Tag Archives: creative writing exercises

Why Paragraphs Matter in a Story

25 Jun
Roxane Gay's story "Contrapasso" first appeared in Artifice Magazine and then in Mixed Fruit.

Roxane Gay’s story “Contrapasso” first appeared in Artifice Magazine and then in Mixed Fruit. The unique structure highlights the importance of paragraph structure.

When talking about structure in fiction, we tend to focus on large-scale issues (story arc and delayed gratification of suspense) and the fine detail of sentence crafting. What often gets neglected in the conversation is a structural unit that is, in some ways, the skeleton of all fiction: the paragraph.

An excellent example of the beauty and importance of the paragraph is Roxane Gay’s story “Contrapasso.” It was first published in Artifice Magazine, and you can read it here at Mixed Fruit.

How the Story Works

In any story, a character begins with infinite possibilities, and the writer’s job is to narrow those possibilities down to a few that the character must choose from. Choosing a theme is one way to narrow the possibilities. In this story, the menu headings provide those themes. Of course, it’s not necessary to stick to the theme in a strict sense, and Gay doesn’t, but her headings do provide a direction for each paragraph.

In this paragraph (from the “Life Maine Lobster” entry on the “Meat and Seafood” page), the theme or idea of boiling lobsters provides an entry into the character and her story about bondage. The heading allows her to write a sentence like this: “Now, in the wake of her divorce, she envied the lobster and the privilege of such pain.” The entire character development proceeds from the heading.

Focusing on paragraph structure can also help you move through time. Look at this section from the “Sauteed Spinach” entry on the “Sides and Accompaniments” page. For many writers, it’s easy to fall into the trap of chronology. So, this section could have been written this way: I followed her, I saw this, I did that, she saw me, we exchanged looks, she got out her phone, I went home, and there was a knock on my door late and the words, “Open up. It’s the police.”

But Gay skips all that unnecessary connecting tissue. Here, the theme doesn’t matter as much. Instead, the paragraph headings force each paragraph to have a point: what the narrator saw, what the cops said, what the narrator did next. As a result, the narrative moves more quickly because the reader doesn’t need to slog through needless detail. But the structure also slows the narrative down. Because each paragraph focuses on a single action or event, you can’t rush on to the next event. Instead, you investigate the action more deeply, which can lead to further character development.

In this story, paragraph structure cannot be separated from story structure.

The Writing Exercise

We’ll write two paragraphs, the first concentrating on character development and the second focusing on moving through time.

Paragraph 1 (Character Development)

  1. Make a list of your characters’ interests: hobbies, food preferences, career influences, regional or cultural influences, etc. For example, if the character is an accountant, he might view the world through accounting concepts. Or, if the character is a high school student who loves to read, she might view the world through the titles of novels, like the narrator of Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl. Choose one of these interests for your theme.
  2. Write the theme as a paragraph heading.
  3. Let the character apply the theme to his or her world. For example, if your accountant character was asked how the whole world can be explained by common mistakes in basic math on tax returns, what would the character say? What if you let the character give an example from his or her life, something like this: “You’ve got two kinds of taxpayers, X and Y. Just the other day, a guy came into the office, and he was type X…”
  4. Tell the character’s story in a single paragraph. Stick to the theme you’ve given yourself.

Paragraph 2 (Moving Through Time)

  1. Same as Step 1 above. Choose a theme.
  2. Tell a story in 3 sentences: X happened. Then Y. Then Z.
  3. Build a paragraph around each of the three sentences. In each paragraph, focus less on advancing the narrative and more on describing in depth some aspect of the action, for instance what the character sees or feels or thinks.

Good luck.

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Setting Up the Inevitable

4 Jun
"Crossing" by Mark Slouka was first published in The Paris Review.

“Crossing” by Mark Slouka was first published in The Paris Review.

Any hack with the smallest facility for plot can walk a character into a situation that cannot be escaped. But it takes skill and craft to make the reader feel the character’s desperation. This is exactly what Mark Slouka does in his story, “Crossing.” By the last paragraph, the tension is nearly unbearable. The ending is powerful: “There was nowhere to go. It didn’t matter. They had to go.”

