The Dystopia

dystopia, novels of--narratives in which the ills of society are exaggerated for thematic effect; cautionary tales demonstrating social, moral, economic, sexual, and religious agendas allowed to run wild.

In the story-telling sense, utopias--stories of perfection and accord--are not really stories because they lack the major dramatic ingredient of conflict. Thus grace is boring, the fall from grace and its consequences a magnet for interest. If everyone gets along, is his brother's keeper, does not covet, etc, the reader will have little reason to continue because, redemption being precluded, there is no big finale to anticipate. If, however, a protagonist, say Ray Bradbury's Guy Montag from Fahrenheit 451, has a gut feeling that there is something wrong about what he is doing, the reader begins to see the inevitability of Montag going up against something quite larger than himself, forced to deal with it.

Seen as a paradigm of a dystopia that cautioned against the consequences of war, The Iliad's most seemly character is Hector. His tragic fate elevates him to a role model for the conflicted protagonist. It was a dumb war to begin with, started when Hector's brother, Paris, made off with his prize from having judged a beauty contest. Hector's wife, Andromache, pleads with him to abandon the war they will surely lose, reminding him that were things to continue, she'd probably be taken as a prize of war and their son, Astyanax, would be killed. As devoted to his wife and son as Hector is, even though he agrees with her assessment, he knows he could not face life, even a life in exile, were he to turn from battle. Nor is Hector naive or insensitive. He well foresees the consequences, but feels obliged to continue, nevertheless.

The backstory conditions of the dystopia--See Brave New World, Logan's Run,1984, The Handmaid's Tale--is the unthinkable come to pass. The present-time narrative of the dystopia sets a protagonist with whom the reader can identify in motion to cope with it.

In its own idiosyncratic and memorable ways, Joseph Heller's Catch-22 is welcomed company in the genre of dystopic fiction, offering forth its modern-day Hector in the form of the bombardier Yossarian. For all her bombast and philosophical sturm und drang, Ayn Rand easily is awarded membership in the Dystopia Society, primarily with Atlas Shrugged and its driven protagonist, Dagny Taggart, but not to forget Howard Roark of The Fountainhead. And not to forget the preternaturally bright Alex, protagonist of Anthony Burgess's enduring dystopia, Clockwork Orange.

Hints: There are seeds of dystopia in every satire, just as there are seeds of satire in every dystopia. If you were to look closely at Tess of the Durbervilles, Jude, the Obscure, and The Mayor of Casterbridge, you could find cause to think of Hardy as a writer of dystopian fiction. Hardy (1840-1928) was a close contemporary of another dabbler in the dystopic, Mark Twain (1835-1910).The 1950-90 science fiction era is larded with dystopic visions, one of many reasons why that genre became literature.

Any Portal in a Storm

fantasy--a novel or story in which magical, supernatural, and preternatural elements are presented as though they were real; narratives in which alternate universes, mythic creatures, imaginary worlds, and extraordinary mental and physical abilities prevail; stories involving clashes of power between rival forces who have rival thematic agendas; stories built on the consequences of spells, curses, and charms.

Ever since Alice (of Wonderland fame) fell into the rabbit hole, fantasy writers have capitalized on the portal or entry way into worlds of their own creation, worlds where often enough there may be intended comparisons between individuals, institutions, and places in the real world. These are worlds where magic--abilities that extend beyond the boundaries of reality--flourishes, but just as contemporary pharmaceuticals do, the magic has a known list of side effects: spells do not last indefinitely, curses may exact a reaction onto the curse giver, and such desirable abilities as invisibility have strict time limits. Portals have led readers and, of course, characters to antique shops, restaurants, book stores, even pawn brokers. The consequence of such visits become manifest when the protagonist of the story attempts to return to the venue of the portal.

Fantasy worlds often parallel the real universe in most details except for those one or two of the author's choice. Thus in Rachel Maddux's short story, "Final Clearance," written during the days of Congressional hearings and loyalty oaths, the payoff comes in the form of a recently dead atomic scientist being denied actual death because of a failed security clearance.

