The Short and Long of It
Our veteran of ten thousand submissions. We present the Walter Cummins archive now erupting with productive essays regarding the art of fiction writing.
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Almost every short story I can recall has an ending that focuses on what happened to the central characters, usually a single protagonist but occasionally two or three linked in facing a common dramatic question. Tessa Hadley, one of the most significant current British story writers, frequently offers a unique approach to this story form. For years, as I’ve read new stories in issues of The New Yorker, I’ve admired the originality of her endings and their ability to shift reader perspectives. One example is “After the Funeral,” the title story of a 2023 collection. The story until its final paragraph addresses what happens to a woman, Marlene, and her two daughters…
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Let’s distinguish between two kinds of backstory: 1) Situational information that relates to the characters’ ongoing condition and 2) specific past happenings that inform the dramatic issues of the present story. Situational information can emerge just from descriptive statements. For example: Stephanie reached across the rich leather seat of her Porsche for her Gucci bag. Alma Sue felt the rattles of the old pickup truck in her bones as she drove down the dirt road to the feed store. Those sentences tell us quite a bit about Stephanie and Alma Sue’s worlds and their life styles. It’s almost impossible not to give that kind of information when writin…
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Writers must make the decision to choose a perspective from which to present a story, picking a point of view and a narrative voice. Often in drafts they try one or another to find which feels right. But once the choice is made the story is essentially locked into that singular outlook. An option, rarely used, is to include more than one in what might be called a bifurcated presentation. I can think of two examples, Joyce Carol Oates’ retelling of Henry James novella “The Turn of the Screw” and Rosalind Palermo Stevenson’s original telling of Benito Mussolini’s one-day and night visit to an Italian home in “The Guest.” Both stories employ the typographical forma…
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Writers usually want to give an indication of what their characters look like to help readers visualize them. But that’s just basic. A really useful description, beyond offering much about the character, also reveals the feelings of the person seeing him and her as well as hints that will affect the development of the story. I’ll start with two well-known passages about young women in bathing suits. Philip Roth “Goodbye, Columbus” The first time I saw Brenda she asked me to hold her glasses. Then she stepped out to the edge of the diving board and looked foggily into the pool; it could have been drained, myopic Brenda would never have known it. She dove bea…
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Although the mantra “show, don’t tell” have been spoken thousands of times in creative writing classes and workshops, the injunction is essentially meaningless. For one thing, it sets up a false opposition, an either-or, as if there is an opposition between showing and telling. But all writing is telling, achieving one overall result because, when a dramatic scene or exchange of dialogue exists, the showing conveys information. That is, it tells. It would be impossible not to. What “show, don’t tell” is really trying to say is, “don’t tell with flat, dull prose.” Bad imaginative writing happens when telling provides information without an iota of showing. But …
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Joyce’s Dubliners after the collection’s publication in 1914 established the model of what a short story should be for decades. A protagonist behaves with a misguided notion about the situation he or she confronts but finally has an illumination that exposes the error and achieves an authentic understanding. Epiphanies occur throughout the collection, but the opening story, “Araby,” usually serves as the ideal prototype as it was taught in thousands of classrooms. A young boy fixated on a friend’s sister seeks to go to what is billed as an exotic oriental fair to bring back a gift for the girl. He encounters frustrations and delays, not arriving at the fair until it…
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Let’s consider two possible extremes of prose style—one of direct sentences that lack syntactic complexity and offer breathing space, the other of a complex density of words packed with information revealed though a richness of shifts and clauses. It’s easier for writers to deliberately work to develop the less method as many emulated Hemingway during his peak, when his approach to storytelling because the model. Attempting such a style involves cutting and deletions, a minimum of adverbs and adjectives and complex sentences. To seek prose density is much harder if the writer doesn’t start with a strong inclination for verbal complexity. What made me think of th…
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One of the most convincing books I’ve ever read is Frank Kermode's 1967 The Sense of an Ending, in which he argues that most people after years of immersion in fictions consider their lives as implementing the pattern of a novel, following a narrative arc that rises to a fulfilling culmination. Our existence is like a bildungsroman that mirrors the teleological expectations of Western culture. We like to believe we achieve a conclusion that is meaningful and purposeful with, like a good novel, a beginning, middle, and end. Kermode says that is because humans are disturbed by the notion that their life is just a brief moment in the expanse of time. In truth, accordin…
