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.

EMERGENCY BLOG POST NUMBER THREE. DIVE, DIVE, DIVE! TORPEDOED BY KACEY VANDERKARR: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

I just discovered that I've been booted out of an aeroplane into clear blue sky. The rest of this blog post will be spent checking for a parachute.
   Who did this to me? Kacey (insert expletives here) Vanderkarr. She just blogged about me, and left me flapping in the breeze. I'll do something a bit different...
   Yes. I'll publish this post now, and continue writing. Kacey is part of some cult called a blog hop. At the last second, she ambushed me with kindness and praise and all that evil stuff.
   Readers of her blog have been steered to my café, in anticipation of GOOD EATS. (See any Harold Lloyd film for details.) I must now frantically scramble literary eggs.
   Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. Abnormal service will be resumed shortly.

*

Well, this is a first. Publishing the blog - going live - and then publishing more of the blog post as the world turned. Readers who came late to the show, you'll just have to take my word for it. That asterisk was your signpost of events in the dim and distant.
   Onward.
   Must be a change in the weather. I’ve been bombarded from all sides by people telling me how nice I am. Maybe someone will come along and accuse me of being a grumpy bastard.
   Take Kacey Vanderkarr, for example. If you were steered here from her blog, you'll know that I am Scottish. How Scottish? Really grumpily Scottish.
   It is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.
   P.G. Wodehouse was not wrong.
   I am grumpy. A professional curmudgeon. Kacey Vanderkarr would have you believe otherwise. (Insert expletives here.) Apparently, I drive her crazy with this whole writing nonsense nonsense.
   Why? How? Oh, I do outrageous things.
   For example. I tell her she can write, and that she has to publish her work - just in case she's swept up in a Zombie Apocalypse. That drives her crazy. How crazy?
   Crazy enough to publish. Here's a link.
   KACEY'S FIRST BOOK.
   Is that crazy enough? No. She likes to embarrass me, she says. How? Oh, by throwing a dedication my way. Here's a link.
   KACEY'S SECOND BOOK.
   On her blog, Kacey says I teach her things about writing. As authors, we are in this business to learn stuff. We'll learn by looking out the window, or staring inward to the heart of darkness.
   And we'll learn stuff by researching. Reading books. Trawling websites. Talking to other authors. I learn from Kacey, from Missy, and other writer contacts too numerous to bribe.
   Writers are not rivals.

*

Ow.
   I've been sapped over the head and dumped into this blog hop. Which means answering four questions. Is there no end to the torture?

1. What am I working on?

More than one book at once, as usual. I'm dividing my time between JAPANESE MONSTERS and many other things.
   JAPANESE MONSTERS is a tale of demonic possession, betrayal, and supernatural spookiness in Old Japan. Expect a dash of Lafcadio Hearn, a hint of Akutagawa, and a hefty dose of Kurosawa. What's not to love?

2. How does my work differ from others of its genre?

I don't know, for a rather obvious reason. To write in a genre, read outside the genre. (This is what Kacey means when she says that I drive her crazy with writing help.)
   If you've never had this advice handed to you before, here it is. On a plate. With yummy sprinkles. Get stuck in. Read outside your chosen area.

3. Why do I write what I write?

I must write. Writing is breathing for scribblers.

4. How does my writing process work?

I could stop to analyse that. Hmm. I'm sure the process would fall apart if I tried to dissect it. However, as you are here looking for substance...
   Come up with an idea. Write it down. Worry about fixing things later. Right now, let the words flow like molten lava. There's a time for editing. A special time. Called LATER. That's a technical term. Remember it.
   Editing? Look for typos, formatting glitches, gremlins, continuity errors, and holes in the plot. Fix all that stuff. Don't rewrite your story. Trust to your gut. Stick with that instinct.
   Endless rewriting leads to endless rewriting. Skip that madness. Develop the ability to cut loose of your story. Wave it goodbye. Treat it like a cake in the oven. Cook it. Remove it from the oven. Slice and serve. Write another tale.

