Spring Short Story Panel discussion

Welcome to the first-ever Spring Short Story Panel. Thanks to all of our panelists for taking part.

To kick things off, I'd like to discuss the form of the story, specifically how it relates to the process of writing it. It seems to me that the short story is something of a contradiction, in that it demands that the writer have total control over pacing and character and that he or she know precisely what he or she wants to do. Yet at the same time, the story can be nearly anything -- it can span years or take place in a moment, it can be 3 pages long or sprawl out over a comfortable 60 pages.

How do you approach a new story with all of this in mind? Do you start from a character and proceed from there? And for those who also write longer fiction, do you know from the outset that you're working on a shorter piece?

I usually think of the short story as focusing in on one moment or element when something changes permanently (or every once in a while, as a moment when something could have changed, but didn't). There's more room in that definition than there might seem to be-- the "something," that shifts can be big or small or somewhere in between-- but for me the form of the story always eventually comes back to that pressure point. That's part of the difference, for me, between a novel and a short story-- however convoluted the shape of a story may be, everything in it needs to be attached to a single central point somehow. There's also a question of perspective-- I knew my novel had to be a novel because it couldn't belong to a single voice or character in the way that a story can. That's not a definitive rule-- there are certainly authors who can sneak a lot of forms and voices into a short work, and novels that work with a single perspective-- but for me, the difference between a novel and a shorter work is often whether or not the story can be contained by a single voice (not necessarily a first-person voice-- just a narrative voice that reads as seamless.)

Having said all of that, I don't tend to really think about form until late in the process, the editing phase rather than the initial writing phase. Some short stories are presents-- they appear fully formed-- others are mysteries, wherein I'll start with some element of character, or plot, or even a line of dialogue or an image-- and have to figure out the rest of the story.

The fun thing about short work is that if on completion, the form just isn't working-- it's the wrong point of view or the wrong structure or the wrong tone-- it's less painful to throw it out and start over with a new approach.

When I write short, usually flash fiction, I think the whole story out before I start. With longer fiction, I usually know characters and some plot points and the end, but let the rest come with the writing.

There are still lots of surprises with the writing,though, even if I've mulled the thing over until I can hold it in my hand. Short is really fun to write, I think- so many cool structures and forms, a manageable amount of story you can wrestle into submission.

When I write short fiction, I have a basic sense of where everything is going. In my most recent story, I knew the main story featured a single character and his transition from one state of mind to another, and the end of that story is his acknowledgement of this new state of mind. I also like how short stories usually deal with one thing at a time rather than take on multiple points at once. It's a breath of fresh air to read something that is resolved within one or two short sit-downs.

I have a tougher problem writing longer fiction. Once all the various parts of the story start to overlap one another, I never know how to weave them together to make them work. I rarely have that problem with short fiction.

The truth is that the overall process is different with every story. If I think about the eight stories in my collection, each has a very different path to completion. A story like “Furlough” started off as being semi-autobiographical, but ended up being not about me at all. The story “Peacekeeper” was born out of a girl being murdered in Waseca, Minnesota, a town where friends of mine lived, and where I visited often. “The Daughter” started with an image of a corn maze, while “The Staying Freight” started with something I read about Harry Houdini. On and on, they’re all different. Some, like “Lazarus”, I knew from the start exactly what I was trying to say and knew the exact paces of the plot. Others, like “Volt”, I followed blindly into the dark recesses of my imagination. All of the stories, in one way or another, ended up as ruminations on things that scared or confounded me, though even that I didn’t necessarily control.

The one thing I can say is constant is that I’m what I call an “empathetic writer”, which means I try, as best, as wholly as possible, to become the character. For me, the art of fiction writing has a greater kinship with method acting than it does with, say, journalism. Much of my process entails me getting my imagination, my emotions, as deeply into the character as possible. My job then, as writer, is simply to find the language to convey the truth of that life, the character in full—their intellect, emotions, their imagination and psychology, as well as their physicality. I believe the most powerful place to write from is from the place of full empathy, where the reader becomes someone who is not them. In fact, I would argue that the great advantage story writing has over every other artistic medium is that we can create full empathy. All other art forms (film, music, dance, visual art,…) do their best to imply empathy. For example, when watching a film we read an actors’ expressions, mannerisms, listen to the theme music, all to gain an implied understanding of who they are in that moment, but we never see out of the characters eyes, smell what they smell, feel the wind on their cheeks, or think what they think. We, as writers, can create empathy in full. This is an advantage we should always use to our favor.

So my process is first figuring out who this character is, in a particular situation, in a particular place and time, and bringing it all to life in my imagination. I’m a big note taker. I draw pictures. I watch videos. I do whatever I need to get that life real in my imagination.