In one form or another, fantasy has been with us since there was a spoken language; it plays a significant part in, for instance, Gilgamesh, which has fantasy themes revisited in The Iliad and even more so in The Odyssey, where it is often used as a metaphor. The contemporary writer, Ursula K. LeGuin, has written a short story, "Horse Camp," in which two sisters, Sal and Norah, along with a friend, Ev, go to horse camps during the summer and are transformed into equines. In yet another of her fantasies, "The Professor's Houses," there is a thematic counterpoint between the house where the Professor lives and a doll house he has made for his young daughter. LeGuin has done in her book, The Language of the Night, what Stephen King has done for horror in Danse Macabre.

Just as the historical story has done for the mixing of genera such as historical thriller, historical mystery, historical juvenile, etc, so too has fantasy become a pairing genre, often seen as magical realism (See any work by Alice Hoffman). This mixture easily extends to work that is by any account considered literature, Robertson Davies' The Rebel Angels being a significant example.

Hint: Check out via Google and Wikipedia the pulp fantasy magazine, Weird Tales. Also of seminal interest to fantasy writers as a source of inspiration, Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series, and the near-iconic Harry Potter books.

Additional hint: Start with a short story in the works, then add to it one magical element, keeping everything else as grounded in realistic detail as possible.

Yet another hint: Do not ever forget The Wizard of Oz, which is not only pure fantasy, it is a paradigm for the structure of a novel, so much so that Margaret Atwood uses it in an essay ("In the Heart of the Heartland" available on Google)in which she shows the connection between Richard Powers's literary tour de force, The Echo Maker, with The Wizard.

The Politics of Concept, the Concept of Politics

concept-driven story, the--a dramatic narrative focused on theme; a novel or story whose plot appears to emphasize a particular subject such as revenge, redemption, or poverty while still providing dramatic structure.

Novels such as Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men, and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle may be seen as examples of the concept-driven story, and although equally at home in the categories of speculative fiction and cautionary fiction, so too are Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, George Orwell's 1984, and Philip Roth's The Plot Against America. Each of these deals with burning political and/or social issues to the point where they have become more than snapshots of a particular era but rather have assumed the status of museum-quality prints, hung in galleries.

Unless a concept-driven story has more to it than the potent dramatization of theme, it runs great risk (as many fictional protagonists do) of being caught in the bog of disaster, which is to say it forgets its debt to story. Alissa Rosenbaum, she who became Ayn Rand, is an unfortunate example of this forgetfulness, beginning her career with The Fountainhead, which took on the theme of art for art's sake to great popularity and, to many critics, to great extreme. Her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, a thirteen-hundred-page-plus novel, articulated her Objectivist philosophy in extraordinary detail, allowing her to express anti-communism, anti-fascism, and anti-welfare-state views in unbridled gallop, reaching a full, Libertarian crescendo in which she deplored any kind of state at all.

In this regard, Rand may be regarded as the right of Upton Sinclair's left. Although they were roughly contemporaries, Rand is probably the better--and more favorably--known, but the reputation comes from her philosophy and argumentative skills rather than her dramatic skills.

The point here is that story is the freighting device for the message. For the concept-driven story to have an audience in the first place, it must eventually have characters who become memorable not because of the smirks they produce but because of the heart tugs. Compare, for instance, George and Lenny with Howard and Domenique or, for that matter, John Gault.


See plot-driven story
See Character-driven story

Politics as Usual

politics--approaches to the use of power; systematic applications of problem solving; means by which divergent groups or individuals attend ethical, moral, and social issues; points of view regarding group and individual governance.

All characters have politics, whether they know it or not. A basic approach to determine a character's political views comes from investigating that character's family background, both in terms of the character's general political views but also from an assessment of that character's gender, the number of siblings, and when that character arrived in the family. Individuals who are adopted may have yet other political dynamics including a curiosity to learn the identities of their biological parents. Orphans or characters who have broken relations with family have yet another political as well as psychological dynamic.

For the writer, knowing the political Petri dish of the character's psyche is vital, providing information about the character's attitudes, responses, and readiness to form alliances and enmities. Of equal significance, a writer needs to consider his or her politics or lack of interest in the broader sense of politics, then investigate personal senses of awareness within family, friend groups, workplace associates, and ties with former classmates.

