The Art of the Short Story Part II Plot

I covered the first part of The Art of the Short Story, mostly insights from the 52 authors featured in this brilliant book yesterday and didn't get around to talking about the last section of the book, Part III "Writing".

The Elements of Short Fiction

Plot

Characterization

Point of View

Setting

Theme

Style

An interesting note from looking at the Table of Contents for this section is that Plot is covered over a total of 6 pages, Characterization over 3 pages, and Point of View over 2 pages while Setting, Theme, and Style are given a mere page each.

The section on Plot opens up with Aristotle's "Poetics", which also gives first importance to Plot.

"A beginning is that which does not come necessarily after something else, but after which it is natural for another thing to exist or come to be. An end, on the contrary, is that which naturally comes after something else, either as its necessary sequel or as its usual (and hence probable) sequel, but itself has nothing after it. A middle is that which both comes after something else and has another thing following it. A well-constructed plot, therefore, will neither begin at some chance point nor end at some chance point, but will observe the principles here stated."

The book states that it is rare for a first attempt at a short story to observe such "obvious" balances of proportion. "A typical first attempt at a short story may include an elaborate beginning of four or five pages, a page or two of summarized dramatic events, and a slam-bang ending of a single paragraph that includes a hail of gunfire and screeching brakes".

The plot of the story, the book says "is first a movement in time; second a movement in casuality; and, third, a movement in dramatic tension".

The section goes on to list stories contained within the book that present unified plots, that is, plots where events happen in real-time. Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour" takes place in one continuous hour. Jack London's "To Build a Fire" closely follows the last hours of a Yukon traveler's life.  Edgar Allan Poe's "Tell-Tale Heart" is the real-time confession of a deranged killer.  Raymond Carver's "Cathedral" takes place between supper-time and bedtime. Another thing to note is that stories with a unified plot also tend to take place in a carefully limited locale.

Plots with longer periods of time are called episodic plots, which oblige the writer to make transitions between scenes. As a writer when I read whether it's a short story or a novel I tend to find that a good number of writers have difficulties making transitions. 

One writer who springs to mind is George RR Martin, author of A Song of Fire and Ice (aka Game of Thrones, which is the first book in this series). I'm convinced that his "Point of View" style is simply because he cannot make transitions - not from one character to another nor from one locale to another. I can understand how this would be a problem given that no one character is the main anything - who the protagonist or antagonist is depends almost entirely on locale. This interests me because as the series begins to draw to a close it's obvious that the various characters will have to come closer and closer together and that there will be less and less locales. I'm interested to see how Martin handles the transitions or if he will switch from an episodic plot to a more unified one as many epic stories tend to do towards the end.

Take for example the author that Martin has seemed to borrow from primarily, JRR Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings". There are a number of changes in locale and the transitions seem logical and streamlined. I think Martin will make a similar attempt to unify in the vein of LOTR meaning that eventually Martin's characters will move towards the Iron Throne in the same way the characters of LOTR move towards Mordor, as the Iron Throne is what unifies the majority of the characters in terms of their motives.

A primary feature of an episodic plot is the ability to move backwards and forwards through time. Additional information is provided by flashbacks while the author is free to leap forward over periods of time that hold little dramatic interest.

The book cites Tolstoy's "Death of Ivan Ilych" as a story that finds its punch using flashbacks. It begins at the title character's wake and continues backwards through the character's childhood, education, marriage, rise to prominence, and finally his fatal illness. The unusual time scheme underscores his assertion that his protagonist's life "had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible".

I can cite a number of stories and novels that fall flat when using flashbacks and if the advise of agents or writers or the desires of publishers are to be taken into consideration, writers are encouraged to not use flashbacks especially in the beginning of the story. 

I cannot necessarily agree with this idea, but one example I can cite is JK Rowling's first book in the Harry Potter series. I don't like the Prologue much but at the same time, the information contained therein about the circumstances that bring Harry to the Dursleys door are extremely important to the story. The next time we see Harry he's a boy of 10, but because of the previous exposition of the essential information  - the who, what, when, where - the reader knows what they need to know to keep on reading.

If the Prologue to the Harry Potter books is exposition in the theme of the traditional fairy tale "Once upon a time", there is another variation, one which seems more in favour these days called the in medias res (in the middle of things). These stories and novels open after the conventions of the old epic poems in the midst of some event or other and it is not until later that the characters and their relationship to the one another or to the story itself are made clear.

Stories that begin in medias res skip the first part of plot (exposition) to the complication or conflict. The rising action of the story (or what Aristotle would have called the essential middle) may or may not be the bulk of the story, but it is always building towards the next part of the plot the climax.

The climax is the greatest point of tension in the story, which brings about the falling action of the story, in which the built up tension is finally released.

