Style Isn’t Story

Sometimes, not too often, but still often enough, I get a student who believes that what you say in a work is less important than the way you say it.

“It’s all style, man! Who cares what it’s about?”

Yes, dear friends. These poor unfortunates are still with us.

Stories, if they’re to be considered at all, are just excuses to exercise one’s style – or should I put quotes around that word? Because what “style,” as these students practice it, consists of, for the most part, are certain distinctive traits of other authors placed in other contexts by the students emulating them. They insist they’re being “themselves,” but they’re really trying on stuff, experimenting, exercising – trying to figure out not who they are, but who they want to be – which is perfectly okay. That’s how you do it. That’s how you find out who you are: as a person, as a writer – as a person who is a writer. They don’t know it yet, but they will eventually.

How do I know?

I used to be one of them.

Back in the 1970s, when there were so many styles to choose from, like so many different hats to try on. And the “literary” side of the street had grown bored with telling stories. More so: they believed it was all in the technique, that the pyrotechnics was the show, and to settle on telling a compelling story to an audience was to lower yourself as an artist. It was like designing a chair that someone might actually enjoy sitting in. How dull! How utilitarian!

The artists above, the rabble below.

Usually, I shrink back from using terms like “elitist,” because they’re usually engaged in political forums and take on political taints that can’t be rinsed off. But one cannot view aesthetics that distinguish “highbrow” from middlebrow, to lowbrow, to no-brow, without feeling a sort of tyranny of exclusivity. “Don’t try this at home, kids. This is high art we’re talking here. Go back to your comic books.”

Well, move over, literati! I was going to show them what real art was all about.

Yeah, right.

Let’s put it this way: I didn’t have a mind that was particularly attuned to nuance. It wouldn’t surprise me if I wasn’t alone in that, back then, for kids my age, with overactive imaginations and a great yearning to be nearly anywhere except where they were. I wanted spectacle and pyrotechnics and just about anything that blew a hole through the status quo.

I liked the nouvelle vague movies and experimental films that were all quick cutting and filters and effects and jumping around in the narrative, and interminglings of fantasy and brutal realism. I liked the dynamic perspectives of Jim Steranko comics and the surrealism of Steve Ditko (I was more in love with his work on Dr. Strange than anything he did with Spiderman). When I discovered New Wave science fiction, I was all for it. The less I understood of what I read, the better I thought it must have been.

“Wow! This is totally incomprehensible! It must be a work of genius!”

I wanted literature to be a huge ladle dipped into the unbridled unconscious, spread out on the page without benefit of organization or interpretation. The stranger the better. In music, I was thrilled by Captain Beefheart, Sun Ra, The Stooges. I was looking for new languages and new grammar in visual expression, in sounds, in written works. No boundaries. No horizons. No walls. No “end” title.

Problem was, I didn’t know what I was rejecting, or if I was rejecting anything by embracing all these apparent manifestations of “the new” (And some of it, in spite of my generalizations, really were brilliant and wonderful; on an instinctual level, I was pretty good; on an intellectual or aesthetic level, I was a complete idiot).

I learned the history of literature backwards – of culture in general. I started with experimental writers and worked my way, years later, back to Chaucer and Beowulf.

Problem was, I didn’t know shit. I didn’t care, either.

But the further my interests went, the further I wanted – needed – to know more of that history.

One of the insights I picked up, as I increased my knowledge and experience, was that much of what I thought of as innovative had roots that went back to the very origins (or as far back as we could find) of the forms that interested me. For example, no postmodernist impressed me more than Sterne, Fielding and Cervantes.

Every age is an age of innovation and discovery. Some of these eras get more attention than others, and the attention varies from subsequent era to era. One period of the past speaks, or reflects, or echoes, a later age more directly than others. That’s when an author, or a whole era of literature is “rediscovered.”

Eventually, it became clear to me what had probably been clear to most of my contemporaries all along: innovations and experimentations in art forms are a means and not an end. The most successful explorations of “style” are the product of necessities driven by other needs. Something we want to say or tell can’t be told any other way.

We do what we have to do to make the work of art we want to make. While we’re doing it, we call it, “getting the job done.” Afterward, we may call it “style,” but rarely before. Style is something someone else calls your writing. You just call it “work.”

Simple enough, but it took me about thirty-one years to get there.

Now, it becomes my job to guide students away from the excesses in which I indulged, and produced reams and reams of unreadable drivel.

Can I do it? Maybe with some students. With others, no.

This is both good and bad. Good because the itinerant student in question has the intrinsic stubbornness that makes for a good writer. But that only works when the writer is, well, right. If not, the writer will spend a long, long time (like me) finding out that the hill chosen to die upon is actually two hills over.

