From the Ground Up: Getting Started
How do Achebe, Oates, and O'Connor get their stories started?
How do stories start? How do they do what they do? I looked at three this week as I think about how my own short story will start.
You can read last week’s start here
For this week, I read three stories:
“Dead Man’s Path” by Chinua Achebe
“Late Love” by Joyce Carol Oates
“Good Country Folk” by Flannery O’Connor
“Dead Man’s Path” by Chinua Achebe
This very short story starts wide and then zooms in to action, steps back, then zooms in, and ends with a stepped back summary. The first paragraph focuses on introducing the situation: Michael Obi gets what he’s always wanted. Quickly, too, Achebe characterizes him as confident, young, and enthusiastic. He refers to the job he gets as a “responsibility.”
Achebe writes, “He had many wonderful ideas and this was an opportunity to put them into practice.” The reader can’t help but wonder if Michael is too confident, bordering on arrogant, and this is confirmed with “He was outspoken in his condemnation of the narrow views of these older and often less-educated [teachers].”
The narrator doesn’t slant us to thinking this way directly. Instead, he lets Michael convince us himself. This is an impressive tightrope to walk. What is my evidence to support that this is what Achebe does here?
Achebe also uses dialogue. “ ‘We shall make a good job of it, shan’t we?’ he asked his young wife… ‘We shall do our best,’ she replied.”
Michael becomes headmaster and his wife is preoccupied with the school’s gardens. She seems to view it as part of their status, to have a good lawn. One night, Michael is “scandalized” to see an old woman—perhaps a spirit—cut across their lawn. He views the path the old woman walks as a blemish. We know this through word choice and dialogue. It “amazes” him, he finds it “incredible” and he is “scandalized.” He tries to fence off the path but the local priest warns him it’s a bad idea; the path connects the village to the cemetery, and therefore their ancestors.
But he does it anyway. A few days later, a woman dies in childbirth. The citizens of the town believe this must be related to the blocking of the path and tear it and the school down, just on the day the school is to be inspected by the Mission.
How does Achebe accomplish what he accomplishes? What is it he accomplishes?
Again, I felt the effect of a funnel in this story. Not as clearly as in “Late Love.” But the first paragraph introduces Michael, the situation, his disposition toward it, and makes us feel at odds with him. Dialogue moves things along. There is another summary—another stepping back or reverse funnel—and then we get into situation again.
There’s something wry about it, which I struggle to articulate.
“Late Love” by Joyce Carol Oates
K and T marry. Both are on their second marriages. They are passive in this relationship. Oates shows that from the start. K and T were “suddenly finding themselves—who knows why—herded into the same meadow…”
They both seem confused. Both are spry for their age and that “must have been” why they were attracted to each other.
After their marriage, the wife discovers her husband suffers from nightmares. These nightmares unman him in her eyes, but Oates does a great job of placing distance between K and her feelings.
“Because she’d seen him naked, in the sweat-soaked T-shirt and shorts. Peered into his craven soul. No man will forgive a woman for having seen him broken.”
warning: spoilers ahead
K concludes that T must have murdered his last wife and that he’s going to do the same to K now that she has seen him in this “broken” state. It’s a little ridiculous, but that’s what creates the dramatic irony of the piece—remember, Gothic fiction is all about this irony. We don’t have our feelings totally confirmed until the ending, where we realize that it’s the wife who’s been having nightmares, who has murdered her first (and then second) husband.
So let’s focus on the opening.
They were newly married, each for the second time after living alone for years, like two grazing creatures from separate pastures suddenly finding themselves—who knows why—herded into the same meadow and grazing the same turf.
That they were “not young,” though described by observers as “amazingly youthful,” must have been a strong component of their attraction to each other.
So we know right from the start that this story is about a couple who’s married and maybe shouldn’t be, or should, who are together possibly because of convenience. We can feel a sense that they are afraid to die alone (“each lonely amid a busy milieu of friends and colleagues.”).
Oates uses the anti-Palahniuk “to believe” verb when she says, “The widow believed herself more devastated by life than the new husband…” but this is an efficient way to say something weird, relatable, and effective.
Oates quickly sets up that this marriage is ill-fitting, one of convenience, and that there is some sort of… indignation between the two. Then we get this warning, which sets the reader's sense of the two’s dynamic in stone:
Only she, once she was his wife, understood how self-doubting the husband was, how impatient with people who agreed with him, flattered him, and looked up to him.
“Excuse me, darling. Thank you very much, but don’t humor me.”
This remark, uttered to the wife in private, was both playful and a warning.
The reader is pushed into the wife’s corner, suspicious of the husband.
In 175 words, JCO sets up the relationships between the two characters, the heart of the story.
Then JCO puts us into the primary theater of the story: the marital bed. Mostly, this story is about sleepless nights. The wife drives herself nuts with her husband’s nightmares—or are they hers? Because the story is told from the wife’s POV, the reader sides with her. The seed above helps secure in us that even when the husband insists it was she who had the nightmares, we’re more likely to think he’s gaslighting her than telling the truth. It didn’t even cross my mind.
How does JCO introduce the “set”?
Soon after they were married, and living together in the husband’s house—the larger and more distinguished of their two houses, a sprawling, five-bedroom, dark-shingled American Craftsman with national-landmark status, on a ridge above the university—the husband woke the wife in the night, talking in his sleep, or, rather, arguing, pleading, begging in his sleep, in the grip of a dream from which the wife had difficulty extricating him.
