Lee Martin's Blog, page 58

An Open Letter to My MFA Students

 

Lined up on the window ledge in my office are your pictures. Since 2001, when I came to teach at The Ohio State University, I’ve tried to get a photo of each of you, my thesis advisees, and me at Epilog, the end-of-the-year gala reading for the graduating MFAs. I may have missed one or two over the years, but trust me, none of you have ever left my memory.

I recall the times you pressed back against me as you went through the process of defining your aesthetics. I remember the times you came to me, discouraged, ready to chuck it all because you thought you weren’t good enough. I remember the times you broke through and wrote that piece that was dazzling, a piece that only you could have written, a piece we agreed was a “keeper.” I remember how I read and read and read your work, thankful each time for the gift of it. I remember your first successes out there in the real world—the first publications, the awards, the books, the teaching positions, the matters both personal and professional that rewarded you. I’ve been your fan from afar all these years.

You have to keep in mind that I was once where you were—unsure of my talents, desperate for validation, searching for my material and my voice(s), so eager to know what the future might hold. You have to keep in mind that I’m still in that place. That never changes no matter how much success I might be lucky enough to have. I’m always afraid that I’m not good enough, that no one will want to read what I’ve written, that the future is a dark tunnel through which I’m creeping. I remember my own writing teachers. Most of them are gone now, and still I hear their voices, and still I want to please them.

As they did me, I ask for your effort when you come to me. I ask you to be open to what other writers have to teach you. I ask you to forsake the ego in order to learn what you need to learn. I ask that you be patient. I ask that you be kind with one another and kind with yourselves. I ask you to forgive me when I fall short of being the teacher that you deserve.

And you hope and fear that I’ll tell you the truth. You want to know whether you have the goods, whether you’re on the right track, whether recognition and acclaim await you. The true answer always is, I don’t know. I can show you techniques. I can share with you the things you have to learn and I can tell you how I learned them. I can show you how to practice. I can talk about what seems to matter to you in your work. I can point to passages you’ve written that resonate, that get inside my skin and live there forever. The rest is up to you and the unpredictable circumstances of the fates. I can tell you why I write and why I teach: because in this world everyone should have at least one thing that gives them pleasure, one thing that is pure and good, one talent that’s his or her reason for putting one foot in front of the other each day. I write because I have so much to shape; I teach because I believe in the value of the written word, and I want to do what I can to help others value it, too.

Thank you for allowing me to enter your work. I’ve tried to only take a little from you: some inspiration for my own writing and teaching, a memory of how far you came in the time you were my students, a photograph by which to remember the work we did together, you and I. I only hope I left something with you that ended up mattering as much as our time talking about writing mattered to me. You bless me every day.

 

Labor Day: Doing the Work

Before I found my way in life and ended up slap-ass lucky with what my father would have called a “pencil-pusher’s job,” I did manual labor. In addition to the farm work that I helped him do, I worked on a Christmas tree farm, and in a shoe factory, a garment factory, and a tire repairs manufacturing plant. The latter required me to be at work at 6 a.m. and to stay there until 4:30 p.m., making rubber patches and plugs in the press room. The work was hot, repetitive, monotonous, and dangerous. Each day was the same as the one before, and each evening found me bone-tired and barely able to eat my supper. Each morning, I woke in darkness and went back to work because my choices were few. I needed the money, and I knew I was lucky to have this job. It was mine to do, and I did it.  I’m convinced that what I learned from this work has helped me countless times in my writing and my teaching. Manual labor taught me to show up each day and to persevere. It taught me that things aren’t always easy. It taught me to put my head down and go, moment by moment. It taught me to do the work. So on this Labor Day, I want to pay tribute to all those who put in the time and do the work by reprinting these excerpts from my essay, “Such a Life,” (from the book of the same title)—a  piece that recalls my father’s own labor at the end of his days.

*

I find the card in a drawer at my parents’ house, a union card that identifies my father as a member of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, a fact that surprises me since I’ve never heard him talk about this part of his life.

