It doesn’t engage your reader for long or help her care about your characters.

My advice is to use both techniques, but learn when to use each.  Showing is necessary for the more dramatic moments of story scenes.  It’s vital to show the key moments of your protagonist’s struggle to resolve the conflict of your story.  However, events have to happen between these key dramatic moments.  Use Telling to catch the reader up on these in-between events.

The suggestion to combine some Telling with Showing isn’t just my idea, but any writer will pretty much tell you the same thing.  Why, then, do you still hear the “show, don’t tell” advice?  It’s because Showing is harder to write than Telling, and it’s easy to lapse back into that narrative, journalistic way of writing. It’s difficult getting into a character’s head and conveying the character’s feelings and impressions.  You have to force yourself to Show.  Although writers must Tell on occasion, they need not be reminded to do that.

One key to writing well in both the Show and the Tell mode is to choose details wisely.  That is well worth a future blog entry all by itself.

So just like in elementary school, it’s important to both show and tell.  For now, class dismissed.  Your homework assignment is to leave a comment with your opinion about the “show, don’t tell” admonition, to–

                                                                Poseidon’s Scribe

 

November 20, 2011Permalink

That’s a Great Story!

What makes a story great, or even good?  For this discussion I’ll concentrate on short stories, my main medium, but the principles apply to all fiction.  Fair warning:  I’ll explore the topic to the best of my ability, but if I was an expert on writing great short stories, I would be better known.

Philosophers since at least the ancient Greeks have puzzled about what makes one thing better or of greater value than another.  Is it really all subjective, in the mind of each individual reader, or are there some objective aspects on which we can all agree?  Further, what is meant by ‘great?’  Do we measure great stories by sales, by the number of favorable reviews, or by how the story stands the test of time?

For an interesting romp through the fields of quality, goodness, and value (in general, not specifically as related to stories) read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig.

Of course, people differ in the stories they like, and a given reader may change her own tastes over time.  So there must be a subjective component to any definition of a good story.  I touched on this in a previous blog entry.

Still, perhaps we can agree on a few elements that should be present in a good story.  Not every element need be present, and excellence in some of them can make up for mediocrity in others.  Further, as you’ll see, these aren’t exactly objective elements, so people could disagree about whether they are present or absent in any given story.  Here are my ten elements, expressed in one long sentence:

  • A good story deals with one or more aspects of the human condition and starts with
  • an attention-grabbing hook that introduces
  • a compelling protagonist, with whom the reader can identify, who is
  • dealing with a difficult problem, a problem
  • with some relevance to the reader’s own life
  • in a vivid setting that puts the reader right there while the protagonist
  • encounters more difficult obstacles along the way
  • with enough tension and suspense to keep readers reading
  • and with the protagonist resolving the problem in the end in a satisfying, logical way, with bonus points if the protagonist learns something, and more bonus points if the reader can’t guess the ending early
  • with the whole story told in strong, clear language that produces an emotional reaction in the reader.

As it turns out, it’s easier to write down that list than it is to write a story that hits most of those marks.  Thinking back over the best short stories you’ve read, are there common elements they share?  Have I left out any elements in my list?  As writers, we ought to be striving for greatness as we tell our tales, so it helps to know what separates good or great stories from the rest.  I welcome your thoughts, which you can provide by clicking “leave a comment” below, whether or not you agree with–

                                                                     Poseidon’s Scribe 

November 13, 2011Permalink

As You Know, Bob…

Perhaps your name isn’t Bob, but this post could still be for you, if you’re a beginning fiction writer.  One of the difficult parts of writing is creating believable dialogue, and one of the easy traps to fall into is called As You Know, Bob, or AYKB.

It stems from the writer’s need to convey information about the world of the story to readers who don’t know it yet.  Dialogue between story characters might seem like the perfect opportunity to convey the information, since dialogue stands out more than long, narrative paragraphs.  Trouble is, the characters are already in the story’s world, and already know about it.

Advertisers fall prey to AYKB too, often in radio ads.  Frequently you hear ads like this:

“I really enjoy Company XYZ.  Their product is superior to all competitors.”

“Yes, and I also like their friendly, knowledgeable staff.”

“And how about XYZ’s convenient location, right downtown at the corner of A Street and B Avenue?”

Advertisers have a limited time to convey information, and they know we pay attention to conversations more than we do to a single, blabbing announcer.  Problem is, the conversation above is just plain stupid.  People don’t talk that way.  In fact, we listeners often feel so insulted by such ads that we start to wonder if Company XYZ’s product can be any good if their ads are so terrible.

