VERY SHORT STORIES: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Songs, poems, and messages scribbled on birthday cards: these are all very short stories. What stories do we tell that qualify as short? Here’s one I’ve just invented.

 The Betrayal.

 “Hi!”

   “Die!”

   “Urgh!”

I might edit that later. The title risks being longer than the tale itself, and that’s always a warning. Also, I may have used too many exclamations. The first exclamation! Well, that indicates an enthusiastic welcome from the character on meeting a sound ally.
   The second exclamation! This emphasises the sense of betrayal. That third exclamation! I could have left it out. The violence of the betrayal comes in telling the ally to die. We could just tail off into the repercussions, without the exclamation, as the body slumps against a wall, smearing blood down and sideways in a short yet tragic arc.
   And now I’ve committed the crime of spending more time explaining the tale than I did in the writing of it. Should I cut the last line completely? Then the title would match the tale in length. That would be 13% too pretentious.
   Carly Simon encapsulates a whole faux poseur art gallery of rogues in a song about being pretentious. Title: YOU’RE SO VAIN. The body of the text delivers on the title’s promise. You probably think this song is about you.
   Simon takes over four minutes to tell the whole story. It’s done as a real singalong song; the level of repetition is called a chorus, and we find this acceptable in so short a span of time.
   I say short. At four minutes and a little bit over, the story falls within the acceptable time-frame of three to five minutes given to songs playing on the radio. Simon released that one in late 1972.
   The start of 1972 saw Don McLean’s hit American Pie clock in at over eight minutes. If you wanted a big hit, you had to go for a small song: stick to around three minutes – or your five-minute epic would fade out sixty seconds early as the news came on.
   Checking music charts for the period, I see MacLean’s song listed as part one and part two. It was released on Needle-Reader Technology using both sides of the disc. Being a singalong song, the level of repetition is called a chorus and we find this acceptable in so short-ish a span of time.
   My story, The Betrayal, uses exclamation as repetition. And that’s about it. I say it is my story, but the brevity of the so-called plot is severe enough that it comes across as a joke that’s been flitting around the world, bat-like, looking for yet another perch.
   Do bats eat fish?
   Apparently, though I can’t confirm that they eat perch.
   Wordplay. Joking. The joke is a short story. Or it should be, almost all the time. I claim no originality for The Betrayal. Something tells me it’s been done before. The only thing more annoying than having seen it all before is not having seen it all before.
   We’ll chalk that up to Oscar Wilde, on the basis that Dorothy Parker attributed every witty aside to Oscar – whether he uttered witticisms or not. Repetition. Brevity. Wit. The very short story.
   That very short story could be shorter.

 Betrayal.

 “Die!!!”

 I feel there is scope for shrinking the tale a shade more.
   Let us try modest variation on a well-worn theme. A new short tale I’ve named…

 Mystery.

 “?”

 

I’m not sure the story needs quotation marks. Title is a bit lengthy. Hmmm…

 Query.

 

?

 

There you go.

 

Quiz.

 

?

 

Better still…

 

Whu

 

?

 

I suppose, in the end, there is this…

 

?

 

!

 

Kill a minimalist approach by means of flogging a dead horse that’s a dead pony in the rewriting of a tale. Once minimalism is down at the particle level, only angels dancing on the head of an argument about angels dancing on the head of a pin can see what’s left. And that is swiftly disappearing up Stephen Hawking’s arse with a sideways commentary that black holes ain’t so black.
   Instead of reducing the size of the story to theoretical levels, open your short story into strange new avenues. Take a long view of the short story and add highly technical things. Characters. Dialogue. Incidents. Plotting. Anecdotes.
   Poetry is short, and commentary on it often unbearably long. But we return to brevity and Oscar Wilde opining on the business of being a poet…
   A poet can survive everything but a misprint.
   Wilde serves us a short story about poets and poetry and the matter of printing. He hints at criticism and worry over career failure brought about by bad reviews. His sentence breezes through the room, and leaves lingering scents which are our own thoughts on his thoughts.
   A story is a story. It is also our impression of the story. A short tale is written with the framework of the world in mind, but knocks out all the scaffolding. That leaves us to view the slender structure with our own knowledge of the world painting a whole landscape behind the piece at a later date.
   One of the best short stories I’ve read? Akutagawa’s story was published one hundred years ago. Even in translation from Japanese to English, the tale still carries a great deal of power, of storytelling energy, in so confined a space.
   Translation is a tricky thing. His story is called In a Bamboo Grove or simply In a Grove. This grove, in the text, is a grove of bamboo and cedars, so I’m inclined to think of the work as In a Grove. The story runs to almost 3,500 words. On average, that’s about two of my blog posts and a little bit over.
   In a Grove is a murder mystery. I first encountered it in the Kurosawa movie, Rashomon. Characters tell different accounts of a man’s death. As I watched the film, I had the distinct impression that we would hear a statement from the murdered man. I’d seen so many Kurosawa movies by the time I watched Rashomon that I’d grown familiar with the director’s style. His flourishes. Having the dead man turn up seemed normal.
   And so it went. Spoiler for you – spoilers about a movie that’s 70+ and adapted from a story that’s a century old…aren’t really spoilers. When it comes to famous stories featuring dramatic moments, you are going to shit yourselves when you read

 

REDACTED.