The biggest quirk to who I am as a writer is that I don’t like sitting at the computer until the life is full in my imagination. I call this “hitting critical mass”—the point where the character (in the situation, in the place) is so alive in my imagination that it’s clawing at the backside of my eyes to get out. About 80% of my process is spent not putting words of a blank page, but doing anything I can/need to do to reach critical mass. By doing it this way, I’ve found my writing takes on an urgency that I struggled to capture before I worked in this manner.

I think it would be crippling to start with all of that in mind, Patrick! Maybe some writers can fit all of the possibilities (time, scope, character, voice, tone, etc) in their brains before they begin a story, but I can't. I tend to start with a single idea, image, or character, and to proceed from there.

I agree with Danielle, that much of that actual-thinking business comes later in the process, once the basic gist of a story is already on paper. Sometimes stories surprise you-- the shortest story in my collection, came out of an idea I had that was originally much, much longer. The final story is only about four pages, and when I got to the end of a particular scene, I realized I'd already written the end of the story. It's nice when stories do that for you, gently tap you on the back and tell you it's okay to walk away.

As for the difference between writing short stories and longer pieces, I find it both more and less challenging. With a novel, you're already done so much work on a single character that you don't have to waste time getting to know them. On the other hand, you've got 300 pages in which to make them do something interesting, and so the plot of a short story tends not to be enough.

Alan wrote: "The truth is that the overall process is different with every story. If I think about the eight stories in my collection, each has a very different path to completion. A story like “Furlough” sta..."

That's so interesting that most of your process ends up being off the page! But you're right--being in the character is so important. When I have (one of my many) writing dry spells, getting back into the same mentality of the character is more challenging, or at least more daunting. Yet getting there seems like the essential thing.

Alan wrote: "The truth is that the overall process is different with every story. If I think about the eight stories in my collection, each has a very different path to completion. A story like “Furlough” sta..."

I love the full empathy idea- it's a very nonjudgmental place to be, and it seems like a way you can get into the head of the difficult to like characters especially. But how do you manage to maintain this strong and full empathy when terrible things are happening to your characters? My stomach hurts as long as my characters are in danger, and I know I tend to ease them out of trouble too soon-- just so I can relax a bit.

Usually my stories start with a particular character in a predicament. It's best if I don't fully understand a character yet at the outset, because the pleasure of writing a first draft, for me, lies mostly in discovering who exactly that character is, and why they make the choices they do.

I often tell my fiction students that stories happen when characters make mistakes, or at least when they make transgressions. We think of "transgressions" as bad, derelict acts, but really the word just means "to step across." Stories happen when characters step across the boundaries of what's normal to them, and into the territory of what's *possible.* When they do that, they (and/or we, the readers) discover exactly what they're capable of; they discover exactly what kind of person they are. That's scary and exhilarating.

But every once in a while I'll write a story from an impulse that is not quite so character-based. My story, "Map of the City," grew out of a desire to write a kind of love story to the city of Moscow, where I used to live. I wanted, in that case, to capture the city itself as a character in a strange predicament, undergoing the unlikely transformations that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. For me, this was a whole new (crazy?) way of conceiving a story, a whole new kind of challenge.

In every new story, I set a challenge for myself. I would never want to write 2 similar stories. Each story is an experiment, a dare, an attempt to do what I never thought I could do.

Sarah: How do you manage to maintain this strong and full empathy when terrible things are happening to your characters?

Answer: I make a simple deal with myself. If I going into a character, I'm going in all the way. It's sometimes unpleasant, sometimes awful, but that's the job. So...it's purely a act of will.

Danielle wrote, "I usually think of the short story as focusing in on one moment or element when something changes permanently."

I concur.

Like Al, I spend a lot of time in mediation on character-- quirks: imagining them in a variety of circumstances, i.e., what they're like around their Mother, Father, boss, on the playground Then, I let these scenarios play out in my mind until I reach, "critical mass."

Like Danielle, my characters are often in a predicament of action versus reaction-- this is what generally spurs story writing for me. A predicament so big an individual is forced by change of some kind. Whether that's adolescence to adulthood or something unexpected like tragic loss, coming out, or meeting a future lover. I try, as the writer to traverse the terrain in such a way that the change taking place in the character has the effect of change in the reader when they are in the fictional dream-- I think that Al touches on this beautifully in his commentary on empathy.

What I love about the short story is that it is as Danielle writes, "something... big or small", but the, "form of the story always comes back to the pressure point," to the point of change, bringing it home, leaving the reader with the imprint of words, of a message about change and evolvement. The novel can do the same, but the trajectory is slightly different-- at least I think, I've never written a novel-- it's robust in its length, while the short story is hard- hitting, fast; can happen within words.

Interesting thoughts, everyone.

