The "Other" Parts

inference--an assumption or conclusion reached by a character in a story or by a reader reading the story; a reaction or decision which is possibly correct, made without direct, unassailable evidence; a conclusion formed by a character or a reader based on past experience; the use of circumstantial evidence; arriving at a conclusion or decision based entirely upon a character's experience and subsequently based on the reader's experience.

As the twenty-first century shifts into gear (See pathetic fallacy), one highly visible fork in the narrative road is the inferential one, in which the reader is left with more leeway to assume such matters as agenda, intent, and volition of characters as well as what actually happened in a narrative. Did they or didn't they? Were they, or not? Such words as ambiguity and elliptical come forth, particularly in the short story.

A highly prolific and versatile writer, Elmore Leonard, speaking at publishing conventions (ABA, Book Expo, etc) and writers' conferences (notably Santa Barbara, CA) has often been quoted expressing his working approach to story, which in essence is to write only the parts that interest him, while leaving out the "other" parts, it being understood that "other" means descriptions and scenes that don't directly involve him. By extension, Leonard could be interpreted to advocate as a part of the revision process the removal of anything he considered unnecessary explanation, whether in narrative (which includes description) or dialogue.

Contemporary writers as diverse as Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, Tobias Wolff, George Saunders, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Haruki Murikami may be argued to write with the inferential less-is-more approach, yet none of these is arguably a minimalist. There is among them a common thread of trust. The interesting questions to consider is the applications of the trust: Do they trust the reader? Themselves? The reader and themselves?

A storyteller in the twenty-first century is well advised to read these writers as well as writers of past eras and, indeed, new writers on their own path of self-discovery, keeping in mind choices to be made about how much the reader truly needs to know.

Hint: Some writers of nonfiction are often seduced by the need to use all their research in a particular project, resulting in their project telling the potential reader more about the subject than the reader wants to know. In similar fashion, some writers of fiction may be tempted to explain to the reader more about their characters and the motives of those characters than the reader wants to know.

Added hint: Because of its subjective base, the result of fiction is greater than the sum of its parts; the goal of storytelling is the evocation of that greater effect. Evoke rather than describe. Encourage the reader to infer. The reader would rather discover his misapprehension in the face of surprise behavior from the characters than be told he was wrong by the author.

In the Beginning

There is a piece of constructive wisdom in television drama that calls for the thrust of the story to be made apparent before the director's credit rolls. Or else. Or else the viewer will click the channel selector to something more promising. In actual time elapsed, the director's credit rolls about ninety seconds in, at most two minutes. This means the intent in television drama is to inform the reader whose story this is, what it's about, and what the risks are.

By virtue of formatting conventions, the short story writer gets about a hundred words of text on the opening page and at most another two fifty on the second page to get the reader to sign on. A novel may proceed at a more leisurely pace, perhaps three or four pages of text.

These three standards are all subject to the laws of contemporary convention; they may change over time as, indeed, they have changed on their way to becoming what they are now. Take a novel of Thomas Hardy, since he is generally acknowledged to have been the rider of the cusp between the nineteenth century and the twentieth. Most of Hardy's novels begin with one or more characters walking down a road somewhere in the westernmost part of England, say Devon. We are treated to a description of the countryside, the narrow roads, the stone walls, the thatched-roof cottages. Then we are presented some sense of what the characters are doing out on such a road, either prefaced or followed by a thorough physical description of the individuals so that even were you to have skipped some of the description, you'd nevertheless be able to recognize the characters should you encounter them in your neighborhood pub or your local school or theater. Only then would you find some clue about what irked, intrigued, or preyed upon one or more of the characters. You do ultimately find out what the story is in Hardy's novels; in The Mayor of Casterbridge, you find out in so memorable way that it has seldom been duplicated. Depending on when if ever you read The Mayor, the opening may still be with you, holding you by the throat in a tighter grip even than Charles Dickens' grip employed in Great Expectations.

In many contemporary novels and short stories, enough care is accorded the characters that the reader begins to suspect something of consequence will happen soon enough to cause the kinds of curiosity associated with suspense, while in others, some intriguing set of circumstances appears to be in play from the very beginning. Tobial Wolff's remarkable short story, Bullet in the Brain, seems to encompass both these approaches with a maximum of economy and dramatic force. It is yet another tribute to Wolff's skills that he has us investing in a character unlikeable at the outset; only toward the very end does he give us clues that Anders, the protagonist, was at an earlier time a nice person

Modern stories and memorable stories from past times begin with a momentum suggesting a decision will be needed, an impasse reached, an alternative given, a consequence to be dealt with. It is not a spoiler to use Marilynne Robinson's remarkable novel, Housekeeping, as a prime example of this opening velocity. Ruth, the young narrator, and her younger sister are withdrawn from their school and small town, thanks to their mother having cast out their father. They are moved to another small town to live with their grandmother, whereupon their grandfather is killed in a spectacular train wreck and their mother becomes a suicide. There is enough velocity there to last for the entire novel, but author Robinson continues to pile it on. Remarkably, Housekeeping is not an operatic melodrama; it is many other things, most of them arguably literary in nature, where melodrama is supplanted by ambiguity.

Opening velocity is a matter of choice, a moment in the orbit of a story where too much background or explanation become the equivalent of albatrosses, weighing the story down instead of helping it take off. Action or volition rather than introspection are the Swiss Army knives and Leatherman tools of the narrative opening, the goal being to get the reader invested in the character by means of being invested in the character's actions. Time enough later on to slow the story down for background material and physical description.