The same situation applies to your fiction writing.  Readers will be turned off if your characters talk like that; there’s plenty of good fiction by other writers they could be reading.

How do you avoid the AYKB problem in your writing, especially since it’s such an easy trap?  Review your character’s dialogue and ask yourself if that’s something someone already in the story’s world would say.  Is it realistic and believable?  Get inside your character’s head and cut the dialogue down to only what the characters would really say.

Of course, you still have the information to convey.  The best way to do that is bit by bit, with small amounts of narration or (better) action accompanying the dialogue.  Use the minimum amount necessary for the reader to understand the world of the story.  You’d be surprised how fast the reader will catch up and understand the world of the story with only teaspoonfuls of information sprinkled in from time to time.

AYKB is a well-known writing problem, and is part of a lexicon of writing problems known as the Turkey City Lexicon.  If you search you’ll find several listings and explanations of the many entries in the lexicon.

Good luck in your efforts to strengthen the dialogue in your writing.  And I can’t resist closing by saying:  As you know, Bob, I’m —

                                                                             Poseidon’s Scribe

October 16, 2011Permalink

What? I’m Supposed to Learn Structure, Too?

Yes, you should know about short story structure to be successful in selling your tales.  Luckily, it’s not difficult.  To learn about structure, I mean.  The actual writing of successful short stories takes some effort, but so does anything worthwhile.

Let’s start with the basic structure of any story.  This structure is true for novels, movies, plays, even comic books.  We’ll then see how the structure applies to short stories in particular.

1.  The Hook.  This is an opening section meant to grab the reader’s (or viewer’s) interest.  I’ll have a few things to say about hooks in a future blog post. The hook needs to introduce your protagonist and his or her conflict.  It should set the story in a particular time or place.

2.  The Middle.  Here the protagonist tries several times to end the conflict, but fails.  It can even be the case that his or her attempts actually make things worse. In any case, the protagonist is tested in some way, either to physical limits or emotional ones, or both.

3.  The Resolution (or Dénouement).  In this section the conflict is resolved.  This usually involves the protagonist learning something, perhaps something about himself or herself.  The conflict could also be resolved by the protagonist’s death.

Aristotle called these parts the protasis, the epitasis, and the catastrophe.

 

 

The novelist Gustav Freytag later introduced the concept of the dramatic arc containing five parts: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and dénouement.  Essentially Aristotle’s epitasis includes the middle three elements of Freytag’s dramatic arc, though the falling action could be part of Aristotle’s catastrophe.  For simplicity here, I’ll stick to a three-part structure and use my titles for them.

 

In many story forms there will be no breaks or signposts separating these sections.  Even so, a reader who is looking for these sections will find them.  If you think back to novels you’ve read or movies you’ve seen, you’ll be able to recognize this structure.

With short stories, everything gets compressed.  The main feature of short stories is, in fact, their shortness.  This benefits the reader, since she or he can enjoy the story in a single sitting, thus remaining immersed in the world of the tale without interruption by the real world.  However, this brevity becomes the driving constraint for the writer.  The writer has to convey all three elements of story structure, but in very few words.

A short story needs a hook, like all stories.  However, an author of such tales cannot include a long description of the protagonist, other characters, or the setting.  Short stories have bare-bones hooks that just (1) introduce the protagonist, (2) introduce the conflict, and (3) set the story in time and place.

The middle section of a short story is likewise compacted down to the bare minimum.  There are fewer characters to interact with, few or no subplots, not even very many protagonist-testing events.  To keep the middle section short, some events or actions can be implied, letting the reader fill in the gaps in his or her mind.  This implication technique seems to contradict the “show, don’t tell” commandment, but it’s different, and it’s something with which I still struggle.

A short story’s resolution section also is a trimmed-down version, in comparison with longer works.  The section needs to resolve the conflict, possibly by having the protagonist learn something or otherwise grow as a person, or defeat the antagonist.  Nearly all the loose ends of the story need to be tied up in this section.  I say nearly all because it’s okay to leave some things unresolved or open to question–that’s life.

Throughout the writing of the short story, the author must take pains to keep a laser-like focus on the theme of the story.  Delete anything not directly supporting that theme, or necessary to having a meaningful story.

As you read more short stories by authors you enjoy, you’ll see how they employ the three-part structure I’ve described.  Soon you’ll be using it in your own stories, too.  As always, please send a comment if this has been useful to you, and address it to–

                                                                      Poseidon’s Scribe 

October 2, 2011Permalink