Principles of Short Story

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BACK IN THE mid-1960s, I found I was hav-ing trouble concentrating my attentionon long narrative fiction. For a time Iexperienced difficulty in trying to read itas well as in attempting to write it. My

attention span had gone out on me; I no longer hadthe patience to try to write novels. Its an involvedstory, too tedious to talk about here. But I know ithas much to do now with why I write poems andshort stories. Get in, get out. Dont linger. Go on. Itcould be that I lost any great ambitions at about the

same time, in my late twenties. If I did, I think it wasgood it happened. Ambition and a little luck aregood things for a writer to have going for him. Toomuch ambition and bad luck, or no luck at all, can bekilling. There has to be talent.

Some writers have a bunch of talent; I dont knowany writers who are without it. But a unique and exactway of looking at things, and finding the right contextfor expressing that way of looking, thats somethingelse. The World According to Garpis, of course, the mar-vellous world according to John Irving. There isanother world according to Flannery OConnor, andothers according to William Faulkner and Ernest

Hemingway. There are worlds according to Cheever,Updike, Singer, Stanley Elkin, Ann Beattie, CynthiaOzick, Donald Barthelme, Mary Robison, WilliamKittredge, Barry Hannah, Ursula K Le Guin. Everygreat or even every very good writer makes the worldover according to his own specifications.

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Its akin to style, what Im talking about, but itisnt style alone. It is the writers particular andunmistakable signature on everything he writes. It ishis world and no other. This is one of the things thatdistinguishes one writer from another. Not talent.Theres plenty of that around. But a writer who hassome special way of looking at things and who givesartistic expression to that way of looking: that writermay be around for a time.

Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day,without hope and without despair. Someday Ill putthat on a three-by-five card and tape it to the wallbeside my desk. I have some three-by-five cards onthe wall now. Fundamental accuracy of statement isthe onesole morality of writing. Ezra Pound. It isnot everything by any means, but if a writer has fun-damental accuracy of statement going for him, hesat least on the right track.

I have a three-by-five up there with this fragmentof a sentence from a story by Chekhov: and sud-

denly everything became clear to him. I find thesewords filled with wonder and possibility. I love theirsimple clarity, and the hint of revelation thatsimplied. There is mystery, too. What has beenunclear before? Why is it just now becoming clear?Whats happened? Most of allwhat now? Thereare consequences as a result of such sudden awaken-ings. I feel a sharp sense of reliefand anticipation.

I overheard the writer Geoffrey Wolff say Nocheap tricks to a group of writing students. Thatshould go on a three-by-five card. Id amend it a littleto No tricks. Period. I hate tricks. At the first sign of atrick or a gimmick in a piece of fiction, a cheap trick or

even an elaborate trick, I tend to look for cover. Tricksare ultimately boring, and I get bored easily, whichmay go along with my not having much of an attentionspan. But extremely clever chichi writing, or just plaintomfoolery writing, puts me to sleep. Writers dontneed tricks or gimmicks or even necessarily need to bethe smartest fellows on the block. At the risk ofappearing foolish, a writer sometimes needs to be ableto just stand and gape at this or that thinga sunsetor an old shoein absolute and simple amazement.

Some months back, in the New York Times BookReview, John Barth said that ten years ago most of thestudents in his fiction writing seminar were interested

in formal innovation, and this no longer seems to bethe case. Hes a little worried that writers are going tostart writing mom and pop novels in the 1980s. Heworries that experimentation may be on the way out,along with liberalism. I get a little nervous if I findmyself within earshot of sombre discussions aboutformal innovation in fiction writing. Too oftenexperimentation is a licence to be careless, silly orimitative in the writing. Even worse, a licence to try tobrutalise or alienate the reader. Too often such writinggives us no news of the world, or else describes adesert landscape and thats alla few dunes and

This essay first appeared in the New York Times Book

Review in 1981 as A Storytellers Notebook. Entitled OnWriting, it is included in Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories(Harvill Press) by Raymond Carver. 1968 to 1988 byRaymond Carver, 1989 to present by Tess Gallagher

Principles

of a storyFrom Chekhov to James Joyce, the short

story defined modern fiction. Subsequently,

it became a form defined by America. Here,

one of the great US writers explains why

he came to prefer the story to the novel

BY RAYMOND CARVER


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lizards here and there, but no people; a place uninhab-ited by anything recognisably human, a place of inter-est only to a few scientific specialists.

