As the World Stearns

[Another handout from the days when I taught at the Writing Center in San Diego, this one focused on the then-in-vogue "Sudden Fiction."]

The Short-Short Story: Sudden Fiction Workshop Notes

Contents of Story Appendix [Obviously not included here.]:

“How to Touch a Bleeding Dog” by Rod Kessler    p. 1
“Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid    p. 2
“Death of the Right Fielder” by Stuart Dybek    p. 4
“On Hope” by Spencer Holst    p. 6
“Happy Endings” by Margaret Atwood    p. 8
“Bigfoot Stole My Wife” by Ron Carlson    p. 11
“[Men Without Women]” by A.P.    p. 14
“A Sudden Story” by Robert Coover    p. 14
“Any Minute Mom Should Come Blasting Through the Door” by David Ordan    p. 15
“Popular Mechanics” by Raymond Carver    p. 16
“Pygmalion” by John Updike    p. 17
“No One’s a Mystery” by Elizabeth Tallent    p. 19
“Yours” by Mary Robison    p. 21
“How to Write to Muriel Adrien” by A.P.    p. 23
“Weekend” by Amy Hempel    p. 24
“Notice” by Ken Kalfus    p. 25

Selected Bibliography:

Sudden Fiction: American Short-Short Stories, edited by Robert Shapard and James Thomas. Peregrine Smith Books, 1986. ISBN 0-87905-265-1
Sudden Fiction International, edited by Robert Shapard and James Thomas. W.W. Norton, 1989. ISBN 0-393-02718-X (hardcover)
Flash Fiction, edited by James Thomas, Denise Thomas, and Tom Hazuka. W.W. Norton, 1992. ISBN 0-393-30883-9
Into the Deep End: The Writing Center Anthology 3, edited by William Luvaas.  A Writing Center Publication, 1997.
Paragraph, Issue 11, Winter-Spring 1993, edited by Karen Donovan and Walker Rumble.
Tumble Home by Amy Hempel. Scribner, 1997.  ISBN 0-684-83375-1
Thirst by Ken Kalfus.  Milkweed, 1998.  ISBN 1-57131-018-5

1.    What is it?

1.1    The short-short (aka “sudden fiction”) might trace its lineage to Joyce’s “Araby,” a very short story that embodied Joyce’s notion of the “epiphany”: “a usually sudden manifestation or perception of the essential nature or meaning of something” (Webs.). That is, that moment when the main character realizes what it is that the story is about, realizes the point to which the story has been moving toward.  Joyce felt all good stories worked toward epiphanies of one sort or another, and that elements such as plot, character, incident, and evocative detail were only the foundations of epiphany, that all of these things existed in a short story merely to allow the epiphany to come forth most naturally.

1.11    Joyce took his notion of epiphany from the idea of religious epiphany, in which a revelation came to a character (that is, a saint), and the revelation changed not only that character’s way of perceiving the world but the world’s way of perceiving itself.  A short story’s epiphany is usually an instance of a corrective lens being loaned to the character or the reader so that she may see the truth that has escaped her until the story’s close.  In this way, every story became the pinnacle of a character’s life, the moment at which she realizes that her life has been “driven and derided by vanity” or somesuch, the moment when the focus clicks on her interior lens (or that of the reader) and everything becomes clear.  In theory, we all experience such moments, moments in which we realize something that utterly changes our lives.  This was the effect Joyce was striving for.

1.2    This approach to the short story has effectively ruled twentieth-century fiction.  Since Joyce, stories such as O. Henry’s (which often had trick endings: Think of “Gift of the Magi”) fell into disdain, and the epiphany became the Thing.  Just about any conventional short story in the twentieth century mimics Joyce’s idea, and we read to discover with the character the epiphany.  And in so doing, we discover some truth about life and living.

1.3    The short-short boils down short stories into even shorter units (quite obviously), eradicating nearly everything but the epiphany and the incidents and details that make that epiphany clear and inevitable.  So, in a sense, the short-short is the epitome of the Joycean short story.

2.    How does it work?

2.1    Most short-shorts, because of their brevity, hinge on an O. Henry-like turn at the end of the story.  Unlike the O. Henry story, however, the twists on these stories are not so much plot surprises as they are revealed truths.  We read and say, “Oh no!” and then “Oh, yes.  Of course.” (To steal from E.M. Forster.)