We all live and learn. Some faster than others, but we learn. If you ever stop, it’s almost as if you’ve stopped being a writer. You’re just going through the motions.

Never sacrifice clarity to style. Style should enhance clarity, otherwise it’s holding you back.

Never sacrifice story to style, otherwise you’re just putting fancy wrapping paper around an empty package.

So I think: what the hell do I know? I’m just a guy who stumbled into a teaching job, and what I know about writing should be considered suspect at best. What does someone who really knows about writing have to say?

The nearest book on writing at hand is Worlds of Wonder by David Gerrold. I open it up at random and the gods of serendipity smile upon me.

Page 234:

You have to know what you want to say.

If you have no clear goal, then you’re just fumbling around, smearing paint on canvas, pounding randomly on the piano keys, and throwing yourself about on the stage in semblance of a performance. If you don’t really know what you’re evoking, then all the exercises of style and form and tense and person will not disguise it.

On the previous page (233), in describing the New Wave sf writers:

In the breakaway from traditional form, what had also occurred was a disinheritance of the storytelling structure. Much of this experimentation was necessary, creating an important expansion of the range of ideas and treatments available to authors, yet it also gave comfort to the idea that traditional forms were worthless and should be discarded. The result, for a while, was a nihilistic abandonment of story.

Fortunately, this trend didn’t last long –

That’s the word from David Gerrold, and he does, without dispute, know a thing or two about writing.

So – do what you have to do. And may the light shine upon you sooner rather than later.

The Cathedral and the Story

At the risk of infuriating my students and colleagues yet again, and doing so in the shadow of the recent, tragic fire at the Cathedral of Notre Dame, I've been thinking recently about the similarities between stories and cathedrals, and maybe how the one helps to explain the other, at least to some degree.

I often refer to stories having “shapes.” I learned the phrase “story-shaped idea” from somewhere and it has never left me. I have had numerous problems with discussions of story structure as practiced in academic and non-academic circles. I learned only recently what a “Freytag Triangle”  (or “Pyramid”) is, and it turns out to be the renaming of a description for “story” I've encountered most of my life, and found true only in the most general (and least helpful) sense.

The Freytag Triangle.  Writers fly into it and are never seen again.

Three-Act Structure.  For the geometrically-impaired.

Six-Act Structure.  Three-Act structure cut into smaller pieces.

Plotto. Pick a plot – any plot.

The Lester Dent Master Plot. Pick this plot!

The Hero’s Journey. A train that only travels in circles.

Narratology – Don’t Go There!

Seriously, all these terms surrounding narrative structure are all fine and well (when I'm in a good mood), but they are at best what you might call “analytic.” Some of them apply best to completed works but do little to help the author of a work in progress. Some of them will help an author construct a plot, but a plot is not a story.

I return to the brilliant observation of book editor Teresa Nielsen-Hayden: “Plot is a literary convention. Story is a force of nature.”

Narratives or plots may be “structured,” but stories are shapes, like containers, or vessels.

On a practical level, they must perform a function and contain the elements essential to make the comprehensible and meaningful communication we tend to call a story.

On an aesthetic level, the variations of shapes, colors, materials and the like are limitless. Function may dictate form, but both form and function are determined by that natural force: Story.

We may not know what it is, but we recognize it when we see it.

More or less.

Sometimes function hides in form, but it is certainly there.

Sometimes the form proclaims the function loudly.

Story can’t survive without a structure, and a structure without a story has no purpose.

The same, to some degree, can be said for cathedrals.

They have elements that help define them as cathedrals: narthex, nave, transept, choir, ambulatory, towers, gables, pinnacle, niche, tympanum, rose window … and so on. Other structures may contain these elements, but are not cathedrals, but nearly all cathedrals will contain these elements – and something more.

At the heart of a story is a point. It may not be a “big” point, or a good point, and it may not be one consciously conceived by its author, but if you look at the story long enough, you’ll find it. One may argue that it is there only because you’ve searched for it, and it’s the product of your searching more than it is of the author’s intention, but it doesn’t matter. Stories are for readers, an audience, and this is one of the things readers do with what they read – again, whether it was their primary intention or not. We read stories for many reasons, and some of those reasons we’re not conscious of at first, or even later, or ever.

At the heart of every cathedral, likewise, is a point. It is a manifestation of a view of the universe, of metaphysics, of theology.

It is a model of the universe as conceived by its initial adherents, perhaps, but it is more than a treatise written in stone, wood, and glass. And one doesn’t have to be an adherent to the worldview, or metaphysics, or theology, to appreciate the point the building makes.

