“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.
3 responses so far ↓
1 Terry Odell // May 2, 2009 at 5:13 pm
Gee Whiz. There are names for all that stuff? I’m more of the “stick the hero/heroine up a tree and shoot at him/her” writer. Didn’t realize there was technique involved.
I will confess that the short story I plotted in most detail was the hardest to write, because the adventure and discovery was gone. Since I knew everything that had to happen, the writing became a chore, searching for the best words rather than the best plot points.
2 abdellatif // Jun 8, 2009 at 3:55 pm
is there a protagonist in the modern short story
3 Yes, always, except when it’s no // Jun 16, 2009 at 4:51 pm
[...] commenter on one of my earlier posts asks, “Is there a protagonist in the modern short story?” My unqualified short answer [...]
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