salvatorefalco.com » Techniques

Progress

Sam — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 01:13:49 +0000

My second Monday off was as successful as the first. I added nearly seven pages of new material and was pleased with what I wrote. That gave me momentum and this morning I wrote 600 words that guided the story back to an existing scene which I’ll modify tomorrow. If this experiment continues to be a success, I will have to try it again. Maybe I’ll give it a try for the next novel’s first draft.

Of course

Sam — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 18:46:46 +0000

I’ve been struggling with a short story for the past two weeks. Writing the first draft earlier this year was arduous. A plot that looked good in outline seemed improbable while I wrote, and led to an unsatisfying ending. I hoped that revision would be easier. It hasn’t been. How I’ve struggled with that plot! As I wrote to a friend, “I’ve brainstormed, I’ve free-written, I’ve talked to myself on the drive to work.” Nothing has worked.

Last night before bed, I wrote a little about the problem. Maybe I programmed my subconscious to work on the issue as I slept, because this morning, these words crawled down my arm:

Of course, the real problem is that your protagonist is a type, not a character. Nothing he does is going to feel authentic because he isn’t real.

Oh. Right.

Playing without rooks

Sam — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 01:35:15 +0000

At one time, I aspired to be a decent chess player and asked a friend who played well to help improve my game. We played a few games so he could judge my skill level. Then he made me play dozens of games without my rooks. In those diagnostic games he had noticed that, like many beginner-level players, I over-relied on my rooks. Once they were taken, I was helpless. When I was forced to get by without them from the start, my skill at using the other pieces improved and my game dramatically improved once I got them back.

In my current short story in progress, I’m doing the literary equivalent of giving up my rooks: I’m writing the story without using any internalization. I do not allow myself to tell the reader what the protagonist is thinking or feeling. It’s a strategy that suits the story well, since it’s a hardboiled kind of tale. But it’s also helping me hone my skills. Instead of using bland narration, I’m forced to rely on Hazel’s actions, words, and perceptions of the setting to convey what’s going on in her head. I have to think more deeply about how she perceives her surroundings and, as a result, write more clearly about the setting than I normally would. These are skills I know I’ll need for my next novel. Already, the prose is more powerful than anything I’ve written before.

Yes, always, except when it’s no

Sam — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 20:51:25 +0000

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.

How I write a short story part 2: Planning

Sam — Fri, 01 May 2009 11:51:22 +0000

“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.