From Words to Flash

These are notes for running a workshop

This evening I hope to illustrate that there's more to sentences than might first appear. Like stories, they can have tension and resolution, pacing and surprise. Getting a sentence right can take a long time but it's worth it - if an editor sees a bad sentence in the first paragraph, your script is likely to go straight in the SAE. We're going to look at words first, then try to calibrate our sensibilities by looking at good and bad sentences, then we'll try to assess some sentences before trying to write our own. At the end we might get as far as writing little stories.

As we'll see later, people disagree about the goodness of sentences. I'm going to focus more on form than content; I'm not going to highlight sentences for their wisdom.

Words

However complex the sentences, they're always made up of words, so we'll start by sensitizing ourselves to the building blocks though we're not going to focus on individual words today.

Ex 1 What are your favorite words (you may like them for their meaning or merely their sound). What are your least favorite words.

Dylan Thomas liked "drome". Some people don't like "garaged" or "to medal"

In poetry books you'll sometime see provocative lists of forbidden words ("shards", "gossamer", "fester", "frond", "lambent","shimmer" etc) but of course, it's not that easy. They say of weeds that they're only flowers in the wrong place. One might say a similar thing about unpopular words.

One way to try to improve a sentence is to replace some of the words by more interesting ones mined from a thesaurus - replacing "red" by "vermillion", "road" by "thoroughfare", "bird" by "lesser spotted warbler" etc. Alas, a sentence full of pretty words might not be pretty. One misplaced word, however interesting, might destroy a sentence.

Today I'm going to work on the assumption that "if you look after the sentences the words will look after themselves". If you want to see how tackle a sentence word by word, take a look at Jim Murdoch's blog where Jim Murdoch tells us how he spent 3.5 hours trying to get a sentence right, or look at the University of Rouen's collection of Flaubert's scripts

Sentences

Now we're going to study some sentences. First we'll look at the extremes

Bad sentences?

In "PN Review 185" Frederic Raphael spends 4 large pages attacking the prose quality of Ian McEwan's "On Chesil Beach". For example, he quotes his sentence -"Two youths in dinner jackets served them from a trolley parked outside in the corridor, and their comings and goings through what was generally known as the honeymoon suite make the waxed oak boards squeak comically against the silence", commenting "'Parked outside in the corridor' is another stock phrase, in which 'outside' is superfluous and 'parked' witless. The repeated use of the copular after the comma appends a tail too long to be supported, most of it ('comings and goings … generally known as the honeymoon suite … comically') redundant. Who cares what the honeymoon suite was generally called when we are already in it? If you use your imagination, you may guess that it had a considerably less brochuresque nickname among the staff, whose consciousness we are supposed to be sharing. Let it pass; what was comic about the squeak, if comic is right, has surely to be that someone - Florence, Edward, the 'youths' - found it so. In which case, in whom and how did the comedy express itself?" (p.45).

I've seen far worse sentences than that. Some of the ones below come from famous writers -

Ex 2 - Can you improve these sentences? Do any make you wince?

1. Having pitched the tents, the horses were fed and watered
2. Before describing what happened, the background to these events must be understood
3. What a beautiful sky, she thought to herself as she ran slowly along the narrow road.
4. More than one person lives in this house.
5. On holiday her car got scratched.
6. On a late winter evening in 1983, while driving through fog along the Maine coast, recollections of old campfires began to drift into the March mist, and I thought of the Abnaki Indians of the Algonquin tribe who dwelt near Bangor a thousand years ago.
7. She wore a dress the same color as her eyes her father brought her from San Francisco
8. Craig stared into the mirror and squinted his eyes, for a moment he could almost see his brother staring back at him.
9. There were less people there than I'd expected.
10. Abstracting the face of the student from the file, the probationer took it to his superior.
11. He and his group swelled in number.

There's an old joke - "I know a man with a wooden leg called Jim". "What's the name of his other leg?". 1 and 2 are from "A Student's Guide to Writing" (Gordon Taylor). 6 is by Norman Mailer - first line of "Harlot's Ghost". 7 is from "Star" by Danielle Steel. The last two are from "The Afghan" by Frederick Forsyth

Good sentences?

Joseph Epstein chose this as the best first sentence in literature - "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." (Anna Karenina, Tolstoy). Fish's "How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One" (HarperCollins, 2011) doesn't mention this. He suggests that you use good sentences as models.

Ex 3: Study 2 of Fish's favorites "And I shall go on talking in a low voice while the sea sounds in the distance and overhead the great black flood of wind polishes the bright stars." (Joyce) "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." (Fitzgerald).

Here's one response to the Fitzgerald sentence: I love how it's so tantalizingly close to iambic pentameter - 5 iambs followed by 4 and 1/2.The cadence carries the reader forward in the first phrase with four staccato syllables. The choppiness of the second phrase brings the current's restraint to life, interrupting the flow of the sentence. The final phrase glides easily, but the missing twentieth syllable leaves the reader anticipating more. One can imagine the novel's last sentence repeating endlessly, beginning again where it left off. And of course that's the point. The art of the sentence is in its structure as much as its words.

How to study sentences

I think the quality of a sentence isn't as objective as the previous comments imply. Let's evaluate some sentences, learn how to talk about sentences. Punctuation is important, so we'll consider that too.

Ex 4 Punctuate and study this - It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

With this and similar exercises supply it without punctuation and get them to guess the author and add punctuation. This the first sentence of Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice"

This dates from a time when books were often read out. Punctuation indicated where to pause, rather than indicating logical structure.

Ex 5 Punctuate and study this - When they entered the room, he was very dead, maybe three or four days dead, since no one at the hotel had seen him around for some time

It's by Margot McCamley and it comes from Writing Magazine, May 2012. They have an "Under the Microscope" feature where they study the first 300 words of a novel.

Here are some suggestions by James McCreet

• Start with "He was very dead when they entered the room ..."
• "The sentence as it stands cannot use a comma before maybe"
• "quite halting and convoluted. This final clause overloads it with information when it needs to have impact and focus"

Ex 6 Punctuate and study - The April day was soft and bright, and poor Dencombe, happy in the conceit of reasserted strength, stood in the garden of the hotel, comparing, with a deliberation in which, however, there was still something of langour, the attractions of easy strolls

It's the first sentence of Henry James' "The Middle Years"

Note that there are lots of opposites. Here are some notes about it from "next word, better word" by Stephen Dobyns (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)

• "James used these commas to call attention to important words, used them in fact as line breaks are often used in poetry", p.129
• "begins with an independent clause; the tone is straightforward and somewhat optimistic ... Rhythmically, we notice the clause is four iambs, which contributes to its lightness.", p.129
• "The second independent clause has seven commas, which ensures no consistent rhythm can be established. This rhythmic disruption, as it were, arises directly from the word "poor" ... Dencombe is "poor" because of his health, but also because he is deceived.", p.129
• "The modifying phrase between the subject, Dencombe, and the verb, "stood," the following dependent clause and string of prepositional phrases create tension by delaying verbs and direct objects, but they also in their progression and rhythm imitate the languor of Dencombe's thought [which] leads to a slightly humorous direct object", p.129
• "As with a classic Latinate sentence, James's second independent clause accumulates meaning until it reaches its most important words.", p.130
• "James's sentence keeps us from being able to anticipate its direction and controls the speed at which we read it, while the word "poor" provides us with suspense enough to care about that direction", p.130

Ex 7 Punctuate and study this sentence - There was a little stoop of humility as she passed through the door, into the larger but darker library beyond, a hint of frailty, an affectation of bearing more than her fifty-nine years, a slight bewildered totter among the grandeur that her daughter now had to pretend to take for granted.

From "The Stranger's Child", Alan Hollinghurst

Here are some notes - "humility" has rather quickly elided into "affectation," and the point of view has shifted by the end of the sentence, and the physical movement through the rooms accompanies a gradual inner movement that progresses through four parallel clauses, each of which, though legato, suggests a slightly different take on things

Note how these sentences have a shape - they have tension and release, the form of the sentence emulates the mood. They flow. But try this

Ex 8 Punctuate and study this sentence - Oddly enough, she was one of the most thoroughgoing sceptics he had ever met, and possibly (this was a theory he used to make up to account for her, so transparent in some ways, so inscrutable in others), possibly she said to herself, As we are a doomed race, chained to a sinking ship (her favourite reading as a girl was Huxley and Tyndall, and they were fond of these nautical metaphors), as the whole thing is a bad joke, let us, at any rate, do our part; mitigate the sufferings of our fellow-prisoners (Huxley again); decorate the dungeon with flowers and air-cushions; be as decent as we possibly can.

Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (more an exercise in punctuation). If you have the time, try this

Ex 9 Punctuate and study this sentence - No, I don't know them," he said, but instead of vouchsafing so simple a piece of information, so very unremarkable a reply, in the natural conversational tone which would have been appropriate to it, he enunciated it with special emphasis on each word, leaning forward, nodding his head, with at once the vehemence which a man imparts, in order to be believed, to a highly improbable statement (as though the fact that he did not know the Guermantes could be due only to some strange accident of fortune) and the grandiloquence of a man who, finding himself unable to keep silence about what is to him a painful situation, chooses to proclaim it openly in order to convince his hearers that the confession he is making is one that causes him no embarrassment, is in fact easy, agreeable, spontaneous, that the situation itself--in this case the absence of relations with the Guermantes family--might very well have been not forced on, but actually willed by him, might arise from some family tradition, some moral principle or mystical vow which expressly forbade his seeking their society.

