What Ray Bradbury Didn’t Teach You About Short Stories (and Why)

 

(I wrote this piece for the Ray Bradbury course thrown to me mid-semester by circumstances outside my control. They seem to be an excellent bunch of students but have some trouble in discussing the short stories on the reading list – and in writing first drafts of stories allegedly “inspired” by Bradbury’s works. It occurred to me that most of the students hadn’t a clue to what short stories are, and maybe someone had better tell them before they get any further in this life. Besides, this isn’t a lit class but a “Craft and Process Seminar,” whatever that is. What’s more “Craft and Process” than learning what a short story is? Therefore… )

 

“The purpose of trial and error, imitations and experiments, constant slaving through uncertainty and despair is twofold: to acquire merciless self-discipline; to acquire conscious story patterns and reduce them to unconscious practice. I’ve often said that you become a writer when you think story, not about a story.”

– Alfred Bester, introduction to “Time is the Traitor” in Starlight: The Great Short Fiction of Alfred Bester (1976)

 

Even in his book about writing, Zen in the Art of Writing, Ray Bradbury never answered a certain simple, basic question that may have been asked of him a million times: What is a story?

If anyone knew the answer, it was Bradbury. Novels, poems, plays, screenplays, essays notwithstanding, Bradbury is best known as an author of short stories.

I don’t think it was a deliberate dodge. Bradbury knew so well what stories were, he may have taken for granted that everyone else knows what a story is. 

And the reason for that, I suspect, is this: Bradbury read so many stories, and read so extensively, that he thought in stories, i.e. his thoughts naturally took story-shaped ideas. It wasn’t necessarily some sort of gift or talent. You have to work at it.

Many people starting out as writers are not as familiar with short stories. They may have read a few in school, but much of what takes up their self-motivated reading are novels. Novels, of course, are stories too, but they can take a number of twists and turns and explore sidelines; or they can be stacks of stories, one atop the other; or interwoven stories of many characters in many places at many times.

I’ve spent a good part of my life teaching folks about short stories. I’ve written a lot about it, too. And I’ve directed aspiring writers to a lot of what has been written about short stories by others. It’s what I do.

There’s no need to bore you with a lot of that at this time, or maybe at any time, granted you have an intrinsic sense of what makes one batch of pages a story and another batch of X-number of pages of prose fiction – a fragment, a scene, a chapter, but not a story.

Within the traditions of storytelling, it’s simple enough to distinguish five basics elements (I don't call them parts, though many others do) you will find in every story. Or, if you don’t find them in a story, it’s because the author has made their presence felt by their absence, or through some other clever redistribution of their weight upon the story as a whole. You’ve got to have these elements or you don’t have a story. And it doesn't matter how these elements appear, in what structure they may be used. Some teachers talk about “three-act structure,” but you don’t need three acts to tell a story, as long as the story has all the elements. The story doesn’t even have to look like a story: it can disguise itself in an imitation of another form, like a text message, or a journal entry, or a piece of journalism. It can look like a postcard, but if it has all the elements, it’s a story.

What are those elements? The answers will seem obvious, but think about them for a moment. Very often, beginning writers mistake elements or discard them, or consider one or the other of them unnecessary, or covered elsewhere.

First, one needs a character/protagonist. The person (even if the person is an object, or sometimes a collective) is who the story is about. The focus upon this character helps shape what the story is about.

Second, the character has to have a sort of defining motivation. Characters can have all sorts of motivations about many things, but there's usually one interest, one desire, one need, that defines the character most specifically, at least for the purposes of this story.

Third, the story has to happen somewhere. The “somewhere” can be described in great detail or it can be sketched out with a minimum of particulars. But even when sketched out, it has to have the feel of a real place, even when the place is completely unreal (Oz, Narnia, Pluto, Hyperborea).

Fourth, the character has to be confronted with . . . stuff!

An opposing force. A nemesis. Something that prevents or obstructs the character’s defining motivation. This can come from outside the character, or from within the character. Ideally, the external force working against the character is a reflection of an inner force that prevents the character from doing what needs to get done.

Fifth, the collision between the character’s defining motivations and the stuff – the forces opposing them – must result in a significant outcome. It can and is often called the resolution. It can be a victory or a defeat. It can be a standoff. It can be subtle or it can come in accompanied by a brass band and twelve sticks of dynamite. No matter how the outcome is reached, it needs to result in a change. The change may be in the character’s self, or it may be in our perception of the character. If we can’t answer the question “What changes?” by the end of the story, either something’s missing in the story or in our reading of the story.

That’s pretty much it. Sounds easy, but often the most difficult things to do are also the simplest.

And it works. Try it. Think over any of the Bradbury stories you’ve read so far in this class. You'll find all these elements there. Try it with the stories we’ll be reading next. After you’ve read the story, ask yourself: “Who’s story is this?” “What do they want?” “Where is this happening?” “What gets in the way?” “How does it all work out?”