To find out how Mark Slouka builds the tension so subtly and yet to such an incredible pitch, read “Crossing” at here at The Paris Review.

How “Crossing” Works

Slouka does two things at once in the story.

First, he takes the father back and forth across the river: with the backpacks and then with his son on his back, and then an identical set of return trips the next day. The first set of trips allows the story to show us the river and the care required to cross it. The details are not particularly subtle. For instance, the father remembers when he was a boy crossing the river with his own father and asking, “what do you do if you fall?” His father answered, “Don’t fuckin’ fall.” It becomes clear where this story is headed.

Yet we forget this inevitable end because of the second thing Slouka does. While the river takes a central place in the story, the focus is actually on the father’s memories and thoughts. In fact, the river doesn’t even appear until the fifth paragraph. The story opens in the house of the man’s ex-wife, where the man is picking up his son:

“He went inside, wiping his shoes and ducking his head like a visitor, and when the boy came running into the living room he threw him over his shoulder, careful not to hit his head on the corner of the TV, and at some point he saw her watching them, leaning against the kitchen counter in her bathrobe, and when he looked at her she shook her head and looked away and at that moment he thought, maybe—maybe he could make this right.”

Slouka uses this opening to set the stakes: the man is going to use this camping trip to make things right with his family. His thoughts circle this idea throughout the story, even as he’s crossing the river. And so he does not see a second set of story stakes appear. While the story starts out being about making this right with his family, it will end with both two lives in the balance.

The Writing Exercise

  1. Pick a place to which you have a strong emotional connection.
  2. Ask yourself: What is dangerous about that place? Or, what danger could the place pose to someone who feels about it the same as you do? The danger could be literal (drowning) or emotional (the end of a relationship). For instance, if I choose my current back yard, where I’m landscaping, the danger might be that a character such as myself spends so much time thinking about what trees to plant that he misses something more important (kids, spouse, etc.). The danger could also be literal: cutting off a finger with a saw.
  3. Create a character who will face the danger.
  4. Finally outline how he or she will end up facing the dangerous situation. What details are crucial to establishing the danger? Why doesn’t the character avoid the situation? You must decide where the story begins. Doing so will give you a timeframe and help determine how quickly or slowly to dole out information.

Many writers will feel reluctant to plan out a story this way or will be unable to stick to the outline once they begin writing. That’s okay. The point of this exercise is to develop a feel for how to parcel out information in order to create suspense.

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Describe Setting Without Getting Lost in the Details

28 May
The Unheralded King of Preston Plains Middle is the debut novel from Jedah Mayberry.

The Unheralded King of Preston Plains Middle is the debut novel from Jedah Mayberry. You can read the opening pages here.

In a story or novel, how do you describe an entire town or geographical area without getting lost in the details?

Many writers have done it, memorably Toni Morrison in Sula and F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby. Add to that list Jedah Mayberry, whose debut novel, The Unheralded King of Preston Plains Middle, begins with a description of a small New England town that demonstrates how to distill history, culture, migration, geography, and demography into a single short passage.

The novel is new out from River Grove Press, and you can read the opening pages here.

How the Story Works

Ernest Hemingway famously claimed that the best writing omitted far more detail than it included–meaning that a story or novel resembles an iceberg, ninety percent of which is underwater. Critics have turned this idea into a theory for art, but, in truth, it merely describes an inevitable problem faced by all writers: if you’re writing what you know, then you know more than can fit into the story. But you can’t simply include and leave out details randomly. You need a method. Mayberry’s method in The Unheralded King of Preston Plains Middle becomes clear in the first sentence:

“The village of Preston is largely defined by the things it is not, by the things its expanse of working farms and decaying historic landmarks serve to divide.”

The novel tells us explicitly how it will organize details about the town. Any that do not fit into the idea of absence or division are left out. The Great Gatsby does something similar in its opening description of East and West Egg:

“I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them.”

In this passage, the writing quickly moves to descriptions of Jay Gatsby and Tom Buchanan. Those characters stand for the difference between the two places. As a result, the setting helps create character.

