Thinking About Short Stories

With my current project writing short stories, I'm piecing together ideas about plot and learning a fair bit about myself.

The first thing I learned is that my natural medium is definitely novels.  I come up with back story and character quirks that would add dimension to the characters or enrich themes or affect the plot eventually, but in a short story there is no "eventually."  There's only the now, and those quirks are just hanging there, extra and unneeded.

A friend of mine once told me that short stories are like a spiral.  He didn't elaborate on this metaphor, and it didn't make any sense to me without an explanation.  (A short story is also like a chicken.  It's also like the color yellow.  See, those mean nothing.)  So this week I looked it up, hoping someone on the internet would have a better explanation--or any explanation.

So think of an atrium with a spiral staircase around it.  The ancient, magical tree in the middle of the atrium is the point of your story.  As you climb the stairs, you spiral around it, seeing the magical tree from different angles, but still focusing on the tree.  So in a short story, everything you say, everything that happens, is an investigation of your theme, but from different angles.  Therefore, all the details, the quirks and the back ground and the world building, have to relate to the point of your story.

Another friend of mine has a podcast, where in last week's episode he shared some advice and helpful questions that he'd heard.  The advice was this: everything under the sun has already been written, so don't worry about making the plot too complicated.  Stick with a simple plot and let the strength and originality of your characters carry the story and make it original.

I like that.  I need a simple plot that I can tell in a sentence or two, and then the rest I can fill with characters and details and world building, as long as those details stay on target, focusing on my magical tree in the atrium and not wandering off the spiral staircase and down a hallway.

So I started thinking about simple plots, and the examples that help me are all pretty silly.

1. Picture books.  I have a toddler, so we read a lot of picture books.  We read a lot of the same picture books over and over and over, and my toddler is starting to get annoyed with me when in the fourth repeat of "Pierre" I start analyzing the plot instead of doing the funny Pierre voice.  (the first two read throughs are for reading, the third is for "where's the dog?  There's the dog!" and the fourth is apparently for me to talk to myself.)

2.  Fables and fairy tales.  I've been thinking about the structure and tone of fairy tales off and on for the past year, and thinking about how that structure and tone relates to the tall-tale oral tradition, so putting this into practice has been fun.  I have a friend (the same friend with the podcast) that wrote a writing workbook for children using fables as a model.  Bad friend admission: I haven't read the whole thing yet, but I think I'm going to bust it out this week.

3. Shaun the Sheep.  This is a claymation TV show with seven minute long episodes that revolve around a herd of sheep, the dog that looks after them, and the farmer who has no idea the sheep have any adventures at all.  Actually, "adventures" is kind of a strong word.  In one episode the sheep refuse to take baths because there's no hot water, so they sneak into the farmhouse and siphon the hot water from the farmer's bath.  That's the plot.  The fun and the charm of the show is in the sheep's attempts to run and hide from the dog so they don't have to take a bath, and in their attempts (that both succeed and fail) to sneak into the farmhouse and distract the farmer, and in the way they have a pool party in their hot bath at the end.

I've been keeping these in mind this week as I've worked, and I've been keeping in mind that I'll need to go back during the editing process and either ax large portions of my stories or twist them until they can do more to help the story along, until they can be part of the spiral staircase looking at the atrium, and until they can pull their weight.