2.2    Also because of their brevity, the epiphany only sometimes belongs to the narrator or main character.  Instead, the epiphany may be the reader’s alone.  We read and realize what the main character may only realize after the story has ended.  “So that’s what’s going on,” we think, and we feel the main character’s pain all the more deeply because the main character has yet to feel that pain herself.

2.3    Part of the design of the short-short is to strip the story down to its barest essentials.  We no longer view the main character as some kind of surrogate for the reader (as often happens in many a short story) but as someone who is enacting some drama for the reader’s benefit.  This often demands a different approach in terms of tone.  The writer is more of a presence in the story, more of a participant than she is in the normal short story.  And so short-shorts are often heavy on summary and light on typical story elements- dialogue, character action, plot-because the writer’s hand is such a strong force in the story.

2.31    Such short-shorts lend themselves to urban legends and stories that sound as though they are oral histories of a moment, as though someone were telling us the story of an incident over a beer.  Or even of an overheard conversation.  The work is done between the reader and the text, in the space between reading and interpreting.  Sounds rather academic, but it isn’t, not really.  Instead, think of it as the operative mode of life: People tell us stories all the time, and we impose our own interpretations on the stories, interpretations that lend meaning where the teller is certain none exists.

2.4    The upshot is that most short-shorts turn in the final sentence.  In a way, the final sentence acts almost like a punch line.  And though many short-shorts are far from jokey, the idea of the joke with the punch line is an effective way to think of the form.

2.5    As well, because the short-short traffics in finely observed moments, the stories are often entire in an instant or two.  The stories exist almost in the time it takes to read them.  Scenes are sketched in instead of fully fleshed, and the scenes are abbreviated.  Or there is only one extremely well-realized scene that captures the whole essence of the story.

2.51    There is a welter of sensory detail that evokes the setting of the story (deftly, one hopes), there are a few maneuvers to set up the epiphany, and then-wham!-the epiphany occurs and the story is over.  The story has “closure,” as they say in fiction workshops.

2.6    More on story structure in relation to the short-short
(for those who want the full story)

2.61    Traditionally, different types of stories demand different levels of closure.  The mystery demands the resolution of the plot.  The quest fantasy requires the hero(ine) to find the sword, the jewel, the magic jockstrap, and to defeat the villain.  The coming-of-age story requires a revelation that signals the onset of adulthood.  A character-driven piece requires that last bit of action or inaction that defines the character for us.

2.611    A simpler formula that applies to the short-short:  Have you said what you wanted to say?  Have you made your point? (Not that we write to drive home points: “Recycling is good!” or whatever.  God forbid.)

2.62    The ending of Vertigo is a fine example.  The film closes with James Stewart confronting the duplicitous Kim Novak in a belfry.  His own character flaws have led him here, and when Novak plunges to her death in echo of Stewart’s first love’s death, everything has come together.  The music thunders up (the singular Bernard Hermann), and the movie is over.  No end credits.  It is overwhelming, but is exactly the right place to end.  The audience has the whole story, and no police inquest and mournful Jimmy Stewart is necessary.  Much more powerful to end with that climax.  The short-short cuts out the preceding two hours and gives the reader the final ten minutes.  Think of the short-short as capturing those crucial ten minutes of a movie.

2.63    Everyone is probably familiar with the traditional structure of the story:

This is a variation of how Freitag laid it out ages ago.  Most stories follow this model. But most short-short stories boil the story part down to that peak in the center.  There may be a bit of the rising action, or there may be a bit of the denouement, but the story is isolated at that moment of change. (“Denouement,” of course, being the fancy-pants way of saying, “the outcome.”)  Most short-short stories have almost no resolution because the story is structured in such a way that the closing material is already known by the reader.  In the climax, the rest likely outcome becomes clear.

2.631    This is why something even as wonderful as a Jane Austen novel may strike some modern readers as tedious.  She spends enormous amounts of time on the set-up (the exposition) and a lot of time with what happens afterward. (“Afterward” meaning here after we know that Catherine Morland will marry, after Emma the matchmaker realizes she has overlooked her own obvious love, etc.)  A short-short reader doesn’t need the nuptials. (Though they can be a lot of fun, they would make the story far too long.)

2.64    In The Godfather, Part II, the story is not complete until we realize just how far Michael Corleone has fallen: He has his own brother killed.  After that, we don’t really need to know how the family, er, business will fail or prosper under his hand; we know he has lost the most important thing, and that is enough.