So that you can see how common this strategy is, here’s the opening of Sula by Toni Morrison:

“In that place, where they tore the nightshade and blackberry patches from their roots to make room for the Medallion City Golf Course, there was once a neighborhood. It stood in the hills above the valley town of Medallion and spread all the way to the river. It is called the suburbs now, but when black people lived there it was called the Bottom.”

Morrison gives us her organizing principle right away: the way the neighborhood looks now versus the way it looked then. That difference helps introduce the story, which is in part about the relations between the people who once lived in the neighborhood and the ones who have turned it into a golf course.

In all of these examples, the writers clearly identify the way they will organize details about a town or area. A place that is vast and filled with innumerable things is reduced to a single passage in a book. In other words, only the tip of the iceberg is revealed.

The Writing Exercise

Let’s follow the example set by Jedah Mayberry, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Toni Morrison.

  1. Choose a town or area to describe.
  2. Write a definition of the town that creates two groups, a la Fitzgerald and Morrison. For instance: “Everybody there was dumb except for the cops.” Or, “The town had a railroad line running through the middle of it, but the division wasn’t between poor and rich but between people living in rundown shacks and people sleeping on the ground.”
  3. Now, try writing a definition of the town that identifies a broad organizing principle, a la Mayberry. For example: “The town was defined by the opportunities it had missed.” Or, “So many people had ended up in the town by accident that everything about the place seemed ruled by random chance.”
  4. Finally, describe the town. Use the definition as inspiration and as a guide for the details.

In both #2 and #3, you can switch the order around. So, you can write the definition but save it. List the details first and then finish the description with the definition. Either way you use the strategy, you’ll begin seeing it in almost every story and book that you read.

Good luck.

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Three Ways to Write Dialogue

21 May
Walter Mosley's novel, Little Green, is the latest installment in the Easy Rawlins series.

Walter Mosley’s novel, Little Green, is the latest installment in the Easy Rawlins series. You can read an excerpt from the novel at NPR’s website.

It’s become a cliche of writing workshops that, in good dialogue, the characters talk past one another. But how? For a primer, pick up any book by Walter Mosley. His most recent is Little Green, the latest in the Easy Rawlins detective series.

You can read an excerpt from the novel, here, at NPR’s website.

How the Novel Works

There are two easy ways to get characters talking past one another. The first is to give them different ends they want to achieve in the scene. The other is to provide the characters with different levels or forms of information or knowledge. (Of course, a third method is to give the characters vastly different personalities.) All of these methods are on display in these two lines from Little Green:

“I’m lookin’ for somebody for Raymond,” I said when the laughter subsided. “Evander Noon.”

 “That’s just the seesaw action,” Jo replied. “You lookin’ for yourself.”

Method 1: Notice how the first speaker, Easy Rawlins, makes his goals clear. But Jo doesn’t give a clear answer. She wants to help him but in a different way.

Method 2: Jo claims that Easy has another, deeper goal, one that only she knows. She possesses knowledge that he doesn’t. As a result, the dialogue takes on the manner of a common person talking to a sage.

Method 3: Easy is a detective, and Jo is a voodoo queen. Thus, he is direct, and she speaks in code. Their styles are determined by their personalities.

As a result, the characters talk past one another. They can’t help it. They’re different types of people with different goals and levels of information.

The Writing Exercise

Let’s trying writing dialogue using the three methods described above.

  1. Create two characters with vastly different personalities, jobs, or situations. Think about how their speaking style would be affected by the job or situation. For instance (relying on broad types), motivational speakers are intensely positive and assertive. Cops tend to speak as if everything they say has been said a thousand times before, which it has. What would happen if you put a cop and a motivational speaker together in a scene? Their styles would probably clash.
  2. Give the characters different goals for the scene. The easiest version of this is a scene involving a couple: one person wants to go out and the other wants to stay in. But there’s another way to approach the method. Make the characters’ goals different in terms of type. So, in the scene with the couple, one person wants to go out, and the other wants to leave. The goals become fundamentally different.
  3. Give the characters different levels or types of knowledge/interest. Imagine if someone has a broken toilet and so calls the plumber. The person wants a particular task to be done, but when the plumber shows up, all he wants to talk about is the metaphysical implications of cracked porcelain. Their interests and knowledge-bases will clash in the dialogue.

