Dear Annie! Pikes Peak Writers Advice Column

Dear Annie:

My critique partners sometimes tell me that they want to know more about this or that element in my story. Isn’t that a good thing? Don’t I want the reader to have questions to keep them turning the pages?

Signed,

Scratching Their Heads

Dear Scratching:

If the questions you raise keep the reader intrigued, you are correct; they do keep him reading. If those questions are not answered or at least developed soon enough, you risk losing the reader. Let’s examine one famous book, To Kill a Mockingbird.

It opens: “When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow. When it healed, and Jem’s fears of never being able to play football were assuaged, he was seldom self-conscious about his injury.”

Already, I’m asking myself why this narrator, a young girl, would open her story by telling about her brother. Their relationship seems unusually close. Why? This will be revealed as we move on, but in the meantime the question keeps me reading.

At the end of the next paragraph, the young girl says that she and Jem discussed what had been a precipitating cause for the accident: “He said it began the summer Dill came to us, when Dill first gave us the idea of making Boo Radley come out.”

Who is Boo? I ask. What a strange name. My curiosity is peaked. Now, if the character (Scout) had not explained how the arm had been broken and left it hanging (bad image), I wouldn’t want to read on as I wouldn’t trust the narrator to tell the story well.

While certain major plot questions may not be fully answered until nearer the end of your book, there must be continual progress in the direction of that resolution.

~ Annie 

Dear Annie:

What is a better way to find a new subject for my novel? I’ve tried some of the suggested techniques, but I’m still not satisfied with my results.

Signed,

Blocked in Texas

Dear Blocked:

Carl Jung said, “The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.” You are experiencing a common problem—one that keeps writers awake at night. My best advice is this: Ponder the subjects that most impassion you. Are they truth and justice? Or political corruption? Maybe Medicare fraud?

Once you select your topic, you have the foundation for a theme, an important element to any significant book. (See my archived PPW article on theme) Now invent a story line which will form the conduit to relay that message. Begin with a strong opening which subtly implies your chosen theme and go from there. Not as simple as it sounds, but you’ll have a solid start to a meaningful work.

~ Annie

Dear Annie:

I have a story idea in mind, but I can’t decide on a setting. They say to write about that which you know. Is that how I should make my decision? I’ve lived in only two boring locations.

Or should I travel to another more interesting setting like Italy and do research? After all, I could write it off.

Tempted to Travel

Dear Tempted:

I see your point. However, I suggest you choose a setting appropriate to your theme. The setting should set the proper mood for the story you are about to tell.

In my first novel set in Colorado Springs, a young girl is madly in love but is forbidden to date her high school sweetheart. She is devastated but later learns that her mother was right; her intended proves to be a clod. The social milieu shapes the values of the people who live there. Fortunately for this girl, her mother’s conservative values save her from a dubious fate and send her on a personal journey that will lead to a suitable mate and career.

The setting of the English countryside where Elizabeth Bennet resides explains the excitement and anticipation she and her sisters feel when they learn of a new tenant of a nearby estate—one capable of introducing some society into their small town. The Nineteenth Century timeframe explains the girls’ motivations to find husbands, perhaps at one of these social gatherings. Jane’s unwillingness to settle for many proposals she receives defines her character and makes her final decision to marry Darcy all the more glorious.

The deep south of the United States during the 1930s is the appropriate setting for Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. There she explores the tension of racial issues. And yes, she grew up there, so she is qualified to tell the story. On the other hand, an author with enough research can choose any setting and tell the story well if the idea motivates him or her enough.

If Italy is a perfect setting for your current story, go ahead and book the trip. If the setting doesn’t fit your story, you can always go for leisure. Maybe the perfect story for that setting will dawn on you while there. Or perhaps you’ll think of an idea set on a plane on the way over and change course altogether. You must follow your central idea to the end by choosing the proper location, tone, and timeframe to compliment your story best.

~ Annie 

Have a question for me? Write to me at annshill@q.com with your suggestions. I will answer serious questions, and maybe some funny ones, to the best of my ability. Your writing is of utmost importance to me because it is important to you.

