Writing is One Big Fat Problem

I've been working on writing better short stories, part of which involves reading slush at Apex. There was no instruction manual on how to do this, and I still don't know if I'm doing it right.  Nevertheless, there are some things I'm starting to pick up on, and I think I'm a better writer for it.

One of those things is the insight that every piece of commercial fiction has a problem. Most commercial fiction follows this pattern:

Problem
How the main character attempts to solve the pattern
Solution (a definite success or failure in trying to solve the original pattern)

This pattern is also known as:

Beginning
Middle
End

Literature and experimental fiction may or may not follow this pattern, but commercial fiction at least includes a problem:  the rest of the story might be implied (especially in flash fiction), but the promise of the story is there.

I've been seeing some submissions to Apex that don't have problems, they have situations.

What's the difference?

A situation is what, in general, is happening.  Aliens are taking over the planet! is a situation.

A problem is a roadblock in the way of a character's goals.  Aliens are taking over the planet and my server went down in the middle of a boss fight! is a problem.  Aliens are taking over the planet and they're killing everyone…including me, if they can catch me! is a problem.  

The difference is that the character may or may not have to respond to a situation; a character must respond to a problem, or there will be unacceptable consequences, for that character, no matter how noble or petty.

You might have a character who doesn't care whether the aliens take over the planet, as long as the servers stay up.  No problem–literally.  You can write a story about that character who doesn't care, while the rest of society collapses.  It's ironic, but it's not actually a story; there's no beginning, middle, and end.  

But add a problem that the character cares about–Aliens are taking over the planet but the servers are still up only now I can't get pizza–and you have a story.  The main character goes through these steps:

Problem:  no pizza
Attempt to solve:  call for delivery.  Nobody answers.
Attempt to solve:  walk three blocks to pizza place.  Nobody home.
Attempt to solve:  break into pizza place and start making pizzas, but don't know how.  Start fire.
Attempt to solve:  call mom for advice on how to make pizza, she's being attacked by aliens and hangs up.

…and so on, until Our Slacker has solved the problem and eradicated the aliens, obtaining pizza in the process, or has failed so definitively that no further action can be taken to solve that problem:  Our Slacker almost succeeded, but the aliens have captured him and extracted all his memories of pizza, returning him to his home with no idea of the humanity he's lost.

If you want a slightly less trivial example, take the story of the Hero who Must Save the World.  

Problem:  Hero must save world.
Attempt to solve:  Whine "why me" a few times and get out of it
Attempt to solve:  Try to trick someone else into doing it
Attempt to solve:  The bad guys come and kick your butt until you're more angry at them than you're afraid of actually getting started, etc.

The story doesn't end until the problem is solved or it very definitively can't be.  People tend to like the first better, unless you want to scare them, in which case the second is a pretty good option.  I also like the stories in which the character solves the problem in such a way as to make the problem worse.  There are all kinds of variations you can take.

If you're like me, as you're plotting and/or editing your story, check to make sure you have a problem, that every action your main character takes is trying to solve that problem, and that problem is solved at the end of the story.  It sounds mind-bogglingly simple until it comes time to apply it to your own work, of course.

Note:  all the attempts to solve the problem should fail until you get to the very end.  If you're like me, you can give your characters a moment of success, then laugh as you jerk it away from them.  But if the character succeeds before the end of the story, then you're going to have to come up with a different problem.

This sounds like a clever solution until you realize that the end of the story no longer has anything to do with the beginning of the story.  Readers tend to notice this; it can be forgiven but generally cheeses people off.  "I thought I was reading a story about Our Slacker getting his pizza, not a romance about love among the storks!"  Fling!

If you're in a college course, this idea is sometimes called "unity of action" or "put the remote down and stop changing channels in the middle of my TV show."

Generally, if you must have that alien/slacker comedy with a touch of stork-on-stork action, it's better to make one problem a substep of solving a larger problem, such as arranging a certain long-legged romance as part of getting the last pizza on Earth away from the aliens.

Literature and experimental fiction are different, of course.  

By my lights, literature is exploring situations, not problems.  Lord of the Flies wasn't mainly about how a group of kids got off a desert island, but how they acted when removed from society.  The story didn't end because the characters got themselves off the island (the solution to a problem), but because they were removed from the situation.  Our delight in the book comes from the ideas of the book and how they were explored, inspiring us to think about them even further, not because some hero saved the day.  (There are no MacGuyvers on the island with Piggy, unfortunately.)

Experimental fiction is a different kettle of fish; it looks at the rules of story and then pushes them around and plays with them, much as a poet plays with words.  The rules of poetry aren't the rules of prose, but you have to know the rules of prose before you start playing with poetry.  Grammar?  Spelling?  Of course.  Some poems have very strict, known rules; others have very strict, unknown rules.  Unknown by the reader, that is.  The poet will know, even if it's only subconsciously.  Experimental fiction writers have usually mastered the regular forms of stories, and are distorting them, remixing them, deconstructing and reconstructing them.  It is by experimenting with fiction that rules are shaken up or destroyed.  Whether a piece of experimental fiction is meant to be commercial fiction, literature, or something else is entirely up to the author.