It was during the Great Depression, he tells me, when the bottom fell out of crop prices and he left the farm in southern Illinois and went north to East Chicago where my uncle got him a job at Inland Steel.

All my life I’ve watched him wear down his body working our farm. He’s wrestled with machinery, hefted hay bales, feed sacks, wagon tongues, stock racks. He’s spent days in the summer sun, cultivating corn and beans, cutting wheat and hay. Winters, in sub-zero weather, he’s chopped ice at our pond and hauled water to our hogs. I’ve seen his shoulders sag as he comes in from the field, his boots shuffling through the dust as if he can barely lift his feet.

When I was young, I never really appreciated the work he did. Although I would come to feel the same strain and weariness in my own body days I spent riding a tractor or later working in factories, I always thought it something I would one day escape. Like my mother, who taught grade school, I was in love with books, and, as I grew into my early adult years, I set my sights on how far away from farms and factories my imagination and words could take me.

My father sits slumped in his chair, his face weathered, the skin loose on his neck. He’s sixty-nine years old. “Now that was work,” he says to me. “That steel. That was damned hard work.”

 *

These autumn days, he slithers beneath his combine each morning to grease the fittings, forcing his heavy body into tight spaces. His toe joints ache from gout, so he gingerly places a foot on the tractor’s draw-bar and pulls himself up onto the seat. That International M bounces over the rutted fields, jostling him. He has to keep getting down from the tractor, whenever he has a hopper full of beans, to empty it into the bed of his truck. Then, again, he has to climb back on the M and start another series of passes around the field. He wears narrow-toed boots, and his toe throbs inside them each time he pulls himself up onto the M, each time he walks over the rough ground. He doesn’t think about stopping; that isn’t a possibility. It’s harvest time, and, as he has done so many years, he has a crop to bring in. It doesn’t matter how he feels. He can rest come winter. That’s what he always says. Plenty of rest come winter.

 *

Then one Monday evening, I come to my parents’ house, and I’m surprised to see my father’s truck parked in the driveway since there’s still daylight left and I can’t imagine why he hasn’t used every bit of it before pulling the tractor and combine into the machine shed and calling it quits for the day.

“Your dad’s not feeling well,” my mother tells me.

He’s in bed, rolled over on his side with his back to me. “I’m sick,” he says when I ask him what’s wrong.

We’ve reached a point in our relationship, that point that men so often reach, where the only way we can show each other affection is through good-natured teasing.

“Sick?” I say. “What do you mean you’re sick? You sure you’re not just gold-bricking?”

“I’m sick to my stomach.” His voice is as flat, as weary as I’ve ever heard it, and I can tell from its sound that indeed something is ailing him. “I’ve been sick all afternoon.”

“Do you want to go to the doctor?” I’m ready to take him, ready to help him to the car and drive him to the hospital, ready to call for an ambulance if that’s what we need. “Don’t you think you should?”

“I’ve just got an upset stomach,” he says.

But it isn’t just an upset stomach. It is, as my mother tells me when she calls me late the next evening, a heart attack, his first. He worked that afternoon with the pressure in his chest. He threw up in the field and kept working. He broke out in a cold sweat and still kept working. It took him the rest of the day and that night and most of the next day to finally admit he was in trouble. “

If you’d waited any longer,” the doctor tells him, “you’d have ended up dead.”

Three years later, he’ll be mowing the yard on one of the hottest days of the summer and his heart will give out for good. That’s what work does to a man. At least the kind of work my father did. Breaks him down. Kills him.

Such a life, I would say to him if I could, as I didn’t that evening when he lay in his bed, his heart seized in his chest. Such a life of toil. All our straining. Such a life of work.

At the Start of the School Year

Another school year is upon us, and, as I do each year, I recall a story that the Chair of the English Department told at the start of the year when I was a Ph.D. student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He said that on the evening before Fall Semester classes were to begin, he came across a young man in the hallway who was looking into a classroom. The Chair, good fellow that he was, asked the young man if he could be of help. The young man, a freshman, said in a hushed voice, the sort of respectful voice we used to hear in public libraries, “Tomorrow, I’m going to have my English class in this room. I just wanted to see it.”