This is all one sentence. It sets the scene and drops us into situation. Then we roll into action. The story just goes from there.
These are the two components I want to think about more:
JCO uses sweeping generalization (is that the type of prose seen here?) to explain the dynamics of the relationship.
She then uses a funnel-like sentence to pull us into the situation.
I think that’s the best way I can put it right now: a funnel. Wide to narrow. General to moment. How does the “general” work? So many writers say to start “in media res.” How does it work? JCO’s prose is so liquid. Between the grammar and the word choice the feeling of the story is that it is jotted on scratch paper. I think that helps it move fast into scene.
I also think it doesn’t hurt that it’s a JCO story published in the New Yorker. There’s a level of “trust” implied in that which most writers don’t get. The image of the grazing animal buoys the first part, too, and pulls us further along. And she does get quickly to the husband’s seeming “secret side,” which is of course intriguing.
“Good Country People” by Flannery O’Connor
There’s the old Flannery O’Connor adage of putting two characters in a room and seeing what comes of it and that’s what this story is.
Mrs Freeman and Mrs Hopewell are in the kitchen at the start of the story. I imagined when I first read O’Connor’s advice this meant that the story had to start with dialogue, two characters with repartee and rattatat, going back and forth in a manner that explained all the tensions of the story to the reader and characterized the major players and all that. That’s not really what happens in this story, though.
There is way, way more narration explaining what’s going on behind the words than there are words exchanged. Way more.
They carried on their most important business in the kitchen at breakfast. Every morning Mrs Hopewell got up at seven o’clock and lit her gas heater and Joy’s. Joy was her daughter, a large blonde girl who had an artificial leg. Mrs Hopewell thought of her as a child though she was thirty-two years old and highly educated. Joy would get up while her mother was eating and lumber into the bathroom and slam the door, and before long, Mrs Freeman would arrive at the back door. Joy would hear her mother call, “Come on in,” and then they would talk for a while in low voices that were indistinguishable in the bathroom. By the time Joy came in, they had usually finished the weather report and were on one or the other of Mrs Freeman’s daughters…
This passage is full of generalizations, and every detail shared matters. But it doesn’t feel like an info dump. Why?
What are the details that matter to the story?
Mrs Hopewell infantilizes Joy.
Joy is not all that attractive (“large” feels is a deliberate choice). She has a prosthetic leg. She’s 32. She’s educated. (We’ll later learn she has a PhD in philosophy).
Joy doesn’t move easily (she would “lumber” into the bathroom every morning).
Joy is angry or inconsiderate (she slams the bathroom door every morning).
O’Connor doesn’t coop us up in this kitchen, either. Very fluidly, the narration describes Mrs Freeman’s annoyances at every meal, at every morning, in general about her person. And within all these descriptions are characterizations of all of Mrs Hopewell’s annoyances, too. Soon, she’ll push us to last night’s events, too, which open up the physical space of the story a little, too. Then, we’ll move forward in time, to later that morning, and the narration will also leave the house altogether. So we never feel stuck, or like we’re in a bottle episode.
Mrs Hopewell liked to tell people that Glynese and Carramae were two of the finest girls she knew and that Mrs Freeman was a lady and that she was never ashamed to take her anywhere or introduce her to anybody they might meet…
Only after setting up these tensions, again, through generalized narration, not dialogue, does O’Connor tell us why she’s chosen this morning to tell us about in these characters’ lives.
“…sipping her coffee, while [Mrs Hopewell] watched Joy’s back at the stove. She was wondering what the child had said to the Bible salesman. She could not imagine what kind of a conversation she could possibly have had with him.”
Up til this point, we haven’t heard anything about this Bible salesman. He is the antagonist of the story. A lengthy flashback will give us more about him, how he came by the house last night to sell a Bible and have dinner, how he said something to Joy out in the street on his way out.
And we will move forward (in time) from there, into Joy’s1 head.
Hulga got up and stumped, with about twice the noise that was necessary, into her room and locked the door. She was to meet the Bible salesman at ten o’clock at the gate. She had thought about it half the night.
And so on the story goes.
I’ve had one unsatisfied question I’d like to work out before I conclude this reflection.
What the hell is the point of Mrs Freeman?
She is in the kitchen, like all mornings, when Hulga gets up and lumbers to the bathroom. She and Mrs Hopewell make small talk. This proceeds while Hulga makes eggs. The two women talk about Glynese and Carramae and their antics, but that isn’t the story at all. It’s the noise on top of the story. That’s what’s being discussed when Mrs Hopewell is sipping her coffee, watching Joy’s back at the stove, wondering what she said to the Bible salesman.
And when we surface to the now, the narration doesn’t immediately hop into Joy’s head where she explains what’s going to happen next with the salesman.
Instead there’s an interstitial period where Mrs Freeman bores everyone in the room with a story about how her Glynese is toying around with a chiropractor who wants to marry her.
And at the end, Mrs Freeman says of the Bible salesman, who, by the way, tricked Hulga into the loft of a barn and stole her prosthetic leg, revealing that he’s not some simple country bumpkin selling Bibles, “Some can’t be that simple. I know I never could.” With a delicious twist of irony that embodies the whole story.
So I guess that’s the point of Mrs Freeman, if ever there was one.
Joy’s name is also Hulga. I won’t explain why. Flannery O’Connor can do that for you.