The final part of a plot is the dénouement or resolution. The word dénouement refers to the untying of a knot which returns the characters to another stable situation.  Just as fairy tales traditionally end with something akin to "and they lived happily ever after", many stories conclude with what the future holds for its characters.

The dénouement may be either closed or open. A closed dénouement ties everything up in a bow and explains all unanswered questions the reader might have, as in the "Elementary, my dear Watson" explanation found in any of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes tales.  On the other hand an open dénouement leaves us with a few tantalizing loose ends.

I can think of any number of stories or novels that end by tying up everything nicely, but fewer who manage to pull off the trick of leaving the readers questions unanswered in a way that is successful that isn't in the genre of sci-fi and or about dystopian futures, which I think are more inclined because of the impending future that cannot be answered to be able to pull this off.

Many of Borges' stories come to no neat conclusion, such as "The Immortal". Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery", contained within this book comes to a conclusion without providing answers to the reader as well. If you can think of others that do this successfully, please leave suggestions as I'm very curious about this mostly because at the end of six seasons of LOST I wanted to hunt the writers down and torture them for answers.

What this book doesn't really say is what makes a good plot? Should I worry that as a writer I myself can't define or distinguish a good plot from a bad plot even though I'm able to nitpick other elements of stories to excess?

A search on Google for "What makes a good plot" turns up a number of answers and I've clicked through a good number of them now without finding any answer better than the definition of plot itself:

plot: is a literary term defined as the events that make up a story, particularly as they relate to one another in a pattern, in a sequence, through cause and effect, how the reader views the story, or simply by coincidence

* I'd also like to mention that the "elements" of plot in this post taken from The Art of the Short Story were taken from Gustav Freytag, which you an read about on Wikipedia here. Also Aristotle's Poetics is a must read for well, everyone.

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The Art of the Short Story

The Art of the Short Story is a unique book. It is a book that wasn't hunted for but given to Monsieur by a lady we both knew before we knew each other who has a story of her own.  Whenever we speak of her Monsieur always says the same thing - how she, Antonia, spent her life taking care of old people but when she became old herself she had no one to take care of her.

When I met her she was living in a tiny chambre de bonne in the 16th arrondissement with very little money. She was a decent poet, full of life and passion that she was able to put into verse, with a habit of chasing after men who were generally a third of her age.  She had one of those sort of faces that despite its weathering and lines was obviously once extraordinarily beautiful and her hair was like a soft flame that spilled down her back in that shade I call Klimt red.

No one we know has had news of her in some years, but I always think of her when I see the spine of this book or on the few occasions when I've opened it.  Last night I decided that rather than fall asleep to movies I was going to try and change my habits and read before I went to sleep. Monsieur saw it and mentioned her again as he always does just as my eyes had skimmed the name of Eudora Welty, who wrote My Antonia!

At 996 pages it's quite a big book. It features 52 authors, their best short fiction, and their insights on writing. Last night before sleeping I read pieces by Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian author of Things Fall Apart; Hands from Sherwood Anderson's acclaimed masterpiece Winesburg Ohio; a very short story from Margaret Atwood called Happy Endings; skimmed a very long short story by James Baldwin; skipped past the Borges story because I've read it before as well as the short story by Albert Camus for the same reasons; and was enthralled by Raymond Carver's Cathedral.

I turned off and tried to fall asleep after reading Carver's story about a blind man who comes to visit, but I couldn't, so I turned the light back on and read one of Chekov's short stories Lady With a Dog which I finished and fell asleep thinking about.

What makes the book interesting and helpful to writers is not just the works, but after each short story is an "Insight". Some are longer than others, but even in one paragraph Chekov offers this helpful advise:

"In displaying the psychology of your characters, minute particulars are essential.  God save us from vague generalizations! Be sure not to discuss your hero's state of mind.  Make it clear from his actions."

I decided to go through the insights to find other things that might be helpful showing no particular prejudice against those authors whom are not to my tastes to find the ten most helpful insights, though they are listed in no particular order. (Quote above, attribution below.)

"It's possible, in a poem or a short story to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things - a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring - with immense, even startling power...In Isaac Babel's wonderful short story "Guy de Maupassant", the narrator has this to say about the writing of fiction: "No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put just in the right place". This too ought to go on a three-by-five."

Raymond Carver mentions the "three-by-five" because in a part I omitted he mentions Nabokov who famously wrote all of his work on index cards so that he could shuffle things around more easily. It seems Mr. Carver was a fan.

Interviewer: "Your writing always, from the first, had its source in other books?"

