WHO WRITES SHORT SHORTS?

MARK HELPRIN


SAM SHEPARD

Every year Writer's Digest Magazine has a contest for very short stories (1500 words or under).  Last year was the first year I entered with a story called "Emily's Dad."  I didn't win, but at least I understood why the winning story walked away with the $3,000 Grand Prize.  It was a work of subtlety and symbolic meaning--all under 1500 words.  

The deadline is December 1, and as I've been mulling over what kind of piece I might like to write and submit, the school year began and I used a short story in our anthology to have my students write a practice literary analysis paragraph.  The story was called "White Gardens" by Mark Helprin.  It involved a memorial service for six firefighters who lost their lives when a building collapsed while they were trying extinguish the fire.  It was mostly from the point-of-view of one of the widows, what she saw, what she thought, and what she was able to take away from the service, especially from the priest's eulogy.  The interesting thing, however, is at one point the priest goofs up his words.  Instead of saying that the deceased firefighters will repose in green gardens (meaning go to a more beautiful and peaceful reward when they die), he is very young and becomes emotionally overcome by the proceedings and says that they will repose in white gardens.  Much of the story concerns everyone--the priest included--trying to figure out what he meant by "white gardens."

I wanted a short piece to use as an example of a quality story my students could analyze, but what I realized is that the story had everything I was looking for in a piece I might write and submit to the Writer's Digest contest:  not only conflict and resolution, but brevity, depth, symbol, specific sensory detail, and emotion.

I decided I wanted to use this story as a model for the story I would write.  But I wanted to tear it apart and see what made it tick.  So I took the story and home and retyped it.  Just to get the feel of typing a high quality short short.  I wanted to see if I noticed anything about the rhythm of writing such a story from start to finish (I didn't).  

I thought it would exceed the minimum word count, but it didn't.  It came in just over 900 words.  Once I double-spaced it and printed it up, I knew I could use it to analyze why it was such a good story. My plan (as it is with everything I read for analysis) was to mark it up and identify many of the issues that I listed above.  Having done that, my theory goes, I might be more apt (that means likely, John) to write a better story.

I'm also planning on doing the same thing with a short short called "The Devouring Lion" by Pulitzer Prize winning writer and actor Sam Shepard. It concerns a man who goes back to work driving a Caterpillar earth mover after a nervous breakdown because a woman left him. It comes in at about three pages, but is a powerful piece of writing. Sam Shepard has always been one of my favorites.

I'm almost done with the YA novel, though, so maybe I won't send anything to this contest.  Who knows?

At least writing and sending a story is the plan.  Stay tuned.  

THE DOCTOROW IS IN

E.L. Doctorow

I was asked for a sample of the story I mentioned in the last post. I chose a section right when the man and woman are about to drop the kidnapped infant off at a Catholic Church, thinking, I assume, that church folk will have instant compassion and concern for an abandoned baby. When the woman expresses some hesitancy about knowing the etiquette for the sacrament of Confession, Doctorow writes the following:

Lester, she said, I don't know the right words for confessing.
It's O.K., I said, just go in there and sit down in that box they have. It's somewhere off to the side. You don't have to be Catholic for them to listen to you. When he hears you, the priest will sit down on the other side, and you just tell him you want to confess something. And he will listen and never betray your trust that it is just between the two of you. And you don't have to cross yourself or anything, he will tell you what to do if you put it in the form of asking for his advice. And you will thank him, and you will mean it, and maybe thank God, too, that there are people who are sworn to do this for a living.

Man, that's good shit. It's colloquial language spoken by a couple blue collar, disenfranchised drifters written in a rhythm that is postively poetry by a man in his early 70s.

Here's some more just before Karen enters the church:

Before she took a breath and stepped down from the Windstar, she held the baby in her arms and caressed his round little head and brushed his dark hairs with the tips of her fingers as he stared up at her in his impassive manner and then looked away. And then Karen slipped him gently into my arms like a friend of the mother's who has been given the privilege for just that moment of holding another woman's child.

It's like BUTTAH.

In my last post, I ended saying it makes me want to write. The other side of that double-edge sword, is that writing that is that good also often makes me want to hurl my computer through the window, scream, "What was I thinking?" and take up macrame. My aunt used to make such nice macrame owls when I was a kid.

Forgive me if I've abused the Fair Use Doctorine, but only two people in the world read this blog.

LET'S PLAY DOCTOROW

I just read a story in The Best American Short Stories of 2003 anthology. It was called “Baby Wilson” and it was by E.L. Doctorow (Ragtime, Billy Bathgate).  The story concerned a crazy woman who steals a baby and her (more sane) boyfriend who knows she’s crazy and that what she’s done is wrong, but he can’t at first bring himself to turn her in, so they go on the lam.  

The entire story was a dramatic monologue, meaning that there was no dialogue and was all told by the boyfriend’s p.o.v.   The language, though, was beautiful and sounded very modern, even though a Google biography  I read of Doctorow said he was born in 1931 (meaning that my prejudice says his language should sound more, I don’t know, serious or old-fashioned or something).  But he captured the voice of the boyfriend and made it sound as if this drifter/grifter was just chatting with us about this wacko thing his crazy girlfriend did.

I’m always amazed at how the “experts” say things like “show, don’t tell” and “use dialogue to advance” plot, and then the masters come along and break those rules in a brilliant and moving manner.

It makes me want to write.