Looking forward to hearing from you,

~ Ms. Annie

About the Author:   Dear Annie is the pseudonym for Ann S. Hill. After hearing the call to write in her thirties, Ann set the ambition aside while life happened. Now that she has retired from her career as a dentist and her children are adults, she is seriously attacking that parked ambition. She spends significant time on her true passion and has recently completed her second novel. Her first novel, Wait for Me, was a finalist in the Zebulon, Pikes Peak Writers Contest. She has written several short stories. In the meantime, she remains a voracious reader and film aficionado. 

Short Stories are Haunted

By: Deb McLeod

I’ve heard some new novelists say they want to practice writing by trying their hand at short stories before they dive into writing novels. Usually it’s a matter of time investment on their part. A novel takes a whole lot longer to write than a short story. Most, anyway.

While it is true both novels and short stories contain similar craft elements, and it is great that short story land presents a practice ground: Short stories are not mini-novels.

The most obvious difference is length. Shortened length means tighter focus. Tighter focus means deliberate selection. Deliberate selection and tighter focus bring short stories closer to poetry than to novels. Successful short stories rely on elements that are elevated beyond the craft basics.

Let’s start with the timeline

The timeline of a novel might encompass the time between birth and death; it might cross generations; or it might just cover a few important days in a life. Sometimes a short story’s scope can be as large as a novel’s, but usually the scope is shorter and only hints at the larger picture outside the story. The larger the scope the more finesse you must use in a short story to include it.

Novels often include back story, contain historical detail, plot lines and subplots that weave in and out. A novel might be told from different perspectives as it creates an entire world and invites you to explore. Novels are broad and question-answering. They transport you to a time and a place; hold you by the hand and say to you: What about this? Here’s why that. Here’s how and when.

Short stories can attempt the same, yet they are different. And not just shorter. They are the significant moment in the entire timeline of a story.

Joyce Carol Oates says short stories are haunted. They imply more than they explain. They are subtle and force the reader to infer. They are tight. And tighter still.

Think of “Where are You Going, Where Have You Been” by Joyce Carol Oates. “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson. “How Far She Went” by Mary Hood and any story by Alice Munro. If you’re a short story reader like me, some of your favorites have haunted you forever. I just reread “How Far She Went” again and I felt the last image in my gut.

So how do you achieve the haunting in a short story so well that the story lives on in your reader for years to come?

Some of the craft elements that play a part in effective short stories and those short story writers need to master are:

• Tone
• Image
• Rhythm
• The objective correlative

Tone

At its core, what is the story about? How can you get that core meaning or question into every single word on the page? In the dialogue and the narration? Into the sentence length and paragraph break? The short story doesn’t have time to develop a feeling in the reader. The short story must contain the feeling in every single word.

In “The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot” by Charles Baxter speaks about tone as a matter of inflection.

Inflection is an alteration in tone or pitch of the voice. Alteration in tone can be the difference… between fighting words and a statement of love, using the identical phrase “You’re really something,” a completely meaningless statement without a tone or context to support it.

Shifts in tone alter the meaning, from sincerity to irony or exasperation to incredulity. Given sufficient urgency, our disbelief is suspended. When someone grabs you by the lapels, you tend to listen to what he says.

That’s what the tone in a short story needs to do. It’s the writer’s job to understand the story at its core and then deliberately pick each and every word to contain the emotion.

Image and Rhythm

The opening sentence of “How Far She Went” by Mary Hood is:

They had quarreled all morning, squalled all summer about the incidentals: how tight the girl’s cut-off jeans were, the “Every Inch a Woman” T-shirt, her choice of music and how loud she played it, her practiced inattention, her sullen look.

Right from the start we see image of the girl in the description. We understand where things stand between her and the unnamed narrator, someone of authority against whom the girl is rebelling. The image is clear in the sentence. The tone is disapproving. The conflict is there and hint of history is there as well. They squalled all summer.

If you read that sentence aloud you will also hear its rhythm. Look how long the sentence is. Doesn’t that match an entire summer of struggle?

Here’s the rest of the opening paragraph. In it you will see more images, more of the same tone and how the author uses rhythm:

Her granny wrung out the last boiled dishcloth, pinched it to the line, giving the basin a sling and a slap, the water flying out in a scalding arc onto the Queen Anne’s lace by the path, never mind if it bloomed, that didn’t make it worth anything except to chiggers, but the girl would cut it by the everlasting armload and cherish it in the old churn, going to that much trouble for a weed but not bending once—unbegged—to pick the nearest bean; she was sulking now. Bored. Displaced.

