The Two Basic Forms of the Short Story Part 2

While Edger Allan Poe, among others, perfected the well-made short story, Anton Chekhov perfected the slice-of-life short story. As I pointed out before, the slice-of-life short story is simply what its name implies: a slice of life. It is a slice or piece of time, or more specifically, what occurs during a certain period of time. It doesn’t follow the typical story structure in the sense that it builds to a climax in the same way a well-made short story does.

Chekov’s idea of the short story differed from that of Poe and many of those who came before him. To him the short story was like a mosaic, little pieces put together to create a larger picture. Many of his stories lacked plot, a dominant characteristic of the well-made story.

One great illustration of this is Anton Chekhov’s short story “Misery.” This story depicts an evening in the life of a Russian sledge driver named Iona who has just lost his son. It begins like this:

        The twilight of evening. Big flakes of wet snow are whirling lazily about the
        street lamps, which have just been lighted, and lying in a thin soft layer
        on roofs, horses’backs, shoulders, caps. Iona Potapov, the sledge-driver,
        is all white like a ghost. He sits on the box without stirring, bent as double
        as the living body can be bent. If a regular snowdrift fell on him it seems
        as though even then he would not think it necessary to shake it off. . . .

  

We see from this introduction that our main character is a bit despondent. He sits hunched over, not seeming to care about the snow that is accumulating on his back.

His first customer of the evening is an impatient Russian officer. 

      “Sledge to Vyborgskaya!” Iona hears. “Sledge!”

       Iona starts, and through his snow-plastered eyelashes sees an officer
       in a military overcoat with a hood over his head.

     “To Vyborgskaya,” repeats the officer. “Are you asleep? To Vyborgskaya!”

The officer gets in and Iona drives on in a rather distracted manner almost running into others.

      “Where are you shoving, you devil?” Iona immediately hears shouts
       from the dark mass shifting to and fro before him. “Where the devil
       are you going? Keep to the right!”

     “You don’t know how to drive! Keep to the right,” says the officer angrily.

After getting the sledge back on course, Iona then tells the officer how he has lost his son.  However while telling the officer the details of the situation, Iona continues to drive off course, almost running into pedestrians. When Iona turns back around to the officer after once again getting back on course, he finds that the officer has closed his eyes and is no longer inclined to listen.

His next group of passengers consists of three rowdy young men. One of them he calls the hunchback because he is shorter than the other two and is hunchbacked. The hunchback is loud, obnoxious, and rude. Iona and the hunchback have this exchange:

     “Well drive on,” says the hunchback in his cracked voice, settling
       himself and breathing down Iona’s neck. “Cut along! What a cap
       you’ve got, my friend! You wouldn’t find a worse one in all Petersburg. . . .

  

     “He-he! . . .he-he! . . .” laughs Iona. “It’s nothing to boast of!”

     “Well, then, nothing to boast of, drive on! Are you going to drive like this

      all the way? Eh? Shall I give you one in the neck?”

After some small talk among his passengers, Iona tries to let them know that his son has died. The hunchback responds:

     “We shall all die, . . .” says the hunchback with a sigh, wiping
       his lips after coughing. “Come, drive on! Drive on! My friends,
       I simply cannot stand crawling like this! When will he get us
       there?”

He tries one more time to tell his passengers of his pain, but to no avail.  After a slap on the back of Iona’s neck and more small talk, their ride comes to an end and once again he is left alone. He decides to call it a day and goes back to the stables. There he tries once again to tell a fellow driver of the loss of his son, but the man does not listen. So he must turn his attention to the only one who will listen—his horse.

     "Are you munching?” Iona asks his mare, seeing her shining eyes.
     “There, munch away, munch away. . . .Since we have not earned
       enough for oats, we will eat hay. . . .Yes, . . . I have grown too old
       to drive. . . .My son ought to be driving, not I. . . . He was a real
       coachman. . . .He ought to have lived. . . .”