I trust you’ll find the answers in any story (even in bad stories sometimes), by Bradbury or by any other author you choose to read. And you’ll also discover that the elements are most interesting when they also are most cleverly hidden and difficult to discern.

And once you have seen how these elements work in the stories you read, it’s possible that you can more readily apply them to the stories you write as well.

 

Two-way Street

The other night I awoke from a dream and found myself compelled to write down some thoughts that floated in my head as sort of the after-burn of dreaming. And that was about what “fantasy” – of the literary type – teaches us. 

Last night, the thoughts preceded the dream, and had to do with science fiction. 

I was reading a manuscript a former student asked me to read for her and comment on. I was no more than a few pages into it when I found myself stymied. It was written about a future world someone might have written about in the 1940s, where, along with humans, there were two kinds of humanoid robots. And it seemed so “retro” that I had to write to the author before I could go any further. I wanted to explain that the conversation about artificial intelligence had progressed a great deal in the seventy-plus years since Isaac Asimov started kicking around ideas about robots.  

There were many presumptions made about “intelligence” and “human behavior” and “self-awareness” and “autonomy” in those days. In a way, we know a lot more about such things, but in another way, we know much less – and in this I’m using the word “know” in a somewhat sloppy way. It’s not so much what we know as what we presume to know.  

In other words, perhaps, we define the problem in such a way as to arrive at a simple solution. It’s not about the “solution,” so to speak, but the definition. If the definition is off, the solution doesn’t really “solve” anything. 

It brought me back to my reading of Louis H. Sullivan’s The Autobiography of an Idea, published the year of his death in 1924. 

 

He [Sullivan himself, writing about himself in the third person a la Henry Adams] had worked out a theory that every problem contains and suggests its own solution. That a postulate which does not contain and suggest its own solution is not in any sense a problem, but a misstatement of fact or an incomplete one. He had reached a conviction that this formula is universal in its nature and in application. ... if one wished to solve the problem of man's nature, he must seek the solution within man himself. ... 

 

When the notion of humanity sitting at the top of the Great Chain of Being was considered indisputable, it was easier for our ancestors to figure out their priorities. Today, we’re not only uncertain of our position on the chain, but whether or not the chain exists at all. 

The more we know, the more we sense how much more there is to know. The more knowledge we gain, the more we understand how much of our universe is perhaps unknowable – at least in the immediate future. 

And I found myself thinking: the important thing in science fiction is not what we know, but what we don’t know. That’s what makes it fun and thrilling and fascinating – discovering the limits of what we know and speculating upon all that we don’t. 

And then I went to sleep. 

And then I dreamed about the house where I grew up. 

Except that it wasn’t the house where I grew up, not physically. It looked older, bigger. But it did have one thing my real house had: a crawlspace. 

And in the crawlspace I discovered that about a dozen college students had snuck in and were living there. They had fashioned their own little cubicles, and their own cubby spaces where they stored their books and laptops and clothing. They had their own sleeping bags and lights. It was all a very neat arrangement. But once I discovered it I had to figure out if I should allow them to live there or throw them out. After all, they were living there without permission of anyone. 

But they were living there because, of course, they had no money. And I could understand that. So I decided that I would let them live there and, if they ever found themselves with a little money to spare, to make a “donation.” 

Unfortunately, the house wasn’t mine. And eventually my brother arrived. And it was understood that he had power of attorney over the “estate,” such as it was, and would throw the students out or call the police on them.  

I awoke before any such eviction occurred. I felt bad about the students and what might happen to them. I hoped they would find another crawlspace somewhere.  

But I felt good about my decision not to evict them. Were it my decision to make, they could have stayed as long as they wanted. 

There was all sorts of other stuff happening in the dream. My parents were there, though dead – their presence was in every room. Pam ordered groceries, and two African immigrants who delivered them were waiting for Pam to fold up the boxes so they could be used for the next delivery. And I had an amusing exchange with a gentleman from Goodwill when I discovered that the uniform shirt he was wearing was exactly the same make as the one I was wearing. I have no idea how this all may have fit with the alleged “big thought” I went to sleep with: Science Fiction is not about what we know, but what we don’t know. 

Maybe there isn’t a connection, but I suspect there is. 

Suspect, but don’t know. 

And somehow, for some reason, I’m perfectly okay with that.

 

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.

Not In Our Stars

“It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors.”

– Jorge Luis Borges, “The Fearful Sphere of Pascal”

On an afternoon I’m supposed to be writing, I get up and walk around. I fidget. It happens when something isn’t coming out right.

I’m in a library. Books surround me. There are times when this can feel oppressive to a writer with a work in progress. So many books. Why add to the noise of language? What will one more work add to this vast outpouring of story?

There are other times when the shelves and shelves of books feel like a resource. I have an army of allies. At the right moment, you can hear the books whispering to you. Some of them are whispering answers. Some of them are trying to help you finish your story.

You take from a random shelf a random book and turn to a random page. Except it isn’t a random choice – you have been pulled by some uncanny magnetism to the right book at the right page at the right moment.