*

At this point, I'm supposed to hand the hopping blog over to some people. They were too busy to participate. But you can still visit places on the internet.
   Try here. E.B. Black. She just moved house, and is about to get married. Which is why she won't be answering the four questions above. E.B. BLACK.
   Or here. Chris McMullen. He's teaching physics as I speak. The founder of READ TUESDAY has been putting out valuable blogs on the writing game. CHRIS MCMULLEN.
   No blog for this next one. Instead, there's a video station, broadcasting to the world. Melissa C. Water is a mental health activist on YouTube. MELISSA C. WATER.

*

It remains only to invite writers reading this to mention Kacey Vanderkarr and drop links back the way, if you feel like answering those four questions. Here they are again, for ease of copying and pasting...

1. What am I working on?

2. How does my work differ from others of its genre?

3. Why do I write what I write?

4. How does my writing process work?

BREVITY. SUMS IT UP NICELY.

Posted by RLL for REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE. © RLL, 2012.

Yes, I suppose I should say something about the impending release of my uncollected short story collection. I vacillated over whether STORIES should be in the title. As I decided to put my pre-publication blogs in the book, I couldn’t class those as fiction. WORKS replaced STORIES.

   You gather scraps, as a writer. Stories with no home to go to. Wayward tales seek shelter under a log. Suddenly, this ragtag band of orphans becomes something more. Or so you like to tell yourself. I could have put every scrap in the volume. But no. I had a long think, about the short story.

   Why write short stories? Well, that was the done thing in school. We were exposed to the concept of writing fiction and not taking all day at it. Now I devote myself to writing fiction and taking all day at it, for money.

   There is a view that it’s important to progress from writing the short story to writing the novel. A contrary view is that you can just jump in and write the novel if you want to. (Third view. Devoting yourself to short stories is no crime.) I feel that chapters of novels are short stories, or should be. Something meaningful goes on in a chapter. That’s the point of isolating part of the story in a chunk.

   What is something meaningful? I’ve read chapters of books that had nothing plot-related go on across the pages. Atmosphere can provide something meaningful in a chapter of that stripe. Perhaps all the action is happening elsewhere, and having nothing plot-related going on inside a chapter is simply the author’s way of stoking tension or interest in what must, inevitably, follow.

   In the short story itself, there’s no follow-on. Unless you come up with a sequel. You will see that happen inside my book. It’s not against the rules, for there are few rules in fiction. What are those rules? Avoid boredom. Be consistent within the confines of any fictional world you create.

   Creating a world across fifteen pages or fifteen-hundred becomes a question of how much space you wish to cover. The short story, in school, often hovered around 300 words. Translated to print, that’s a single page of A4, double-spaced, in a 10 pt font. More or less.

   A page.

   Would I write a short story that short now? If I felt like it. I don’t generally feel like it. If I want to write a short story, I’ll scribble a few thousand words rather than a few hundred. This blog has a minimum limit of 1,500 words. Enough space in which to say what I feel like saying. If I were to write a short story as a blog entry, then, yes, the story would meet that minimum requirement. And some vague maximum limit.

   How long can a short story be, before it is no longer a short story? I’d still call a piece of fiction a short story at 15,000 words. That’s something I could write in a day. We’d have to draw on other terms, from the wilderness, to help define a sense of scale. A novel hovers around the 75,000 limit.

   Do we simply apply labels on the basis of the 25,000-sized chunk? Novel, 75,000. The novella, 50,000. Extended short story, 25,000. Short story? Everything beneath that lowered limbo-bar, down to the pub joke or fortune cookie declaration.

   Short stories. Do they sell? How do they sell? This is the digital age, and there are many options available. A story could be released into the wild on its lonesome. That serves as a taster. Would I charge for that? Perhaps if I put out a series of single tales.

   You can read a free taster on my Hallowe’en page. One day, I’ll edit The Chalice in the Snow for inclusion in a collection. There won’t be much editing done to it – I have very few alterations to make to the piece. When it is released, it’ll be the collection you’re paying for rather than that story. (I’ve now edited The Chalice in the Snow. Tidied a few sentences. That was all. The version on the blog remains unchanged.)