I can never tell this story without feeling humbled. Like many teachers, I love what I do, but, again, like many teachers, I sometimes grumble about the job. This story reminds me each year that I’m in the service of students like the young man who came into Andrews Hall to take a look at the room where he and his fellow-classmates and his instructor would engage with the written word. Granted, it’s sometimes easy to think that students like this one are the exceptions rather than the rule, but still, it makes me stop and think about what I owe those who occupy my classrooms. Someone is paying a good deal of money for each student’s education. I owe those students, their parents, spouses, the University, or whoever is putting up the cash, my very best.

What a gift I’ve been given, the opportunity to make my living doing the thing I most love. Each year at this time—I’m about to start my 33rd year of teaching—I think about a student in Nebraska, a young man I never met, someone whose name I never knew, and how he was eager, reverential, expectant. He was on the verge of his adult life. He’ll never know how much he’s meant to me over all the years that I’ve taught. Bless him and all the others who are about to walk into a classroom—students and teachers alike. Bless us for the sacred act of learning that is soon to begin.

 

My Mother’s Hands

Because my father lost his hands, my mother made a gift of hers. Cuticles ragged, knuckles scraped, fingernails smashed—farm work showed her no mercy.

Her hands were made for more delicate things, but she gladly sacrificed them because, really, what else was she to do? My father needed her, and she loved him, so she put her hands to work on our farm. She should have had the soft and beautiful hands more suited to her soft and beautiful heart, but life had other plans for her.

My father continued to farm after his accident, his prosthetic “hooks,” as he always called them, levied recklessly, the steel used to hammer and pry, to gouge and pull. Often, while working on machinery, his hook pinched or smashed my mother’s finger, and she took in a breath. If I were nearby, I’d hear her swallowing air. She might drop the wrench she’d been using. She might shake her finger. My father looked sheepish. Sometimes he asked her if she was all right. Sometimes he cursed. “Goddamn it,” he might say, angry with himself because he’d hurt her. Other times, he said nothing, just looked down at those hooks and maybe banged them together, angry with the fact of them as he waited for my mother to once more take up the wrench. He spoke to her gently. “Let’s try again,” he said.

I’m remembering all this today as we draw closer to the start of another school year. My mother was a grade school teacher for thirty-eight years. Her hands were meant for turning the pages of books, for cutting paper into lacy snowflakes to decorate her classroom in winter, for moving across a tablet page with a red marking pencil, for petting the heads of girls and boys who for whatever reasons needed her affection.

But she gave her hands to my father. I never heard her utter a single word of complaint. She put away her nail files and emery boards and fingernail polishes, and her hands became rough with the signs of her work and her love.

When my father died, she wept over her casket. She said, “I’ve taken care of him all my life. Now what am I supposed to do?”

She lived six years beyond him, spent so many hours alone, her hands resting on the arms of her chair, her fingers lifting and falling, one after the other, as if she were a young girl, playing scales on a piano. I lived away from her then. We wrote letters. She wrote to me once toward the end of summer about watching the schoolgirls pass her house. She wrote about the sound of their bright voices, the way they interlaced their fingers and skipped along the sidewalk. Oh, their bright voices, she wrote. Oh, those beautiful hands.

 

Persona and the Lyric Poem

This post comes early because I’m off to Vermont bright and early tomorrow morning to teach for a week at the Vermont College of Fine Arts Postgraduate Writers’ Conference. If you can tolerate it, I’d like to say one word more about persona, this time in connection with poetry.

I’ve chosen this old lyric poem by William Allingham:

Four Ducks on a Pond

Four ducks on a pond,

A grass-bank beyond,

A blue sky of spring.

White clouds on the wing;

What a little thing

To remember for years—

To remember with tears.