Iona goes on to lament that his son has died for no reason. Chekhov ends with this:

     The little mare munches, listens, and breathes on her master’s hands.
     Iona is carried away and tells her about it.

As you can see, the story has no plot but simply portrays a moment or an evening in the life of this man, Iona.  It is, in a sense, a slice of time taken from his life. You may be asking what it is that holds stories like these together since they have no plot. What is it that makes them worth reading?  According to professor Laurie Rozakis of Farmingdale State Universiy, it is the character’s moment of realization or epiphany. Or, you could call it an Ah-ha moment. Whatever you choose to call it, it is essential to the success of your slice of life short story.

Dana Gioia and R.S. Gwynn. The Art of the Short Story. New York, NY: Pearson Longman, 2006.

Laurie E. Rozakis, Ph.D. Creating Writing for Dummies. New York, NY: Alpha Books, 2004.

What's in a Label?: Creating First Impressions for Your Novel and Short Story Characters

In fiction, labeling is important for introducing your characters and for creating that first impression of your characters on the reader.  As Dwight Swain says in Creating Characters, there are four main labels you must use in the initial creation of story characters: sex, age, vocation, and manner.

The first thing you notice about someone you first meet is that person’s gender.  You never walk away from an initial encounter not remembering whether someone’s male or female.  Therefore sex is usually the first thing you will reveal about your character. 

The next label is that of age.  Even though we may not know a person’s exact age, we usually can make a pretty good guess about it.  Like sex, age is crucial part of a first impression.  It is one of the first things we notice about the people we meet.  So, age is something your reader is going to want to know about your character. 

After you know a person’s sex and age, you usually want to know their vocation, that is, what they do for a living.  Although a person should not be judged by their vocation, their chosen career says a great deal about them.  For instance, a person who decides to become a doctor is telling us something different than someone who decides to be a computer programmer.  Even the retired character can tell us who they are through the hobbies they engage in.  Of course, your character’s vocation will be largely defined by the plot of the story.

The last label that is critical for first impressions is that of manner.  Manner is a bit more complicated to 
achieve but must be achieved nonetheless. You can begin by thinking of manner as an adjective.  Is your character sweet, shy, pushy, calculating, indifferent, or mean?  A character’s manner is defined mainly by the part he or she is playing in the story. 

Once you have decided on the most accurate adjective to describe the manner of your character, Swain says you need to decide how you will reveal it.  As you know, the first rule of fiction writing is “Show, don’t tell.”  So don’t just tell us that X character is pushy, show us. 

Swain says manner can be revealed in one of four ways: appearance, action, dialogue, and introspection.  Sometimes a character’s appearance can say a lot about his or her manner.  Is the character wearing leather and chains?  Are the clothes they are wearing something out of the sixties?  Is the character wearing horn-rimmed glasses?  What about their hair? Appearance can say a great deal about a character.

Action is another sure way of revealing manner.  A shy character will avoid certain social situations.  A cruel character may kick the dog.  Look at the adjective you chose to describe the manner of your character and try to find an action that fits.

What we say and how we say it says a lot about who we are.  Dialogue is another good way of revealing manner.  For instance, a rude person is going to say things differently from a polite person, and an angry person is going to say things in a way a happy person never would.

Like dialogue, introspection can be an effective way to reveal a person’s manner.  Getting inside a person’s head is sure way of knowing who that character really is.  If your character is crazy, you can show the reader by creating interior monologue for your character that reveals irrational thought patterns.

Remember: You only have one chance to make a first impression.  Try to keep your character consistent with the first impression you create for him or her. But don’t worry if in the course of writing your story, you want your character to be different from what you originally intended.  You will just have to do a bit of rewriting.   

Handling Subplots in Your Novel

You may find that in plotting your novel you have additional smaller plots that pop up in addition to your main plot.  These are called subplots.