Proust. Translation by C.K.Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin.

Sentence length

These sentences are growing longer. Is there any limit?

• Jeet Thayil’s debut novel Narcopolis (ManBooker-shortlisted in 2012) begins with a 5 page sentence
• "The Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (5 pages)
• Molly's soliloquy in "Ulysses"
• Jonathan Coe's novel "The Rotters' Club" (2001) ends with a 33-page sentence (13,955 words)
• Ed Parks' novel "Personal Days" ends with a sentence over 16,000 words long.
• "Dancing Lessons" (Hrabal) is a single 117 page sentence
• "The Gates of Paradise" (Jerzy Andrzejewski, 1960) consists of two sentences, the first 158-pages long and the final one 5 words.

Writing sentences

We get into habits when writing sentences. The next exercise strives to break those habits by varying structure while keeping the words the same.

Ex 10 Use the all the following phrases in 1st person, past tense sentences. No embellishments - just stick to the given information. "Jim", "purple armchair", "blow his tea cool" (or "blowing his tea cool", or "the better to blow his tea cool"), "talking" (or "talked"), "Arabella", " resigned amusement on her face" or ("an expression of resigned amusement on Arabella's face"), "walked into the room" (or "walking into the room"), "I saw". First write the sentence that comes most naturally to you, then try some variations

Adapted from an Emma Darwin blot post. Get people to produce sentences, then discuss the ones below

Here are some of the alternatives you could have produced. Which is best?

1. I walked into the room and saw that Jim had sat down in the purple armchair, the better to blow his tea cool and talk to Arabella, who had an expression of resigned amusement on her face.
2. Walking into the room I saw that Arabella, with an expression of resigned amusement on her face, was being talked to by Jim, who had sat down in the purple armchair the better to blow his tea cool.
3. Arabella had an expression of resigned amusement on her face, as I saw when I walked into the room, and was talking to Jim, who was blowing his tea cool as he sat in the purple armchair.
4. Jim was sitting down in the purple armchair and talking to Arabella, who had an expression of resigned amusement on her face while she watched him blowing his tea cool, as I saw when I walked into the room.
5. The resigned amusement on Arabella's face, as I saw when I walked into the room, was caused by watching Jim sitting in the purple armchair blowing his tea cool and talking to her.
6. Talking to Arabella, who had an expression of resigned amusement on her face as I saw when I walked into the room, and blowing his tea cool, was Jim, who was sitting in the purple armchair.
7. Sitting in the purple armchair I saw Jim, who was blowing his tea cool, and the resigned amusement on Arabella's face as he talked to her which I saw when I walked into the room.
8. Sitting in the purple armchair and talking to Arabella was Jim, blowing his tea cool, and I saw when I walked into the room that she had an expression of resigned amusement on her face.
9. Blowing his tea cool as he sat in the purple armchair was Jim, and I saw as I walked into the room that he was talking to Arabella, who had an expression of resigned amusement on her face.

Emma Darwin suggests that A good basic principle is to stick with the order in which your view-point-character perceives things, which is likely to be 1) in this example. 4) is an example of what I call 'zig-zagging', which starts a little way in and then jumps back to the beginning. Would your narrator take more notice of Jim or Arabella? Would s/he observe their emotion along with their action, as in 5), or only after a general survey of the room, as in 1)? 7) is a mess.

If you were allowed to use any words in this sentence, how might you write it? Perhaps you could hint that there's something about the situation that surprizes the narrator.

Short Fiction

If you go through each sentence in a story of yours, generating a list of alternatives and assessing them, it might take a while. Maybe it's time to consider shorter forms. There are many to choose from - memoes, recipes, adverts, anecdotes, lists, vignettes, shopping lists, etc. More recently there's "ketai fiction" (to fit in a text message), "Twitter Lit" (to fit Twitter's 140 character feed), etc. There used to be markets for these genres (fillers, Readers Digest). In his collection "This Isn't The Sort Of Thing That Happens To Someone Like You" (Bloomsbury, 2012), Jon McGregor has 2 stories that are fewer than 15 words long. Markets are re-emerging. Let's first try an easy genre.

6 word stories

How many words do you need for a story? 6 might be enough. Examples include

• For sale: baby shoes, never worn - Hemingway
• Computer, did we bring batteries? Computer? - Eileen Gunn
• Longed for him. Got him. Shit. - Margaret Atwood

Ex 11 Write some 6 word stories

Flash

What is Flash? According to the Bridport competition it's a maximum of 250 words that "contains the classic story elements: protagonist, conflict, obstacles or complications and resolution. However unlike the case with a traditional short story, the word length often forces some of these elements to remain unwritten: hinted at or implied in the written storyline." It overlaps free-form poetry at one extreme, and short stories at the other. Pieces like Forché's "The Colonel" have appeared both in Flash and poetry anthologies. Often the limit's more than 250 words - 1000 is common.

Here are 2 from the web

• Bedtime Story
  "Careful honey, it's loaded," he said re-entering the bedroom.
  Her back rested against the headboard. "This for your wife?"
  "No. Too chancy. I'm hiring a professional."
  "How about me?"
  He smirked. "Cute. But who'd be dumb enough to hire a lady hit man?"
  She wet her lips, sighting along the barrel. "Your wife."
  (Jeffrey Whitmore)
• The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door... (Fredric Brown)

Ex 12 Put people in pairs. Get them to think up a scenario where someone has to explain an awkward situation. Get them to write an Abcedarian, each person writing alternate sentences - begin the first sentence with A, the second with B and so on.

Impro comedians can do this on the spot

Conclusions

We've looked at individual words and how their energy can be harnessed in a carefully punctuated sentence. The structure conveys its own meaning, like a bass-line mood accompaniment to the melody of the words' meaning. Not all readers will notice this bass-line, but they'll feel it, and some editors will look out for it.

We've looked at what to avoid and emulate, how length and clause order can be varied. What next? As an exercise, print out a story of yours one sentence per paragraph and consider each sentence in isolation. Are they of similar length? Do they all have a subject-verb-object structure? After labouring so long over so few words, you may no longer have the stamina to write 3000 word stories. Don't worry - shorter stories will do!

• When a competition maximum word limit in 3000, don't forget that a 500 word story might win.
• You might be able to get your piece accepted as a prose-poem.

Finally - if nothing else, get the key sentences right!

Some URLs

• sixwordstories and narrative magazine's 6-word stories
• about long sentences
• about sentences
• a long sentence
• one-sentence stories
• a list of Flash outlets, sorted by word-length

With help from John Riley, Janice D. Soderling et al.

What's wrong with SF?

"sometimes it seems to me that you are grasping ideas that I have tried to express much more fumblingly, in fiction. But you have gone much further and I can't help envying you”.

This was written by Virginia Woolf to SF writer Olaf Stapledon. But SF has had some public relations problem since then, not least amongst writers. SF went through a growth spurt in the pulp zine era, then another in the UK during the 1960s. Andy Hedgecock in "From New Wave to SciFi Strange: thematic shifts in the SF short story" (from "Short Fiction in Theory and Practice" 1: 1) covers the genre's history from then to now

• "The new wave in British science fiction (SF) was a literary movement championed and guided by the London-based magazine New Worlds in the mid- to late 1960s". He quotes Colin Greenland: "One of the strongest imperatives of Moorcock's editorial policy, ... was to bring sf back into the arena of contemporary fiction, first by incorporating into sf the characteristic themes and techniques of fictional innovators from Joyce and Beckett to Burroughs and Borges, and then by investing the sf writer’s inheritance of images and approaches into a fiction whose primary and most urgent concern was not remote space or the distant future, but the condition of the present"
• According to Kelly and Kessel (in their introduction to "The Secret History of Science Fiction") "'after the mid-1970s, SF went back into the playroom, never to be taken seriously again'. As the same authors point out, however, forms of literary SF ignored by the mainstream media continued to flourish both with and without the ‘science fiction’ label"
• "In recent years writers and critics have endeavoured to define a form of SF that offers accessible storytelling but returns to the literary and human-centred values of the new wave. The term 'slipstream', originally coined by SF author Bruce Sterling, was used to refer to fiction that blended SF, fantasy and literary fiction, and which focused on feelings of strangeness and dislocation; while the 'New Weird' combined urban fantasy, literary experiment, SF and horror. It is suggested the most useful term for recent developments in SF storytelling is 'SciFi Strange'"
• He concludes by writing "There is a rejection of ‘disguised nostalgia’ in SF stories and a hunger for new approaches, often based on the blurring of genre boundaries. Contemporary SF writers tend to believe, like their predecessors in the 1960s, that mainstream fiction ignores significant aspects of human experience such as politics and the abuse of power, ecological disaster and the fragility of identity. ... The development of a new approach to SF storytelling, SciFi Strange, seems to be inspired, in part, by a wish to use the tools, techniques and tropes of the genre to discuss the diverse themes set out above with an audience unfamiliar with traditional SF. There is little compelling evidence of a resurgence of the formal experimentation of the 1960s new wave"

The early Star Wars films didn't help establish SF's high-art credentials - SF got dragged back to what the SF people call Sci-Fi (pronounced 'skiffy', I'm told) where too many loner scientists (i.e. authors) save the world and get the girl.