2.65    To repeat, the short-short is all about that final moment.  In fact, that is often the entire story.

3.    What kinds of short-shorts are there?  Is there a taxonomy of the sudden fiction?

Well, yes and no.  One can make categories and fit kinds of short-shorts into each one, but there are as many categories as there are kinds of stories (innumerable).  Still, it might be helpful to create a few categories, namely:

3.1    The Play on Form.  “How to Write to Muriel Adrien” plays on a familiar form, as does Ken Kalfus’s “Notice.”  Some people create lists that move into some sort of meaning, others create scripts-any form can be mimicked to create a short-short.  The only thing that must happen is that there must be a meaning that the form gives to the story itself.  Form can sometimes be content; in the short-short it almost must be.

3.2    The Urban Legend/Childhood Story.  Look at “Death of the Right Fielder” by Stuart Dybek. The first line is almost a joke in itself, but then he develops the notion into a story about how we age and lose a certain youthful promise.  Or “Bigfoot Stole My Wife,” which functions in a couple of different categories.  What does it mean for that kid to become cross-eyed from forcing his eyes to do that?  And so on.

3.3    The headline/news item.  This is a popular form for The New Yorker’s “Shouts and Murmurs” page.  Someone will take a news item and spin it in a silly way.  Or look at how Ron Carlson takes a “Bigfoot Stole My Wife” headline (from The Weekly World News?) and reveals the heartache that might lie behind it.

3.4    The Voice.  Some people let a character’s voice tell the entire story, and by capturing that voice perfectly, allow the reader to see what the speaker does not.  Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” is a classic of this sort.  Listen to the stories that taxi driver tells-why is he so intent on sharing his story with you?

3.5   The Retelling.  Not a few people take a familiar story and rework it for their own ends, latantly calling the original to mind to explain a character’s dilemma.  Look at John Updike’s “Pygmalion,” for example.

3.6    The Tall Tale. This old form appears often in short-shorts, but with a twist: the tale isn’t merely about it’s own outrageousness, but instead is toward some sort of end.  Spencer Holst’s “On Hope” is this kind of story.  But it is truly about hope itself, and so the tall tale ends up revealing how we, as readers, invest stories with our hopes and fears.

3.7    The Instructional.  Margaret Atwood’s “Happy Endings”-another story that is about story-also tells us how to write stories.  “How to Write to Muriel Adrien” is an instructional not only in how to write to Muriel (a useless skill for most) but in how to write to any loved one who has gone away.

3.8    The Finely Observed Moment(s).  “No One’s a Mystery” by Elizabeth Tallent, “Weekend” by Amy Hempel, “Yours” by Mary Robison, “How to Touch a Bleeding Dog” by Rod Kessler, “[Men Without Women]“-all of these stories are structured around finely observed moments.  These are realistic stories (well, somewhat), and they work in traditional ways, with the usual revelations of character and event.  But like most short-shorts, they turn on a dime in the last page or paragraph or sentence.

3.9    The Small Moment that Plumbs the Tragedy.  In “Any Minute Mom Should Come Blasting Through the Door,” the tragedy that overshadows the story finds its concrete expression in a couple of things: the sandwich, and the son giving his mother mouth-to-mouth.  But what drives it all home is the father’s comment at the end.  “Yours” hinges on the uselessness of talent in the face of loss, and a look at some pumpkins arrayed on a banister.  Instead of simply writing about some horrible event, these stories find the one element that will bring the tragedy to life for the reader.

3.10    Stories About Story.  A great many short-shorts are about story itself.  They can’t help but be sometimes because of how condensed the form is.  The reader becomes hyper-aware of just how the story is put together because there are no languorous stretches in which the author can create misdirection and hide the artifice of storytelling.  So some writers make that obvious quality the very subject of the story.

3.11    —Well, why go on?  There are many, many categories, and because of how short the sudden fiction is, anything you try can work. Short-shorts are light and small and carry aloft on a breath of inspiration.  It doesn’t take much to come up with something that works.

4.     How to Prepare for and Begin the Short-Short: Exercises

4.1    Choose a form.  Or mimic a short-short you found especially interesting.  Or plumb your past for some figurative moment and see if you can’t cast it into a brief revelatory piece.  Or read the newspaper.  Or try to figure out what some character was thinking about when you avoided him at the coffee shop.  Or …

4.2    Then start.  There are number of ways to get into the story.  If you are playing with form, then the form will dictate the direction you will go in (two follows one on a questionnaire, etc.).  If you are writing something that is more traditional, a story about a well-observed moment, then begin with the senses.  Make the world of the characters real with a few swift strokes.  Think of the pop-tabs on the floor of the truck in the Elizabeth Tallent story.  The more concrete you can be, the better.  Or you can let a character’s voice fill you up and spill out on the page.  Think of how Gwen imitates people in “Pygmalion.”  Do that yourself and see where it takes you.