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When I first read Robert Coover’s story “The Babysitter” in his 1969 collection Pricksongs and Descants, I found it revolutionary. It appeared at the height of the dominance of the well-made story in which the fiction was supposed to be a self-contained reality, fully believable in itself. The author was meant to be invisible, as James Joyce had him or her, an offstage presence ignored by the reader because the story was an end in itself. In radical contrast, “The Babysitter” exposed the artifice of story making by shifting among several plot alternatives and telling multiple story versions through a series of what could happen nexts. Unlike the well-made story with …
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The reputation of a significant novel can survive a weak and even a bad ending. For example, Judy Berman writing “Fantastic Novels with Disappointing Endings” in Flavorwire cited a number of fictional favorites with that problem, including The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides, Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, The Secret History by Donna Tartt (“After the book’s big mystery is revealed and manipulative ringleader Henry murders his blackmailer, good-ol’-boy Bunny, the group’s dissolution and plunge into utter lunacy takes a bit too long while the characters’ outsized, artsy personalities nearly verge on self-parody”), Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates (“Plenty of …
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The dispute over the benefit of the editorial cuts and changes Gordon Lish made to drafts of many Raymond Carver short stories before they were published reminds me of Ezra Pound's substantial deletions to T.S. Eliot’s original version of “The Waste Land.” Pound reduced the original manuscript, which was about 800 lines long, to approximately half its size. The final published version of "The Waste Land" is 434 lines. Eliot thanked Pound and gave him credit for improving the poem. Carver eventually turned against Lish and made his originals public so that readers could compare and judge the versions. The two men had been friends, with Lish a strong advocate for Carve…
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Although people often use these terms interchangeably, for a closer comprehension of how short stories are made, it’s useful to define each one specifically. The best distinction I’ve found is that of E.M. Forster as restated by Janet Burroway: A story is a series of events recorded in their chronological order. A plot is a series of events deliberately arranged so as to reveal their dramatic, thematic, and emotional significance. That plot arrangement may often ignore the chronology to adjust the timing of revealed information for maximum impact. The placement of backstory is a common example of such reordering. While backstory is usually considered as th…
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Story Openings Story openings now have several goals to accomplish. The first is to engage the reader immediately and create a desire to engage with what will happen. That goal has become more crucial in recent years when readers have so many more choices to fill their time, and not just fictions on a page. Magazine editors abet this pressure because they are bombarded with submissions. Editors don’t have the time or patience to indulge a leisurely writer. More and more decisions as to what stories they will read through are based on the appeal of the opening. Many editors admit that if the first page doesn’t grab them, the story submission will be rejected immediat…
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Much writing advice often ignores place, but I agree with Eudora Welty, who stresses that place is as central to fiction as character and plot. She wrote the most important essay on the subject, “Place in Fiction,” in 1955, and it is still crucial. For her, place is a "named, identified, concrete, exact and exacting, and therefore credible, gathering spot of all that has been felt, is about to be experienced …” In our lives where we are when something happens involves a myriad of associations. So it should be in our fictions. The fundamental difference is that in life we have years to gather those associations. When writing a story, we have only a few pages to sugges…
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During my years in Iowa City I struggled to learn how to write what we called the well-made story. It wasn’t until years later that I discovered I also had been serving the goals of the CIA. Before that, my assumptions about government control of writers had been shaped by the brutality of executions and soul-deadening physical labor in frozen Siberian gulags. In Iowa my only labor was pounding a manual typewriter, grading undergraduate essays, and—for a time—changing diapers. But the CIA was much more subtle than Stalin. It fought the Cold War by supporting literary magazines like the British Encounter and the Partisan, Paris, and Kenyon Reviews, as well as the teac…
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The short answer, of course, is that they don’t sell nearly as well as novels. But the core question is why they don’t sell. Let me suggest two possible reasons—story worlds and story characters. A reader has to adapt to the distinct world of every new individual story, even in a collection by the same author. Let me use a travel analogy. You arrive in a city for the first time ever, and it probably takes a few days to first your way around—the shops, the restaurants, the metro stations and bus stops, the route back to your hotel. You may even have to pull out a street map or ask for directions a few times. Eventually, you know your way around and feel confident that…
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When I finished my MFA in fiction, I submitted to the groupthink of my classmates who argued that the way to go for our futures was novel writing. A successful novel meant getting an agent and ultimately achieving fame, fortune, book signings, grants, awards, and for those of us in teaching careers, tenure. We’d become household names, and some of us did, at least in the literary realm. I wasn’t one of those names even though I devoted the next five years to novel drafts and even found an agent willing to shop them around. Two even came out as paperback originals. But soon after they appeared in racks on newsstands they embarrassed me. They still do. In fact, one of …
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