Good luck.

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Using Dialogue to Create Conflict

14 May
Rene S. Perez in The Acentos Review

“Lost Days” by Rene S. Perez II first appeared in The Acentos Review and is included in his debut collection, Along These Highways, which won the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Prize and was published as part of the Camino del Sol series by the University of Arizona Press.

If you close your eyes and listen to people—your family or friends—you’ll discover that they don’t all talk the same. They use different diction, different cliches, and sentences of different lengths. Yet in fiction, we too often write dialogue as if everyone talks the same.

Not Rene S. Pérez II. In his story, “Lost Days,” he creates characters with distinctive speaking styles, and those style become the center of the conflict. The story is a great example of how character, when fully realized, can drive plot. “Lost Days” is included in Pérez’s collection, Along These Highways, and was first published in The Acentos Review, where you can read it now.

How the Story Works

Let’s take a look at a key paragraph from “Lost Days.” In it, you’ll see how Bobby talks differently than his mother and father and how the story comments on this style. Both are important in using character to create plot.

“I don’t mean to disparage the whole of Corpus as being ‘ghetto,’ because that connotes a certain socioeconomic status,” he said, trying to backpedal as delicately as he could out of a comment he’d made at the dinner table that offended Beto, her husband, his father. He had always spoken that way; Stanford didn’t do that to him. “It’s just that there’s a culture here which is such that one can’t be challenged or even stimulated intellectually. There’s no art, no progress toward it or high culture. It’s a city of… of… philistines.”

Bobby’s diction (disparage, connotes) and phrasing (which is such that) suggest not only that he is smart but that he’s trying to be smart, that he feels a need to prove his intelligence. His speaking pattern has a whiff of desperation, and so it’s no surprise that he ends up calling his hometown stupid and dull. In life, people generally say what they feel. It’s hard to maintain a true shellac over our inner selves. In fiction, you can use this tendency to create plot by having characters say what they think (in their unique voices) to the people most vulnerable to those opinions. Perez has established in one paragraph an entire family dynamic and conflict.

Perez turns this conflict into a narrative arc by focusing Bobby’s desperation on a single point: Starbucks. At first, he says, “I mean, this town doesn’t even have a Starbucks.” But later in the story, as his mom drives away from the town’s first Starbucks, he’ll say, “Starbucks is the Wal-Mart of coffee shops. I bet the opening was in the news and everything.”

In some ways, this is a story about that old saw, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” All it takes to make the story work is a few words from one character and a cup of coffee.

The Writing Exercise

This exercise is really more of a writing habit. The first part you may have heard before, but the second will likely be new to you.

  1. Begin writing down snippets of dialogue. The speakers can be anyone: people in line at the grocery store, customers at a coffee shop, drinkers at a bar, your kids or spouse or parents, your friends. Try to write down a few sentences verbatim. Don’t worry about capturing an entire conversation. The back-and-forth may sound amazing, but on paper, it will almost always last too long and wander from its point. It’s more important to capture the essence of how the person speaks.
  2. Try to impersonate those people. Say aloud what you have written as they said it. Imagine that you’re an actor on stage. You may find that in order to fully capture the voice, you must delete or add words or change their order. Remember: Dialogue needs to sound lifelike, not be lifelike. Once you’ve captured the person’s voice, write down the dialogue as you speak it. Add attributions (she said) or descriptions (she wiped her nose) to help provide the rhythm of the voice.

Have fun.

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Raising the Stakes in a Fragmented Narrative

7 May
In the Middle of Many Mountains by Nahal Suzanne Jamir

Suzanne Jamir’s story “In the Middle of Many Mountains” was first published in Meridian and is the title story of a new collection, now out from Press 53, that has been called “a magic that is real.”

Stories are not true to life. Memoir writers quickly understand that they’re recreating moments from half-blind memory. They leave out as much as they put in. But even stories that make no claim for historical truth, that simply attempt to portray a life as it might be lived, tell a kind of lie. They offer a coherent storyline, a definite beginning and end, and a consistent narrative voice when life offers no such thing. As the writer Nahal Suzanne Jamir will say in Thursday’s interview, “We can’t expect the main character to have an inner conflict and insist that the form or approach of every story be neat or rigid.”