 

I chose this poem as a way of looking at how persona works in a poem that isn’t narrative and has no clearly-identified speaker—no “I.” I wanted to see whether, as in last week’s example from fiction, a poet can use a shift in persona to good effect, particularly at the end—or the turn, if you will—of a lyric poem.

Think about the persona that the first four lines seem to come from—a placid and pleasant observer, enjoying the springtime. Now notice what happens after the stop of the semi-colon at the end of that fourth line. “What a little thing.” There’s a different sound in those five syllables: “TA ta TA ta TA.” That’s the way I hear it, with the stresses falling on the first, third, and fifth syllables. I’m way out of my league here when I try to make this analogy to musical composition, but please let me try. It seems to me that there’s something similar to a minor chord in the sound of that line, “What a little thing.” A minor chord, as we know, sounds darker than a major chord. From what I understand, a minor chord has a root, a minor third, and a perfect fifth. I’ll admit to having no damn idea what any of those are, but please indulge my ignorance because what I see is that a minor chord is composed of three notes just as this line of poetry sounds three stresses. I’ll let the musicians sort this all out, but for that reason alone I hear this line the way one would hear a minor chord sounding the darkness. Already the turn is starting to appear, and it comes fully to the surface with the sad last line of the poem, “To remember with tears.”

Much the way a piece of third-person fiction has an effaced narrator, this poem has a disembodied voice, and that voice is composed of contradictory personas. The sadder, darker one is present from the beginning but it’s submerged beneath the more hopeful, lighter one when the poem starts. The poem gains its effect by covertly uncovering the darker persona at the very end of the poem. That sound, because it’s been hidden, resonates when it finally arrives.

 

 

Personae and Tone in Fiction

Personae and Tone in Fiction

I’m still thinking about this issue of persona and how it contributes to the life of our prose. Part of the pleasure of reading a memoir comes from the resonance of different layers (or personae, if you will) of the narrator vibrating against one another. Does the same hold true for fiction? If we look at a third-person narrative, will we find shifts in persona of the effaced narrator and modulations of tone used to good effect?

I start with Raymond Carver’s story, “A Small, Good Thing,” the story of the death of a little boy and what his grieving parents find in the presence of a baker whom they once considered a menace. Here’s a paragraph from the opening of the story when the mother, Ann Weiss, comes to the bakery to order a birthday cake for her son, Scotty:

She gave the baker her name, Ann Weiss, and her telephone number. The cake would be ready on Monday morning, just out of the oven, in plenty of time for the child’s party that afternoon. The baker was not jolly. There were no pleasantries between them, just the minimum exchange of words, the necessary information. He made her feel uncomfortable, and she didn’t like that. While he was bent over the counter with the pencil in his hand, she studied his coarse features and wondered if he’d ever done anything else with his life besides be a baker. She was a mother and thirty-three years old, and it seemed to her that everyone, especially someone the baker’s age — a man old enough to be her father — must have children who’d gone through this special time of cakes and birthday parties. There must be that between them, she thought. But he was abrupt with her — not rude, just abrupt. She gave up trying to make friends with him. She looked into the back of the bakery and could see a long, heavy wooden table with aluminum pie pans stacked at one end; and beside the table a metal container filled with empty racks. There was an enormous oven. A radio was playing country-western music.

The story establishes an initial persona as the voice of the effaced narrator blends with the consciousness of Mrs. Weiss. I’d describe the persona as being guarded, observant, restrained a little prickly. The prose reflects that with its simple, declarative sentences. Language and sentence structure and tone work together to express the state of mind of Mrs. Weiss as she deals with this baker two days before the accident that will cost her son his life.