One problem is that the definition of SF is slippery - if you want to buy "The Handmaid's Tale", "Cosmopolis", "The Time Traveler's Wife", "Never let you go" or "Frankenstein" in a bookshop you wouldn't head for the SF section (which seems the place where SF authors' books - rather than SF books - are kept). China Mieville's books challenge classifications. Borges, Vonnegut, Calvino, etc edge toward Fantasy or Science Fiction too, but the rule seems to be that SF with literary value isn't "Science Fiction" - it's just "Fiction". Whenever an SF overlaps another genre or mode, the odds are that SF will lose its claim in a resulting tug-of-war if the work is good or topical

Some writers/agents encourage the SF/non-SF division - Margaret Atwood didn't want her books on SF shelves; Iain Banks writes as Iain M. Banks when he writes SF. The goalposts have moved over the years though

• When Swift wrote Gulliver's Travels he could use distant lands, but nowadays it would be set on different planets or in the future - like "1984", "Planet of the Apes", "Clockwork Orange", etc. These Allegories/Satires are no more scientific than "Animal Farm" is horticultural.
• SF settings are used to explore alternative lifestyles and sexualities. or used as a source of comedy - e.g. "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". During the cold war there were several post-apocalypse novels - "A Canticle for Leibowitz", "Planet of the Apes", "Riddley Walker", etc - which because they dealt with mainstream pre-occupations were accepted by the mainstream.
• The PostModern mix of high and low cultures offers a route for SF to fraternize with literature. William Burroughs and Vonnegut live happily enough on the edge. Vonnegut said (perhaps tongue-in-cheek) that "the science-fiction passages in SlaughterHouse-Five are just like the clowns in Shakespeare".

Whether or not the author wants it, the science element in these could be considered incidental. In Paul March-Russell's "The Short Story" it's suggested that SF is less a sub-genre than a mode of writing - i.e. a vocabulary of images than can be applied to various genres. Perhaps so. Science might be there only as a source of new metaphors for old problems. E.g., William Gibson (Neuromancer) said that "computers in my books are simply a metaphor for human memory: I'm interested in the hows and whys of memory, the way it defines who and what we are, in how easily memory is subject to revision"

SF can appear escapist in a derogatory sense, but I think the situation's more nuanced than that. SF and Romanticism have been associated for decades - Frankenstein's associated with the English Romantic poets, and Wells described his SF works as "scientific romances". The re-evaluation of (or search for) Self in times of Technological Revolution goes on. Man's place in nature is re-assessed. Loners and explorers venture out across dales and galaxies. Sometimes Humanity wins, sometimes Technology does. More often nowadays some fusion is reached - most explicitly with cyborgs.

Rather than being escapist, SF has been used as a way to avoid censorship. According to "Anatomy of Science Fiction", ed Donald E. Morse, Cambridge scholars press, 2006

• "In Central Europe in the twenty-first century there is now little in the way of home-grown science fiction", p.190

• "After reunification, many GDR authors stopped writing science fiction or ceased writing altogether", p.180

Another barrier to literary acceptance is that SF stories often adopt a traditional 'Realism' attitude to language. There's competition from other genres too - as bloggers have point out, imaginative reconstructions of historical (or even alternative history) scenarios aren't subject to the same linguistic constraints. According to George R.R. Martin in a recent interview SF is even losing ground to the Fantasy genre.

Yet another factor affecting the reputation of SF is that it's sometimes said to suit the currently unfavoured short-story genre - novels like "2001" and "Fahrenheit 451" began life as short stories - but SF isn't well represented in general short story magazines and anthologies.

Is the situation any better now? In a Sept 2009 Guardian blog written by SF writer Prof Adam Roberts, his professorial colleague (and Booker prize judge) John Mullan said that SF is "bought by a special kind of person who has special weird things they go to and meet each other" although according to Roberts, "British SF really is going through a golden age". The New Scientist Sept 2009 issue had some Flash SF pieces, and the UK's £5000 Edge Hill short story collection prize was won by Chris Beckett in 2009 for his SF collection "The Turing Test", ahead of some well-known mainstreamers. Maybe that will help change the attitude of people who say of an SF text that "It's not real SF. It's just exploiting SF to write about Satire/Politics/Love/Life". It's SF Jim, but not as we know it.

So don't be too put off by the SF label - yes, it may be just "cowboys and indians in spacesuits" but it may also be the speculative literature of our age. More SF is slipstreaming into the mainstream - David Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas" is partly SF, as is "A Visit from the Goon Squad" by Jennifer Egan. If it's good enough for Virginia ...

Let's Twist Again

One of the problems with a "well-constructed" piece where "not a word is wasted" is that of predictability. As Chekhov said, if a shotgun is mentioned early in a story, you can bet it'll go off before the end. O. Henry (1862-1910) based many stories around a final twist. Such stories still exist, but the purest forms have become genred - the whodunit, etc.

Stories that depend on a twist in the tail have to contend with the possibility that some readers will guess the ending. One can deal with this by adding several Red Herrings, demoting the plot in favour of character or mood, or writing a thriller where there are several twists. There's another way though, that keeps both the naive and world-weary reader happy while retaining the "well-constructed" craftmanship - use a "false ending". What you do is write a story with a twist as usual near the end. Experienced readers may well have anticipated this twist, but the writer needn't worry, because while the readers are gloating and off their guard you twist again. The first twist masks the second. It's a misdirection trick sometimes used by magicians - they let the audience think the trick is done one way, then they overtrump the trick.

It's hard to pull this off. Ideally you need to make the naive reader miss the clues to the first twist, and make the expert reader miss the clues to the second. However, readers vary hugely in their ability/desire to see clues, sometimes missing obvious points. Studies have been done to see how adaptable readers are and how their interpretations change from one paragraph to the next. At the start they often don't know the gender/age of the characters, the setting, or the genre. Some readers cling to their initial assumptions, others remain non-commital. If a first sentence read "What's your name?", Sam barked. you might assume that Sam is an angry man, though perhaps Samantha turns out to be a curious dog. See What Happens When Our Students Read, and What Can We Do About It? for a report on how a bunch of people read Graham Greene's "The Second Death".

In Agatha Christie's whodunits there's often a sequence of false endings, some rather unconvincing. When you Twist the Twist, the first twist must be good (satisfying enough to be a final twist) otherwise the 2nd twist won't work. Mamet's film "House of Games" has something like the same form.

An example

In "Precipitation within Sight" (Wendy McKechnie, Pulse Fiction anthology) the narrator (one of the last inhabitants of a Scottish island), thinking that it's time to get more experience of people and the world, attempts to get friendly with a male visitor. In the last paragraph we read "I'm not getting any younger - I was fifty-five last birthday". Throughout the story there are hints that the character was a young woman. I suspect that this revelation of the age is supposed to be a surprise. The final sentence is "There's no pleasure in being ... the only gay man for two hundred miles" which is supposed to be an even bigger surprise.

The readers who keep an open mind and are happy to keep it open may not be suprized by these revelations, especially if they're experienced readers used to anticipating literary punchlines. But having 2 punchlines offers 2 chances to surprise the reader, and even experienced readers seeing the statement about the age may be lulled into believing that this is the final punchline. With their guard down they may be unprepared for the gender news.

I think in general that surprises work if they're seen to be

• Plausible - not a deus ex machina
• Fair - the story shouldn't make the surprize seem impossible
• Illuminating - the surprise should force a re-evaluation of the earlier text. Ideally the piece should make more sense in the light of the denoument
• Unexpected - If the 1st punchline is a showstopper and the 2nd follows quickly, the impact is greater.

In this piece we have

• the narrator wearing "vests and extra pants"
• "Bridget and Anne were ready to retire, but I wasn't"
• "There are no people of my age, or within twenty years of it"
• "I'm no Leda, and it's a flesh and blood, feather-free Prince I'm after"
• "I sing Casta Diva like Maria Callas"
• "and I come kicking down the hill, wellies out, like a chorus girl"
• "maybe even go back to school. It's not too late for me to make friends, have relationships"
• "I told him how much I liked .... cotton/silk underwear next to the skin"
• "I thought of Joan Collins, my heroine"

Only towards the end does the misdirecting becomes a little unfair - which is fair enough. The surprise is plausible - the piece is a first person narrative, so any suppression of adverse reactions by others is reasonable. There's isn't much illumination though.

In this example I think the trick works because the author isn't assuming that the reader expects all relationships to be heterosexual, but is assuming that the readers expect an isolated fishing community to have repressive sexual mores.

Genre and critiques

To varying extents, the formal features of genres establish the relationship between producers and interpreters. Alastair Fowler goes so far as to suggest that 'communication is impossible without the agreed codes of genre' [1]. It's difficult to separate Mainstream pieces from Genre pieces - the mainstream's only a loosely related mass of more popular genres. There are even people who look upon each piece as a unique sub-genre, self-defining a way in which it can be read. Genres make life tricky for critiquers though. Pieces by Agatha Christie or Robbe-Grillet don't have character development - should we worry? Plot-driven works like Harry Potter use character development as a filler between action scenes - is that better? Gertrude Stein's repetition and restricted vocabulary are part of her game. Were Hemingway's later mannerisms as vital?

Once you're inside a genre, sub-genres appear, sometimes replicating the genres in the higher layer. Within Science Fiction for example there's hard-SF (written by highly qualified scientists), speculative-SF (idea-driven), comic-SF, space-opera, "1984", "The Handmaid's Tale", etc. Each sub-genre has implicit rules and priorities - it's easy to pluck a paragraph from Arthur C. Clarke's "2001: A Space Odyssey" and enrich its variety of structure and vocabulary, but doing so may well be counter-productive. There's no reason why expert scientists should make expert SF writers, though as readers they're best placed to offer the kind of factual critique which fans will appreciate much more than the rewriter's literary suggestions.