Borges: "Yes, that's true. Well, because I think of reading a book as no less an experience than traveling or falling in love...Many people are apt to think of real life on the one side, that means toothache, headache, traveling and so on, and then you have on the other side, you have imaginary life and fancy that means the arts.  But I don't think that that distinction holds water.  I think that everything is a part of life."

Jorge Luis Borges interviewed by Richard Burgin

"Any first-rate novel or story must have in it the strength of a dozen fairly good stories that have been sacrificed to it. A good workman can't be a cheap workman; he can't be stingy about wasting material, and he cannot compromise. Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand - a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods - or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standarized values.  The courage to go on without compromise does not come to a writer all at once - nor, for that matter, does ability."

Willa Cather

"I am forced to admit I have not the writing habit. But it is hard to make people with the questioning habit believe this.  How, where, when, why, what do you write? are some of the questions that I remember.  How do I write? On a lapboard with a block of paper, a stub pen, and a bottle of ink bought at the corner grocery, which keeps the best in town.

Where do I write? In a Morris chair beside the window, where I can see a few trees and a patch of sky, more or less blue.

When do I write? I am greatly tempted here to use slang and reply "any old time", but that would lend a tone of levity to this bit of confidence, whose seriousness I want to keep intact if possible. So I shall say I write in the morning, when not too strongly drawn to struggle with the intricacies of a pattern, and in the afternoon, if the temptation to try a new furniture polish on an old table leg is not too powerful to be denied; sometimes at night, though as I grow older I am more and more inclined to believe that night was made for sleep.

Why do I write? is a question which I have often asked myself and never very satisfactorily answered. Story-writing - at least with me - is the spontaneous expression of impressions gathered goodness knows where.  To seek the source, the impulse of a story is like tearing a flower to pieces for wantonness.

What do I write? Well, not everything that comes into my head, but much of what I have written lies between the covers of my books.

There are stories that seem to write themselves, and others which positively refuse to be written - which no amount of coaxing can bring to anything."

Kate Chopin

"He must learn them again.  He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.  Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he relearns these things, he will as though he stood among and watched the end of man."

William Faulkner (from his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature)

"The sentences in a book must quiver like the leaves in a forest, all dissimilar in their similarity."

Gustave Flaubert (from a letter to Louise Colet, April 1854, during the writing of Madame Bovary)

"Why I wrote The Yellow Wallpaper

Many people have asked that. When the story first came out, in the New England Magazine about 1891, a Boston physician made protest in The Transcript. Such a story out not to be written, he said; it was enough to drive anyone mad to read it.

Now the story of the story is this: For many years I suffered from a severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia - and beyond. During about the third year of this trouble I went, in devout faith and some faint stir of hope, to a noted specialist in nervous diseases, the best known in the country. This wise man put me to bed and applied the rest cure, to which a still-good physique responded so promptly that he concluded there was nothing much the matter with me, and sent me home with solemn advice to live as domestic a life as far as possible, to have but two hours intellectual life a day and never to touch a pen, brush, or pencil ever again as long as I lived. This was 1897.

I went home and obeyed those directions for some three months, and came so near the borderline of utter mental ruin that I could see over...

But the best result is this. Many years later I was told that the great specialist had admitted to friends of his that he had altered his treatment of neurasthenia since reading The Yellow Wallpaper.

It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked."

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

"I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next."

Ernest Hemingway (from A Moveable Feast)

"Another problem in my writing life, I think, is frustration."

Ha Jin

"The realist, if he is an artist, will endeavor not to show us a commonplace photograph of life, but to give us a presentment of it which shall be more complete, more striking, more cogent than reality itself. To tell everything is out of the question; it would require at least a volume for each day to enumerate the endless, insignificant incidents which crowd out existence. A choice must be made - and this is the first blow to the theory of the whole truth.

Guy de Maupassant (Preface to Pierre et Jean)

I've only included 10 out of the 52 authors presented in this book - a few of whom I've left out because I've written about their advise before on this blog such as Jack London, John Steinbeck, Rudyard Kipling, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. One of the best sections of the book, full of essays and other information about the elements of writing short fiction, I've neglected entirely, but it's impossible to retype this advise and not feel inspired by it and now I am anxious to make potato salad and homemade BBQ sauce that can sit in the fridge and gather their flavours while I try to write a few sentences.

One thing I do want to say is that I've not quoted Sherwood Anderson on this blog post, but I plan on writing about him later. His short story "Hands", from his collection Winesburg Ohio struck me in a way that even now, with the afternoon almost behind me, still feels physical. I'd been encouraged many times to read Winesburg but never paid it much attention. I plan on reading it from cover to cover as soon as possible. It was disturbingly beautiful.

I hope that these little snippets offer up some inspiration and if you have any to share, please feel free to comment.

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