It should be noted that real experiment in fiction isoriginal, hard-earned and cause for rejoicing. Butsomeone elses way of looking at thingsBarthelmes,for instanceshould not be chased after by other writ-ers. It wont work. There is only one Barthelme, andfor another writer to try to appropriate Barthelmespeculiar sensibility or mise en scneunder the rubric ofinnovation is for that writer to mess around with chaosand disaster and, worse, self-deception. The realexperimenters have to make it new, as Pound urged,and in the process have to find things out for them-selves. But if writers havent taken leave of their senses,they also want to stay in touch with us, they want tocarry news from their world to ours.

Its possible, in a poem or ashort story, to write about com-monplace things and objectsusing commonplace but preciselanguage, and to endow thosethingsa chair, a window cur-tain, a fork, a stone, a womansearringwith immense, evenstartling power. It is possible towrite a line of seeminglyinnocuous dialogue and have itsend a chill along the readersspinethe source of artisticdelight, as Nabokov would haveit. Thats the kind of writingthat most interests me. I hate

sloppy or haphazard writingwhether it flies under the ban-ner of experimentation or else is

just clumsily rendered realism.In Isaac Babels wonderfulshort story, Guy de Maupas-sant, the narrator has this tosay about the writing of fiction:No iron can pierce the heartwith such force as a period put just at the right place.This too ought to go on a three-by-five.

Evan Connell said once that he knew he was fin-ished with a short story when he found himself going

through it and taking out commas and then goingthrough the story again and putting commas back inthe same places. I like that way of working on some-thing. I respect that kind of care for what is being done.Thats all we have, finally, the words, and they had bet-ter be the right ones, with the punctuation in the rightplaces so that they can best say what they are meant tosay. If the words are heavy with the writers ownunbridled emotions, or if they are imprecise and inac-curate for some other reasonif the words are in anyway blurredthe readers eyes will slide right overthem and nothing will be achieved. The readers own

artistic sense will simply not be engaged. Henry Jamescalled this sort of hapless writing weak specification.

I have friends whove told me they had to hurry abook because they needed the money, their editor ortheir wife was leaning on them or leaving themsomething, some apology for the writing not beingvery good. It would have been better if Id taken thetime. I was dumbfounded when I heard a novelistfriend say this. I still am, if I think about it, which Idont. Its none of my business. But if the writing cantbe made as good as it is within us to make it, then whydo it? In the end, the satisfaction of having done ourbest, and the proof of that labour, is the one thing wecan take into the grave. I wanted to say to my friend,for heavens sake go do something else. There have tobe easier and maybe more honest ways to try and earna living. Or else just do it to the best of your abilities,

your talents, and then dont jus-tify or make excuses. Dontcomplain, dont explain.

In an essay called, simplyenough, Writing Short Sto-ries, Flannery OConnor talksabout writing as an act of dis-covery. OConnor says she mostoften did not know where shewas going when she sat downto work on a short story. Shesays she doubts that many writ-ers know where they are goingwhen they begin something.She uses Good Country Peo-ple as an example of how she

put together a short storywhose ending she could noteven guess at until she wasnearly there:When I started writing that story, I

didnt know there was going to be a

PhD with a wooden leg in it. I

merely found myself one morning

writing a description of two women I

knew something about, and before I realised it, I had equipped

one of them with a daughter with a wooden leg. I brought in the

Bible salesman, but I had no idea what I was going to do with

him. I didnt know he was going to steal that wooden leg until

ten or twelve lines before he did it, but when I found out thatthis was what was going to happen, I realised it was inevitable.