Of all the many influences likely to emerge in the themes of a particular writer's work, the writer's personal and broadband politics rank close to the top of the pyramid, influencing choice of characters and the types of conflicts in which those characters engage. As examples of writers whose politics or political interests seem to shine through their pages, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, John P. Marquand, and Margaret Atwood inspire close study.



quest--a major goal for any character; an intensified apprenticeship undertaken in hopes of achieving virtuoso ability; a search, study. or other organized pursuit with a goal in mind; a systematic and insistent research; an attempt to find a meaning, relic, or understanding.

Sometimes a quest is for a tangible, physical place, other times it is the means by which a point of view or personal commitment is achieved. Everyone in fiction is on a quest. Often, relationships in fiction are abrogated because of conflicting quests, thus the importance of knowing what each character in a story wants, how seriously, and to what lengths the character will go to achieve the end results of the quest. Murder? Perhaps. Betrayal of principal? Perhaps. Treason? A likely possibility.

A popular add-on to the quest being achieved or realized can be found in the irony of B. Traven's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Was Charles Rider's quest in Brideshead Revisited any the less ironic? And what about the payoff of The Maltese Falcon? For a writer, knowing what a character wants is a major step toward realizing a memorable story; it is no less important for the writer to know how the character might behave having seen the quest through to completion. Would Gatsby have been truly happy with Daisy? For that matter, would Daisy have remained content to be with Gatsby? And while we're on the subject, Miss Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy each appeared at the conclusion of Pride and Prejudice to have arrived at a goal of a companionable, partnership-type marriage, but would they remain so ten years down the line?

Thus quest, the dramatic boulder of Sisyphus, poised at the peak of a hill.

The Short Story

At the moment, the most famous American invention is intransigence. There was a time when we were known for positive things: jazz, bourbon whiskey, baseball, basketball, and, some would say, the short story.

There can be no question about our intransigence as it relates to such painful subjects as Iraq, foreign policy, womens' reproductive rights, the right to privacy, guns, and so-called faith-based initiatives. Such intransigence comes from distrust, which is generally used by those in power to manipulate those who wish to be in power.

On a happier scale of measurement, there is little question about jazz, which also extends to bebop; bourbon, baseball, and basketball. Arguments about the origin of the short story, even if they become acrimonious, are still lively and instructive, as opposed to our intransigent position at the table, which is not only acrimonious, it is frustrating and frightening.

My take on the origins of the short story sets its birthplace in the early tales of Washington Irving, relishing in its infancy and gaining coordination in the tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose early collection of stories, Twice-Told Tales, were reviewed by Edgar Allen Poe in an iconic moment where Poe, as though he were taking dictation from Aristotle, fresh off his Poetics, set forth a standard for what the short story could and should accomplish.

While Poe was writing some of his own ventures into the short form of fiction, a young man in the Midwest was busily listening to tales, some of them fanciful in origin, others as rooted in heritage as jazz was rooted in the blues. In time this young man extended his range of interests and activities to the West, where he lived and worked among miners, cowhands, and the vast undifferentiated audience of unlettered men, waiting for the beginnings of The Industrial Revolution.

Do I need to tell you that the young man took on the name Mark Twain?

In one way or another, Twain helped spread the allure and effect of the short tale from its oral tradition to the printed page, influencing writers throughout Europe and stirring up additional interest here. In what I shall claim as my own invention, the blog leap, a convenient compression of time, the American version of the short story was off and running, championed by the likes of Jack London and not to forget the short story writer we are always too quick to forget, Rheingold "Ring" Lardner.

Like Twain, Lardner used regional dialect and attitudes, a true sociologist as well as a ranking humorist. Before Lardner, our baseball heroes were all good-natured man, perhaps under read but by no means lacking in acuity. After Lardner, we began to see them for all their humanity and bigotry and superstition, at once making them more real and more heroic.

Meanwhile, in Europe, a famous mentor was working with a famous student. Gustave Flaubert was willing to mentor Guy de Maupassant, provided de Maupassant followed Flaubert's instructions to the letter. One such letter was that de Maupassant was not to even consider sending his stories to potential publishers until he had one hundred of which Flaubert approved. De Maupassant quickly provided the hundred stories and Flaubert, after making editorial suggestions , ultimately gave his approval. Within ten years of that approval, de Maupassant had become synonymous with the short story, a sky rocket in the literary heavens.