It is a design, but it is not the product of any single designer (except for more recent examples); it is the product of many, laborers, craftspeople, artisans.

Each cathedral built along the general principles outlined by what we recognize as common or defining elements to the structure, but each one is distinct, different – its own experience. And every individual who journeys into the structure will find something distinct and, possibly, wondrous within it (and around it), beyond the intended tenets of any specific religion, spirituality, or theology.

And this is one reason why we are often moved so deeply when we visit these places. They are singular structures, but their very singular-ness is an echo of an entire reality – not to be mistaken for “reality” itself, whatever that is, but a response to reality, one of many within the human experience.

Which also can be said, without too great an exaggeration, of a story. The materials differ (thank heavens for that; fiction is cheaper and easier to carry around), but the results, potentially, are often the same.

Neither cathedrals nor stories should ever be taken for granted.

Well Hey, It's Been Only Fifteen Months ...

I’m back.

Yes, it’s been a while.

I got a “day job.”

And I had to finish writing a novella – one that I really had to finish before I could move on to anything else.

And even with a day job, I wasn’t about to give up teaching. And teaching wasn’t about to give me up, either.

But every time I thought about writing another blog entry, I got blocked.

Seriously blocked.

There was one more entry I wanted to write, or assemble, concerning exercises I use in short story writing classes. I wanted to go back over the past twenty-five-plus years and look over the exercises, scan a few of my handouts – put it together in a comprehensive way, which meant searching through stacks and stacks of old papers.

A lot of work – but not a lot of time. And I kept telling myself that I needed to finish that last piece of the puzzle and then I could move on.

But I couldn’t finish that last puzzle piece.

It’s taken me until now to get past it. I’ll write about exercises – later.

For now, I just want to get back.

Yes, I have a “day job” – at big advertising agency, one of the biggest and most prestigious agencies in the world. And a place that even has a kind of philosophy – one that I can even relate to and sort of believe in.

But it’s been a strange, awkward transition for me. Partly because I feel like an interloper, walking into a world I don’t want to throw off-balance by my presence.

In one respect, I came in highly knowledgeable. In another, I am dumber than dirt.

Writers are usually people who can feel two different ways about things simultaneously, if not more ways. That’s how we can work out conflicts in stories. We play chess from both sides of the board.

So I could feel at once like I had superpowers (though I couldn’t use them without betraying myself) and like I was a complete incompetent, out of my league and out of my depth. At some point, I believed, I would be discovered (either for incompetency or for possessing superpowers) and summarily dismissed.

In the mornings, I would sit in a little fast food place on the first floor of the building where I work – for an hour before starting time. I would order a small coffee and write. I’d write in my legal pad, in my spiral-bound notebook, until both were filled. I wrote every scene I thought I needed for my novella, many of which were cut or altered by the “final” edit (I know I’ll probably edit more at some point). I wrote and wrote and wrote. On Saturdays I typed up what I’d written in longhand.

I hadn’t written so much in longhand in ages – much of it crap, but it felt very different to write in longhand again, crap or otherwise.

Except for those days when I needed the time to read and comment upon student assignments, I remained devoted to finishing the novella in a very disciplined way. And for those months, between eight and nine in the morning, I became something of a fixture in that fast food place.

That was my superpower – not that I was writing anything good, but that I was writing, period.

Eventually, my energies shifted from writing longhand to revising my printed-out pages – turning a mess of papers into a manuscript of about 180 pages, then paring it down about thirty pages to something that resembled a novella.

In a new job, in a new world, it’s important to find some sort of “center” for yourself – something that helps define you when it seems that everything else seems to be trying to define you in a score of alien ways.

I’m supposed to be a copy editor, whatever that is, for a good part of the week.

When I’m not doing that, whatever it is, I’m supposed to be a teacher – whatever that is. And I read a lot of work in that capacity as well as reading a lot more work for workshops, writers’ group and the like.

It’s easy to forget what got you started in this direction in the first place.

I hope I’ve remembered it now. Because even when you’re trudging at a death march pace through a scene you can’t see an end to, it feels like there’s nowhere else you’d rather be; nothing else you’d rather be doing, no one else you want to be.

More about this later.

Writing Short Stories -- Accumulated Nonsense from 23 (Going on 24) Years of "Teaching": Appendix Appendicitis 2

Took me long enough, didn't it? This is what happens when I conceive of making a simple list of stories I've used in class with a brief explanation of why. Most of the time, I don't know why, not consciously. And the answers aren't always simple.

I have one more appendix to add to my notes on short story writing. May I complete it before I mark my twenty-fifth year of teaching, or pass into oblivion.