Mrs.Weiss, of course, is about to live through a series of events that will require much more from the prose than this initial persona can provide. Consider, then, the final paragraph of the story. Scotty has died, Mrs. and Mr. Weiss have received a series of brusque, and seemingly menacing phone calls from the baker about picking up the birthday cake: “Your Scotty, I got him ready for you,” the man’s voice said. “Did you forget him?” Finally, Mr. and Mrs. Weiss figure out that the calls are coming from the baker, and they drive down there to confront him. After their burst of anger, the baker invites them to sit. He apologizes. He gives them his sympathy. He explains that he’s a baker, that he has no children of his own, that he knows loneliness. Then he offers them bread:

“Smell this,” the baker said, breaking open a dark loaf. “It’s a heavy bread, but rich.” They smelled it, then he had them taste it. It had the taste of molasses and coarse grains. They listened to him. They ate what they could. They swallowed the dark bread. It was like daylight under the fluorescent trays of light. They talked on into the early morning, the high, pale cast of light in the windows, and they did not think of leaving.

Notice the difference in sound between this passage and the one I quoted earlier. It seems to me that even though the sentences are perhaps even terser here, they make a very different sound, one I’d describe as quieter, reverential, humble, full of forgiveness. It is the surprising moment of grace found from an unexpected source upon which the story depends for its effect. The resonance comes from the shift in the persona that allows the sound of this passage to vibrate against the sounds of other personae at work in the story.

We often remember a moment in a piece of fiction in part because of the way the sound of the prose surprises us. In a first-person novel or short story, we, of course, have at our disposal the various aspects of the narrator’s personality to create these shifts in persona and sound. What I hope the Carver example illustrates is that even in a third-person narrative aspects of the main characters’ personalities merge with the sound of the effaced narrator’s voice—that disembodied story-telling voice—thereby deepening the experience of the novel or story.

Just as we need to be aware of our own multiple personae when writing memoir, we need to pay attention to our fictional characters and how they’re slightly different people in each moment of a narrative. In both memoir and fiction we sometimes have to consciously exaggerate a dimension of persona in order to fully express a shift in the narrative, one that will stay with the reader far beyond the reading.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Art of the Twerk: Writing the Miley Cyrus Way

To start. . .ahem. . .with a sentence I never in my wildest dreams could have imagined writing: Miley Cyrus has something to teach us about writing. Intrigued? Read on. Shaking your head in disbelief? Wondering about my sanity? Stick with me. This post is all about the outlandish. It’s about encouraging outrageous personae as a way of opening up aspects of our material that otherwise might remain closed. It’s about using exaggeration to give some jazz to lifeless prose. It’s about the art of the twerk.

Let’s start by admitting that we all have a number of different aspects to our personalities. We may be the sober, studious bookworm, but given the right circumstances we may also be the fun-loving imp who loves to play practical jokes, or the smooth-talking conman (or woman) who will say whatever needs to be said to get what he or she wants. We may be Arnold Friend from Joyce Carol Oates’s story, “Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been?” (“Gonna get you, baby.”), or Dill Harris from Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (“I’ve been up since four. I always get up at four. My daddy was a railroad man.”), or Daisy Buchanan from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (“It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such–such beautiful shirts before.”). Sometimes we forget that these aspects of our personalities come into play when we’re writing, whether we’re writing poetry or prose. Sometimes, when our words on the page lack a certain something (energy, urgency, tone, etc.), we need to call up one or more of our personas to make the writing vibrant and resonant.

So here’s an exercise designed for injecting life into wooden language:

1. Write down a few of your personas, the more conflicting the better.

2. Take a few lines from something you’re working on that feel wooden to you, or a section that hasn’t quite announced its reason for being included in what you’re writing. Or write a few lines of ugly prose. What makes it ugly? Maybe passive voice constructions, vague or trite language, mixed metaphors, a neutral tone. Maybe it ends up something like this:

“A boat was on the water. It wasn’t moving with the current. It was pushed back. It kept ending up where it started.”

You probably recognize this as an uglified form of the haunting final line of The Great Gatsby. You can work with that if you wish, or you can take a favorite passage from poetry or prose and ugly it up. Take the life and beauty and emotion right out of it.

3. Choose two of your personas that seem to be incompatible and rewrite your passage twice, each time exaggerating some aspect of your personality to see what you might discover.

