July 25, 2022
Behind the Scenes of Writing a Short Story
With this post, I’ll do something pretty different. I’ll offer you a “behind the scenes” look, focusing on the intricacies behind writing a short story. But there’s more: In order to do that, I will use one of my short stories – indeed, one that I’ve posted on the blog before.
I’m of course referring to “1992”, which I shared with you some time ago – here are part I and part II. I’m offering this look into “what goes on in an author’s mind” from the unique perspective of being the author as well as someone with the academic expertise to use it as teaching material.
How did I come up with the idea? What does it mean on a personal level? Who is the protagonist? Why? What? How? Plenty of literary lessons awaiting!
Writing a Short Story: Inspiration
Let’s first start another way: Is there any connection to real characters? How about fictional ones?
In regard to the latter, the answer is explicitly offered in the posts containing the story. Just check the caption of the photo accompanying both part I and part II: The Mariner is a recurrent character in my work, having appeared in some of my novels (including Apognosis and the limited-edition Self Versus Self project). Self-evidently, he also features in Tell Me, Mariner.
The character of the young woman is based on someone I knew in high school. The interesting part is that inspiration for the story came from a dream I had with that very woman. In the dream, I saw her looking at a piece of graffiti containing the number 1992, just as in the story.
Now, the intriguing part is that I barely knew that girl; we had talked to each other once, maybe twice. Why she would visit my dreams more than two decades later, I have no idea. Also keep in mind that 1992 was not the time I was in high school (I was younger at that time; hadn’t even met her). So, although I didn’t know what my subconscious tried to say, I thought, screw it, there’s a story there.
There are also some other personal elements there. The old lady selling cotton candy and the white balloon that escaped from the child’s hand are based on incidents of my very early childhood. A good memory is important for a writer, and an affect-based memory (remembering how it felt), even more so.
“What Happened?”
If you’re remotely familiar with my writing and teaching style, you should know by now that I don’t believe in plots. What happened in the story is what you want to have happened. Questions such as “Who is the Mariner?” or “How did he know where to go and why did he?” are entirely irrelevant. There are some ideas in my own head, but I would do you a disservice if I revealed those particular aspects.
Like the rest of the stories in the Tell Me, Mariner project, the story is an attempt to create interactions of affect with a minimal storyline in the background. I built a skeleton story, providing minimal details, and you, the reader, are supposed to make it fit whatever your mind creates. I’m only offering you instances of affect.
So, what are they?
Writing a Short Story: Themes and Instances of Affect
Most of the readers should recognize several themes in the story. Keep in mind that the list is not exhaustive. The whole idea of art is to allow interpretative room. With these in mind, the story revolves around:
- Nostalgia and the past.
- Lost love.
- Decisions.
- Loneliness.
More intriguingly, I consciously attempted to convey an aura of mystery, almost magic:
The fact that this masterpiece had materialized in a single night, without anyone witnessing it, seemed to be a part of the fascination it inspired.
The artwork felt, quite literally, otherworldly.
The motivation behind this choice is related to the way the story was inspired, that is, as a result of a dream.
Here’s another intriguing phrase, which echoes through the story: “The Mariner […] wasn’t quite sure why he knew, but that is rarely important.”
This has a double effect: i) it’s again relevant to the mysterious origins of the story; ii) it’s self-referrential (that is, on yet a deeper literary level), as it refers to the process of creating narratives without being preoccupied with explaining every little detail.
Oh, and did you notice how the Mariner lights a cigarette, waits for forty minutes, and at the end of the event he discards the cigarette? Something’s “wrong” there, isn’t it? Unless if you examined it from the symbolic perspective of time having lost its sense, everything happening here-and-now, and reality not being quite what it seems.
What Kind of Literary Lessons Can We Learn?
Regardless of whether I was successful in showing it with “1992” or not, the key takeaway should be this: Let go of the need to explain things to the reader.
“1992” (which, as a short story, has an advantage anyway) throws the reader into the action; no need to explain who the Mariner is, why he is there, why anything happens. Parenthetically, if you thought such explanations exist elsewhere in the project (as in, in another story), you would be wrong. I leave it entirely up to the reader to come up with an explanation as to who (or, symbolically, what) the Mariner is.
All that matters in the context of the story is how it feels and, consequently, how it relates to the human experience.
And so, with this in mind, instead of another conclusion, here’s a short list of things to keep in mind:
- The audience will always “get it”, and if they don’t, they don’t deserve your work anyway.
- Plot is secondary; affect primary.
- Let go of linearity. No, stories don’t need explicit (=chronological) beginnings or endings.
- Originality comes not from plot but from style.
5 Comments
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In scifi, world building is critical, but the author of a short story doesn’t have the luxury of unlimited words. Instead, she has to create a minimalist breadcrumb trail of world ‘facts’ that most readers of the genre understand. Then, she has to trust that the readers will be smart enough to ‘fill in the gaps’ from their own imaginations and prior knowledge. That leaves space for events and characters. Not quite scifi haiku but not that different either.
I’m not very good at writing short stories, possibly because I don’t particularly enjoy reading them. I always end up wanting to know ‘more’. That said, I did have the above epiphany about the form when I read a Hugo Award winning short story many years ago. That trust in the reader is something I can relate to. 🙂
I must confess, the term “scifi haiku” intrigues me beyond description! 😀
Perhaps I have to experiment with something like that.
Thanks for your comment!
-grin- my pleasure. 🙂
Short stories were the literary melting pot in which I was created as a writer. Not only did I study a short story writer during my scientific initiation during undergraduate studies, but I have always appreciated short story writers and the compact form of the genre, its ability to make one feel and live so much with so little material. But the truth that occurs to me, reading your explanation, is that it is not “so little material”. Rather, it is a lot of material involved, but the material is unconscious and remains hidden. And I say this not only at the level of the individual unconscious of each reader, which would be saying a lot, but at the level of the unconscious of human languages and literary languages themselves. I mean: a word like “mariner” carries with it relations and connotations that are there with that word, even if we let it slip or don’t consciously realize it at all. A mariner has no firm ground on which to set foot; on the contrary, she lives on the waters, which are not firm, but move constantly and can be fatal. There is also a cinematic imaginary of the sailor as someone tough and distant who smokes and is covered in scars, more like a living armour than a flesh and blood person. All this is not in the order of personal opinion, but is associated with the word and the image of the mariner. As the sea is an immense and uninhabitable place for us — we can only live on islands —, there is also that sensation of losing sight, of the infinite, but not the abstract, mathematical infinite, rather the material, concrete infinite of the horizon line. And so the associations follow, producing a whole sensorial and ideal universe which fills the tale, being present because it is not explicitly said, but being brought about by the association between words and things. As the unconscious works by associations, like a syntax that will only produce a semantics at a later moment, it is not necessary to worry about the (mathematical) logic of the thing, it is enough just to tell the story and everything will work itself out.
Your example is perfect. A single word, “mariner”, can open up a universe of connotations. As you aptly said, “it is a lot of material involved, but the material is unconscious and remains hidden”.
Based on discussions I’ve had, online as well as with students and peers, most people seem to miss what I believe is a crucial aspect of symbolism and literary meaning: Symbolism (at least on a deeper level, beyond simple, recognizable metaphors) is literally about the unseen. To read symbolically literally means reading “stuff” that aren’t there on the page. This is extremely powerful.