A Long Reading List of Short Stories

Below is a list of stories I’ve assigned to my Short Story Writing students over the years. It may not be complete but it’s as close as I will ever get without digging through boxes and crates (yes, I do have boxes; crates may be a slight exaggeration). It constitutes my unofficial “anthology” of short stories, if ever I were to put together a textbook for my class. I never used a textbook , because I never found one that contained everything I wanted. I keep running into the problem that most collections of short fiction are geared for literature classes. I would like to see more anthologies designed for use in writing classes (publishers: get in touch with me; I’m available).

Certain stories I’ve used over and over again. Others I have tried once and promptly abandoned. It’s difficult to know how a particular class will respond to a particular story. Every class reads the same story differently, just as every individual reads the same story differently. In one class I might have great success with Nabokov’s “A Guide to Berlin”; in another class it shoots right over the students’ heads. You make your picks and you take your chances.

The stories reflect my own tastes more than they reflect any notion of choosing “the best” or “the greatest.” That’s for literature classes. In my writing classes I’m more interested in what’s being done story-tellingwise and how that may have been accomplished. Of course, that doesn’t preclude a story being “great,” which a significant number of these stories happen to be (and not necessarily the ones you might first suppose).

When I started listing these stories, I had no idea how many there were. Twenty-four years will do that.

In no particular order:

“Araby” by James Joyce

I’ve been using this one for ages. If you haven’t read “Araby” you haven’t taken my class. The quintessential “epiphany” story, which serves as a decent model for what can be done with a story based on “personal experience,” real or imagined. Sometimes I say it’s the greatest story ever written; other times I say I haven’t the slightest idea why it’s earned its reputation. But I keep reading it and I keep finding new reasons to admire it.

“A Dill Pickle” by Katherine Mansfield

This may be my second most often assigned story. I love that all takes place in one scene, in a little tea room, between two people – although much is touched upon within those constraints. I admire its economy and its mastery of point of view.  I am also amazed at how differently students will interpret the characters in this story (and so validly)

“Duel” by Richard Matheson

I’ve used this story because the TV movie made from it is so well known. I emphasize the economy and precision of Matheson’s storytelling. We also look at the opening sentence: it’s apparent simplicity but it’s subtle drawing of the reader into the action of the story.

“In the Late Cretaceous” by Connie Willis

I use this one because it’s so funny and because of the way she draws the parallels between the dinosaurs demise and the modern university, as well as keeping the multiple threads of her characters in play without dragging down the story’s pace.

“Defender of the Faith” by Philip Roth

A great “problem” story. Editorial comment: you have to go back to the short fiction to see how great a writer Roth can be.

“The Last Mohican” by Bernard Malamud

Malamud’s “doppelganger” story. It’s a good example of a story putting a character to a very personal test by pairing him with a character that subtly reflects a part of his own unacknowledged, darker nature.

“A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor

Absolutely essential to read this story. We look at the opening paragraph and see how it prepares you for every subsequent revelation of the story. The ending as well is worth many re-readings.

“Parker’s Back” by Flannery O’Connor

When I get tired of talking about how great “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is, I try to find another exemplary O’Connor story. This one isn’t perfect, but it has at its heart a great problem, which the protagonist tries to solve. His failure is brilliantly illustrated, like the tattoo itself that Parker gets.

“A Temple of the Holy Ghost” by Flannery O’Connor

See above. Along with the masterful control of point of view, its powerful climax and its serene, haunting ending.

“The Demon Lover” by Elizabeth Bowen

I read this story for years without going back to the ballad of which this turns out to be an effective and loyal retelling – a matter which adds such great resonance to Bowen’s painstaking and effective use of detail – sense of place, character, tone and mood. The heart of the story is so lightly but effectively introduced. And the ending, after multiple readings, remains chilling and disturbing in the very best way.

“A Tree of Night” by Truman Capote

One year my class night fell on Halloween. I decided to celebrate (and allow my students to celebrate) by choosing three of the creepiest stories I had ever read. This was one of them. I love stories that take place in essentially one setting – in one scene. I later tried my hand at my own “terrors of travel” story, called “The Ambiguities.” Capote, I confess, still managed the more effective job.

“Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” by Joyce Carol Oates

My second choice for Halloween (my third was “The Demon Lover”). A profoundly scary story where essentially nothing dramatic occurs. It is all in the dialog – the sense of threat from “Mr. Friend,” of the mercilessly cool exercise of power and the thick sense of inevitability of our unfortunate protagonist’s fate.