Sometimes we need to greatly exaggerate something in order to shock the language. Once the language has a life, it starts to reveal. What it reveals may surprise us. We may find ourselves more closely connected to the words we’re putting on the page. We may discover an urgency that we lacked. We may feel a door open to somewhere we didn’t know we needed to go. We may sense a meaning and a purpose we didn’t previously know. All sorts of things can happen if the language is alive. One way to make it so is to really exaggerate some aspect of the self. Sometimes to make our writing work, we have to make it twerk.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Taking the Temperature of Writers’ Conferences

Since we’re in the midst of writers’ conference season, I decided to rerun a post this morning:

If you’re of a certain age, you’ll remember the old thermometers, the ones that you had to keep under your tongue for four minutes, the ones you had to shake down with an expert snap of the wrist, the ones that made you squint in order to make out the level of the mercury that told you your temperature. Believe it or not, I’m now the owner of a thermometer very much like this, only this one contains Galinstan, “a non-toxic, Earth friendly substitute for mercury.” You still have to hold it under your tongue for four minutes.

I was surprised to find out how impatient I was for those four minutes to pass, accustomed to the quick turnaround of a digital thermometer. I’d been lured into the world of instant gratification. Shame on me. If there’s one thing being a writer teaches me, it’s the art of patience. Results come in increments; sometimes, many more than four minutes pass between them. A career happens over a lifetime and not in a few seconds.

When I was just starting out, I decided to attend some writers’ conferences. It turned out to be a smart thing for me to do. Now, as I teach in a number of conferences each year, I try to keep in mind the person I was when I was a participant. I try to remember that I was nervous and just a little scared to have my work talked about by published writers and the other participants in the workshop. I try to remember that I often felt very far from home, a little bit like the boy on his first day of school. I was lucky, though. The writers’ conferences I attended gave me exactly what I needed:

1. A supportive group of folks who took my work seriously. In their company, I felt like a writer.

2. A smart group of folks who told the truth, but as delicately as they could.

3. An exposure to the literary life, and contact with agents and editors.

4. A network of friends, many of whom I’m still in touch with today.

5. Dedicated workshop leaders who were more interested in teaching than in playing the role of “famous author.”

6. The sense that with hard work and continued practice I could be better.

Maybe as I’ve taken the temperature of writers’ conferences (groan), I’ve given you something to think about. If you decide to attend one, stay open to learning, check your egos at the door, get to know people, give the sort of effort and respect to others that you want for yourself, leave with a sense of purpose and a direction to follow with your work. In a few weeks, I’ll be teaching a workshop in the novel at the Vermont College of Fine Arts Postgraduate Writers’ Conference. My one objective, as always, will be to enter a participant’s work with thanksgiving for its gift, with an understanding of what the work is trying to do, with plenty of praise for what’s working well, and with some suggestions for continued work. I hope I’m successful in returning each participant to his or her writing space with renewed vigor and a genuine excitement about the work that lies ahead.

 

Writing to Preserve

I lost a pocket comb yesterday. It exists somewhere without me now. It was a black pocket comb, purchased in Anchorage, Alaska, to replace another comb that I lost there. I usually don’t lose combs, but now I’ve lost two in two months.

*

Loss informs so much of my writing. I’m forever interested in what’s been lost, or what might be lost. Maybe it’s because my father lost his hands in a farming accident when I was barely a year old. He became a different man, a man of temper, a sometimes violent man. While he was in the hospital, I stayed with my aunt and uncle. She told me in her late years how she would take me to the waiting room at the hospital, and my mother would come down to see me. I wouldn’t let her hold me. I clung to my aunt. I suppose my entire world had been disrupted. I had a home and then I didn’t; I had a father with hands and then suddenly I didn’t. Loss is the legacy of my family. I come back to it again and again in my writing.

*

I wrote my first novel, Quakertown, because I was fascinated with a lost African-American community in 1920s Texas. A renowned gardener, Henry Taylor, lived in that community before the city of Denton forced it to relocate to inferior land a few miles east of its location. I started my novel with the desire to figure out what it meant to call someplace home and to what lengths someone might go to preserve that place and the family that he was a part of there. I’d just moved to Texas, and I missed my native Midwest. I missed my connections to family members who had passed on, to those who remained, and to the places we’d always thought of as home.