   How would I package my short stories? Single release? Collection in a group of six? Another flock, in a group of a dozen? Some overlapping, from one collection to the next? Bumper gathering of 20+ tales? Overlapping again? No, I don’t think I’m going to duplicate tales across collections.

   I see advantages in the notion. A collection of rocket ship stories. Another gathering of horror tales. One piece of fiction is a rocket ship story and a horror tale. So that appears in both volumes. Transparency is important if you are going to offer customers your stories in that way.

   Mark the collections clearly. Itemise and advertise the inventory for the benefit of your would-be readers. Don’t short-change customers, and don’t leave them feeling short-changed either. Otherwise resentment creeps in, when having to pay for the same mutant-monster tale five times in a row.

   On a side-note, I’ll add that naming a collection of short stories WORLD’S BEST TRICK-ENDING TALES is not a great ploy. Unless you have a greater ploy in mind. Similarly, your HERO UNMASKED AS THE VILLAIN COLLECTION, and ORDINARY STORIES FEATURING THE UNEXPECTED ARRIVAL OF ZOMBIES, may alert readers to some of the surprise twists you have in store. On the flip-side, WEREWOLF TALES better have werewolves in there. Or be tales told by a werewolf, at the very least.

   The appeal of the short story takes on a new lease of life in our digital age. Readers of this blog could be reading the blog on a phone, on a train. (How did the phone come to land on the train?) We may define the shortness of a short story by whether or not it is consumed at a single sitting on a train journey.

   It would be uncharitable of me to suppose that you could chomp through the complete works of Tolstoy on a single train journey in this part of the world. I am here to talk about writing, not about interminable train trips in the Wild West of Scotland.

   Brevity, as Dorothy Parker has it, is the soul of lingerie. It is also the spine of the short story. Get in, write what you have to, and get out. The exact number of words involved is unimportant. Atmosphere is what you are after.

   I don’t think I ever read a Mark Twain book that felt like a book. Tom Sawyer and his rascally pal Huck Finn will always inhabit the landscape of the short tale, to my mind. Drifting along the river, chapter by chapter. Maybe it’s the way Twain wrote. Well.

   There are countless forgotten novels whose only impact on my life was the removal of hours that could have been spent more profitably. Over the course of a few pages, using a curious mix of mist and words, Akutagawa gave the world a short story that ranks as one of the most atmospheric I’ve ever read. And that, filtered to me through the Japanese-to-English translation. In a Grove. You may have encountered the story as a movie called Rashomon.

   In a Grove is such a short short story, that I pause (briefly, how else) to consider editing short pieces. How to edit a short story? The same way a large story is edited. Electronically, using features of the word processor to iron out the few rough spots on the shorts.

   Microsoft Word has many features to it. A few are even considered useful. I vaguely recall OVERTYPE mode being something you could switch off FOR ALL TIME™. In one of Microsoft Word’s previous lives, at any rate. That handy ability, of permanently dispensing with the bloody annoying thing, no longer appears to be available in this particular incarnation. For the sake of brevity, we’ll pretend my 95-page rant on this topic never existed.

   My rant must have been edited from the blog, but how? Swallowed by the red circle, obviously. An esoteric cabal, set up in the era of your choice. If you want to concoct stories about a covert society, that is. THE ADVENTURE OF THE RED CIRCLE.

   I use a Microsoft Word circle, filled red, to mark a point in my work. This electronic bookmark serves one purpose. To note the progress of my editing. On the off-chance that I’m torn away from my writing to deal with the drains, or other world-shattering events, I mark the latest edited point with that red circle.

   As I move down pages, I drag the red circle with me. When I reach the finish, I delete the red circle. Whether I’m writing a novel or short story, the red circle crawls across the pages in search of matters that require fixing. Mistakes do not quite fall into the red circle’s gaping maw. A fair bit of prodding goes into that circus act.

   I see, by the enchanted bean counter attached to this machine, that I am at the finish. Though, in drawing attention to that fact, I have, miraculously, padded out another paragraph. Consequence? In going back to tidy some typing, I accidentally activated OVERTYPE mode. Not, I fear, for the last time.

NEXT BLOG: NEXT BLOG.