In this context where do criticisms like "sloppy writing" stand? Van Gogh's a terribly sloppy painter compared to Vermeer, and Vermeer's a mess compared to some Hyperrealists. And yet one doesn't want "it's a genre piece" to be a license for any type of writing ("so what if my story has a few spelling mistakes - so has Finnegan's Wake"). The genre competence of an experienced reader needs to be both nimble and creative. To readers who've read Fantasy and Realism but nothing in between, a piece of Magic Realism may seem an unfortunate mix falling between 2 stools.

Criticising a text might be tantamount to criticising the genre, and someone with no previous experience of the genre will have a hard job. Genre-sensitive criticism (aware of, but not subservient to, the demands of the genre) tries to relate the piece to its genre, using terms like

• "Good of its type" - a description sometimes applied to a good example in an unappreciated genre.
• "Stylist" - a writer whose elegance of prose exceeds what the genre promises (Forsythe for his spy thrillers?)

Because of this genre-related complication, some critics try to focus on factors which are common across genres. "Well-written prose" may not be a requirement for swashbuckling SF but surely there are some standards which apply to many genres. However, the value of elegant prose in itself is contestable. We're used to the idea that dialog can legitimately contain errors - after all, we're only human. The omniscient narrator is just another voice, and it's a genre issue (rather than one of quality or sophistication) as to whether that fact should be hidden. One can "show the working" - in a sense, all narrators are unreliable. A work's uniformity of narrative mode (or point of view) is also used as a supra-genre indicator of writerly skill, as is the writer's ability to make all readers think the same thing, or the author's ability to carry out his/her putative intentions. These too are genre-bound concepts though, considered ideologically suspect by some.

John Hartley argues that 'genres are agents of ideological closure - they limit the meaning-potential of a given text' [2] . Key psychological functions of genre are likely to include those shared by categorization generally - such as reducing complexity. This is a price we pay when trying to communicate, but genres can play a role in innovation too (in "The Name of the Rose", perhaps), providing familiar ground for readers to stand on while they come to terms with the unfamiliar.

New genres emerge from old much as new species emerge

• Mutation - a variation on an existing genre: often a change in the proportions of the ingredients
• Combination - a fusion of 2 or more genres: magic realism for example. Some hybrids may be sterile.
• Arrested development (neotony) - e.g. a sketch treated as a finished work
• New habitats - a new media will encourage new or adapted genres

As usual, once a reader strategy is identified, writers will exploit it. Readers look for categorisations that increase coherence and satisfaction. Writers such as Borges take advantage of this desire, leading the reader into one genre-context before surprising them with another. More radical genre experiments abound - "The effect which many identify with the Postmodern is produced by defeating readers' generic expectations" [3].

---

1. "A history of English literature", Fowler, 1989, p.216
2. "Cultural Studies (Studies in Culture & Communication)", O'Sullivan et al, Routledge, 1994, p.128
3. "The Ideology of Genre", Thomas O. Beebee, Pennsylvania State University Press. 1994

Organising a story collection

Ok, so you've had a few stories published, maybe even won a prize or two. Perhaps it's time you thought about a publishing a book. Though we're not in a golden age of story collections, the situation's not quite as bad as some people claim: Jhumpa Lahiri's debut short story collection, "Interpreter of Maladies", won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and The Short Review lists 96 short story collections published in February in the UK alone, so there's hope yet! Moreover, UK publisher Salt has started The Scott Prize (deadline 31st Oct - 45k words, 18 pounds entry fee) which will lead to publication of up to four more collections. Why not have a go!

But how should you organise your collection? Should you just chuck your best stories together? Probably not. The ordering of the stories needs consideration for a start, but you might want to (or need to) do more than that.

People mention several reasons for the popularity of linked story collections.

• Writers like them - some authors want to produce unified harmonious work
• Critics like them - Ra Page noted that "when you get a collection or - even worse - an anthology - all the [critics are] left with is either the anthology's theme, if they're interested, or just to list what's available in this collection, and pick out a couple of highlights."
• Readers like them - if they're used to anthologies (readers of ghost and Sci-Fi stories in particular are) then they'll be used to the pacing of disconnected stories, but for mainstream readers used to multi-volume series and doorstep best-sellers, by the time they've got to know the characters and location of a story, it's ended, and they have to start all over again. Or at least, that's what the marketing droids lead us to believe.

These pressures can lead to several reactions -

• A book might be planned from the start as a unified collection - almost an episodic novel. "Pavane" by Keith Roberts, "London" by Edward Rutherfurd or "Accordion Crimes" by E.Annie Proulx might be viewed that way. David Mitchell's interwoven "Ghostwritten" began as 3 separate stories but we worked them into a collection.
• Pieces may be adapted to fit together better, or keynote stories written to integrate existing pieces. When Hemingway was putting together "In our Time", he read Joyce's "Dubliners" and noted how "The Dead" helped integrate the other works, so he wrote his story "Big Two-hearted river" to do the same for his own collection.
• Better pieces might not be selected in favour of pieces that fit the collection better. Additionally, the collection can be given a misleading title, with "short stories" not mentioned on the cover.

One would expect a bunch of stories written by the same author over a year or 2 to have things in common. However, if an author doesn't write much the collection might contain decades of experiences and artistic phases. Venessa Gebbie (another author published by Salt) wrote her 1st collection's stories in 3 years - she wrote 200-250 stories in that time though, which may explain the variety of her book.

I think that were Dubliners written today, it would be sold by a major publisher as a novel - we're more tolerant of baggy novels nowadays.

But maybe this trend towards linked stories is on the wane.

Salt author Tania Hershman knows as much about collections as anyone. Not only does her book "The White Road and Other Stories" ("... an author dripping with talent, this is as good as modern reading gets" - New Scientist Christmas Books Special: Best of 2008) bring together a wide range of stories (from 100 words to thousands) but she also runs The Short Review, an excellent (maybe unique?) review site for short story books. Here are her views

Did you feel the need to have a theme for your book?
When I was studying for an MA in Creative Writing in the UK in 2003, I was under great pressure to not write short stories ("they don't sell" blah blah) and if I was going to insist on a short story collection "at least they should have a theme"! I had always wanted to do some kind of science-linked fiction, which isn't science fiction but what I would rather call "science-inspired fiction", so this is what I did: all the stories I wrote for my MA final manuscript were inspired by articles from New Scientist magazine. However, I didn't have quite enough for a book, and I also wanted to include a number of flash stories, very very short stories I have been writing a great deal of since the MA. When Salt accepted my collection, they didn't care at all about a theme or anything, which was very refreshing. Thank goodness for small presses who just love short stories!

What affected the choice of pieces and their order?
I decided to alternate between longer stories and flash stories, I thought it might work like a sort of sorbet, something intense and small, in between courses. There are mixed opinions about this depending on the reader and whether they like flash stories or not. The collection contained all but one of the science-inspired stories I had written, because of space, and pretty much all the flash stories; I am not a writer who produces vast quantities, so didn't have any choice but to include almost everything.
When it came to order, I just couldn't do it myself, I could "see" the stories anymore, couldn't see how a reader might read them all, so I printed them all out and my partner James laid them on the dining table and shuffled them around. There are various themes that emerge when you see them all together, and he ordered them so stories that might be considered similar weren't next to each other, for variety. I wanted the title story to be the first story, and the last story was picked because it echoes some of the themes from the first story, as the ending of a short story should have some resonances of the beginning, I think.

Did you reject some stories merely because they didn't fit?
Nope!

In the collections you read, do you see a trend towards linked stories?
Nope! I read a short story collection a month, at least, to review in The Short Review, and I don't believe I have read any linked collections since we started, a year and a half ago, and it's not that I deliberately avoid them. There are a few on the site under the category "novel in stories", but very few. Most short story collection these days are published by the wonderful small presses, and they don't buy into the myth that if you pretend a short story collection is a novel, people will buy it. They are happy to proudly shout about short story collections, thank goodness!
To give you an idea, here are how some of the authors we've interviewed on The Short Review answered the question "How did you choose which stories to include and in what order?"

