Spellbinding Short Stories

MONDAY

SPELLBINDING SHORT STORIES: WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?

Catching your reader’s attention with:

A. TITLES: SHORT, PUNCHY, DIRECT, WITH AN ELEMENT OF MYSTERY

“What Remains” (Emma Donoghue); “Ashes to Ashes to Ashes” (Ruth Nadelhaft); “Winter Term” (Sallie Bingham); “The Lady with the Pet Dog” (Anton Chekhov); “The Beast in the Jungle”
 (Henry James) — choose a favorite. Why?

• “What Remains”: present tense

• “Ashes to Ashes to Ashes”: cliché built upon changed meaning

• “Winter Term”: double meaning; youth

• “The Lady with the Pet Dog”: elegance

• “The Beast in the Jungle”: violence

B: YOUR FIRST SENTENCE

• “She hasn’t asked for me in two months.” Ambiguity: who is speaking? (Donahue)

• “It was said that a new person had appeared on the sea-front: a lady with a little dog.” (Chekov) detachment? Sense of a crowd of spectators?

• “Old Jeff Patton, the black share-farmer, fumbled with his bow tie.” (Arna Bontemps) contrast.

• “Everyone asks what I “think” of everything, said Spencer Brydon” (James) voice

Choose one. What makes it work?

Write a first sentence without worrying about what will follow. Read aloud. What would the title be?

TUESDAY

1.WORD CHOICE:

Your reader may be somewhat dead to words due to texting, Twitter, etc. which do not depend on word choice for communication. Therefore you may need to startle with ADJECTIVES, VERBS and METAPHORS that are fresh and invigorating:

ADJECTIVES

“She was lying there like a whale ready for the ax”—cliché made new with implication of violence. (Donahue)

“We talked of London, face to face with a great, bristling, primeval glacier” (James, “The Private Life”) Bristling is unexpected, communicates threat, aliveness.

“A good little hand….has its nails cut short, a thumb that readily bends back like a scorpion’s tail.” (Colette, “Break of Day”) Threat?

VERBS

“His body hung loose as he knelt by the couch.” (Sonia Sanchez, “After Saturday Night Comes Sunday”) Implication of passivity?

“Not enough!” snapped the priest. “If you do not pray daily, you are neglecting your immortal soul.” (O’Connor, “The Enduring Chill”) snapped vs. said

“Round the corner of Crescent Bay, between the piled-up masses of broken rock, a flock of sheep came pattering.” (sound of the verb) (Mansfield, “At The Bay”)

“I saw my wife laughing as she parked the car. I saw her get out of the car and close the door. She was still wearing a smile. Amazing.” (Raymond Carver, “Cathedral” (intentional flatness)

“I seen the little lamp.” (Mansfield, “The Dolls House”) verb used to convey information about the character—more effective than a direct statement about class.

METAPHORS AND SIMILES (handle with care)

“…a rural worthy with a dirty finger in every pie” (O’Connor, “The Enduring Chill”) cliché used to show writer’s attitude toward her character—is this effective?

“Ahh, ahh, sounded the sleepy sea” (Mansfield, “At The Bay”) repetition of s’s is effective but beware personalizing nature.

“Beside the neutral expression she wore when she was alone, Mrs. Freeman had two others, forward and reverse” (O’Connor, “Good Country People”)

WRITE A SENTENCE USING A FRESH VERB, NOUN, AND METAPHOR OR SIMILIE. DOES ANYTHING SUGGEST WHAT IS TO FOLLOW OR WHO THE NARRATOR IS?

WEDNESDAY

BUILDING CHARACTERS

• Using dialogue (color, intensity, dialect, regional difference, humor).

• Concealment as showing—what? (Mansfield dialogue, next page)

• Tone of voice establishes who is speaking, rather than she says/he says: (Horrocks dialogue, next page

• Hemingway: “A Clean Well-Lighted Place”: only dialogue

• Using adjectives that reveal character, through appearance or beyond appearance.


