Plotting and Re-Plotting Stories

I find that when I read short stories, more short stories of my own come to me and I believe Delany when he says that you can’t write anything better than the best stuff you’re reading. Here’s ten of my most accessible favorites, mostly speculative fiction, but with a few lit writers in there as well.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. – Vonnegut is the best of the best, and I don’t just say that because he’s a fellow Hoosier. Welcome to the Monkey House is a great collection to start with and one that I read over and over in high school, but I’m also fond of Look At the Birdie, published posthumously.

Carol Emshwiller – Also amazing, also doing things so skillfully that plain language manages to become part of such a lovely construction that the grain of the words seems ornamental as well as story material. I just love Emshwiller, and getting to publish one of her short stories during my time at Fantasy Magazine was a highlight. I particularly recommend I Live With You and Report to The Men’s Club.

James Tiptree Jr. – For some of the most wonderful titles around, for some of the most subversive and interesting spec fic ever, look no further than Tiptree, aka Alice Sheldon, who shaped the field to the point where they named an award after her. Her Smoke Rose Up Forever and Brightness Falls From Air are both good starting points. (Julie Phillip’s biography, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, is a fascinating read that brings even more to the stories.) And the award anthologies are FULL of good stuff that shows some of the best in the field.

Philip K. Dick – Dick does ideas, and amazing ones, but he’s also a really solid writer. Start with the volume edited by Jonathan Lethem, Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick. Like Tiptree, this is one of the people who didn’t just subtly shape the field of spec fic but banged their name into the side of it with a sledgehammer.

Donald Barthelme is one of the writers that falls into the literary side of things, but spec fic readers that like slipstream will find him well suited to their tastes. Sixty Stories should be sitting on your shelf.

Grace Paley is also literary, but holy cow, just go buy her three slim little books of fiction (which is all we have, sadly) and read them. Enormous Changes At the Last Minute, The Little Disturbances of Man, and Later the Same Day are the titles. Having Grace at my dinner table asking for a second helping of the pumpkin cheesecake and warning us all that at some point of the meal her false teeth might fly out of her mouth and that if that happened, the last thing she wanted was for anyone to pretend it hadn’t happened, was one of the greatest moments of my time at Hopkins.

O. Henry is a classic, prolific short story writer. Some stories have aged better than others, but going through his collected works is a good use of time for a short story writer. Three things he’s good at: plot construction, pulling on the heart strings, and dialogue.

Joan Aiken did more than write some great YA fiction. She’s also got a ton of good short stories. Many are adult, but The Serial Garden, which contains all her Armitage family stories, is full of good fantasy.

Theodore Sturgeon was prolific and has done some amazing speculative stories t. The nice thing if you’re a bibliophile is that North Atlantic Press does a complete edition of his short stories (which I covet and wouldn’t mind for Christmas if any spouses named Wayne are reading this), starting with Volume I, The Ultimate Egoist.

James Thurber is another writer that I hit in high school and who I read over and over. His letters are actually one of the books that shaped my life: his good humor in the face of adversity shines in them. Flash fiction admirers should check out Fables for My Time.

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I’m finishing up the year by trying to wrap up writing the on-demand version of my Moving from Idea to Draft class. This is a tough translation, because the live class depends heavily on what the students have brought: I try to help them go deeper into the idea each has brought to class and show them ways of fleshing it out.

For the on-demand version, what I’m doing is looking at each of the various ways I’ve seen stories develop and doing a section on each, looking at what it is, what it gives you to help with fleshing out the story, possible trouble spots, some ways to proceed with it, and then two or three exercises to refine skills with that, each with a basic and then an overachiever version, a model I used with the Description and Delivering Information class. There’s twenty-three sections altogether, but here’s the section on starting with a plot, minus the exercises.

What It Is:

Some stories begin with a plot. This is a complete story: you know the problem, some basics of the characters and what will happen. Perhaps it’s something you’ve generated or taken from elsewhere. Perhaps it arrives pre-made in your head (and you should glory in it when it does, in my opinion), so all you need to do is sit down at the keyboard and write it out.