Subplots can add a great deal of depth depending on the type of story you have.  They can also keep the story moving during a lull in the main plot.  But just as a main plot must follow the path of conflict, crisis, and resolution, the subplot must do the same.

For instance, in Disney’s Swiss Family Robinson, a family gets shipwrecked on a deserted island.  Initially, they must face the daunting task of finding food and shelter.  Later, the two oldest boys decide they want to explore the island in hopes of finding other inhabitants and end up rescuing a girl disguised as a cabin boy, whom of course they both fall in love with. To complicate matters, the girl had been the prisoner of some pirates who decide to come for her. But the main plot is the family’s struggle to make the island as much like home as possible while maintaining the hope of getting off.

The battle over the girl’s affection is a subplot with its own conflict or complication, crisis, and resolution.

Complication or conflict: the brothers find out the cabin boy is actually a girl, and they both find her attractive.

Crisis: their jealousy leads to heated exchanges and eventually escalates into a fist fight.

Resolution: the girl makes her choice, and the losing brother accepts the reality. 

One way you can handle subplots is by weaving them together as you would a braid.  Ansen Dibell describes it this way in her book Plot:

In long fiction, plots don’t merely alternate with subplots: they’re often woven together in something very like a braid.  One strand loops around to the outside, out of sight, then warps in or under to briefly become the central point before warping off for another turn.

Once you have the initial situation running, with the major characters established and facing some crucial problem the reader can tell isn’t going to go away, a braided plot won’t just continue on. You’ll bring in a new subject, one that has some new plot thread which you make clear but leave unresolved so that the reader can see that there are more developments to come.

She also writes that subplots work best for stories with plots that are direct (A and B meet, A and B lose each other, A and B find each other again) because it can give them an added dimension and make the stories less predictable. Conversely, subplots may be a problem in stories with central plots that are slow to unfold and are less direct.

The thing to remember is that subplots should only be used as long as the main plot is strong enough to handle the diversions.

Tips for Planning Your Novel Part 2

When writing your first novel, it is always good to have a plan.  You need a map that helps you know where you are and where you are going.

I mentioned in my last blog that a good place to start in your planning is to get a notebook or binder and to create three main sections in it: plot, characters, and outline.  

Here in your notebook you can write freely about the plot ideas that pop into your head. As a result, your plotting section can grow to be many pages, which is why binders are helpful.

Plotting helps you work through the scenes and events that will ultimately communicate the point of your story.  Think back to your favorite novel or movie.  What was the theme? What events occurred in the story that helped to communicate the theme?

Simply put, plotting is crafting the story so that it makes your point. 

Once you have decided on your problem situation you can begin to think more clearly about your characters. Here you can start jotting down ideas for your characters including their names. 

This may seem unimportant, but the names you pick can be significant, as novelist and creative writing professor Phyllis Whitney points out in her book Guide to Fiction Writing. She writes how she slipped up in Listen for the Whisperer by using the names Leigh and Laura. By the time she realized the confusion it created, it was too late to make any changes. 

Some writers, she says, fall into a first-letter obsession without realizing it.  For instance, using Jim, John, and Jack in the same story may cause the reader to spend extra energy keeping them straight.

To keep from doing this in your story, I suggest writing down a list of all the first and last names of your characters and going through them to make sure you are not using too many names that start with the same letter.

You can also begin the process of getting to know your characters: what they look like, what they do for a living, whether they are married or single, et cetera.  Here you can decide who your characters are and what parts they are going to play.

    

Lastly, I want to discuss the outline.  When I say outline here, I do not necessarily mean the Roman numeral variety with points A, B, and C.  This is just the point at which you can decide what you want to have happen in each chapter of your book.  Begin each chapter on a new page and write down the main events and scenes you would like to include in each of those chapters.

Know, however, that nothing is set in stone. You may find that once you start writing, your story evolves into something quite different from what you had mapped out in your outline. 

 

As the old saying goes, a map is not a journey.  It’s just a starting point.