Notice also how much Hood gets into that one long, dissatisfied and grumpy paragraph from Granny’s point of view. Notice the voice says “unbegged.” Granny isn’t going to ask and she chastises the granddaughter for not offering.

I don’t know about you but I recognize the relationship a young girl has with the unwritten rules of behavior that many of us girls faced in our early life. By the end of the first paragraph I’m already feeling something. I’m identified with the girl who must be visiting her granny for the summer in what feels like some farm-like or rural setting.

Granny calls her ‘the girl.’ Granny boils dishcloths. She has beans to pick. She resents pretty much everything about her granddaughter, who doesn’t know the difference between a flower and a weed. Note the conflict and how much is contained in that first paragraph.

Read the paragraph out loud for the rhythm. Notice the image of the Queen Anne’s lace that is treasured by one and a useless weed for another. Two characters who will never see eye-to-eye. Until the end of the story, of course.

The Objective Correlative

Short stories gain a lot when they make use of the objective correlative. T.S. Eliot defined the objective correlative as a set of objects, situations or events which contain the formula for a particular emotion. One of the artist’s jobs is to find that formula that best expresses the emotion, but resists moving into cliché.

Think of the movie “Castaway.” Remember the painted volleyball, Wilson? And what it symbolized when it floated away at Tom Hank’s character’s lowest point while lost at sea? Think of Boo Radley in “To Kill a Mockingbird” and what he represented. Or, if you’ve read the Hood short story, think of the dog and what he represents. Each time the objective correlative comes in to play, and each time it’s combined with other symbolic elements in the piece, it is shorthand for the emotion the reader is to feel. Rain at a funeral brings up an emotion but is mightily overused.

Spoiler alert! In the Hood short story, the narrator uses an objective correlative throughout. Take the title of the work “How Far She Went” add to that that the granddaughter does try to leave but the roads are all too short. In the granddaughter’s point of view, she thinks there are no roads long enough to get far enough away. Add to that that her father has dumped her there with her grandmother not just for the summer but for school in the fall, too. The symbols of the road, of dead ends and the granddaughter vaulting over the chain link at the end of the driveway to run away. Then there’s what the grandmother has to do to save her (I won’t spoil this one). All of these are symbols add up to a formula that produces an emotion in the reader.

Then like the excellent writer she is, Hood closes the story with the grandmother walking back to the farm, measured and slow, like she does everything, and this sentence: “The girl walked close behind her, exactly where she walked, matching her pace, matching her stride, close enough to put her hand forth (if the need arose) and touch her granny’s back where the faded voile was clinging damp, the merest gauze between their wounds.”

This story started with two characters as far from one another as can be and ends with the granddaughter not fighting any longer, but emulating. So what is the objective correlative here? Read the story and see if you can identify it. What are the images, the plot twists, the sentences that produce the emotion the reader feels throughout the story? And how does Hood turn that in that last sentence?

A Process

I challenge my clients who want to write short stories, especially if they are novelists, to write everything out first. All the backstory, all the history, all the world, and more. Write until they understand the story and what they want to say. Then cull or rewrite the instants that absolutely need to be included. When that’s done, focus on the language, the symbols, think about the objective correlative and play with the music of the story. How can everything in those few words reflect what the story is about at its core?

To some, this kind of writing might sound like the most awful of chores. But to those of us who love short stories, the challenge to be brief and deep and musical is enticing; to study how each word plays off the previous and the next and how all of it might add up to a reader’s experience of the truth we’d like to leave behind; for those of us who are intrigued by that, there is nothing more rewarding than the challenge of writing a short story.

About the Author: Deb McLeod, MFA, practices novel research immersion. For her novel, The Train to Pescara, Deb journeyed to Sardinia to study ancient goddess worship and spent time in the Abruzzi village her great-grandparents left in 1905. Her metaphysical knowledge for the Angel Thriller, The Julia Set, culminates from four years of studying and teaching meditation, clairvoyance and chakra healing. For over fourteen years, Deb McLeod has been a creative writing coach helping other writers to embrace their passion and get their words on the page. For more, see www.debmcleod.com.