The problem is that readers want coherence. The  magic of stories is that they offer a clarity that is rarely present in life. Jamir’s story “In the Middle of Many Mountains,” finds a way to face this paradox. The story shares a title with Jamir’s new collection out from Press 53. An excerpt is available online at Meridian.

Or you can download their entire story here: “In the Middle of Many Mountains”

How the Story Works

The narrator is trying to understand how she has come to this present situation: her is dying, her father is living with another woman, and her sister is wasting away from an eating disorder. A once-tight family has unraveled for reasons that are not and may never be clear. As a result, the story is structured as a collection of fragments. Any other structure would force coherence upon the naturally incoherent.

And yet a story needs coherence in order to be read. Jamir manages this paradox with a simple strategy: Even though the narrative is fractured, the stakes are clear. Nowhere are they laid out more clearly than on page 5, when the sister, Marjan, says, “I need you to help me…but you’re not going to like it. You won’t want to hear.”

Though the form is fragmented, the characters retain a certain amount of wholeness. It’s possible to say what they want and do not want. These desires drive the plot. The narrator will be forced to do what seems impossible: to hear what she doesn’t want to hear and see what she does not want to see. Thus, the story uses the strategy used by all great stories. It pushes a character until the only option available is the one she never thought she’d choose.

The Writing Exercise

No matter how your story is structured—using some traditional plot or a shape invented on the spot—it’s important to make the stakes clear. It’s even more important when the story asks its readers to learn a new kind of storytelling.

So, let’s set the stakes. We’ll come at the problem from a couple of angles:

  1. Brainstorm the following: What do your main characters want more than anything? What do they avoid at all costs? What is the guiding principle of their lives? In your story, the characters’ desires will likely be tested. How badly do they want X? Will they be willing to do what they normally avoid? Will they even sacrifice their principles? It might help if you finish this sentence: X wants to…, and so he/she will be forced to… 
  2. Make the impossible possible. List the things in your story that seem permanent: relationships, geography, jobs, situations, existences, lives, etc. Now pick one or two and describe what it would take to make them impermanent; in other words, what force would be required to break an unbreakable thing? You can also flip this around and ask what force would be required to make permanent something that is either impermanent or not currently in existence.

Once you’re able to clearly answer any of these questions, you may find that your story comes into focus, both in shape and about-ness.

Good luck.

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Short, Direct, and with Style

30 Apr
Kelly Luce Exercise

Kelly Luce’s story “Rooey” was first published by The Literary Review. It will also appear in her forthcoming collection Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Trail.

I’ve heard it claimed that you can teach writers plot, structure, and character, but you can’t teach them to write well, with style. As evidence, look at Vladimir Nabokov. His unpredictable sentences flash between subjects (picnic, lightning) at the wild speed of genius. They are impossible to imitate, I’ve heard. But I don’t believe it, if only because there are so many great writers crafting astounding sentences.

One of them is Kelly Luce. Her story, “Rooey,” was first published in The Literary Review, and you can read it here.

How the Story Works

Great sentences—and great lines of poetry—often work the same way. They strive for leaps in logic, for the unexpected juxtaposition of images. Readers are expected to keep up, to make the connections without the aid of explanation. Keep this in mind as you read the first paragraph of Kelly Luce’s story:

Since Rooey died, I’m no longer myself. Foods I’ve hated my entire life, I crave. Different things are funny. I’ve stopped wearing a bra. I bet they’re thinking about firing me here at work, but they must feel bad, my brother so recently dead and all. Plus, I’m cheap labor, fresh out of college. And let’s face it, the Sweetwater Weekly doesn’t have the most demanding readership or publishing standards.

The leaps of logic begin in the first sentence. The comma acts as a pivot point. Death we understand, but what does it mean to not be yourself? The first two examples (foods, humor) make sense within our common understanding of grief, but the third (“I’ve stopped wearing a bra”) is strange by almost any measure. The leaps continue: dead brother to cheap labor. By the end of the paragraph, we’ve moved from death and identity crisis to newspaper publishing standards.