• Warren Adler (New York Echoes) "I tried to put the stories in some rhythmic order that was purely subjective, trying to place them by judging dark to light, serious to lighter, less irony to heavy irony."
• Allison Amend (Things that Pass for Love) "There were some practical considerations: start strong and middle strong and end strong. Don't put all the really short ones next to each other. Separate the 'golf stories.' And then [my editor] Gina organized them to her own particular logic. I didn't even ask her for an explanation."
• Elizabeth Baines (Balancing on the Edge of the World) "I think people rarely read collections from cover to cover like novels - I don't anyway - but I still think order is important: an overall impression is created, and the opening and closing stories, which I think people are most likely to read first, will be taken as pointers to the whole book. Since irony is on the whole my stock-in-trade, I decided to begin with two of the more comic stories, while beginning and ending with two stories which best summed up a main preoccupation of the collection: that of the unacknowledged or surprising viewpoint. It was interesting to see the different ways in which my stories 'talked' to each other according to the order in which I placed the rest of them - creating different rhythms of mood or style or situation. In the end I found a journey through situations and subject matter - stories about adults to stories about childhood and back again via stories about parenting - which also to some extent followed developments of mood and style."
• Richard Bardsley (Body Parts) "The order was dictated to a certain degree by the structure of body parts I'd chosen, which ran from head to toe, the opposite of the old song, Dem Bones, though I obviously didn't include every single minute part of the body. As for deciding which stories to include, the collection was written at random rather than consecutively, and since I wanted the styles, voices and tone of each one to vary, I went back a few times, had a cull and started again from scratch if successive stories became too repetitive. It all sounds rather calculated but it actually happened quite harmoniously."
• Nona Caspers (Heavier than Air) "The final book order came from a brilliant friend of mine, Maria Healey. She's also a writer. I didn't know how to order the final stories once the book had been accepted for publication, and she read the manuscript and said - here, try this. I think order is partly intuitive and partly world building and juxtaposition of texture and tone."
• David Gaffney (Aromabingo) "Me and my editor Jen of Salt press went through everything I had, and selected from there. Jen at Salt is very good at working out the running order - I sometimes wonder whether with very short fiction people dip in and out randomly. It is possible to organise my short fiction much more - I have several stories set in offices, and several in shops, several about relationships, and these could have been put together, but ... .I'm not sure this structuring would add anything."
• Peter Hobbs (I could Ride All Day in My Cool Blue Train) "Due to the variety of styles I'd been writing in, it did look like it would be a problematic process. More of a mess than a collection. But there were underlying themes that recurred in many of the stories - some of which I was completely unaware of as I wrote - and after we (my editor Lee Brackstone and I) looked at what I had, it became clear we were pretty much agreed on which pieces worked, and the collection itself came together. Once they were collected it began to look almost organic, as though they'd always been designed that way. Ordering them was entertaining - it's an odd art, and was mostly done by instinct."
• Roy Kesey (All Over) "Somewhere along the line - two or three years ago, I guess - I realized that I was closing in on having enough material for not one collection but two. I went through all of the stories, trying to sort out a way to split them up more or less evenly. None of the usual suspects (time, place, character, theme) stepped forward, so I went back to the matter of form, and ended up splitting the mass down the middle, with the more structurally playful work to one side and the less-so to the other side. The stories in All Over are all from the more-so half. Once that was done, I wanted the book itself to share the same conceit, so after discarding a few stories that no longer seemed quite strong enough to pull their weight, I did what I could to arrange the rest such that no two stories in a row have too much in common in terms of length, form, character, or point of view. That turned out to be a not-quite-possible puzzle, but it was fun work all the same."
• Paddy O'Reilly (The End of the World) "I decided early to put only first person narrative stories into the book, told by wildly different narrators in wildly different styles. Not just as an indication of my split personality (!) but because one of the joys of writing stories is the freedom to be anyone. I hoped readers would feel that freedom too. As for order, that was a case of looking carefully at how the stories held each other up. Kind of like a string of different objects all tied together and trying to float."

Even experts can have second thoughts. When her book "The Beggar Maid" was at first page-proof stage, Alice Munro withdrew the book at her own expense and substantially rewrote it.

See Also

• "Oceans of Stories: Collections, Sequences and the Short Story" (a conference run in 2008)
• Short Story Collection Contests, Part I: The Reading and Judging Process (Laura Maylene Walter)
• Short Story Collection Contests, Part II: Submission Pitfalls and Tips (Laura Maylene Walter)

Discussion points

• Have you ever been impressed by a collection's organisation?
• Have you read a "novel" that was really a collection of short stories? Janice D.Soderling replied mentioning "The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan which, though it is called a novel, is actually an intricate weave of short stories from the perspectives of eight women. Each story can be enjoyed completely separate from its mates, but together they give more. Tan even has a kind of index to help the reader keep track of who is who - until we learn to know them.". She also mentioned Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried".
• Do collections require organising? Don't readers just dip in nowadays, making their own play-lists?
• I've not seen an author produce a book of stories and poems, though several (Updike, Lasdun, etc) could have. Why is that? And would the reasons apply also to mixing Flash Fiction with longer stories?

Child narrators in adult fiction

with Elizabeth Baines and Charles Lambert

Introduction

Some people (me included) rarely produce child-centred stories, which is odd - after all, we were all children once. Writing from a child's point-of-view isn't easy. Done well though, it can be effective and affecting, so it's worth a try. Most stories of this type use a third-person-priviledged point-of-view, though a first-person treatment is possible. Two story collections I've read in the last year or so have a fair proportion of child-centred stories, so I thought I'd bring the authors' views into the discussion.

Some writers raid their own pasts

• "The key, I think is memory: quite simply, remembering, never forgetting what it was like to be a child - ... when I was in my early twenties I made a conscious vow ... never to forget what it was like to be a child ... But I do also happen to have a very good memory: ... 'Leaf Memory' is based on a real-life memory of my own, aged two years and two months" - Elizabeth Baines
• Exercise

  Write 100 words about your earliest memory. Do it twice - first in a language closest to the way you thought at the time, then using your current powers of expression.

My memory's nowhere near that good. I'm a parent, which you'd have thought should be useful in this context, but childlessness may have advantages. Parents have less time to write, but that's not all - in "The Psychologist" March 2009 they reported on a survey that found that parents are no happier than childless couples. In fact, once the children leave home, parents are sadder. One begins to wonder what the point of children is.

• "having no children myself means that I've never fully grown up. I'm at the age where many of my friends are wondering why hostile, sulky delinquents from outer space have occupied their teenage children's bodies. And what do I do? Easy, I side with the kids. ... Basically, I can't grasp the crisis from the parent's viewpoint, however hard I try." - Charles Lambert

In his film, "A story of children and film", Mark Cousins suggests that children's points-of-view been dealt with in film more often than in novels. Maybe so, though novels are catching up - a judge of the 2013 Man Booker competition said there were a lot of child-PoV entries. Writing's hard enough as it is without burdening oneself with extra handicaps, so why should authors restrict themselves to a child's viewpoint and vocabulary? It's fair enough in children's fiction but what about fiction for adults? Let's look at each restriction in isolation

• Viewpoint - Though children might not understand what's going on, and might be unable to be involved in the scene, they have certain advantages as observers - like cameras, they might see things from a new angle and might be ignored by the protagonists. The child might not understand what's going on, but readers are likely to. The difference between the character's and the reader's understanding can be exploited for laughs or for more serious effect. On the BBC's web-site they give the example of this - a child bursting into his parents' bedroom, upset to find them wrestling naked on the bed. Successful writers consciously exploit this irony
  • "children can have instinctual knowledge which we adults can lose, and these insights yet gaps can be the stuff of dramatic conflict and motor a story" - Elizabeth Baines
  • "one of the things I'm doing when I choose to use children as the channel through which the narrative is seen is what Henry James did with Maisie; I'm exploiting their clear-sightedness and innocence. Children see everything, but don't necessarily understand any of it. Whether they're protagonists or witnesses, they tend to be one step behind - or to one side of - the attentive adult reader, which sets up an interesting narrative gap through which the unsettling elements can squeeze." - Charles Lambert
  A way round both of these limitations is to use a fluid 3rd-person priviledged point-of-view, rather as in the Joyce example below.
• Language - Children may not have a wide, intellectual vocabulary, but that needn't be such a restriction. They can be original in their use of words, less restricted by convention and social mores.

Exercise: Guess the age!

How young can you go? "My Mother's Dream" (Alice Munro) is from the viewpoint of someone before their conception, then as a foetus, then a baby for most of the story, which is probably beyond the call of duty. Try guessing the age of the children in these extracts, and the supposed age of the narrator.

• Maisie received in petrification the full force of her mother's huge and painted eyes - they were like Japanese lanterns swinging under festival arches

• After a while of playing, Mary gets bored and speaks on the phone. She always twirls the cord around her finger and gets her whole body wrapped up in it. It’s silly. Sometimes I don’t think she’s really a grownup. Maybe she’s just playing dress-ups. Daddy walks in with a big smile on his face, and Mary skips up to him like a little girl and gives him a kiss on the cheek. “Did you go to see your mother today?” That’s Daddy speaking to Mary, not me. She nods and does doll’s eyes and hangs her head to the side making a stupid groaning sound. She sounds like my Ted in the mornings.

• Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo... His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face. He was baby tuckoo. The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne lived: she sold lemon platt. O, the wild rose blossoms On the little green place. He sang that song. That was his song. O, the green wothe botheth. When you wet the bed first it is warm then it gets cold. His mother put on the oilsheet. That had the queer smell.

• We were coming down our road. Kevin stopped at a gate and bashed it with his stick. It was Misses Quigley's gate; she was always looking out the window but she never did anything. - Quigley! - Quigley! - Quigley Quigley Quigley! Liam and Aidan turned down their cul-de-sac. We said nothing; they said nothing. Liam and Aidan had a dead mother. Missus O'Connell was her name. - It'd be brilliant wouldn't it? I said

• The wide playgrounds were swarming with boys. All were shouting and the prefects urged them on with strong cries. The evening air was pale and chilly and after every charge and thud of the footballers the greasy leather orb flew like a heavy bird through the grey light. He kept on the fringe of his line, out of sight of his prefect, out of the reach of the rude feet, feigning to run now and then. He felt his body small and weak amid the throng of the players and his eyes were weak and watery.

• MARCH 25, MORNING. A troubled night of dreams. Want to get them off my chest.

• Saturday January 3rd I shall go mad through lack of sleep! My father has banned the dog from the house so it barked outside my window all night. Just my luck! My father shouted a swear-word at it. If he's not careful he will get done by the police for obscene language.

