The Obligatory White Male Author’s Fiction Manifesto: Stories (Part 2)

Note: In Part One, I talk about the short story, and what I see wrong with the way it’s often practiced. Here we get into the really bossy stuff, the guidelines.

Do I believe everything has to follow the same set of rules, that all short stories should be the same? Of course not. But I believe a lot of people are producing a lot of shitty short fiction, and this is what has turned a lot of readers away from stories. So here’s what I look for in short fiction. This is what I wish for when I read it, and what I demand of myself when I’m writing it:

• Real characters. Not types, and not a collection of lonely yearnings wandering the grey suburban landscape. Jesus Fucking Christ am I tired of reading about how spiritually empty the suburbs are. I’m just as sick of people fetishizing rural America or the inner city as the Only Real Places. It’s 2012, and you’re grown-up enough to know all kinds of people live in all kinds of places for all kinds of reasons. I think the suburbs-are-evil thing is done partly out of laziness, with writers not realizing the writers they’re aping were writing about the suburbs in a time when suburbs were a new thing. But it also seems to be done in lieu of writing real characters. Real characters are complicated and often (mostly) wrong-headed and funny and weird and maybe even a little annoying. I don’t have to love the character, but I’d better feel like the writer is at least fascinated with the person. Otherwise, what the hell’s the point? Why should I be fascinated if you can’t bother to show some interest? (Please don’t mistake this as a wish for “likable characters.” I don’t even know what that means.) Just write people. Not a set of circumstances, not a nest of quirks. People.

• Active characters. Related to the above. I had a student in workshop the other night ask of a fellow student’s character, “Why does she need to go rushing over to this guy’s hotel to confront him about the work problem? Couldn’t she wait until morning?” It’s a great question, but it also is its own answer: No one wants to read about the person who would wait until the next morning. It’s like I was saying in Part One: Don’t tell me about the time things happened the way they usually do, tell me about The Time Something Different Happened. Similarly, don’t tell me about any person, tell me about The One Person Who…. Active characters make the mistakes, the leaps and lapses in judgment, the transgressions that lead to things like situations and unforeseen results. In fact, when I teach about scene, I teach a (reductive) principle called the Three Es: Encounter/Event/Effect. In every scene, a character must have an Encounter with something or someone that then leads to an Event of some sort, which then has an Effect. (The effect doesn’t always have to be obvious to the character(s); it can happen to the reader.) This is similar to the idea that a scene cannot begin and end without some change having occurred. This is the very stuff of fiction, yet we forget it as soon as we put fingertips to keypad, and then we have characters sitting around waiting for things to happen to them. No. The characters create the story. They make choices and things happen as a result. Even the best passive characters are thoroughly active in their passivity. Grady Tripp in Wonder Boys and Jeff Lebowski in The Big Lebowski are allegedly the laziest people in their stories, but they’re actually the busiest: Things have shifted and they’re desperately trying to drag everything back to square one. Or think of Hoarders: It takes a lot of work to appear that sedentary.

• Make something happen. To me, this doesn’t have to mean spectacle. Believe it or not, I don’t need it to be all gunfights and anal sex. (Although….) One of my favorite story writers is William Trevor, who specializes in creeping dread, thus his stories seem to contain very little action. However, in the weird silences and loaded interactions, Trevor’s stories contain all the plot and forward motion you could ask for in a piece of fiction. (The genius of William Trevor, by the way, is that his characters almost never experience revelation or epiphany. These things happens to the Trevor reader, and it’s often stunning.) When I read a short story, I’m still looking for the elements of plot — accumulated incidents, some kind of forward motion, increasing tension, climax, etc. — that I’d expect from a longer work. Otherwise, I’d be reading poetry or essays. But this is fiction, and I believe it still ought to have, you know, Fiction Stuff.

• Surprise me. Here I don’t mean plot. Here I mean, show me something — in a character, in an observation — that I haven’t seen before. Tell me something new about an old thing. In his collection Knuckleheads, Jeff Kass writes about athletes — and men — in a way I haven’t seen elsewhere. Please do write about a married couple not getting along, but surprise me with your take on it, your insights into the situation, your characters.

• Interaction. A lot of stories baffle me, frankly, by not letting their characters interact, either with each other or with an animal or object. I love the narrator of Grace Paley’s “Wants,” but so much of what makes her great becomes apparent when her ex-husband shows up while she’s waiting on the library steps. Story arises from character, thus character needs something to bump up against. Please don’t give me a guy driving for three days, thinking about stuff. Put someone else in the car with him, or let him hit an antelope, or have the car itself be the foil. But something.

• Demonstrate an understanding of your characters. Going back to yesterday’s Hemingway bit, I want to know that you know where the rest of your iceberg is. I can’t tell you how many stories I’ve read in journals and anthologies and thought: “This writer knows only what’s going on at the surface of this scene, and that’s it.” And it reads like one of those embarrassing playlets they used to do on Star Search during the drama competition, only with far less dialogue and more wounded glances. You know that writer has no clue what his characters do on their off-days. But he uses lots of tricks of voice and narrative perspective so we don’t notice he has no fucking clue what his story’s really about. You need to connect to your characters with every bit as much intensity and understanding as a novelist does, or what’s the point of my reading it?

