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A commenter on one of my earlier posts asks, “Is there a protagonist in the modern short story?” My unqualified short answer is, “Yes, always.”

Now I’ll qualify it: I can imagine an experimental, literary short story with no protagonist. Perhaps a tale told through multiple viewpoints, none of which dominates, might work. But I think even there, readers would be frustrated by the lack of a primary point of view. In genre fiction, which I prefer, I don’t think a story sans protagonist would work. Maybe Kurt Vonnegut could have pulled it off. I sure couldn’t.

A sure sign that I’ve lost my way is that I start to think about going to law school. It happened again last month, so I spent some time re-examining my goals last week. I reached a few conclusions:

1. I reminded myself that I’m not writing fiction for the money.

That’s not to say that I won’t take it if it comes, or that I’ll keep my day job even if I some day discover that writing fiction brings me enough to live on, but when I start thinking about writing fiction as a way to make a living, a peculiar thing happens: I can no longer write. More to the point, I can’t focus on anything long enough to write it. Whatever I’m working on now? Not good enough. Maybe this other thing… and pretty soon I’m spinning my wheels.

Yes, I would love to hit the best seller list consistently enough to write full-time, but I cannot make that my primary goal. I have to write what I want (and love) to write and make it as good as I can, rather than chase trends. What’s hot right now might not be hot next year, and even if it were, it’s not necessarily going interest me.

2. I confirmed that my primary goal is to publish a novel.

And then repeat that process as often as I can. And I’m talking about publishing with a professional publisher, not self-publishing. No disrespect intended toward those who self-publish. I considered a few possibilities in the self-publishing arena; it’s simply not where I want to go. So I’ll keep working on No Humans Involved. When I finish that, I’ll start a new novel, then come back and revise it. I’ll seek an agent, try to get published via the traditional route.

3. I decided to continue to write short stories.

It’s not an art form that comes naturally to me, but writing short stories has benefits that translate into publishing novels. It hones skills I need to improve and as I get stories published, that helps build a platform that can help me publish novels.

Two years ago, I discarded the idea of putting off what I most want to do so that I can spend more time on it later, with no certainty that there will be a later. I was right to reject it then, and I’m right to reject it now. Occasionally I need to remind myself of that.

A piece of advice I read when I first started writing suggested always using short character names, especially for main characters. You’re going to have to type those names a lot, the writer said, and you don’t want to have to type Theodore repeatedly when Ted will do the trick. It seemed silly until I named a protagonist “Archimedes.” Then I understood. What a pain! Why hadn’t I called him “Archie?” Or “Arch.”  “A” would have been even better. That was in the days before word processors, though. I’m old enough to have had a manual typewriter until I went to college and traded it in for an electric–but even my electric typewriter didn’t have an autocorrect feature.

You know what I’m talking about: the feature that diligently switches your hastily typed “teh” to “the.” Hijacking autocorrect is a trick I learned when I was a technical writer. The official name of most products is ridiculously long. the common name for a program might be WriterTool, but the full name is Software.com’s WriterTool Pro 2009 for Windows. You don’t want to have to type that twice. So you add an autocorrect entry to your word processor of choice that corrects the letters “swt” to the full product name. Viola, you’ve just increased your productivity and saved yourself some typing. The same technique can be used to make it easier to type long character names. In a short story I’m working on now, “psq” becomes “Pasquale” whenever I need to type the main character’s name.

Here’s how to do it. Steps provided are for Microsoft Word, but other word processors are similar. For example, in WordPerfect, the feature is called “QuickCorrect.”

Word 2003

• Select Tools > Autocorrect Options.
• Click the Autocorrect tab.

Word 2007

• Click the Office button.
• Click the Word Options button.
• In the left pane, click Proofing.
• Click the Autocorrect Options button.
• Click the Autocorrect tab.*

Then…

• In the Replace box, enter an easily typed two or three letter abbreviation for your unfortunately-named character.
• In the With field, enter the character’s full name as you’d like it to appear.
• Click Add.

After you close the dialog, type the three-letter abbreviation you entered in the Replace box. When you hit the space bar or type any punctuation mark, the abbreviation will be replaced with the character’s full name. Now isn’t that easier?

My motto is, “Higher productivity through laziness.” Happy writing, and join us next time on “The Lazy Writer” when… Oh, who am I kidding? If there’s a second Lazy Writer post, I’ll be surprised.
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*As you can see, Microsoft’s claim that Word 2007 is more efficient than previous versions is correct…  If by “more efficient,” you mean, “it takes twice as many steps to accomplish the same thing.”

“Getting an idea” is the first step in writing a short story, but the next stage is more  difficult: planning the story. Planning takes a lot of effort and time, but it’s worth it. Writing without a plan usually ends in, at best, a couple of pages that don’t go anywhere. At worst, I create a long, rambling draft that absorbs dozens of hours and makes me feel like a failure. An outline is crucial. To create one, I rely on a description of short story structure that I discovered last year: “A situation, a complication, a climax, and a denouement.” This simple definition changed the way I thought about short stories.

I had the most difficulty pinning down what “situation” meant. A born novelist, I want to spend time and pages developing background, multiple layers of conflict, and a web of character relationships. There’s no room for any of that in a short story. For a short story, situation means one thing: a protagonist who wants something.

A protagonist sitting around wanting something isn’t interesting. Neither is having the protagonist walk out and achieve the goal without some kind of complication. Complication creates tension, and tension keeps the reader interested. In most popular fiction, the complication comes in the form of another character who has a different goal that blocks the protagonist’s. This blocking goal can take a variety of forms:

• Direct opposition–prevent the protagonist from achieving the goal.
• Redirection–change the protagonist’s mind about what the goal is.
• Interference–achieve a separate, possibly unrelated goal that blocks the protagonist’s effort.
• Distraction–similar to redirection, but the antagonists doesn’t have a specific aim in mind for what the protagonist’s goal should be.

The situation and the complication make up the bulk of the story: the protagonist identifies the goal and is prevented from immediately accomplishing it. The climax occurs when the protagonist’s quest is resolved, one way or another. The protagonist succeeds, fails, abandons the effort, or redefines the goal. Denouement resolves how the story affected (or failed to affect) the main character and sometimes others.

Situation and complication take the most time to define, but once I understand both, the climax and denouement flow logically from them. For a short story, I usually use a bullet list of plot points rather than the very detailed outlines I use for longer fiction. Creating this short outline comprises about 60% of the effort of writing a short story, but without it, I’m less likely to finish at all, so it’s worth the energy and time it takes.

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