*

The house where I grew up in the small Illinois town I’ll always think of as home is vacant and in disrepair. Like so many of the homes that I remember from my boyhood, it’s disappearing. Shrubs grow wild around its foundation, the grass is long and in need of mowing. Someone has taken a chainsaw to a fallen tree and left it in sections in the driveway. The garage is falling in on itself. The town itself is disappearing. . .at least the town as I recall it. My high school is gone. I was a member of the last graduating class before consolidation with the school in the next town over. The school building now houses an elementary school. The barber shop where I got my hair cut is gone as is the sundries store where I bought candy and comic books, and where my mother bought my first baseball glove, making the mistake of buying a glove meant for a southpaw, thereby making me ambidextrous. The nursing home where my grandmother lived the last years of her life is gone. The hardware stores where my father went for whatever he needed are gone. I can count at least five grocery stores that no longer exist, and the list goes on. I like to think of all those places and the people who passed through them.

*

Which leads me to this: Writing is an act of preservation. No matter if we’re creating fictional worlds, we’re saving something, holding onto something, honoring something even if that something is roughed up and ugly and scarred, even if it’s something we wish we’d never known. When we write, we invite some piece of life to return. We’re not just telling stories–real or fictional–or working with language and image in poems. We create in order to contain something, so a reader can say, “Yes, yes. This is how it is, was, will be.”

Juggling Balls: An Exercise for Opening a Short Story

For whatever reason, I’m thinking this morning about the openings of short stories and what we expect of them. Rust Hills, in his excellent book, Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular, says the end of a good story is always present in its beginning. The final move of a story is only possible because of everything set in motion in the opening.

For that reason, I’m interested in stories that open with some degree of forward momentum. That momentum can come on a plot level from a sense of mystery or a problem to be solved, but it can also come more quietly, but just as urgently, from a character struggling with something. Maybe it’s something about the self, or maybe it’s something about a certain situation or another character in the story. Whatever it is, there’s something to be resolved and the story from its opening words, is moving toward that resolution, or else toward the lack of a resolution and all that it will mean to the characters involved. No matter how quiet the opening a story may be, there’s tension and urgency because stories are about characters moving through pivotal moments of their lives.

So here’s an exercise for opening a short story.

1. Open a story with a line something like this: “I was cutting wheat when Burton Quick came to tell me (fill in the rest of the line however you’d like.)”

Something in this first line signals that the story is opening in the midst of something that will make this day unlike any others in our narrator’s life.

2. Write a second line something like this: “At the house, my wife was (fill in the rest of the line however you’d like.)”

Often one storyline isn’t enough. Two elements of the plot need to vibrate against each other to create a resonance. I assume from our opening two lines that whatever Burton Quick has come to say will bear upon whatever is at issue for the narrator and his wife.

3. Write a third line that contains the narrator’s initial response to whatever his wife is doing at the house. Something like this: “I’d told her (fill in the line however you’d like), but she wouldn’t listen, so I‘d decided to (again, fill this in however you’d like.)”

We now have three things to pay attention to in the story: (1) whatever it is that Burton Quick has come to tell the narrator, (2) whatever it is that the wife is doing in spite of her husband’s protestation, (3) whatever the narrator thinks he’s decided to do. Three balls up in the air within three sentences. Quite enough to arouse our curiosity, to make us keep writing to see where things might go.

THE BONUS ROUND: Write a few lines that you imagine might serve as a closing move. You’re free to create whatever you’d like, but I’ll offer up a few lines as an example. “That’s when my wife surprised me by (fill it in). It was like nothing I’d ever seen. Burton Quick’s story seemed like (fill it in). I felt myself moving toward something and I (fill it in).”

The final move of the story, of course, may change as you write the draft, but at least writing one now will give you some sense of the sort of ending that you’ve made possible with your beginning. Feel free to modify this exercise however you’d like. Keep doing the good work.