“A Guide to Berlin” by Vladimir Nabokov

On first reading, this looks like a random selection of jottings, interesting in their individual vividness, but not particularly cohesive. With the last few sentences, you realize this story is a story, structured to hide its intent in plain sight. It’s still open to a number of interpretations, but its themes of war and time and remembrance remain powerful even nine decades after its first publication.

“The Jar” by Ray Bradbury

What’s in the jar? Imagination. It’s TV. It’s the unconscious manifest. It’s just junk collected in a jar. It’s the perfect metaphor – except you ruin it if you call it a metaphor. I’m not sure if I have a clear reason why I’ve used this story in class except that it fascinates me, and I hope it fascinates my students as well.

“There Will Come Soft Rains” by Ray Bradbury

I’m adamant about stories being about people. I’m also adamant about exceptions to the rule, of which this may be one of the most notable. This story “works” in a profound way, but why? The commentaries my students provide on that question I find ceaselessly fascinating.

“The Wooing of Ariadne” by Harry Mark Petrakis

I have always loved this story for its plain narrative structure, its strong first-person voice and it’s just-breaking-the-ice conclusion grabbing victory from the jaws of defeat. And yet, in its simplicity (it’s been staged as a high school play) it leaves a depth of texture and interpretation that’s humbling for any writer who reads it. Petrakis, perhaps, is a writer’s writer. He channels all his Greek ancestors with every sentence.

“The Women Men Don’t See” by James Tiptree, Jr.

I’ll never forget the rage expressed by one of my students, a retired accountant, at discovering that this was a science fiction story only after reading almost the entire story. Of course, a careful rereading reveals that this is science fiction story from the very first sentence. Books can be written about this one story – or at least collections of essays.

“The Chaser” by John Collier

This serves as the classic example of how to do a full story in one scene, consisting mostly of a dialog between a young man looking for a love potion, and the older gentleman who sells it to him for a dollar. Within the scene, we gain, in the most economic way, what led the young man here and – inevitably – where he will go from there, and how he will return to the little apartment of the older gentleman. A masterpiece of economy, voice and structure.

“Walking Distance” by Rod Serling

Often, I’ve had students in class who weren’t familiar with short stories – but they were familiar (especially if they were “of an age”) with anthology format TV shows, like The Twilight Zone. I chose this because not only is it one of the deepest, most poignant (and slightly autobiographical) of the TV episodes, it’s also one of Serling’s best short stories as short stories (he published a few collections of prose versions of his scripted episodes).

“The Familiar” by Albert E. Cowdrey

The first story of Cowdrey’s I read, which mixes a vivid New Orleans location with mystery and magic. I used it as a example of “trusting the story” to find the “voice.”

“The Little Things” by Bridget McKenna

This is a great example of how to take a fantasy premise and write about it in the most realistic way possible. A brilliant, vivid, witty tale by a most underrated writer. I thought my students would appreciate it and I was mostly right.

“The Dead Boy at Your Window” by Bruce Holland Rogers

I love this story as an example of taking an impossible, dreamlike premise and presenting it in a mix of folk tale and dream record – but never questioning its bizarre reality. It has a strong, emotional core that is never overplayed and all the more effective for that restraint.

 “The Brown Wasps” by Loren Eiseley

Technically, this is an essay, but an essay with all the elements and qualities of a good short story.

“The Snatchers” by Jane Yolen

As they say these day: “Because Jane Yolen.” I needn’t say more, except that I was looking for a story that worked in a contemporary fashion though it evoked all the disturbing strangeness of a good folk tale.

“O Lonesome Day That Ends in Shame” by Andrew Fox

“The Secret Life of Mrs. Lewis Lockhardt” by Tom O’Neal

“The Gentleman” by Martha McPhee

“Every Day Different” by Robert J. Levy

One term, many years ago, one of my students wanted to know why I didn’t use more contemporary stories in class – what was being written now and what, logically, editors were buying. I picked this story from Redbook, I believe, along with another and a couple from The New Yorker. I can’t say I remember much from the reading of them. All of them seemed somehow incomplete, indirect, in conclusive. I suppose I should give them another chance, after almost twenty years, but so far I’ve been able to find more interesting stories to add to the reading list rather than revisit this and the others I chose that term.

The exception, at one level, is the story “Every Day Different,” which I drew from a then-current issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction. The story shows exceptional skill as it finds a new take on an old story premise.

 “In the Balance” by Judith L. Post

From that same period of the stories cited above, I found this a solid, balanced and very human mystery tale drawn from the pages of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, which is still a good source for work of equal caliber.

“Riding the Rap” by Elmore Leonard

Also from that same above-mentioned period (my students rode me hard in those days). This appeared in the New Yorker, which appeared to signal that “popular” writer Leonard had arrived. The piece demonstrates all the qualities and strengths of a first chapter of an Elmore Leonard novel, which is exactly what it is.

