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Sara Bannerman's avatar

This takes me to a theory I’ve been wrestling with for a while now. The idea of trust that the audience has for the writer. Is it possible the writer submitting this question is facing rejection because he is “unknown”? Were he an established writer familiar to the magazine, is it possible his lack of “story” would be accepted as cutting edge and unique, rather than lacking and wrong?

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mary g.'s avatar

This is the never-ending question: what is a story? Or, as the questioner puts it: “When is a story a story?” And I think the questioner may, in fact, know the answer. Because he writes: “I wrote a short piece I really love. It's not exactly "a story.” I’m guessing that what the questioner wrote was something more like a prose poem—he says his piece had detail, movement, and emotion, which all fall within the definition of something poem-like told in the form of a piece of prose. But it doesn’t sound as though his piece has what George is calling “complication.” And it doesn’t sound as though his piece follows the kinds of conventions most of us know of as “story conventions.”

The short pieces George has posted (one by Lydia Davis and the other by Daniil Kharms) also are not stories, per se. And by per se I mean, that although they do “complicate” and even “resonate,” they do not provide the conventions of storytelling as we here in the West define it. So a person can call them whatever they want—stories, vignettes, flash fictions, poems, prose poems, etc. And there are journals who will publish them. Complication plus resonation: many people love these sorts of pieces.

I know I’ve talked about my own history of writing stories before, so please ignore this if you’ve heard it before. In the beginning of learning how to write, I wrote stories that were not stories. Instead, they were my emotions more or less being barfed up on the page. They sounded often like beefed-up journal entries. And many came pretty much directly from my own life. They ended in completely unsatisfactory ways because I did not yet know how to carve stories from real life or how to write a story at all. At a certain point, a friend of mine sent some of my work to a well-known author and asked him if he wouldn’t mind giving me some advice. He did this because my writing was good, but my stories were not. The well-known author very kindly sent me the following advice, not in these words, but hopefully you’ll get the point. He said: A story ends in a win, lose or draw.

After much, much, much work and thousands of words, I finally understood what he meant. You can’t just write description and emotion within some sort of movement (as the questioner says he did, and as all of my early stories did) and expect readers to walk away thinking, “now there’s a story.” You need a character (define as you wish) who goes through something (define as you wish) that escalates, and at the end of the story, that character either wins (can be thought of as “changes”), loses (does not “change”) or draws (they were given an opportunity to “change” and did not take it).

Sometimes when writing, thinking in this way (“win, lose, draw”) can be unhelpful. I find it most helpful to first write something, and then think about the story in story terms later. Do I have a character? Does the character go through something—not just internally but also externally? Does the story escalate to a boiling point? Does the character have to decide what action to take right then? Does the character win? Lose? Draw?

I know many people do not like to think of stories this way as it seems too conventional. But the vast majority of stories we all love have these conventions in place in some fashion—sometimes they are buried in such a way as to not be so obvious; others are very clearly following conventions.

The questioner asks: How much plot is needed? And the answer is: As much as necessary to make your story succeed. In other words, you set up your story in the beginning with some sort of question. Your story succeeds if the plot takes us down a road that lets us see how that question will be answered. Remember that we do want to see it. On the page. We don’t want inferences or cloudiness.

Will I have more to say later? Probably. But I’ll post this for now. Thanks for reading!

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