The speed of those leaps is what gives the story its style. The sentences are not long or grammatically complex. They do not suggest but, rather, state things outright. Very often, beginning writers believe that good sentences are overwritten and overly subtle. The truth is usually quite the opposite. If you don’t believe me, here is part of the first page of Nabokov’s Lolita.

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child.

Though Nabokov is known for his “poetic” style, the sentences are short, direct, and to the point. Their beauty is in the phrasing and the speed at which they move from “four feet ten in one sock” to loving “a certain initial girl-child.” That is fictional style.

The Writing Exercise

To be stylish, you need to know what your story is about. If you don’t know, then your sentences won’t know, either. If that makes you despair, don’t. The search for a story’s about-ness is often also a search for its style. Let’s start searching. We’ll write two paragraphs:

  1. Who is your story about? Why is the story about him or her or them? To answer the first question, begin by describing the person as plainly and directly as possible. Keep the second question in mind. Make it your goal to answer it by the end of the paragraph. So, you’ll likely move from literal description to a statement of causation: Because of her, I… or If it hadn’t been for him, she… (For a model, look at the example from Lolita.)
  2. What event is at the heart of your story? What are the implications or ramifications of that event? What is the story about? To answer the first question, state what happened (Since Rooey died… or When Billy got married…). Then, move onto the ramifications. What happened next? How did this event ripple forward into time? Make it your goal to answer the final question (what the story is about) by the end of the paragraph. So, you’ll move from what happened to why we’re reading the story. (For a model, look at the example from “Rooey.”)

Have fun!

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Narrating a Crime Scene Investigation

23 Apr
Steve by Marcus Pactor can be found online at this journal and also in his new collection of stories, vs. Death Noises.

“The Archived Steve” by Marcus Pactor can be read online at Timber and also in his new collection of stories, vs. Death Noises.

Literary fiction could learn a lot from the TV show CSI. If that claim sounds absurd, consider this: The show does not follow a traditional plot structure. No episode can be summed up with the old saws “Stranger Comes to Town” and “Character Goes on a Trip.” Those plot lines are present in the show, but they occur quickly—usually, within the first two minutes—and serve only to introduce the true story: the investigation, which consists almost exclusively of people standing around, talking to one another. Sounds pretty cerebral, right?

The problem with most detective shows is that their investigations have the same emotional impact as piecing together a jigsaw puzzle. The detectives remain untouched by their work. In a literary investigation, however, the characters are forever changed by the information they uncover.

A recent story that illustrates the dramatic potential of an investigation is “The Archived Steve” by Marcus Pactor. It appears in his new collection vs. Death Noises, and you can read it online at Timber.

How the Story Works

Here is the story: Steve is dead, and the narrator is searching through the items left in his apartment. With each discovered item, the narrator begins to piece together the story of Steve’s death. A show like CSI would maintain its focus on this search and puzzle solving. But the focus of “The Archived Steve” shifts away from the corpse and onto the man searching the apartment, a man who will learn that he is partly culpable in Steve’s death. The story, then, becomes about the emotional consequences of his investigation.

So how does the story work? While its premise may seem disconcerting at first—some readers may be thrown off by the matter-of-fact listing of evidence—the story does not plunge into the evidence without purpose. The first paragraph makes clear that the narrator’s goal is to “correct that fool doctor” and his autopsy report.

Aside: I’ve mentioned this idea several times on the blog, and it bears repeating. It’s important to give readers a sense of where the story is going. There are many ways to do this. For more examples, check out these exercise based on Manuel Gonzales’ story “Farewell, Africa,” Owen Egerton’s chapter “Nativity,” and Stacey Swann’s story “Pull.”

Once Marcus Pactor establishes the direction of the story’s investigation, he quickly sets it into motion, offering and explaining evidence. Notice how the type of evidence changes, moving from the concrete (“technological equipment and books”) to the more abstract (“Steve’s Inverted Pyramid of Suffering”). As this shift occurs, the reader requires more explanation from the narrator, which leads the narrator to insert himself more fully into the story. As a result, the pronouns begin to change halfway through the story. The words “we” and “I” appear more frequently as the story becomes the narrator’s, rather than the corpse’s.

What begins as the search through items left in an apartment becomes the story of a man’s growing sense of guilt and failure.

