if you're looking to find some of my recent work, I have a novelette, All the Pretty Little Mermaids, in the March 2014 issue of Asimov's. I've also got a non-fiction interview with Bud Webster in Analog.This came up in the advanced workshop – how does one grab a reader and have an impact on them? Because surely this sort of emotional identification that makes a reader experience a story as though it were a blow aimed directly at their heart is crucial to the best storytelling. The student pointed at an interview with Yoon Ha Lee in Clarkeworld magazine where she says:
The whole point of a short story is to assassinate the reader. You don’t have the time or the space to go to war or do large maneuvers, you can’t do chapters of elaborate setup, there’s much less room for character development””a good writer can get more character development in, but that isn’t my particular strength. Anyway, everything in the short story has to drive toward a short sharp point, whatever it is you’re trying to leave the reader with at the end of the story.
I say “assassinate” and it sounds hostile, because it is. I work better when I can think in terms of opponents. The thing is that I don’t want the reader to see the short sharp point clearly from the beginning, but I want it to make sense afterward as the angle of attack. Tactical sense, I guess, in the context of the story’s setup.
Most of the time I write didactically, as if a short story were a proof. There is some object lesson, or ethical question, I want to leave the reader with. “Ghostweight” is a good example of this; it doesn’t pretend not to be didactic. So when I build the character and their strengths and weaknesses and motivations, when I build the setting, the majority of it needs to be in support of that point. With a proof, you want to include all the necessary axioms and arguments, but leave out the extraneous. A short story is very similar. I am not sure my math professors would approve of the use I am making of my college education, but there it is.
To me this is connected to something Michael Swanwick told my Clarion West class: in a short story, pick your antelope out of the herd and chase it whole-heartedly. If you change course midstream because that other antelope is limping or that other one comes with a garnish, you are likely to have no antelope at all.
So you must determine your antelope, by which I mean, you must figure out what’s the emotional core of the story, what’s its heart? What does it say about the state of existence? And once you know that, you can construct a narrative that grabs the reader through devices like sensory engagement, identification with the main character, and other beguilements until you have them trapped, at which point you force them to confront some fact of existence that may be normally unseen or even actively avoided.
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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."
~K. Richardson
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3 Things That End A Story Well
Think of the opening and ending of the story as the reader passing through the same door.Someone mentioned that they’d like to see a post on endings. Endings are hard. You have to go back and look for all the loose ends. It’s like weaving a basket – all those spiky little sticks poking out need to be woven together into a coherent shape. Here’s three things I think about when working on an ending.
1. Circularity is a big help. It provides a sense that the reader has returned to the beginning, but now everything is changed. Here’s a cheat – take something that appears in your first three paragraphs and invoke it in your last three as well. It can be changed – the rose that initially trembled, dew-covered, as our heroine picked it is now lying withered and flat in the road. Or it is a new rose, being picked by another woman who is the replacement for the first?
For an example of this, I’m actually going to be obnoxious and point to my own story, Magnificent Pigs. Technically I cheat, because the object I used doesn’t appear until the fourth paragraph, the brass bed which creaks in protest as Aaron sits down. At the end it’s become the object of Jilly’s salvation, the vehicle that carries her away into the sky. There’s other reappearing things: pigs are mentioned right off the bat (in the title, even) and they’re crucial to the end. And the story begins and ends with the idea of death and (hopefully) changes your perception of it.
Here’s another example, taken from Joe Hill’s wonderful “Pop Art” in 20th Century Ghosts (Kindle edition) It begins with a paragraph that sets up the rules of the story gracefully and efficiently:
My best friend when I was twelve was inflatable. His name was Arthur Roth, which also made him an inflatable Hebrew, although in our now-and-then talks about the afterlife, I don’t remember that he took an especially Jewish perspective. Talk was mostly what we did — in his condition rough-house was out of the question — and the subject of death, and what might follow it, came up more than once. I think Arthur knew he would be lucky to survive high school. When I met him, he had already almost been killed a dozen times, once for every year he had been alive. The afterlife was always on his mind; also the possible lack of one.
We know that the story is about the narrator and his best friend, but the focus will be the friend. We know it will have funny moments, and many of those come from Arthur’s mouth, so we like him even more. We know that in this story, the surreal is fair game. We know that there can be fairy-tale resonances. And we know, immediately, that the story will be about Arthur’s death.
That death returns at the end of the story, which I will not include, because you should read the story without that particular spoiler. But I feel comfortable in revealing that Arthur’s death reappears at the end in the shape of two people talking about it. It’s a lovely, well-constructed story with a lot of clever structure to it.
2. Give the reader space in which to appreciate your ending, a sentence or two of standing back and letting the story tumble into meaning in their head. That’s what “Pop Art” does – doesn’t end with the actual death, but ends with a discussion of it, which provides a chance to extract additional meaning from the story.
Here’s the end to Carol Emshwiller’s equally lovely “Grandma,” from the collection, Report to the Men’s Club (Kindle edition). The story, told by an superhero’s grandchild, begins with a litany of actions that the grandmother has performed in her role as superhero, and ends with the decision to take up that role (although somewhat modified), given physical form:
I’m wearing Grandma’s costume most of the time now. I sleep in it. It makes me feel safe. I’m doing my own little rescues as usual. (The vegetable garden is full of happy weeds. I keep the bird feeder going. I leave scraps out for the skunk.) Those count — almost as much as Grandma’s rescues did. Anyway, I know the weeds think so.
3. Let the reader hear the door of the story click shut. John Barth said this in a workshop one time and it’s always stuck with me. This is related to number 2, but even more, it’s the idea of providing a line that says “The End” or the equivalent, and lets the reader know the story is over. Have you ever heard someone read and not been sure when to clap? Those readers need to close the door a little harder.
Here, for example, is the end of Pat Cadigan’s “Vengeance is Yours” from her collection Patterns.
That’s the funny thing about vengeance. Half the time people hire me, they’re getting back at the wrong persons for all the wrong reasons. I should know. I’m an authority.
But then again, the vengeance isn’t mine.
BOOM the door is shut and the story is over.
Like beginnings, endings are important, and worth spending some extra time on. They’re the last handshake on your reader/guest’s way out the door, the smile or clever goodbye that makes them sigh in satisfaction, sitting in their homeward bound taxicab: “Oh, that was such a good party!” A good ending lets the reader close the book then sit back and savor its perfection, reconciling them to the fact that the dream you spun is over.
Writing exercise: Grab a story whose ending doesn’t satisfy. Using your first three paragraphs, write an ending that returns to that scene and lets us know exactly what has and hasn’t changed.
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Wondering about some of the gender breakdowns in publishing from last year? Here’s coverage of women on f/sf blogs in 2012. Read Renay’s piece talking about the project first. She also mentions a book I highly, highly recommend, How to Suppress Women’s Writing, by Joanna Russ. I found that book in college and it really shaped my thinking.
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