 

What of this dead witness? The ghost operates through a medium to tell his version of events. This murder mystery uncovers another crime during the investigation – that of a rape. Different characters have their own versions of what happened and why.
   Ghostly testimony wouldn’t be admissible in a court of law, or on a court of tennis for that matter.
   There isn’t much room for the writer to move around when the short story is packed with characters. Akutagawa uses minor details as mighty weapons to get around a few problems. You’ll find witness accounts differ in tiny ways. One witness mentions a point. No one else mentions that point at all.
   Several witnesses mention the same point, but discrepancies arise in the smallest details. Inconsequential? Perhaps. There’s the matter of people who confess to the killing. We’re not talking about suspects denying committing crimes. No. It’s the reverse. Characters queue up to admit what they’ve done.
   Akutagawa plotted discrepancies with incredible skill. As readers, we are even prepared to accept the introduction of a new character – the dead man himself – and play the game of considering how accurate his ghostly evidence is.
   To be precise, we consider how accurate the medium conveying the information is. If we want to. So, technically, that’s the introduction of two characters.
   This story could’ve been murdered in translation.
 

Wait a minute; this guy’s contradicted that guy. Okay, it all goes down in this grove just off the Yamashina stage road. But how many arrows were really there? Violent struggle? Where are the signs? Whoever wrote this didn’t keep a lid on the small details. Here, I’d better fix this, and fast.

 

Fast and loose.
   Luckily the story wasn’t “fixed” in translation. Every witness has something different to say. Four of the witnesses explain events to a High Police Commissioner…
   At this stage, I’m not even convinced they were all talking to the same investigating official. There is some question as to where a character was from, and that could bring in police officials from different jurisdictions…if you want to press the point.
   Can we add a headline to this crime? Samurai from Kyoto…wait. We aren’t even sure of that. Someone is pretty sure he wasn’t from Kyoto.
   Since its publication, In a Grove has generated many stories about the one true version of what went on. As a story, it has been studied to death and studied beyond death in the ghostly section of the tale. A story is short…but don’t write it off as slender or lacking in character.
   Stories are sometimes stories about stories. A movie review is a short story about a longer story, for example. And a movie review about a movie not even seen by the reviewer can, on occasion, be priceless instead of worthless.
   Sir Michael Caine, on his movie JAWS: THE REVENGE.

I have never seen it, but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific.

Caine was paid a lot of money to go on holiday to the Bahamas and out-act a rubber shark. He accomplished this difficult task. Nice work if you can get it. Purely in the interests of research, I watched a mercifully brief video compilation of Sir Michael’s dramatic input.
   He left his mark on the franchise.
   If, in your heads, you are thinking to yourselves that this was a skid-mark, I, for one, would not contradict you.
   Telling short stories is conversational. Except for the typing. I’d use voice software to recognise the words and burble them out for me, but voice and recognition software are terms that don’t go together if you are un-American.
   A cruel rejection of a vital vowel-sound, and I was sent back to the typographical salt-mines.
   How to write a short story? Invent something and babble until you run out of steam. If you accidentally create a novel…oops.
   Invent something. Anything. Invent a television show about a dinosaur brought back to life by mad scientists, only for the dinosaur to crash and almost die while flying an experimental fighter jet. Don’t worry. We have the technology. And the TV budget. We can rebuild him. He is…
   Cyborgosaur.
   Underneath his skin he has a solid Tyrannosaurium™ chassis, as well as extendable metal forearms with opposable thumbs, laser-beam eyes, cyborg legs with Turbo-Boost™ and secrets yet to be revealed. He is Michael Knight Dynne O’Saur, a man reptile barely alive.
   Join him and his merry gang of misfits, operating from their secret desert base in the Canyons of the Doomed. Embark on a shadowy car-trip into the thrilling world of a man reptile who does not exist.
   With Raphael – his open-top bus pursuit vehicle...
   Angel DeVille, the loveable rogue mechanic...
   ...and Control, played by veteran of the London stage Sir Suave Bright-Smoothly.
   Every week our lone hero embarks upon a crusade to champion the downtrodden, cheer the helpless, back up the innocent, and slam dinosaur tail into the butts of those who believe they are above the law.

Episodes, in order of broadcast: Pilot Part One, Pilot Part Two, Rogue Cyborgosaur, Reptile Twin of Evil, Control on Trial, Death of a Buddy from the Old Days, Cyborgosaur: P.I., Goodness Cretaceous Great Balls of Fire, Dinosaur Down, Old Fossils Never Die, You’re a Lizard Harry, and the thrilling finale Extinction Event.
   With Ernest Borgnine as Harry Dean Stanton.

I’d tune in to watch that. Who wouldn’t? Maybe it plays better as a short collection of words. Under 250. If you are struggling to write something, write something short. At least the struggle isn’t as long as the one over writing a novel is.