Tall tales told briefly: a short story writer’s guide

I confess: after publishing nearly two dozen short stories, I’d given up. Writing workshops were starting to tell me my tales didn’t fit into the few-thousand-word format of a short story. Flash fiction, micro fiction? Forget about it!

Ann Fields

Then at a recent meeting of the Dallas Mystery Writers, I heard short story writer Ann Fields speak on the few (but basic) principles, and thought, maybe I’ll find the courage to try the short form again. I’ll think of it as a summer wardrobe for my writing. Fewer pieces, no layering, just the basics.

Not that Fields saw the light immediately in her own writing career. She started by writing long – four romance novels and one novella published under the pen name Anna Larence. Her short fiction has been published in the anthologies Lyrical Darkness, Voices from the Block (volumes I and II): A Legacy of African-American Literature.

“I loved the long form, but I had a day job and found it hard to keep my focus. So, I took a detour through short form and fell in love with that form of writing,” she told her mystery-writing audience.

Writers often ask how many words it takes to make a novel. How few does it take to make a short story? Like your summer wardrobe, there’s brief, briefer and briefest. Remember, like the length of your skirt hem, the following word counts are suggestions. When writing for publication, check your publisher’s website for specific guidelines.

That said, Fields’ definitions for short fiction categories range from micro fiction (up to 100 words, or less than a page), flash fiction (up to 300 words, or up to a single page), short stories (up to 10,000 words, or 35 pages or less), and novellas (up to 30,000 words, or 130 pages or less).

(I’ll add a note: in my experience, many ezines and anthologies prefer “short stories” on the shorter side, often in the 3,000 to 5,000-word range.)

That said, short form fiction still needs to be fiction. It must be a complete story with a definable beginning, middle and end. It needs well-developed characters, strong story conflict, internal (character) conflict, a provocative setting and an intriguing story question. It will also contain such basic elements as dialogue, action, description, narration (exposition) and internal monologue (introspection).

Fields notes that, because of their brief length, not all short stories will contain all of the basic elements. Still, it seems like a lot to cover while still staying under 10,000 words, maybe under 100.

Her suggestion is, rather than fixating on word-counts, simply to write the story in your heart in the way that seems natural to you – and it. “How did the story come to you?” The most important factors in determining the form (and length) of any story, she said, are the author’s intent, intuition, and writing sense.

“I credit (my intuition) to reading a lot of short stories and getting familiar with the feel and the rhythm of them.” For those not sure where to start reading short stories, she suggests the annual Best American Short Stories anthologies. “I spend way too much money at Lucky Dog Books and Half Price Books for those story anthologies.”

Other resources for finding short stories include Hemingway/PEN Award winners, New American Fiction, and  Flannery O’Connor Award winners. Favorite writers include those as diverse as J. California Cooper, O. Henry, Eudora Welty, Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen Crane and Joan Silber. (However, she urges caution when using older writers as guides. Poe’s classic, The Fall of the House of Usher, spends its first page and a half on a description of setting, something “he would not be able to get away with in modern times!”)

That said, short stories focus more strongly on a single character than do longer forms of fiction. More than a single character is acceptable, but the viewpoint of one individual must be paramount. They also have a single theme, a unified feel, and are tightly written. And only one plot. No subplots allowed! Think about whether your story can be read in a single sitting. And have fun. There’s room for experimentation and atypical styles in the short fiction format.

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Need more motivation to write short? Consider this short story writing contest that offers cash and publication credits. The Dallas Area Writers Group’s 2017 Short Story Contest (closes August 15). See the site for details. 

Adventure classics -- Haunted by a love that killed

Beloved

by Toni Morrison

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The year is 1873, and at a former station on the underground railroad, the ghost of a vengeful slain baby shatters mirrors, strews food on the floor and leaves tiny handprints in the icing of cakes. Seemingly exorcised after years of haunting, the baby disappears. But now a mysterious young woman waits at the door for the family’s return. Calling herself only “Beloved,” she insists she doesn’t know who she is or where she comes from. But she’s has an ominous scar under her chin. And she’s strangely familiar with the secrets of the woman of the house, Sethe, from the earrings she never wears to the songs she sang only to her children. And who has been ostracized from the colony of former slaves in Cincinnati, Ohio, for killing her young daughter eighteen years earlier.

While still recovering from the birth of her youngest child, escaped slave Sethe and her four children were tracked down by her former owner. She managed to cut the throat of one child before being caught. attempted to kill all her children, but only succeeded in cutting the throat of one daughter, a children just learning to crawl.

“I couldn’t let all that go back to where it was,” Sethe tells her lover, Paul D, when he confronts her.

But though Sethe believes her action was the only way to protect her child, how could she explain that to her tiny dead daughter?

While researching an earlier book, Toni Morrison came across an 1856 newspaper clipping that provided the real life inspiration for the story of Sethe and her family. Entitled “A Visit to the Slave Mother Who Killed Her Child,” it quoted escaped slave Margaret Garner saying she “would much rather kill (her children) at once, and thus end their sufferings, than have them taken back to slavery, and be murdered by piecemeal.”

(Margaret Garner was not tried for murder or attempted murder, but for what the courts of the time believed to be her real crime, escaping from slavery.)

The story seared Morrison. Ultimately, she decided to concentrate on the emotional life of Sethe and her fellow slaves instead of reconstructing the historical mother’s situation. The result was her 1987 novel and Pulitzer Prize winner, Beloved, followed by a 1993 Nobel Prize for literature.

Whatever Margaret Garner may have finally felt, the family of Beloved was shattered, both by Sethe’s actions and devastation of slavery, separating Sethe from her own mother and her children’s father, Halle, who she believes died during a failed escape attempt; deadening her will, her initiative, her ability to love.

“I got us all out. Without Halle, too.” Sethe tells Paul D. “Up till then it was the only thing I ever did on my own. . . Maybe I couldn’t love em proper in Kentucky because they wasn’t mine to love.”

And he understands. “To get to a place where you could love anything you chose--not to need permission for desire--well now, that was freedom.”
The threat of losing that freedom terrified Sethe enough to kill. And would terrify her again and again, until the ghost of Beloved is finally--but is it finally?--exorcised.

In both book and movie versions, Beloved is widely available. And for Morrison’s own thoughts about the writing of her book, see “Toni Morrison: Beloved” at
www.youtube.com/.

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics begins a November of fantasy with Lord Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter.)