“At the table a man…sat motionless. He was a skeleton with the skin drawn tight across his bones, with long curls like a woman’s and a shaggy beard. His face was yellow with an earthy tint in it, his cheeks were hollow, his back long and narrow…” Do you then need “a man unlike ordinary people” in the first sentence? (Chekhov)

“The doctor was again smiling, his eyelids low against the little black pupils, in each of which was a tiny white bead of light.” (Conrad Aiken) Why “smiling”? Contrast? Malevolence? Using humor: not to undermine your character, but to show complexity.

“The charmed affection with which he took everything for granted.” (Henry James) Do you believe this? Is it condescending, or illuminating?

“He didn’t think he was any better than anybody else, even though he was.” (Flannery O’Connor) same questions

WRITE SEVERAL LINES OF DIALOGUE DESCRIBING TWO CHARACTERS, WITHOUT ANY OTHER DEVICES.

READ PLAYS TO HONE YOUR DIALOGUE: in theatre, dialogue must carry nearly all the meaning, characterization, etc. READ FIRST PAGE, “WILD THING”

THURSDAY

ESTABLISHING POINT OF VIEW: WHO IS TELLING THIS STORY?

• Third person omniscient: you are God

• Unreliable narrator: why?

• One character in the story is the narrator: why?

• Avoiding overusing your own point of view: frequently creating a character of your own age, gender and background. Then fiction proves unreliable.

• Told from one character’s point of view: Can this pov change during the course of the story?

UNRELIABLE NARRATOR:

OMNISCIENT NARRATOR:

“He stayed away, after this, for a year; he visited the depths of Asia, spending himself on scenes of romantic interest, of superlative sanctity; but what was present for him everywhere was that for a man who had known what HE had known the world was vulgar and vein.” James, “The Beast in the Jungle.” Is this omniscient narrator—James—reliable or is he making points against his character:”superlative sanctity”—irony?

“All that day the heat was terrible. The wind blew close to the ground; it rooted among the tussock grass, slithered along the road, si that the white pumice dust settled in our faces…” (Mansfield, “The Woman at the Store”) Can this be omniscient—“our faces”?

“The worst thing in a woman’s life: her first man. He is the only one you die of. After that, married life—or a semblance of it—becomes a career.” (Colette,” Break of Day”) Omnisicent narrator may speak directly to the reader; may be epigrammatic.

NARRATOR IS A CHARACTER: don’t mistake for memoir or autobiography; in fiction, the first person is not the author.

“My trade is not what might be expected from the height of my red-heeled sandals or the swing of my patent-leather bag.” (“Mending”, Sallie Bingham)

“He had felt the end coming on for nearly four months. Alone in his freezing flat, huddled under his two blankets and his overcoat and with three thicknesses of the New York Times between, he had had a chill one night, followed by a violent sweat….”(“An Enduring Chill”, O’Connor) Narrator as a character may speak in first or third person.

FRIDAY

HOW TO END WITH A BANG

Epiphanies: moments of revelation, plot or character driven, that reveal a profound change on the part of the central character:

“But today she passed the baker’s by, climbed the stairs,went into the little dark room—her room like a cupboard—and sat down on the red eiderdown. She sat there for a long time. The box that the fur came out of was on the bed. She unclasped the necklet quickly; quickly, without looking, laid it inside. But when she put the lid on she thought she heard something crying.” (Mansfield, “Miss Brill”) Who is crying?

Joyce: “The Dead”. The narrator sees his wife, at the end of the party, standing at a window on the stairs, looking out at the snow, and realizes suddenly that she has been in love as a girl and that she will never love in that way again. Epiphany depends on a character’s obliviousness—habit, conventionality, failure to observe; so an ordinary event can have unexpected consequences.

Tying up plot or leaving the ending open:

“My doctor was on the telephone when I came in, and I looked at his free ear and knew he would never be mine. Never. Never. And that I would live.” (Bingham, “Mending”)

In Writing Cape Cod Writers Center Conference Writing Short Stories