When I read this some years ago it came as ashock that she, or anyone for that matter, wrote sto-ries in this fashion. I thought this was my uncomfort-able secret, and I was a little uneasy with it. For sure Ithought this way of working on a short story some-how revealed my own shortcomings. I rememberbeing tremendously heartened by reading what shehad to say on the subject.

I once sat down to write what turned out to be apretty good story, though only the first sentence of

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ESSAY/CARVER

JOHNH

OLDER


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ESSAY/CARVER

the story had offered itself to me when I began it. Forseveral days Id been going around with this sentencein my head: He was running the vacuum cleanerwhen the telephone rang. I knew a story was thereand that it wanted telling. I felt it in my bones, that astory belonged with that beginning, if I could justhave the time to write it. I found the time, an entireday12, 15 hours evenif I wanted to make use of it.I did, and I sat down in the morning and wrote thefirst sentence, and other sentences promptly began toattach themselves. I made the story just as Id make apoem; one line and then the next, and the next. Prettysoon I could see a storyand I knew it was my story,the one Id been wanting to write.

I like it when there is some feeling of threat orsense of menace in short stories. I think a little men-ace is fine to have in a story. For one thing, its goodfor the circulation. There has to be tension, a sensethat something is imminent, that certain things are inrelentless motion, or else, most often, there simplywont be a story. What creates tension in a piece of fic-tion is partly the way the concrete words are linkedtogether to make up the visible action of the story. Butits also the things that are left out, that are implied,the landscape just under the smooth (but sometimesbroken and unsettled) surface of things.

VS Pritchetts definition of a short story is some-thing glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing.Notice the glimpse part of this. First the glimpse.Then the glimpse given life, turned into somethingthat illuminates the moment and may, if were luckythat word againhave even further-ranging conse-quences and meaning. The short story writers task is

to invest the glimpse with all that is in his power. Hellbring his intelligence and literary skill to bear (his tal-ent), his sense of proportion and sense of the fitness ofthings: of how things out there really are and how hesees those thingslike no one else sees them. And thisis done through the use of clear and specific langage,language used so as to bring to life the details that willlight up the story for the reader. For the details to beconcrete and convey meaning the language must beaccurate and precisely given. The words can be so pre-cise they may even sound flat, but they can still carry;if used right, they can hit all the notes.

THE STORY: A SHORT MISCELLANY

Among the earliest writers of the modern shortstory were Miguel de Cervantes, Walter Scott,Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allen Poe. One ofthe earliest short story collections was WashingtonIrvings Sketchbook(1820)

Edgar Allen Poe wrote a critique of NathanielHawthornes Twice Told Tales(1837), which has beenused as a definition of the short story. For him, a storyshould be structured: 1) to be read at one sitting, 2)using a limited number of characters, incidents, styleand tone, 3) using words efficiently and sparingly.

The publishing explosion at the turn of the 19thcentury was unprecedented in history. When the fic-tion-packed Strand magazine launched in January1891, it sold 300,000 copies in Britain.

The synchronic series format of story publishingtook hold with the success of the Sherlock Holmesstories, beginning in July 1891. Arthur Conan Doyle

had realised that serial stories in magazines were amistake because if the first number were missed read-ers would be debarred from the story; so he thoughtof writing a serial without appearing to do so, witheach instalment standing alone, yet retaining a con-necting link by means of the leading characters.

James Joyces short stories are characterised bydeletions, the most obvious deletion being that of theconventional beginning and ending. The techniquehas been considered Chekhovian but it is as likely thatJoyce adopted it from the work of English story-writ-ers of the 1890s.

The major British prizes for fiction (the ManBooker, the Whitbread) are specifically for novels; USprizes (such as the Pulitzer) are for fiction in general,and have been won by numerous short story collec-tions, including by writers Jhumpa Lahiri, JohnCheever, Jean Stafford, Katherine Anne Porter,William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, James AMichener and Robert Olen Butler.

The most prolific of British short-story writers wasVS Pritchett.

Compiled by Sophie Lewis

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Principles of Short Story