The modern short story--the twenty-first-century short story--is no longer American; it has a world view and an international pedigree although many argue that another short story writer, Ernest Miller Hemingway, gave the form a considerable boost. Well, maybe so, but you'd also have to factor in John Steinbeck, Ray Bradbury, John Cheever, Annie Proulx, Raymond Carver, Bernard Malamud.

Not to forget those two estimable Canadian writers, Alice Munro, and Margaret Atwood, also keeping in mind the Brit, Somerset Maugham, and from Ireland, James Joyce, Frank O'Connor, and arguably the most emotionally and technically deft writer at work today, William Trevor. The Russians have added to it, and we also get the Wasabi bite of Haruki Murikami from Japan, as well as, ah, she is splendid, Jhumpa Lahiri, from beautiful downtown Cambridge (Mass., not England), but with a Bengali flavor.


In spite of protestations from literary agents and publishers, new collections not only appear sporadically, they appear in ever increasing numbers, attesting to the bottom-line mentality in which demand creates supply.

Having invented the blog leap of time to make a point, the point I'm after is the way the short story in addition to its already solid dramatic structure, has begun shaping the long form, the novel. At the forefront is a collection of short stories that began to take on their final form in The Lion's Den, the Saturday morning workshop I co-hosted with Leonard Tourney before he moved off to take a post at BYU. Jean Harfenist's A Brief History of the Flood (Knopf, 2003) appeared as neither fish no fowl; it is not a novel, but they more or less let the browser think it is. Every one of the chapters was placed as a short story in a literary journal. Arranged in a more or less chronological order, A Brief History can, indeed, add up to a novel. Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine becomes another example, taking us away from the more or less conventional novel format of a single narrator or a select group of narrators to a kind of ensemble cast effect.

Because of its length, a novel has the opportunity, indeed the obligation, to portray change. A short story simply doesn't have the room, and so it doesn't deal with change so much as it takes us up to a point of awareness which the protagonist may or may not experience (see , for instance, "The Peacock," or "Cathedral" by Raymond Carver). Thus the short story is a living, breathing example of opaqueness and ambiguity; the modern novel, although unlikely to tie up all relevant loose ends, has the space to be more attentive to resolving a theme. For convenience sake, you might consider the short story as a concerto to the novel as a symphony. In dramatic terms, the short story is more like the one-act play, the modern novel more of a piece with the modern two-act play.

Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood get past conventional and editorial discomfort with a short story having more than a single point-of-view; William Trevor writes so well in omniscient point of view that he is effective with it in short fiction as well as the novel.

If you were to look at the point of origin of stories appearing in the three major best-of-the-year collections of short stories, you'd be sure to discover that the great majority first appeared in The New Yorker, with the likes of Granta, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, Georgia Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Paris Review as also-rans. The Gettysburg Review would be more likely to place candidates were it not for the fact of its editor producing a continuing stream of editorials best described as self-indulgent.

Many of the short stories of Annie Proulx that appeared in Open Range rank among my favorites, and because of my long association with universities and because of my politics, and because of the author's ability to evoke complex feelings I have a special fondness for Tobias Wolfe's "In the Garden of the American Martyrs."

The 2006 edition of The Best Mystery Stories contains at least four short stories that demonstrate how the demands of the mystery genre are not necessarily a lead weight, holding the short story down.

Many of today's younger--under forty--short story writers are bringing the energy of their discovery to the form, using it as a building block for learning to write in the longer form, but investigating the dramatic potential as a step-ladder to their own voice.

Ever have the experience of blowing a paper bag full of air, twisting off the top, then using that air-filled bag as a weapon to scare someone by popping it unexpectedly behind them?

The many times I did that as a kid, I never thought I'd be using the memory of the experience as a metaphor for the short story. A finite container, filled with one's own breath, suddenly brought to a surprising explosion. What a lovely metaphor for an art form that may help America earn back a reputation that has been too long in the unemployment line.