If you can describe in a few sentences what will happen in a story, you know the plot. For example:

• A little girl takes cookies to her grandmother and encounters a wolf along the way. When she gets to her grandmother’s house, the wolf is waiting to attack. A nearby woodsman comes and kills the wolf. (Little Red Riding Hood)
• A man steals the defense plan for a planet that is immensely wealthy. When he tries to use it, he finds out that the defense is constructed out of (because this is a spoiler of an excellent story, you should go read it) and meets a terrible fate. (Mother Hitton’s Littul Kittons, by Cordwainer Smith)

What it gives you:

You know the overall flow of the action: this happens so this happens so this happens and then it ends this way. You know the basic story pattern: that tension increases until the climax, and then rapidly falls. You know the source of the tension and usually the basic conflict: how the wants of two or more entities are collide in some fashion.

You have some sense of where it begins and a stronger sense of where it ends (although the reverse is not impossible).”‹ Connie Willis says to begin at the moment when the problem becomes a crisis. I don’t know that I agree that you should always do that, but it’s certainly better, in terms of story tension, to start with a moment where the problem is already taking place than to start with an idyllic landscape that slowly goes bad.

You may or may not know the characters involved, but you have some broad basics, and know some of the things about the character that affect it most for you, which will probably include gender and approximate age.

Similarly you have some broad basics of the setting, the overall world of the story, although you may need to think of specifics pertaining to scene locations.

More importantly, often you have an impalpable feel for the story, a sense of the overall tone and emotion that will help you shape the words as you write. To make the most of that, spend a couple of moments thinking about the atmosphere of the story. What movies or books might you compare it to? What is the overall emotion, both yours in writing it and what you want readers to take away?

What you need to think about:

What do you bring to the story that makes it unique? There are only so many plots (opinions of the actual number differ, with some saying seven, others numbers like 3 or 36, but the fact of the matter is that at a certain level you will not be able to do anything genuinely new unless you are more of a genius than I, and so you should look at what you bring to the table: the unique details of your life and experiences, your emotions and understandings, and your sensibilities. What instances of this plot have you witnessed being played out in your own life, perhaps as actor, perhaps as audience, and what of that experience can you draw upon?

Specifics of the action may be lacking in your broad overview, in which case you will need to flesh them out. Your burglar steals something – what? Who owns it and what defenses against thieves do they have? Your bounty hunter is chasing her prey, but what crime has that prey committed? Specifics of the location are something that you may well need to flesh out, in which case try to think of aspects that are particularly engaging and use those as interesting backgrounds to add interest to a scene: make that important conversation take place while the two are racing on ice skates through a city’s lower levels or at a party whose main entertainment are levitating performers who are half-dragon, half-human. What can you use?

Things to watch out for:

Sometimes when you go to put these stories down on paper, they are not the well-fleshed entities we hoped, but incomplete things, hints of lines that don’t tell us the entire picture, whispers instead of words, a sense of brushing up against one side of the story in the dark rather than holding it in its entirety. In such cases, I usually build a mind-map, writing down the details that I know and expanding from that. I’ll build on how to do that in the next section, Possible Next Steps.

Be careful of the generic. We all have a set of flimsy and unconvincing stage sets in our heads that, when examined with care, can probably be traced back to specific television shows or movies. My desert island will always have Gilligan lurking in the underbrush, for example, and any Victorian London scenes have to be forcibly wrenched out of the black and white of the old Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movies.

Possible next steps:

Take your two or three sentence description and expand on it, stretching it to five hundred words by expanding on generic details with specifics and figuring out the overall timeline.

Write out list of scenes then develop the basics of what happens in each scene: they go to the movies, see a clue in the opening, and try to rush out of the theater only to find a bunch of lamias in the parking lot ready to brawl; they fight with the lamias and defeat them by throwing soap bombs at them, but Ellen’s arm gets broken in the process. You will probably tell it in chronological order, but it’s not too early to think about mixing it up if you think it would accomplish something in the story, like provide additional pleasure for the reader by allowing them to assemble the pieces of the puzzle.

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