The Writing Exercise

Let’s use “The Archived Steve” as a model. Just as Marcus Pactor’s story focuses on items rather than the dead man who left them behind, let’s create a story from the things that our characters pull in their wakes.

  1. Choose a mysterious premise: someone has disappeared, someone has died from undetermined causes, something has been stolen, something has gone missing.
  2. Put yourself into a room where the person was last seen or where he/she spent a great deal of time—or the room where the item went missing from. What is in the room? Make a list. Be exhaustive.
  3. Now that you’ve created the items, give yourself an investigative goal: to sift through the items in order to find/figure out X.
  4. Begin explaining the relevance of each item to the missing person or the connection to the missing thing. Keep in mind your goal. What clue does each item offer you in your effort to reach the goal?
  5. If you find that explanations of certain items tend to veer unexpectedly or slide into unexpected tangents, that’s great. Follow those tangents. Just as a true crime investigator leaves no stone unturned and follows every tip, you should follow every trail that your subconscious provides. Keep in mind: you’re uncovering a story just as your narrator or character is uncovering a crime. Give yourself permission to explore.

Have fun and good luck.

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The Inscrutable Stranger Comes to Town

16 Apr
Kirstin Valdez Quade's story "Nemecia" won first place in Narrative Magazine's Spring 2012 Short Story Contest.

Kirstin Valdez Quade’s story “Nemecia” won first place in Narrative Magazine’s Spring 2012 Short Story Contest.

The writer Charles Baxter once wrote in an interview that he liked “to throw characters together into situations that create stress so that as the story goes forward, something in the situation or the characters is forced to reveal itself.” And yet Baxter has also written, “When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story.”

This contradiction is faced by all writers. We must seek to understand the motives and meanings of our characters’ actions, but if we understand them too well, the story loses any sense of mystery. As a result, some of the greatest stories—such as “Bartleby the Scrivener”—are those about the search for understanding. In Melville’s story, the narrator nearly drives himself  mad trying to figure out why his employee, and then former employee, Bartleby, responds to all requests with “I would prefer not to.” In the end, though, Bartleby resists explanation. He remains a cypher.

That same inscrutability can be found in Kirsten Valdez Quade’s story “Nemecia.” The story won the Narrative Magazine Spring 2012 Short Story Contest, and you can read it here.

(Note: Registration is required–but it’s free and definitely worth the few seconds required to do so.)

How the Story Works

The story is about Nemecia, an unsettling character who has joined, under chilling circumstances, the narrator’s family. The narrator’s attempt to understand Nemecia’s odd behavior shapes the story. The first section acts as an introduction.  Here are some select lines:

  1. Nemecia had an air of tragedy about her, which she cultivated…At night she stole food from the pantry, handfuls of prunes, beef jerky, pieces of ham…The quick efficient bites, the movement of her jaw, the way the food slid down her throat—it made me sick to think of her body permitting such quantities.
  2. I was afraid of Nemecia because I knew her greatest secret: when she was five, she put her mother in a coma and killed our grandfather.

The next section operates in the same way as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown.” The narrator’s new knowledge affects her view of the entire community. Here are some select lines:

  1. The next day, the world looked different; every adult I encountered was diminished now, made frail by Nemecia’s secret.
  2. I wondered if they were afraid of what she might do to them. Perhaps the whole town was terrified of my cousin.
  3. At night I stayed awake as long as I could, waiting for Nemecia to come after me in the dark.

A great story can put goosebumps on its readers’ arms, and following that last line, the story leaps into action. With each new awful attack by Nemecia, the narrator tries to understand her nemesis, to comprehend what has made her so cruel. But she repeatedly fails and, by the end, she can only watch as “Nemecia held a wineglass up to the window and turned it. “See how clear?” Shards of light moved across her face.”

Nemecia remains inscrutable.

The Writing Exercise

This story is a fresh version of the age-old tale “Stranger Comes to Town.” Let’s try our own version. As you brainstorm for each step, write quickly. Don’t think too hard. Let your subconscious spit out material. You can edit it later.

1. Pick a town/neighborhood. Describe the main street, the stores, the residential streets, a house. Who lives there? What objects are important in the street, the stores, etc. Be specific.