“The Price” by Algis Budrys

Like “The Chaser,” a chilling story done in one scene, in one room, with four characters and a powerful ending.

“Semper Fi” by Damon Knight

“Masks” by Damon Knight

Knight published both these stories, in different places, with annotations on the right-hand page, explaining why he put this in or didn’t mention that. They may not be Knight’s best stories, but I like to show students that sometimes there is a method to the madness, and the effects they feel from reading a work of fiction have deliberate (as well as intuitive) causes.

“Two Gallants” by James Joyce

“Eveline” by James Joyce

Occasionally, I tired of using “Araby” in class, so at different times I have tried these two, which are both fine stories, though they don’t have that feel of lost innocence, regret, and kick-in-the-head-epiphany that makes “Araby” so vital.

“The Magic Man” by Charles Beaumont

I was looking for a story that evoked a sense of wonder without necessarily engaging in fantasy or speculation. Of wonder, of “magic,” and its intrinsic frailty. In other words, I was looking for an excuse to include a story by the brilliant (and overlooked) Charles Beaumont.

“The Portobello Road” by Muriel Spark

It occurs to me, as I look at the Muriel Spark stories I’ve chosen over the years, that the brilliance of Spark is often in her choice of point of view. Here’s a ghost story told by the ghost. It is not like anything you would imagine a ghost story to be, but when you reach the end it is profoundly apparent that no other point of view could have told this story so fully and so powerfully.

“Three Fairy Tales With Unhappy Endings Due to Bad Timing” by Pamela Miller

A set of three poems by my wife which are exactly what the title states they are. I gave them to students so they can see how one can re-imagine folk and fairy tales, using the basic structure of such tales to add a new twist, especially helpful for writers who have trouble applying structure to their writing – why not borrow parts or even the whole of another kind of story?

“Exchange” by Ray Bradbury

A beautiful latter-day Bradbury tale that takes place in a library. What’s not to like?

“The Distant Sound of Engines” by Algis Budrys

Budrys was a genius for many reasons, but he possessed a particular genius for telling science fiction tales without traditional science fiction trappings or settings. This story takes place completely in a hospital room, narrated by an injured truck driver. It is evocative, haunting and unmistakably science fiction.

“Henry James, This One’s for You” by Jack McDevitt

Stories often rely on the decisive actions of their protagonists. That’s certainly true of Jack’s evocation of a book editor’s anxiety. Half the readers of this story cheer the editor’s action; the other half scream bloody murder (for a reason).

“Steadfast Castle” by Michael Swanwick

A story told entirely in dialogue utilizing a simple method and effective method. More than a clever exercise in technique, content and form are beautifully matched.

“Charles” by Shirley Jackson

A recent addition. I wanted to find a Shirley Jackson story that wasn’t “The Lottery.” This story may telegraph its conclusion, especially for more sophisticated readers, but it’s still fun to study how Jackson drops all the hints that allow we readers to intuit the story’s ending long before the protagonist does.

“He Swung and He Missed” by Nelson Algren

I had a hard time choosing an Algren story for my classes. So many of them seem formless; others have a structure that seems to lead to an inevitable march toward doom – neither impression is really true, but it can be too easy to arrive at that conclusion after an initial reading. I picked this one because it’s essentially a love story, an unabashed love story, and a poignant one at that. I believe Algren is one of the unacknowledged geniuses of American letters, and I decided this one is an “accessible” introduction of both Algren’s wit and his hard edges.

“Circe” by Eudora Welty

Just tried this story recently. I was intrigued by a Welty story that didn’t take place in her native Mississippi, and a story based on myth.  I admire that Welty has chosen the point of view of a character from whose POV we rarely see, and that her narrator’s eye is as relentlessly perceptive as in the best of her better known works.

“Dalrymple Goes Wrong” by F. Scott Fitzgerald

I chose this one because it has an opening that is, of its sort, absolutely perfect.

“The Forks” by J. F. Powers

I chose this one because it has an ending that is, of its sort, absolutely perfect.

“Coming to Terms” by Eileen Gunn

I liked this one because it has a mystery at its core that is never solved and that keeps the story from resolving, I believe (though I may be wrong). And yet it works. It also helps that its inspiration is the author Avram Davidson, who I consider one of finest writers of the twentieth century, and whom I suspect would appreciate this story, and even unravel its intrinsic mystery.

“The Green Glass Sea” by Ellen Klages

Started (and published) as a short story. Turned out to be the first chapter of her first novel. Is it a short story disguised as a novel chapter, or a novel chapter disguised as a short story? Either way you decide, it has a vivid austerity. Klages is an author who will always find a way to break the rules, but invisibly.