• 'Is that your name?' I was bold enough to ask the Miss more prone to mirth. 'Eleanor is what I was christened but people call me Ellie.' Idly, I said, 'That's not what my mother calls you.' 'What does she call her?' enquired the one who was not Ellie. 'Not just her, both of you.' What does she call us?' Her dress smelled of corridor. The sisters awaited an answer. Ellie, dried dribbles of Wall's ice-cream on her frock, seemed as eager to know as her sister. A curler in her hair, a clip between her teeth, my mother held her breath, 'She calls you …' I paused to accord the phrase the respect with which I had always heard it uttered, 'She calls you "the Misses Linster".' Though obviously the cause of amusement, I wasn't sure what was funny.

The extracts are from "What Maisie Knew" (Henry James; the child's 7), "The Book" (Jessica Bell; the child's 5), "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" (James Joyce), "Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha" (Roddy Doyle; the boy's 10), "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" (James Joyce), "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" (James Joyce), "The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, aged 13 3/4" (Sue Townsend) and a story by Ian Madden; the child's 6 years old. Authors often seem to have over- or under-estimated the child, but kids have an irritating habit of not acting their age - one moment they talk like an adult, next moment they sulk like a baby. In any case, one shouldn't expect dialogue in literature to be like Real Life - it has to be artificial to some extent but how much? It can be difficult to convince the reader of the narrator's age.

Examples

Let's see how the experts do it

• Today I'm five. I was four last night going to sleep in Wardrobe, but when I wake up in Bed in the dark I'm changed to five, abracadabra. Before that I was three, then two, then one, then zero. "Was I minus numbers?"

• A shadow made me start as my mother's face loomed towards me where I lay, eight months old, tongue-tied, spastic and flailing on my course rug, on the warm lawn, in the summer of 1947 - in an English country garden. My father was playing French cricket with Miranda and John, and I could hear a tennis ball

• Early one morning as we were beginning our day’s play in the back yard, Jem and I heard something next door in Miss Rachel Haverford’s collard patch. We went to the wire fence to see if there was a puppy—Miss Rachel’s rat terrier was expecting— instead we found someone sitting looking at us. Sitting down, he wasn’t much higher than the collards. We stared at him until he spoke: “Hey.” “Hey yourself,” said Jem pleasantly. “I’m Charles Baker Harris,” he said. “I can read.” “So what?” I said. “I just thought you’d like to know I can read. You got anything needs readin‘ I can do it...” “How old are you,” asked Jem, “four-and-a-half?” “Goin‘ on seven.” “Shoot no wonder, then,” said Jem, jerking his thumb at me. “Scout yonder’s been readin‘ ever since she was born, and she ain’t even started to school yet. You look right puny for goin’ on seven.” “I’m little but I’m old,” he said.

Note that these extracts tell the reader the age of the child. Kids tell each other their ages, so it's not too artificial. It gets round one problem when writing such pieces.

Problems

• It's very tempting to slip out of character for a few paragraphs. A commonly used way to include an adult's viewpoint is for the child to be an uncomprehending messenger - e.g. to have the child find an adult's diary and read it (Paula Sharp calls that a hackneyed device though!). Here's Elizabeth Baines' approach
  • "The story 'Power' ... strictly, use[s] a child narrator, ie, the voice is that of the child as a child, and in this case in the present tense, as the story is happening. This is the most restrictive way of adopting a child's viewpoint, with least chance for authorial intervention. The main way I get round the restriction here is to splice the child's narrative with the mother's phone calls on which the child eavesdrops."
  • "In 'Star Things' ... the child is constantly and innocently quoting things her parents have said"
  She notes however that "the children's voices in these stories aren't entirely naturalistic, I do take linguistic licence, as they're not intended as straightforward dramatic monologues"
• Even the best adult books with child narrators risk being treated as if they're children's books
• One has to be rather careful about using material that can be traced back to a particular child - moreso than with consenting adults.

Special Needs

Authors have tried combining age limitations with other features. In a sense, these writers are having it both ways; they can exploit the freedom and freshness of the child narrator without having to make too many compromises in vocabulary or intellect.

• "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time" (Mark Haddon) has a clever, autistic 15-year-old narrator
• "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" (Jonathan Safran Foer) is held together by Oskar, a precocious and obsessive nine-year-old polymath
• "How the Light Gets In" (M.J. Hyland) has a highly intelligent, damaged 16-year-old
• "Flowers for Algernon" (Daniel Keyes) doesn't have a child narrator, but the IQ and language of the narrator change in the course of the novel.

Authors quoted

The quotes are used (with the authors' permission) from Virtual Booktours that they made - Elizabeth Baines' "Around the Edges of the World" Tour and Charles Lambert's "Something Rich and Strange" Tour

• Elizabeth Baines won 3rd prize in the Raymond Carver Short Story Competition 2008. Her book, "Balancing on the Edge of the World" (Salt) was shortlisted for the 2008 The Salt Frank O'Connor Prize.
• Charles Lambert was an O.Henry Prize winner in 2007, along with William Trevor and Alice Munro. Books include "Little Monsters" (Picador) and "The Scent of Cinnamon" (Salt)

Examples

• Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artists as a young man" - `When you wet the bed, first it is warm then it gets cold. His mother put on the oilsheet. That had the queer smell. His mother had a nicer smell than his father.' (not quite first person, but the book's language grows as the boy does)
• Hugo Hamilton's "The Speckled People" - people have said "The world here is viewed through the eyes of a child who does not judge, merely details and describes." .... "Though Hugo matures as the story unfolds, the simple, declarative sentences of a child's confused and partial understanding do not. (...) He has made an attempt on something impossible - to show from a child's point of view what a child can't see. To the degree that he succeeds, it's remarkable."
• Paula Sharp's "Crows over a Wheatfield" - people have said that "the characters are so involving - not since 'To Kill a Mockingbird' or the opening chapters of 'Jane Eyre' has there been a more acute and astute child's view of the world".
• Eimear McBride's "A girl is a half-formed thing" (Faber 2013) - "Two me. Four you five or so. I falling. Reel table leg to stool. Grub face into her cushions. Squeal. Baby full of snot and tears. You squeeze on my sides just a bit. I retch up awful tickle giggs. Beyond stopping jig and flop around. I fall crack something. My head banged. Oop. Trouble for you. But. Quick the world rushed ou like waters. Slap of. Slap of everywhere smells kitchen powder perfume soap of hedges in the winter dogs and sawdust on a butcher's floor. New. Not new. I remember. Patterned in my brain." (p.7)
• Sue Townsend's "The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4". Comedy.
• Colum McCann's "Everything in this country must" - this collection's stories have 1st person narrators in their early teens.
• Roddy Doyle's "Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha" - has a 10 year old 1st person narrator
• Daisy Ashford's The Young Visiters was written for adults by a 9 year old
• Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird" - has a 6 year old narrator.
• Emma Donoghue's "The Room" - has a 5 year old narrator.
• Jessica Bell’s "The Book" - has a 5 year old narrator. See Jim Murdoch's blog for details.
• "The Life of Pi"? "The Tin Drum"? "Empire of the Sun"?

Discussion Points

• Are child-narrator stories usually autobiographical?
• What other devices do authors use to bring an adult perspective into child-narrator stories?
• What 1st person child narrator novels/stories have you read? Did they work?
• Try writing a 1st person child narrator story!

Story Beginnings and Endings

Beginnings

"It was a dark and stormy night ..."

The opening of a short story is more important than a novel's - it's a bigger proportion of the whole, and because a story's supposed to have a tight structure, the beginning's a strong indicator of the whole story's genre, mood and tone. Sometimes they even suggest what the end's going to be. Here's the first paragraph of a story. How's it going to end?

"You're not going out with him and that's the end of it!" Jenny's father announced.

(I'll show you the ending later. For now here's a clue - it's from "Yours", a Women's magazine).

Beginnings often set the scene in some way. In the olden days, first paragraphs were info-dumps. Here's something from 1859.

As Mr. John Oakhurst, gambler, stepped into the main street of Poker Flat on the morning of the twenty-third of November, 1850, he was conscious of a change in its moral atmosphere since the preceding night. Two or three men, conversing earnestly together, ceased as he approached, and exchanged significant glances. There was a Sabbath lull in the air which, in a settlement unused to Sabbath influences, looked ominous.

Initial info-dumps aren't necessarily bad - beginnings like "Gregory Samsa woke from uneasy dreams one morning to find himself changed into a giant bug" quickly give the reader the required context - but newer stories tend to spread out the scene-setting, sometimes starting in the middle of the action - medias in res. A survey came up with these statistics for how stories begin: 40% "narrative", 30% "description" (e.g. info-dumps), 10% "speech", 5% "author comment".

In "More five-minute writing", Margret Geraghty lists a few common types of starts

• Attention-grabbing - "The strangest thing about my wife's return from the dead was how other people reacted" ("The Beginner's Goodbye", Anne Tyler)
• Visceral - mentioning a strong smell, taste, etc
• A Question - "Was was it, Tiffany Aching wondered, that people liked noise so much?" ("I shall wear midnight", Terry Pratchett)
• An aphorism - "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." ("Anna Karenina", Leo Tolstoy)

It's worth getting the first sentence word perfect. A draft of Nineteen Eighty Four began with "It was a cold, blowy day in early April, and innumerable clocks were striking thirteen" which isn't as crisp an attention-grabber as it could be.

Endings

"Then I woke up and realised it was all a dream."