2. Pick a stranger. Keep in mind that the best strangers have poker faces; they do not give away their thoughts. Some people will consider them sweet, and others will find them menacing. Give the stranger behavior that suggests both views—but that also suggests something isn’t quite right.

3. Pick one of the objects described earlier in Step 1. Make it go missing. Or make it malfunction. Or make it suddenly turn up in the stranger’s possession. In other words, disrupt the world that you created. Regardless of what disruption you choose, the stranger should be implicated.

4. Provide the stranger with a logical excuse—or simply allow the stranger to remain quiet so that others will make the excuse for him/her.

Your goal is to slowly increase the pressure on the town to discover why the stranger has behaved in this way, to understand what is happening. Yet you must also allow the stranger to resist this understanding. When done well, this can produce an incredible tension in your story.

Good luck.

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How to Reveal Plot with Dialogue

9 Apr
The Dead We Know is a zombie novel in the tradition of epics like The Walking Dead and Stephen King's The Stand

The Dead We Know is a zombie novel in the tradition of serial epics like The Walking Dead

Can literary writers do genre? Many people think not. A literary writer will get bored with the conventions, they say, and begin experimenting, producing a pulp/literary hybrid.  Recent history shows many examples of this: Michael Chabon won a rash of prizes for his detective novel The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, and New Fabulists like George Saunders, Manuel Gonzales, and Karen Russell embrace and explore the conventions of fantasy and science fiction.

But what about the pure genre novel? Is it really off-limits to literary writers?

T. J. Danko is the pseudonym of a literary writer who has published stories in various journals, but his latest work embraces one of the most popular forms of genre literature—zombies. The Dead We Know is not a Chabon-like crossover or a Saunders-esque ironic treatment. It’s old-fashioned page-turner that keeps you up after your bedtime.  You can read the first chapter of The Dead We Know here.

How the Novel Works

Works of genre, like all novels, deliver pieces of information gradually. One way to accomplish this is through dialogue, and this is where The Dead We Know excels. For instance, look at Nick and Eduardo’ argument about whether the truck window should be rolled up or down:

“I’m freezing. Why aren’t you freezing?”

He closed his eyes and began to drift off. Eduardo punched him.

“Ow.”

“What are you doing? You close the window and you go to sleep? Fuck you. You want me to crash or something?”

“Fine. Turn on the radio.”

“Fantastic,” Eduardo said. He switched on the radio, and there was a sharp crackle. He kept turning the dial, but there was only more noise.

“Nothing?” Nick asked.

“The whole trip I get nothing but static.”

Nick yawned loudly. “We’ve been driving in the middle of nowhere.”

“Help me stay awake,” Eduardo complained. “It’s boring driving in the middle of the night.”

The scene’s realism—Nick and Eduardo behave like every road-tripper who’s ever lived—is what heightens the tension. Through a realistic argument, we’re being told, indirectly, everything that will happen. Of course they will crash, and of course the crash will happen in the dark, in the middle of nowhere. This is a zombie novel, after all. It might be tempting, as a writer, to “reinvent” the genre, but the best genre novels stick to conventions. The writer’s skill is in making those conventions seem fresh and new. One way to do this is to avoid giving the reader information directly. Instead, focus on the characters, the ways their personalities clash. Give the characters lives that exist prior to the zombies. In other words, give the characters something to talk about, and then let the story intrude.

The Writing Exercise

Let’s play around with dialogue. For this exercise, write a scene (two pages max) in which you use only dialogue.

  1. Choose a setting (exiting a movie theater, approaching a rope bridge over a lava flow with pterodactyls flying everywhere).
  2. Choose a relationship dynamic (they’re fighting over…, they’re upset because…, they’re relaxed because…).
  3. Choose a goal (character will confess his/her love for the other, character will reveal a hideous secret)
  4. Now write the scene. But here are the rules: The characters cannot state outright the relationship dynamic or the goal. They must allude to or approach the dynamic/goal from an angle or under cover of some other piece of conversation.

These rules may seem difficult, yet you may discover that your scene begins to move in unexpected ways. Try it out.

Good luck.

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