Or it could be truly random. Outside the framework of causalities real and imagined, most everything is.

This time I reach for David Gerrold’s book on science fiction writing, Worlds of Wonder, because I don’t have a copy of it at home (well, I do, but it’s from the Columbia library, which means it one day has to return to their shelves).

The “random” page I turn to is under the chapter title “Transformation” (page 101) and addresses the matter of fictional characters, specifically protagonists, and ways to think about the problem of change that most every fictional protagonist has to face.

The whole matter of characters in fiction has been on my mind a lot. Science fiction has always been perceived as having problems with the creation of vivid characters. For much of its history, the criticism has been valid, with many and varied notable exceptions.

The criticism remains valid. I had been reading through the most recent “Best of” anthology for science fiction, looking for stories I wanted to assign to my students for class reading. I found many great stories with many wonderful characters, but I also waded through pages and pages of depictions of empty people, dead inside, psychologically opaque, mechanisms suffering “hardware issues.”

It wasn’t that these characters weren’t interesting in their deadness, so to speak, but that this same kind of character kept on showing up again and again and again until it sounded to my reader’s ear like a pianist banging on the same key over and over.

Today, we have better writers, better schooled in both sciences and arts, and the ones who pursue short fiction are rarely burdened with the necessity to hammer out one story after another to make a living. There is no living to be made from writing short stories. So why should all these protagonists be so similar? Why do so many of them seem to be simply going through the motions?

I have an interest in this question as a teacher. I want my students to be the writers who will break this contemporary convention. But I also have an interest as a writer myself. Have I fallen into the same morass? Or will I, eventually? Is there something I can keep in mind so that I can maintain my own standard that places character at the core of any successful story?

At the outset, Gerrold tells us, The transformation of the character is the reason you’re telling the story.” The story can go no further without it. It’s the reason for everything included in the story and the reason why the story is about this character, not someone else.

In boldface: “Transformation is the reinvention of the self by the Self.” The problem, or nemesis, or obstacle, the character faces is not so much what prevents the transformation, it is the self, or “Self” defining the obstacle as insurmountable, at least by the character. Gerrold describes the character as saying, “I can’t handle this,” then continues, “By choosing to make this situation the problem, the hero creates himself as the source of the problem. Until he recognizes his own authorship of the dilemma, he cannot create himself as the source of the resolution.”

Forgive me if my summary makes this idea seem too convoluted. The simple version, best as I can manage it, is: “The real conflict of the story is not between the character and the external obstacle, but the character in conflict with him/her/it/they self.”

Which reminded me a lot of William Faulkner, in his Nobel lecture: “… the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.”

An obvious, and fitting, connection.

What it also reminded me of was this passage I encountered in Louis H. Sullivan’s The Autobiography of an Idea, his last great statement to beliefs in art, and nature, and its reflection in his architectural work, published the year of his death in 1924. Sullivan writes of himself in the third person, which can be a tad annoying for twenty-first century readers, but bear with him here. He describes the moment when his aesthetics all clicked together for him:

He had worked out a theory that every problem contains and suggests its own solution. That a postulate which does not contain and suggest its own solution is not in any sense a problem, but a misstatement of fact or an incomplete one. … he had reached the advanced position that if one wished to solve the problem of man's nature, he must seek the solution within man himself. ...

In other words, chosen by that author with an uncanny penchant for finding “other words” that live forever, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves. …”

Or, as Gerrold states it, “The moment in which the hero recognizes, ‘I’m the problem – ” he also recognizes the corollary: “—therefore I’m the solution!” His commitment becomes ‘I can handle this. I will handle this.’”

Story structures can vary. In a “realistic” story, the problems may not be so apparent. In a science fiction story, the science-fictional concept may serve to define the internal conflict. The concrete representation is external and tangible, but the solution is internal – is personal, even if the subject is personhood itself, as it can so often be in contemporary sf.

It may seem overly self-reflective to say that the character’s plight echoes the plight of the author in writing a story. The solution is to found in the problem itself; if the problem is within the author’s imagination, so is the solution.

Let’s throw this in, just for the hell of it, a little something I picked up in a faculty seminar when novelist Nami Moon was teaching at my school. Conflicts can be divided into two groups: “Chronic conflict” (long term, over the course of the character’s life), “Acute conflict” (the immediate situation which spurs the problem within the story).

There’s a distinction here that’s useful in most any kind of fiction, but may work with exceptional success in a science fiction story. The science-fictional problem in the story reflects what has long-dogged the central character, in fact, defines that character.

Science fiction can and very often does explore the concrete representations of emotional and metaphorical hopes and fears – we fear change; we need change; we fear the “other”; we are the “other.”

What makes the form so thrilling and interesting that it can expand upon these basic emotional dichotomies to limitless dimensions. We have more than one universe to play with.

It’s just important that, in making these stories memorable and resonant, that we remember where to seek the solutions to their immense and wondrous problems.