Accomplished writers rarely find the optimal place for beginning in early drafts, choosing other methods for beginning the actual setting down of words, methods such as starting with characters in the middle of an argument, with characters pointedly trying not to argue with one another, with characters misunderstanding one another. Some accomplished writers begin with weather reports or scenic descriptions of the landscape; others still begin with descriptions of the characters or some thematic statement relative to the story; in any case, most begin with the goal of writing long then cutting short, setting down everything they can think of, then purposefully cutting it back, mindful of the weight each word carries.

If there is such a thing as the five-thousand-word short story, as many books on writing technique suggest, a significant approach might be to get down ten thousand words on a particular story, then remove five thousand of those words.

For some years, Barnaby Conrad gave an intriguing exercise in his workshop at the Santa Barbara Writers' Conference: Write a five-hundred-word sentence--any five-hundred-word sentence. Not all that many years back, one of the students in Conrad's workshop was a former newspaper reporter, Fanny Flagg, whose approach to the five-hundred-word sentence made her recall an incident from her childhood, which she called prophetically, "Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle-Stop Cafe."

Whatever it takes to get it going. Then come back to look for the place where the events begin gathering a momentum. Find the spot where it is impossible to insert explanations, adjectives, adverbs, and weather reports. That's the place. Right there.

Obits and Pieces

In an admiring and comprehensive obituary of actor Richard Widmark, dead at age 93, in today's New York Times, the author quoted a remark Widmark once made about the craft of acting. The older one gets, Widmark said, the less one knows about acting and the more one is able to recognize the truly great actors.

Indeed, one of the living greats, Paul Schofield, left us not two weeks back, and today's Times carries notices of yet another, Patrick Stewart, maintaining that his current rendition of Macbeth is an opportunity of a life time.

All this as prologue to my conflating Widmark's observation about actors to writers. There are times just before I enter a class room or workshop venue when I am struck by my audacity in presuming to present information to students about writing. Saving grace and salvation appear almost immediately with the reminder that I am not entering with notes written on stone tablets nor am I speaking entirely of my own beliefs but rather am using examples and visions of women and men whose works cry out for recognition because of their ability to transport, transpose, dignify, explain, and evoke.

You can tell the great ones by the stature with which their words appear on the page, neither overdone nor timid, rather confident of the vision they impart to the story they wish to share.

Some days back, I was slathering at the prospect of the new collection of stories by Tobias Wolff, which arrived yesterday and into which I fell with reckless tantivy. He has become, I argue, the American version of William Trevor, a storyteller so sure of himself that he is able to move us, no, more than move, to transport us to places we thought were beyond our frame of business. Such is Wolff's approach to storytelling, however, that he is able to make it our business by including us and them--his characters--in the rubric of shared humanity.

The new stories are featured in a section at the rear. Many of the earlier stories, taken from earlier collections, appear first, prefaced by a brief note from the author in which he confesses to having tweaked some of them in the service of making them more accessible. What a lovely word, accessible. I have a suspicion of writers who opt for the murkiness of obfuscation rather than the target of at least transparency on the way to pellucidity.

Sure enough, he tweaked the opening of one of my favorites, In the Garden of American Martyrs, which made me resolve to revisit that in its entirety. But for the moment, the lure of the new was strong and so I began with the first, something that seemed so bland on the surface as to give me pause, induce me back to the beginning again for a closer look. All I will say of it is that the strategy was worth the effort. I was made to think, yanked from one place where, in many ways, I'd been myself, to a new kind of awareness that is the kind of awareness not arrived at with ease, at least not by me. I was made, in a sense, to grow up. In actual chronology, I'm probably more grown up than Wolff, but remember, he is a gifted writer who has worked at his gifts and by no means squandered them.

Thinking back on it, I realize I became caught up on reading to be transported to times and places where things were happening that made what was happening in my young, routine-filled life seem bland. Now, what I read and write makes me anxious to return to those days, filled with the techniques of masterly men and women who taught me over the years to look for and find the miracles buried in the terrain of the ordinary.

Short stories

Short story collections forthcoming:

1. Tobias Wolff Our Story Begins
2. Jhumpa Lahiri Unaccustomed Earth,

in anticipation of which, whoopee! There is something qualitatively enhancing about each author and the ability each has to compress so much detail and energy into such a relatively small container.

The short story does not allow for summary or settling of accounts; it lurches to a stop just before those controlling words THE END, leaving us with a sense of awareness just barely manifest. The ending of a short story is the RENT DUE NOW note slipped under the author's door by an impatient landlord; it is the index card or note pad found on the table at a coffee shop: THINGS I'VE BEEN MEANING TO TELL ARTHUR, and you wonder if it is a real note and there is a real Arthur who may at this very moment be getting told things that will change his life or maybe the previous occupant at the table was a writer, thinking things through for a story and if I got a double latte and stayed up all night, maybe I could get a draft on the story done before this author.

I adore novels, run off with them for illicit weekends, thinking at times that I have in my hands a work so splendid that its dialog will work with real persons in real life, all to my advantage. I learn from novels, spend endless hours thinking of new ones, almost happy to have nothing of interest to read so that I can write a novel that will interest me because that's what novels are for, aren't they, to keep writers interested.

But short stories are like love affairs, like being witness to moments that crackle in the night air, that deserve to be pressed between the pages of favored books, that remind you of old dreams, new dreams, and impossible plans that you somehow put to good effect. They are events shamans whisper over tangy cedar logs, drawings etched on cave walls, hearts inscribed on deserted beaches with forbidden initials inside. Short stories are mantras to be repeated, photos taken when the world was young and no one was ever suspicious, elaborate wide-angle shots of gatherings of dozens of people, so special that if you look closely, you can tell who is in a relationship with whom. Short stories are French kisses, huge scoops of gelato, ficelles fresh from the oven, news from the cosmos that today you matter, maps to the homes of the happy, gift cards to as yet uninvented rides at unimaginable theme parks.