• Display some narrative authority. Related to the above. If you can’t tell your story with authority, if I can’t glimpse just the slightest shadow of an author here and there, then I won’t know who’s driving this train and I will ultimately question the value of the journey itself. I think conveying Narrative authority is one of the last things a writer learns to do well, not unlike achieving OT-VIII in Scientology. Narrative authority, by the way, should not be confused with showiness. I once heard Amy Bloom say that if she read a line of hers that delighted her, she cut it. Why? Because anytime you can hear the author chuckling at his own genius, you’re not in the story. But I am looking for evidence of a smart, interesting author. We experience narrative authority via things like evocative word choices, living characters, strong thematic concerns, and clear storytelling decisions. On that last one: When a writer clearly knows where to end a scene, or shows me the ONE thing that tells me everything I need to know about character X’s house, versus listing a catalog of a dozen details, then I feel like I’m in sure hands.

• Use humor. Is it too much to ask for flashes of humor and lightness in a story? You know, like there are in LIFE? Christ, even in the concentration camps there was humor – in fact, it was vital for survival. Maybe, then, you can see your way to putting some in that estranged-middle-class-spouses story? I honestly can’t think of one dark story where the presence of humor has marred it; on the other hand, I can think of hundreds of dark stories where humor would’ve made a huge difference. Good rule of thumb: If you’re over thirty, there’s no excuse for mistaking darkness for depth.

• Be entertaining. There is no excuse for forgetting this. It’s bare minimum requirement #1 for literature. If you are putting your work out for others, you are hoping for them to enjoy it. Pure and simple. If your whole raison d’être is to provoke, then you are being a child. People who consider themselves mainly to be “provocateurs” are not merely pretentious, they’re selfish, miserable blights on the world. They are adding nothing; rather, they are only taking. So: I’m not telling you to dumb it down, I’m not telling you to make your characters “likable,” I’m not telling you to put your characters in wacky situations, I’m not telling you to avoid serious or disturbing ideas. I am telling you to remember that you write to be read and that you should at the least be entertaining. The best writers know how to be artful and enjoyable at the same time. Exhibit A: Lolita.

• Risk Sentimentality. The word “risk” here is crucial, for sentimentality alone is not good. Look: We live in an age of irony, or so my Hang In There, Kitty! calendar tells me. And while sentimentality is cheap, irony and detachment are not only cheaper these days, they’re actually detrimental. They cost something of us by mocking our ability to feel things, by shaming our humanity. I love the excited, flawed writer who is Rick Moody of The Ice Storm and Purple America and The Black Veil, but I loathe the clever, self-important Rick Moody of a lot of his short stories, the one who couches seemingly everything in overwrought wording and formal stylistic exercises. I believe it’s far more noble — again, crucial — to take a risk on being perceived as sentimental and mawkish, as long as you’re being true and honest and specific. This last thing is key. If you go for universality — “everyone will get this!” — you will fail every time. The more specific you go, the more universal it will actually become. “Parenting is hard, but you gotta laugh!” is not only non-specific, it’s just plain stupid. Which is why it’s the premise of a thousand shitty sitcoms and Chicken Soup For The… stories, all of which trade on cheap sentimentality in place of actual emotional connection. But let’s say this: You have a story about a mother who’s having a hard day with her toddler and — just when she’s on the brink of losing it — the little boy slips in his own urine and falls on his ass, and the mother inadvertently laughs. The child looks up at her, confused by what’s just happened. He’s just hurt himself, yet his number-one protector in the world  thinks it’s funny? He begins crying. And now so does she. It’s a specific moment we’re talking about here (versus “Aw, Tyler drew on the wall!”) yet it’s one every parent knows: You love your kids, but to be able to laugh right in their little faces at the worst possible moments is priceless and necessary.

There you have it: my requirements for short fiction. I hope you’ll notice they contained nothing regarding content or style, that I never said anything like, “Always describe a character fully, using at least three pages to do so!” To be prescriptive about those would be weird, especially from a guy who likes 19th century literature and comic books. By the way, these requirements are — shocker — also what I want from long-form fiction! I don’t know why you’d expect less from one versus the other, but it seems people do, or at least they’ve come to.

I’d love to change that. Short stories are some of the first sophisticated literature you read in school as a kid (I’m happy to report this is still the case) but somewhere between childhood and adulthood, the stories you read seem to change at their core, which is exactly where they shouldn’t. The situations and characters should become more sophisticated, but the basic elements shouldn’t change or disappear. And yet.

There are good writers out there working hard to make good stories for you. The hours are terrible, the audience is (rightly) skeptical, the pay is almost nonexistent, and the effort to be heard through the crap is exhausting. But they’re doing it anyway, because it’s a great form of literature. I hope you’ll read a short story today. (Maybe this one, for instance. Or these.) But I also hope that if that story doesn’t live up to the basic standards I’ve outlined above — doesn’t entertain you, doesn’t move you in some way, doesn’t bother to treat its characters as real people — you will throw that story down and cry, “I denounce you, bullshit story! I denounce you to the depths of Hell!” You have every right to do so.