According to "The Narrative Modes" by D.S. Brewer (where I also got the statistics from) "Endings are even more various and harder to classify. They are also apparently harder to write well". Here are the statistics for endings: 31% speech, 10% ironic (in novels the percentage is lower), 8% main character dies, 7% a symbolic final event (a door closing, a journey ends, etc), 5% a question, 4% "author comment", 1% wedding (in novels the percentage is far higher). Over 15% end with a sentence of 5 words or less.

Aristotle thought that endings should be "inevitable and unexpected". William Goldman wrote that "The key to all story endings is to give the audience what it wants, but not the way it expects". After Poe, surprize endings became popular and influential - "Though surprise endings as not ... numerically dominant in the whole of any writer's work until O.Henry, the effect of the surprise endings on short-story structure and on the popularity of the form extended beyond the actual number of examples". The importance of the ending can be so strong that it affects the shape of the whole story. Even authors who don't exclusively use twist-endings may be very end-oriented in their writing procedures - "If I didn't know the ending of a story, I wouldn't begin. I always write my last lines, my last paragraph, my last page first, and then I go back and work towards it" Katherine Anne Porter (in Writers at Work: "The Paris Review Interviews", p.151)

As an example of how closely the ending and beginning can be tied together, here's the end of the story from "Yours"

Mrs Wilson winked at her daughter and said: "So he's not such a bad catch after all!"

Sometimes the ending refers back to the beginning even more explicitly. Here's the start and end of "The Joy Luck Club" by Amy Tan

• My father has asked me to be the fourth corner of the Joy Luck Club. I am to replace my mother, whose seat at the mah jong table has been empty since she died two months ago.
• And I am sitting at my mother's place at the mah jong table, on the East, where things begin.

More often, the beginning prefigures the end - symbolically maybe, a broken dish fore-shadowing the infidelity revealed in the punch-line. I think it's always worth reading the beginning again after reaching the end of a story. Here's the start of "Words from a Glass Bubble" by Vanessa Gebbie - an award winning modern story.

The Virgin Mary spoke to Eva Duffy from a glass bubble in a niche half way up the stairs. Eva, the post woman, heard the Virgin's words in her stomach more than in her ears, and she called her the VM. The VM didn't seem to mind. She was plastic, six inches high, hand painted, and appeared to be growing out of a mass of very green foliage and very pink flowers, more suited to a fish tank. She held a naked Infant Jesus who stretched his arms out to Eva and mouthed, every so often ... "Carry?"

And here's the final paragraph. It has many echoes of the first - checklist the first paragraph's items to see what happened to them. Identify themes.

Then, there was a sound. The cry of a buzzard as it might have been made by a small boy, a thin little cry that rose triumphant into the post woman's house, echoed round the stairs and floated out of the open windows to disappear among the whispers of wind in the night sky

Here's the first paragraph of Steve Almond's "Donkey Greedy, Donkey Gets Punched", the first story of Best American Short Stories 2010. It's a typical well-crafted opening - informative about the main character and establishing the narrative voice.

Dr. Raymond Oss had become, in the restless leisure of his late middle age, a poker player. He had a weakness for the game and the ruthless depressives it attracted, one of which it probably was, fair enough, though it wasn't something he wanted known. Oss was a psychoanalyst in private practice and the head of two committees at the San Francisco Institute. He was a short man with a meticulous Trotsky beard and a flair for hats that did not suit him. He cured souls, very expensively, from an office near his home in Redwood City

Open Endings - and Beginnings

As the 20th century progressed, the trend was not to end with an explicit authorial comment (which is one reason why stories more often end in speech nowadays), and not to link the start too tightly to the ending. Increasingly, endings are "open" rather than "closed".

William Gibson's "Neuromancer" ends with a section entitled "Coda: Departure and Arrival" which sums up what many endings do - some mysteries are solved, but others are begun.

Here are some typical modern endings which give a feeling of closure but leave some doors open - new relationship, new realisations, new starts.

• And that was what she remembered. That was what she always said to Queenie later, how all the future had come flooding in with him, through the open door.
• Later, the plane makes a slow circle over New York City, and on it two men hold hands, eyes closed, and breathe in unison.
• Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.
• After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain (one of 47 ending that Hemingway tried for "A Farewell to Arms")

Just as some authors chopped the traditional beginning from a story, so some chopped off the ending, but even stories (by Barthelme, Coover, etc) without conventional closure exploit "closure signals" (repetition, change of tone or voice, zoom-out) to prepare the reader for the end.

Nowadays the expectation of closure is so low that the climax of a text can be the moment when the theme or genre is revealed. Beginnings are becoming more ambiguous too. Here are some initial paragraphs. Trying to guess the genre is hard enough let alone guessing the ending

• Once a mouse family lived under the floor of a playroom. There was a mother mouse and a father mouse. There was a big sister mouse called Mousikin and a baby brother mouse called Little Mouse.
• Once upon a time there was a little old woman, who lived in her council flat, and was as lonely as lonely could be. She had been retired from her old job at Superdrug when her hearing seemed to be on the wane. She had accepted her glass clock meekly, and the last-day paper cup of fizzy wine, then cried on the bus all the way home.
• So Pete Crocker, the sheriff of Barnstable County, which was the whole of Cape Cod, came into the Federal Ethical Suicide Parlor in Hyannis one May afternoon - and he told the two six-foot hostesses there that they weren't to be alarmed, but that a notorious nothinghead named Billy the Poet was believed headed for the Cape.
• We defended the city as best we could. The arrows of the Comanches came in clouds. The war clubs of the Comanches clattered on the soft, yellow pavements. There were earthworks along the Boulevard Mark Clark and the hedges had been laced with sparkling wire. People were trying to understand. I spoke to Sylvia. 'Do you think this is a good life?' The table held apples, books, long-playing records. She looked up. 'No.'
• I'm Push the bully, and what I hate are new kids and sissies, dumb kids and smart, rich kids, poor kids, kids who wear glasses, talk funny, show off, patrol boys and wise guys and kids who pass pencils and water the plants - and cripples, especially cripples. I love nobody loved.

The shorter the fiction, the more significant the ending becomes. In the Guardian (14/5/12) David Gaffney wrote Make sure the ending isn't at the end. In micro-fiction there's a danger that much of the engagement with the story takes place when the reader has stopped reading. To avoid this, place the denouement in the middle of the story, allowing us time, as the rest of the text spins out, to consider the situation along with the narrator, and ruminate on the decisions his characters have taken. If you're not careful, micro-stories can lean towards punchline-based or "pull back to reveal" endings which have a one-note, gag-a-minute feel - the drum roll and cymbal crash. Avoid this by giving us almost all the information we need in the first few lines, using the next few paragraphs to take us on a journey below the surface.

Short stories are usually too short to offer alternative endings in the way that "The French Lieutenant's Women" (Fowles) and "The Black Prince" (Murdoch) do.

See Also

• Stanley Fish, in "To Write A Sentence: And How To Read One", discusses first and last sentences. He likes Roth's "When I first saw Brenda she asked me to hold her glasses" (the start of "Goodbye Columbus") because it quickly introduces the personalities. He likes Fitzgerald's "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." (the end of "The Great Gatsby") because the narrative goes forwards but the sounds repeat.
• Listen. Come in Here. You Want to Know About This by Victoria Heath

Flash

People not uncommonly say that short stories are more like poetry than novels. Some short, single-focus stories may well be mistaken for poetry, just as some poetry gets called "chopped-up prose". In the journey from story to poem there used to be a no-man's land of unpublishable short prose. The only hope of publication for these pieces was in poetry magazines. Texts in the format of recipes or shopping lists became poems. Anecdotes and vignettes couldn't be prose-lineated in poetry magazines because they weren't "Prose Poems" - a term that had rather been taken over by surrealists and erstwhile experimentalists (Baudelaire, Russel Edson etc.) So they got a line-breaks make-over.

Now the literary landscape's changed - we have Flash. Flash isn't a genre or a mode. Definitions vary, but in practise it's short (less than 1000 words, sometimes a lot less) and doesn't use poetic line-breaks (though it may still use line-breaks the way that adverts, lists, etc use them). Usually it employs narrative, character or plot, but sometimes it uses juxtaposition. The style may be poetic without it needing to be a poem, though the more it jettisons traditional story features (character, plot, length) and adopts poetic ones (sound effects, form) the more like a poem it will be.

I think Flash writers reading some poetry magazines for the first time might see familiar material but might wonder about all the line-breaks - "It's Flash with hiccups". Some free verse writers don't like adjusting let alone removing line-breaks though they have trouble explaining what they are for - "they just feel right" ... "they just came out that way" ... "they give the imagery room to breathe", etc. The poets might indeed be able to point to a line-break that introduces a telling pause, neglecting to explain what the pauses presumably introduced by all the other line-breaks are for. The "free" in the phrase "free verse" means to me that the author's freed of the need to put line-breaks in just for the sake of a restrictive form, but that freedom has become a duty, with many poems adopting the regular rectangular stanzas of older formal poetry.

I don't think there's such a thing as a neutral line-break. They're never hidden characters. To me each line-break added is an effect that is potentially powerful but can as easily backfire. And yet, reading poetry one might believe that line-breaks don't have to pass stringent tests to justify their existence the way that adverbs do. Irrelevant ones are politely ignored, like someone's speech impediment. Take Catherine Smith's "Snakebite" (in the Forward book of poetry 2009). It's 13 3-line stanzas ending with "Tomorrow/ we'll feel sick as dogs. But tonight,/ here, under a bright, full moon,// we're amazing, and as we hug/ on my doorstep, I taste you,/ kiss the snakebite off your lips". If you gave a point for each line-break that did something and deducted a point for line-breaks that did nothing (or less than nothing), I don't think you'd come out with a positive score. It's not an auto-cue text, it's literature, so why not let the story speak for itself? "If in doubt, leave it out" is a maxim that can be applied to more than words. Flash takes the radical approach of eliminating the poetical line-break.

