A Man Thought About How Short Stories Work. What Happened Next Will Blow Your Mind!

Let’s be clear: Most human beings want nothing to do with short stories. Publishing types tend to think the short story peaked commercially around 1998, but realistically it was more like 1955. People either want to live with the characters in a novel for days or weeks, or they don’t want to read at all. (Or they’ll read, you know, business books.) As with politics, most people don’t want to really consider a third party. For the rest of you poor fools, here are some things to know about the art form you insist on loving…

(NOTE: I’m going to offer my opinions here, but these are not to be taken as absolutes. I’m very, very choosy about short stories, and I’m as hard on the form as I am on myself while writing in the form. I think the short story is one of the great western contributions to world culture, and I think an awful lot of people have written an awful lot of shitty, shitty stories.)

1) They are not training wheels for future novelists. The structure of a story is almost nothing like the structure of a novel. We expect things in a novel-length narrative that, if delivered in a short story, will feel either rushed, overstuffed, or bullshit-y. If you want to learn to write a novel, then write that novel, Scooter. If you want to write a story, let it be because you want to respect the form and make a great short story.

2) They are not there to impress your workshop classmates, nor your teacher/mentor. This, I’m convinced, is the reason why so many readers think they don’t like short stories. Atmosphere and language prized over character, faux-meaningful endings, an excess of rural/blue-collar characters written by persons clearly unfamiliar with the realities of such things. These are actual complaints I’ve heard from actual readers. If you’re writing a story, it needs to be because you want to tell a story, one which will (somehow, in part) entertain your reader.

3) They are hard to end well, which is part of what makes them so great. I took 1,000 stories down to the scientists at Debenham Laboratories, and approximately 10% of them ended in a way that was agreed to be “satisfactory.” But if everyone could do it well, and every time, then short stories wouldn’t be a thing to aspire to. They’d just happen, like Facebook movies.

So how do short stories work?

1) Stories are about compression. This is by necessity, right? You have 10, 15, 20 pages, you’re going to need to make some choices. This is hard, but it is a good thing. What happens has to matter most. So not only are we limited in terms of how many things can happen in a story (let’s call this “event”), we’re limited in our timeline. Stories drop in on a character or situation, and then drop back out. In between, something happens that changes something for someone.

2) Stories are about a thing that happens. It’s that simple. I call this “the time that…” as in THE time, not A time. I don’t want to read about an example of the usual goings-on at league night. I want to read about THE time someone phoned in a bomb threat to the bowling alley. Or even just about THE time Mark wasn’t acting like his usual cheerful self. What’s going on, who does it affect, how does it affect them?

3) Stories employ structure, just not how we expect. Even in a great short story, it can be hard to find the plot “beats” you’d ordinarily find in a novel. Because of the compression aspect — gotta choose your moments and make ’em count — a lot of the traditional story elements are left off the page. However, in a well-done story, you’ll still be able to feel those elements, like phantom limbs. This is what Hemingway meant when he talked about stories being like icebergs — that carefully chosen omissions (i.e., the parts of the iceberg hidden underwater) will actually strengthen a story.

Just today, we were talking about a student’s piece where a woman in her mid-fifties is in Nepal to acclimate to the altitude and cold before attempting to climb part of Mt. Everest. The story, which is going to be a killer, is (in these early stages) overstuffed. We get details about her fragile marriage, and some of the students wanted more info on this. I argued the opposite: that knowing what we do — a married person in their fifties is clear across the globe from their spouse on a dangerous jaunt — is everything we need to know. In other words, she’s already done the hard work of letting the character’s choices and situation speak for her history. We don’t need details of the marriage, and without them the story is actually stronger. The trick, of course, is to have a character and situation that are evocative enough to imply such a thing.

4) There are always exceptions. Alice Munro, for instance, is kind of the exception to everything: She writes stories that regularly exceed 40 pages, which seem to cover a character’s entire life, and which take place in Canada. Those are three of the big no-no’s of short fiction. Of course, they don’t really cover a whole life — she employs plenty of limitations and compression — but that’s the magic of Alice Munro: you feel like you’ve really lived with her characters.

Also, the kind of story you’re trying to tell really is going to dictate a lot of your choices. If you’re telling a horror or adventure story, then you really do have to honor the traditional plot elements. If you’re telling a more internal story, traditional plot can work against it, cheapening it. (Plot itself is not cheap; only poor use of it is.)

5) Stories should leave you somewhere safe. I don’t mean boring. I mean, a story is a little like a stranger giving you a ride in an unfamiliar locale. They can’t bring you all the way home, because that’s not how it works, but they also can’t leave you in the dark or in a bad neighborhood. A good story, like a good stranger, will leave you where you can easily get your next ride, or at least a meal while you figure out where you’re going. A teacher used to tell me, “Leave your stories on a precipice” — meaning, with access to an imagined next level. Remember: We drop in and we drop out. We spend an afternoon or a week or a year with these characters, compressed into 15 or so pages; let me imagine what the rest of the iceberg looks like, but write it real enough that I know there’s more to the iceberg.

6) There is no formula for a successful short story. But that’s like anything. There’s no formula for a great song, either. There are elements we like to hear in songs — strong melody, some repetition but not too much, a memorable chorus — but there are other intangibles that have to be there, or it will feel cheap and gross. Similarly, I could replace the main characters in ZZ Packer’s “Brownies” with white cub scouts — same exact setting, same situation — and it would fall flat. I’m pretty sure if I kept the main actors as African-American kids but changed only their gender, it’d STILL fail. “Brownies,” in order to be “Brownies,” has to be about those girls in that troop in that time and from that shared background. That’s it. Oh — and it has to be written by ZZ Packer, with her point of view and manner of thought. Those are the magic intangibles.

7) Stories are the character actors of literature. Lead actors, like novels, can go a long way on charm. A character actor has a limited set of lines and moments to make an impression on you. What makes a character actor great — and invaluable — is their ability to do just this. Stories are like this. The language, the character, the situation, the urgency — all have about a page to grab you before you decide you’d rather be doing something else. And just like a character actor wants you to come away thinking, “God, the guy in those bank scenes, though!”, a short story wants you to say, “Man, remember that story about the bomb threat in the bowling alley?”

(Note: I see a lot of novelists claiming they have more freedom than story writers, since they have room to “explore” and digress. Maybe this is why so many books are 400+ pages, and it’s also maybe why I can’t tell you how many people I’ve heard say, in recent years, “I just gave up on that book.” I’m not claiming novels are an inferior art form, and I’m not claiming all novelists are guilty of this. I am claiming that perhaps novelists ought to read more short stories. To imagine you are somehow free from the burden of entertaining and captivating your reader is some pretty crazy shit. And just because it’s easier nowadays to generate 400, 500, 600 pages doesn’t mean you should do it. Make some choices, superstar.)

8) Stories seem to work best when they ask questions. I didn’t make that up, by the way, so if you don’t like it, talk to Lorrie Moore. (And when you do, please tell her that I love and admire her.) But I very much believe in it for myself. If you write a story looking to prove a set of answers — “I want to show how this guy can find peace with himself for murdering his brother’s rabbits” — then you run the risk of leading the witness, as it were. You’re making a case for something, which is not terribly fun to read. But if you simply ask, via your story, some questions — “Can a person really find peace for horrifying acts? And is it a lasting peace, or just a momentary calm?” — then you’re getting into interesting territory. Because we don’t really read fiction to find answers, I don’t think. We read to know that other people are asking the same questions as we are.