Danielle: "I usually think of the short story as focusing in on one moment or element when something changes permanently."

This is the best definition of the short story I've read yet. When I'm writing a short story, I feel like I'm composing a sort of montage, a series of moments that focus on the evolution and/or dissolution of something.

I loved what Alan said re: writing "from the place of full empathy." I really admire that, Alan. I often get too anxious and enforce a psychological distance, putting myself in the narrator's audience for a little while.

Emma: "It's nice when stories do that for you, gently tap you on the back and tell you it's okay to walk away."

I love that too! It doesn't happen enough.

Thanks for the gift of listening to the internal elements of your writing process on short stories!

Loved the pieces on form and depth of character, transgressions and predicaments, taps on the back, and embracing the interior reality of a story.

For me I cherish carrying around the hard copy of the story, folded and slipped into a book, or a bookbag, or an armful of other family and child oriented tote scenarios, and pulling it out and trying to make changes sentence to sentence that help the poetry and prose of the story build to their self-directed crucibles of intimacy or power.

How do you all work on the fine elements of your art like word choice, choice of title, and the torque involved in good endings?

Shann wrote: "Thanks for the gift of listening to the internal elements of your writing process on short stories!

Loved the pieces on form and depth of character, transgressions and predicaments, taps on the..."

"family and child oriented tote scenarios" !! great phrase-

I love polishing the language until it's powerful and so quiet it's almost invisible. I do it on the computer now, though I only made the switch from paper a couple of years ago.

When I first started to write flash fiction, I would write a story and then force myself to edit it down to half the word count, without changing the story. I did that for a year, just an exercise, and am still in love with brevity. I also play around with set word forms, like drabble- stories of exactly 100 words. (Which is usually what family members get for Christmas!)

I've noticed cliches sneak in when I'm tired. I don't beat self over the head, just regard them like placeholders until I can think the idea through clearly.

I'm thinking about what you said, pulling out the paper and working on it in different places. I wonder how much changing the environment alters the writer's mind set? I'll have to take a story to the park and work on it there, see if anything changes. If it will only stop raining.

Shann wrote: "I cherish carrying around the hard copy of the story, folded and slipped into a book, or a bookbag..."

I love this stage too! When you've finished a draft but know it's not quite ready yet to show to others, so you carry it around like a secret lover, fondling it, adjusting its tie and hair... (OK, getting carried away with the metaphor here.)

There's a wonderful Zadie Smith essay, "That Crafty Feeling," in her latest collection, "Changing My Mind," where she writes about this same stage but with regard to a novel instead of a story. It's really worth reading. "... I mean when there is nothing in the world except your book... If you go outside, everything -- I mean everything -- flows freely into your novel. ... You open the paper -- every single story in the paper is directly relevant to your novel..."

if you're interested, you can read the essay here: http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/?p=...

Shaun wrote: For me I cherish carrying around the hard copy of the story, folded and slipped into a book, or a bookbag, or an armful of other family and child oriented tote scenarios, and pulling it out and trying to make changes sentence to sentence that help the poetry and prose of the story build to their self-directed crucibles of intimacy or power.

This makes me so nostalgic, Shaun. I used to print everything out in high school (I wrote poetry exclusively back then) and carry my pages around the house, around town in my purse, pulling them out at random to add things/change things/make notes. Now everything I write, except notes while I'm out, is via the computer. I still carry my drafts around--now they're on a USB flash drive. It feels funny how quickly things change.

In response to empathizing with a character by becoming the character: I used to explore my character's motivations as I first thought them up, but then discovered a sameness started creeping in. I wasn't becoming them, they were becoming me. Now when I get the basic elements of crisis, setting (which is pretty much locale, since I've traveled a great deal) active and reactive agents, I not only settle on a POV character, but I begin casting around for models for that character.

Who is she or he like that I have met? Then it becomes real fun, because I have a real person to sketch.

This is an idea I borrowed from my art classes. (I also paint) Suddenly I had much more lively individuals and, consequently, much more lively stories. Just a technique I offer.

Valerie wrote: "Shann wrote: "I cherish carrying around the hard copy of the story, folded and slipped into a book, or a bookbag..."

I love this stage too! When you've finished a draft but know it's not quite rea..."

thanks for the tip, Valerie! Just printed off the essay from Zadie.

Depending on the length of the story, my approach is a little different.

If it's a flash fiction, I try to start right at the heart of the story, the heat of the action, and race to the end anywhere from 250 words to 1,000 words.

If it's a short story that's not specifically targeted for a certain anthology, then I start with a character and let the story run from there...

Fun discussion! :)

Lisa

As someone who teaches a course on the short story as a form, it is wonderful to have all these different perspectives on how authors approach their craft gathered in one place. Thanks so much for sharing.