“The Prehensile Tail” by James Tate

Tate is a brilliant, surrealistic prose poet. His work often breaks every expectation a reader might have, but we still enjoy reading his crazy little tales. I like to ask my students, “How can he do that?”

“The First Year of My Life” by Muriel Spark

Another of Spark’s brilliant exercises in voice, this time by casting a baby as omniscient narrator. Just when you think you’ve pegged it as a brilliant stunt, the story gets profoundly serious. Never turn your back on Muriel Spark

“We’re the Only Colored People Here” by Gwendolyn Brooks

Another novel chapter disguised as a short story and included in anthologies, but all the parts of a short story are there. Brroks uses her skills as a poet to distill all of the work of a story into a vivid scene. I use it as an example of how poets teach us a lot when they write prose. Probably more than prose writers can teach poets when they enter into verse.

“To Da-duh, In Memoriam” by Paule Marshall

Story as memoir, or memoir as story, executed with the utmost craft.

“The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe

The ultimate example of the “unreliable narrator” and how it can be used to devastating effect.

 “Bang Bang You’re Dead” by Muriel Spark

Another splendid Spark conceit: people sitting in a room watching home movies. Each reel of film provokes a memory that helps to tell the story behind each shot in the movie. Nothing is ever as simple as it really seems.

 “And Come From Miles Around” by Connie Willis

I love this story because it’s about perceiving things and noticing things that everyone else takes for granted. It is a story about being a writer in which a writer never appears. Willis is known these days for her big-getting-bigger novels, but her brilliance is most apparent in her shorter works.

“The Cat and Mouse in Partnership” by the Brothers Grimm

I first read this Grimm fairy tale as an undergraduate and I still find it to be a near-perfect model of folktale as story. “And that is the way of the world.”

“Never Meet Again” by Algis Budrys

I use this one because it’s one of my favorite “parallel universe” stories. You can count on Budrys to find the deeper human dimension to almost any science fictional concept.

“The Garden Party” by Katherine Mansfield

This story so splendidly models and balances all the traditional elements of a short story, it would be shame not to use it in a writing class. A lit class would after all sorts of perceived symbolism here, but the power of the story is in its perfect plain-ness. It is completely out in the open and brilliant.

 “To Build a Fire” by Jack London

I’ve used this classic story to illustrate how a short story can resolve itself without the protagonist’s success. After all these years it remains a chilling (pun intended) finale.

“The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant” by Jeffrey Ford

It’s so difficult to find stories that accurately depict the life and activity of a writer, I grabbed this one the moment it was published in Fantasy and Science Fiction. It accomplishes the first goal, and neatly illuminates the nature of fiction by the end of the story.

“My First Time” by Drazen Bell (Gregory Bell, former student)

Greg Bell attended the first short story class I ever taught, so of course I wanted to include his story in my class when it was published. It effectively camouflages its structure in a breezy narration, focuses on the most mundane of matters and defies you to find it uninteresting.

“The Cold Equations” by Tom Godwin

“Think Like a Dinosaur” by James Patrick Kelly

I paired these stories in my Science Fiction Writing Workshop and they worked so successfully together, I figured I’d try them in my short story class. The pair demonstrate how literature is in a conversation with itself. The Godwin story illustrates an effective strategy for manipulating a reader’s perceptions of what constitutes the “cold equations” of the universe. The Kelly story addresses our own sense of identity and uniqueness: the “equations” aren’t cold, but we can be.

“The Catbird Seat” by James Thurber

“The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” by James Thurber

I went to Thurber because I wanted more humor in the stories we read in class. The oddest thing we discovered is that humor often doesn’t survive scrutiny. With Thurber, humor is most often a product of voice and though both these stories have major flaws if we look at them structurally, they are still great fun to read.

“The Riddle” by Walter De La Mare

This is one of the oddest stories I’ve used in a class and one of the oddest I’ve ever read, period. It breaks several of the rules that a class like mine tries to outline, but either in spite of or because of its rule-breaking, it creates a powerfully disturbing atmosphere that never lets go. Never.

“The Novella Race” by Pamela Sargent

A funny story treating the literalized metaphor of competition among writers. What if the writing of novellas was an established Olympic event? Years before NaNoWriMo made this sort of thing less metaphorical.

“The Goldin Boys” by Joseph Epstein

“The Count and the Princess” by Joseph Epstein

I wanted to find stories that took place in recognizable Chicago neighborhoods and address some real problems faced by people growing up  in a world that might be familiar to some of my students. Epstein taught Freshman Writing for many years, and his concerns for clarity and precision are joined with a profound desire to find dignity in every little action and gesture.