4.3    The key is to start writing.  These stories are so short that you can produce material enough if you simply let it come out.  Then you can go back and shape it and cut it and make it the well-polished gem that you envisioned when you first started.

5.    How to End

Sooner rather than later.  Has the story turned?  End it.  End it with a punch (if not a punch line).  End it at its most shocking, when everything comes together.  You’ll know.  Think of when someone tells you a story and just goes on and on and on and on and on.  What’s the point? you wonder.  Don’t let yourself zoom past your end point.  When you hit your mark, exit the stage. (Speaking of which, this paragraph is done.)

6.    How do you know if you don’t have a short-short?

6.1    Can you tell your story in four pages?  Are there too many characters fighting to have their stories heard?  Is the epiphany too complicated to do justice to in such a short space? We can speak of a broken heart in four pages; the horrors of the Holocaust will likely be slighted in such a short space.

6.11    Though Cynthia Ozick’s “The Shawl” manages to capture just that horror in a mere seven pages.  So it can be done, but it takes a degree of clarity and focus to get all your nuances lined up perfectly.

6.2    Is there too much plot?  Have you pared it down to that one (or three) moments that make everything else clear?  Rarely will a short-short cover more than a single day.  If you’re telling a mulit-generational saga, chances are you’ll need a five-hundred page book. (But you might want to mock just such a book by piling up names into a multi-generational short-short.  Just make sure that the story is about how multi-generational sagas work.)

6.3    You’ll know if you don’t have a short-short story if you begin wondering if you have a short-short story.  Some stories just refuse compression.  “I’m a full-length story,” it tells you.  Or “I’m a novel.”  Or “I’m a panda bear.” (In which case, you’ve really gone far afield.)

7.    Possible Markets

Happily, these are good days for the short-short.  Most markets prefer shorter stories because longer stories allow fewer stories to appear in an issue of a magazine.  Some magazines even have regular sections for sudden fictions.  For Esquire, there is “Snap Fiction,” a monthly feature on the last page.  The New Yorker has “Shouts and Murmurs” (always comic).  The North American Review has a regular section of three or four short-shorts in each issue.  Story has a yearly competition for the short-short, in which you can win money, the spite of your classmates, and the everlasting hosannas of readers from coast to coast.  Spend a day in the library looking through journals and seeing which show short-short predispositions.  You’ll be heartened by how many editors have soft spots for that deft sudden fiction.

8.    Think of the Short-Short as a Laboratory

A final urging to dare something in your short-shorts.  Because sudden fictions are so brief, they require less of an investment of time and energy than does a longer story.  You can write more of them, you can write them faster, and you can finish them in the space of fifteen minutes.  So leap before you look!  Take chances!  Dare to fail spectacularly!  Even if the story doesn’t work, by trying something new (a strange form, a voice, a tall tale) you’ll learn skills that will serve you in all of your writing.  Timidity serves no one.  Certainly it doesn’t serve your characters or your story.  Put ‘em through a hell only you can imagine.  And then wrap it up quickly.

9.    Questions to ask of your short-short:  A checklist

Have you pushed the form?
Have you found a form that engages your story?
Have you merely used form as a gimmick?
Is your formal play part of the purpose of the story?

Do you have too complicated a plot? (If you have much of one at all, it’s trouble.)
Do you have too many characters?
Do your characters speak too much without saying enough?

Have you cut out all extraneous event?
Have you boiled your story down to a scene or three that capture the story?

‘Are you not employing enough summary?
Are you employing too much summary?
Is there too much dialogue?
Too little vivid description?
Do your descriptions go on too long?  Find the three strongest setting-cues and cut
everything else.

Did you go on too long past the climax?
Did you start too early, so that the climax is too distant?
Could you not find the climax?
(If so, stop and figure out what matters most to the characters, then recast the
story with that in mind.)

Have you come up with a clear epiphany/twist?
Is the ending merely a twist?
Is the ending an inevitable close for the story?

Is your subject too large for a short-short?
Is your subject too slight? (Doubtful, but always a possibility.)Do you need to focus your subject more so that you can get your hands around it?

Enough.