I think many poems written in the past few decades in retrospect fall more appropriately in the Flash category - poems like Carolyn Forche's The Colonel for example. Simon Armitage's poems in the Winter 2009 issue of "The Rialto" (a poetry magazine) looked very Flashy to me. Some magazines ("Tears in the Fence", for example) avoid genre classification by not labelling sections "Prose" and "Poetry". Sometimes (as in a few New Writing anthologies by the British Council) there's a section entitled "Texts" for debatable works.

The 2 Flash writers I've followed most closely (it's hard to avoid them if you read online) are Vanessa Gebbie and Tania Hershman. They both write poetry and short stories as well as Flash. Their Flash spans a spectrum. Pieces like Tania Hershman's "Hand" is where poetry takes over from Flash. The shortest piece in her The White Road and Other Stories book (Orange Prize Commended) is 102 words long. She's got Flash into the august "London Magazine", and in June 2010 BBC Radio 4 will present a week of her Flash. Vanessa Gebbie's contributed to "Field Guide to Flash Fiction" (Rose Metal Press), and has edited SHORT CIRCUIT - A Guide to the Art of the Short Story. Her Flash tends to be closer to prose, I think, which may be because she's more serious about her poetry (her work's been short-listed in the Bridport poetry competition).

Both are relatively new writers emerging without historical baggage into a world where Flash is a viable option and poetry isn't necessarily considered a higher form of art. It will be interesting to see how this new generation of writers redefines the genres.

See also

• A crash course in flash fiction by Laura I. Miller
• Michelle Elvy
• Allan Drew

Transparency, Barthelme and Lahiri

I've been reading Jhumpa Lahiri's short story collection "Unaccustomed Earth" recently, along with "Donald Barthelme" (by Lois Gordon) and "Reading Network Fiction" by David Ciccoricco. First I'll mention some general language features, then I'll compare the writers. In some aspects they're opposites though I like them both.

Language

• Knowledge of, and skill with, words isn't a sufficient condition for understanding the world. In itself it's not even a necessary condition. We learn by doing, by writing. Learning leads to new instruments, new worlds. The Word and World inform each other. For writers in particular, words are not passive mediators.
• The Self isn't a separate layer either. It needs to be added into the mix. The "World -> Self (Author) -> Word" pipeline is misleading. There are eddies and backflows. Authors write in order to understand.
• The Reader needs to be added into the mix. The "World -> Author -> Words -> Reader" pipeline is misleading. There are interactions between the elements. The words that are read by the reader are given meaning by a world the author might not share, or an opinion of the author that the author might reject.
• When these elements interact there are terms of engagement: rules, conventions, games. People can
  • make-believe that a layer is transparent, that in an interaction between 2 elements, one dominates.
  • swap layers. Metaphors can be taken literally; puns can be a factory for producing new items; a single Word (or Interpretation) can generate many possible Worlds;
  • switch between layers. Done inappropriately it may make a character seem schitzoid, or it may lead to humour.

Transparency and Immersion

• Is transparency good? - "It is by no means apparent that medial transparency is or should be the measure of a successful narrative ... often a message is conveyed only through the interplay between a story and the story-producing mechanism" (Ciccoricco, p.118)
• Is immersion dependant on transparency? - "Common to the discourse of immersion theory is the notion that the realist novelist and the virtual reality environment designer pursue the same goal - the disappearance of the medium [but this] conflates immersion in representation (as in a Victorian novel) ... with immersion in simulation (as in a VR environment)" (Ciccoricco, p.119)
• Are there other forms of immersion? - "Ryan identifies three forms that fall under a 'poetics of immersion': spatial, where the reader develops a sense of being at the scene of narrated events; temporal, where the reader is caught up in narrative suspense; and emotional" (Ciccoricco, p.121)

Barthelme

There isn't much word-play in his work. Certainly he doesn't smash the words into letters. The words are tokens that may switch meanings (often by their context changing) but they don't lose their internal integrity. His pieces have structural variety though he plays few games with narrative (his pieces don't always have a narrative to play with). There are few multi-framed stories, mobius-band pieces, or circular works.

His characters don't say funny things though they can be wistful and resigned. His humour is more to do with tonal mismatches and juxtapositions of the ridiculous or fantastic and the banal. There are other shifts too, "from myth or old-fashioned fairy-tale prose to modern psychologese, or from mock-epic diction to comic-book slang - or from the inflated platitudes of political, philosophical, or academic jargon to hip advertising lingo" (Gordon). "Typically his work moves in and out of reality, from the concrete to the abstract, from moral characterisation, the allegorical and mythic, to the most extreme manipulations of metaphor and description, and the creation of new grammar and words." (Gordon). Different aesthetics operate within the same work. To take an analogy from art, imagine looking at a painting of a landscape. On the horizon you see what looks like a yellow rectangle. You wonder if it's a building or a lorry, but it could be a yellow rectangle, there to contrast with the shape and colour of the setting sun. In places the canvas has been left bare.

He foregrounds language rather than words. At times language becomes opaque, the category difference between "apple" and an apple dissolving. Words are his "real toads" in imaginary gardens. He "literalizes the metaphors of life as war and love as soap opera. His focus is not so much the precariousness of what is traditionally considered reality or fantasy, but [..] the way in which our lives are saturated and ultimately defined by the media" (Gordon). And yet, themes show through the flattened significance of signs - fatherhood, sad marriages (he had 4 marriages), the futility of war (he arrived in Korea on the last day of war).

Here's the start of "The Indian Uprising" - We defended the city as best we could. The arrows of the Comanches came in clouds. The war clubs of the Comanches clattered on the soft, yellow pavements. There were earthworks along the Boulevard Mark Clark and the hedges had been laced with sparkling wire. People were trying to understand. I spoke to Sylvia. 'Do you think this is a good life?' The table held apples, books, long-playing records. She looked up. 'No.'

Given the problems with identifying the place and era, I suspect spatial and temporal immersion is unlikely, though there's hope on the emotional front.

Gordon writes that later in the story "A key line, which occurs after three pages, establishes at least three different perspectives: "but it is you I want now, here in the midst of this Uprising .... It is when I am with you that I am happiest. ... 'Call off your braves'" This alerts us to the fact that (1) although up until now we thought the war real and indeed the subject of the story, (2) the lovers in fact may not only be witnessing or participating in the flming of of war, most importantly, (3) everything we have read up until now ... may simply be the speaker's reactions (in film terms) to his frustration ... only in his mind, ... he can only respond to experience as an actor on a [Hollywood] set"

Reading a Barthelme piece one has to decide to be an active reader or give up. The diction and genre of a section may not match the content. Lovers may be locked inside a discourse more suited to weather forecasting or art criticism. Readers need to keep their perspectives open and normalise at their peril - his pieces are not "really about" something else.

Lahiri

I think her language aspires to transparency, and I think the plotting does too. But sometimes cracks show

• In the title story of the collection a daughter greets her father after an absense of several months. "He had not lost weight and the hair on his head was plentiful, more so, she feared, than her own after Akash's birth, when it had fallen out in clumps ... her bathtub was still filled with shampoos that promised to stimulate scalp growth, plump the shafts. Her father looked well rested, another quality Ruma did not possess these days. She'd taken to applying concealer below her eyes ..." (p.12).
  The character is having thoughts at moments convenient for the author who's hoping to bury an info-dump by interleaving the information. The spell of immersion is broken by the distant clatter of a keyboard.
• Narration and plotting isn't crucial to her style; mechanisms tend to be kludgey or repeated. In the title story for example, we have a visiting parent (a topic she's covered elsewhere). College life and families are never far away. The idea of the child's garden seemed a little odd - a MacGuffin as much as a grandfatherly indulgence. The use of the postcard at the end works symbolically (the child wanting it to "grow") but would the child really have taken the postcard?

For me the transparency doesn't lead to immersion because there's too little interest generated (or maybe too few types of interest). Branches in the plot can be anticipated, following well-trodden paths, and they're well separated, giving time to guess what will happen next. Emotionally I'm told what to feel. I'm more spatially than temporally engaged - objects and interiors are carefully described and India/US differences are attended to. Big journeys mean big changes - any deviation from that pattern tends to carry significance.

Clear as ink

Lahiri's reliable. Like a lawyer she presents paragraphs of facts when making a point, hoping to convince by sheer volume of evidence. You'll know what's important because you'll be told and shown- "Why?" In her son's small face she saw the disappointment she also felt. "Daddy's coming back tonight", she said, trying to change the subject. "Should we make a cake?" (p.57).

Barthelme's more hit-and-miss, but that in the nature of the game he plays. He too cares about getting the words right (he re-wrote pieces even after publication), but he doesn't polish his prose so that you can always see right through it. Language becomes a character in his stories: moody, stubborn, playful - not transparent, not a cardboard cut-out.

I'm not asking for everything to be a symbol, or for stories to be difficult, or for writers to exhibit ability in several styles (I like Proust's work). But I think Barthelme plays his game better than she plays hers. I'm just glad I'm not a judge having to assess two such entries.