“Madame Zilensky and the King of Finland” by Carson McCullers

I wanted to find a McCullers story that a.) did not take place in the South, b.) was funny and c.) had that odd kind of ambiguous reversal that marks so many of her works. So much depends upon a dog walking backwards, sometimes.

“The Circular Ruins” by Jorge Luis Borges

“Everything and Nothing” by Jorge Luis Borges

“The Garden of Forking Paths” by Jorge Luis Borges

There is no way that I can describe the genius of Borges in a few sentences. I won’t even try. Why I try to introduce Borges to my classes is that I want to show them that you can write about the most metaphysical of subjects (reality and the nature of identity) through the simple specificity of places and people

“Pump Six” by Paolo Bacigalupi

Because it begins so deceptively simple and it ends so powerfully. This is the story I point to when I want to show aspiring writers who and what they’re competing with. Novelists will be relieved to know that Bacigalupi is best in the shorter form. Don’t get me wrong: his novels are great. But his stories are masterpieces, “Pump Six” most of all.

“Kirinyaga” by Mike Resnick

Resnick’s skills as a storyteller are apparent throughout this story, but the main reason I picked it for my short story class (as well as for my science fiction writing class) is that his narrator, who is also his protagonist, is an intelligent, likeable, sly and memorable character who is also justifying his performaning an act most readers will find abominable. I ask my students, “How do you get away with that?” “Do you ‘get away’ with that? And why?"

 “Speech Sounds” by Octavia Butler

Science fiction fans are disappointed when this story is chosen over Butler’s “Blood Child” for selection in major anthologies. I’m not. Every sentence sizzles with anger and frustration, and yet the story is anything but despairing. She does a number of very daring things for a short story author to attempt. Contemporary readers will think the science-fictional “concept” here is the devastating virus and the post-apocalyptic landscape in which Butler’s story takes place. What’s truly “sfnal” here is that Butler’s story “about” language is a meditation upon language and questions its boundaries in ways that make more allegedly sophisticated works appear anemic and superficial in comparison.

 “And Now the News” by Theodore Sturgeon

I can pick a dozen Sturgeon stories to use in a writing class, for a dozen different reasons. But I believe the one common element you would find within the diversity of his ideas, structures and characters is this: voice. His narrators are always in control of the story, and always directly address you, as if you were sitting across the table from them, in a café or dining room. This one, which addresses some aspects of suburban life seemed appropriate in a class that I teach at several suburban campuses. It still delivers a powerful kick at the end.

My Latest Mantra and a couple of quotes

(a brief inclusion I'm adding to my class notes for the "Writing Short Stories" class I teach for Oakton's Alliance for Lifelong Learning Program. It will go at the end of the section on "Narrative -- Plotting -- 'Story.'"

Below that is a non-satori satori taken from Algis Budrys' brief little masterpiece, Writing to the Point. Did you ever wonder why it seems all the best books on writing are also the shortest? This will go after the 2007 satori about "the BING! moment."

So now your version of my class notes will be complete as well -- Kids! Collect them all!)

MY LATEST MANTRA (in 2014): Journalists, election campaign consultants, marketing “experts” and other souls who wish to sound sophisticated and erudite have seized upon the term “narrative.” It’s become the latest secret key and entré into what’s happening, how the world works and how to make the world seem like it is working. You can’t go half a minute watching a PBS talk show without hearing someone use it in some knowing fashion. Which is fine. I’m all for everyone with a smart phone thinking they know all the secrets of the universe (unless they think that by knowing them they should by rights control the universe as well, and then act upon that belief).

But when it comes to writing, specifically the writing of stories, and fictional ones at that, I find myself reciting this mantra as I read the work of a number of my student:

n  The “stuff that happens” is not the narrative.

n  The narrative is not the plot.

n  The plot is not the story.

Each may lead successively to the next, but never (or hardly ever) mistake the one for the other, or think that you may arrive at the end result without the aid of each (or at least two out of three).

And nothing is more important, at least to the writer, than the story.

 +   +   +

NOT-SO SATORI IN 2014: I keep looking for simple ways to say this, but Algis Budrys can’t be beaten at succinctness: “Writing primarily consists of forming a series of events in your mind and somehow transmitting them into the mind of a reader.”

And one more: “Story affects the reader through a balance between an engineered series of events and an artful depiction of what they mean to the characters involved in them. Without the art, the engineering is empty hackwork. Without the engineering, the art can’t be communicated clearly.”

(from Writing to the Point, The Unifont Company, Evanston, 1994)