From the Ground Up, Part One: Ideating
Making a short story
In this series, I’ll take you step-by-step through my process for writing a short story. I’ll be thinking out loud, so to speak. In each installment, I’ll include the next piece in the process. In this first one, ideating, I’m just getting my ideas flowing. I’m picturing the setting I want, the characters, and their relationships to each other. And that’s it. Exercises mentioned in this series are from the phenomenal book What If? by Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter.1
Exercise 3: Ways to begin a story
Generalization:
No neighbors in all the history of the Montpelier county ever got on but none so bad as us and the MacDarnmotts.
Animals, I’ve come to notice in my long and dust-filled life, die with more grace than people do.
Description of a person:
When I was little, I thought grampy and his rocking chair were all one hard, angular, creaking body. He did sit in it so long his spine fused to it, Dr Follett remarked when he came to collect the wiry, tawny body. He would rock in that chair from the time mima helped him out of bed at nine every morning until dinner time. She would bring him his orange juice and his knife and a piece of wood to shave. He would sit and whittle and squint out over the dusty, yellow fields out front of that house, and count the cars that drove past Potter’s Field Road all damn day.
With Narrative Summary:
Grampy cursed the Mortimer family that summer when I was nineteen and I won’t ever forgive him for any of it, but least of all for getting my dog killed.
I tell people, when they ask, my fondest memory of my grampy the great war veteran is sitting with him on their porch sipping OJ and counting cars that passed. But my fondest memory is actually the day I found him lifeless on that same porch.
With Dialogue:
“One more thing, sweetheart,” grampy murmured, “before you go. Would you take this box and drop it off at thirteen?”
“Thirteen?” I shrieked. “Is this a bomb?”
“No, nothing like that.”
With Several Characters but No Dialogue:
All three of us sat up on the porch: me, mami, and grampy. It was one of those rare, celestial events to have mami sit down and look out over the blushing wheat fields with us. It was grampy’s favorite pastime beside whittling. Which he did while we sat there. Even when she got off her feet, nothing could stop mami’s mouth from moving. She filled us in on just about everything that had happened that day to her in town, and out back in the garden, and we sat there ignoring her, occasionally grunting when the cadence of her soliloquy seemed to command we do so.
With a Setting and Only One Character:
I escaped to that porch as I had escaped there all through junior high and high school. But now, I was alone up there, above the wheat, choking in the stale air. Mami had forbade anyone touch Grampy’s chair but herself, and that only to put it back after the wind made it rock down the leeward side of the porch, so I sat in my hard spot on the floor against a post below it. I escaped the bar-b-cue out back because the smoke of the fire stung my eyes and the coleslaw stank. Margarite’s cloying laugh clung in my ears like Wal-Mart perfume. I had a watermelon seed stuck in my tooth and David could never, ever understand how choking and evil and wretched the place in my heart was where this damn house stood. He just sat out back with a beer, trying not to act flattered when one of Margarite’s little girls twirled her hair at him.
Reflection:
This story is writing itself in first person so far. In a few of these, generalization, description of a person, and with a setting and only one character, the point of narration seems to be far in the future. The narrator is looking back on a formative event.
This event seems to centralize around her grandfather. I really like the fantastical element of his spine “fusing” to the rocking chair. He embodies inflexibility, is set in his way.
Mami is also introduced. She seems to enable grampy’s inflexibility, or at least to tolerate it. In most iterations, the narrator is conflicted about them both: there seems to be some admiration and some hatred.
I sense this “Hatfields and McCoys” type thing going on with the folks at “thirteen” and with the dog dying. The narrator blames grampy for that.
I did a bad job in the last iteration to keep it to only one character. This narrator is swirling with thoughts, judgements, and criticisms for the people in her life. She’s angry and she can’t keep it in. That is compelling. What do you think?
Exercise 4: Begin a Story with a “Given” First Line
With all this brewing around, I did Exercise 4, which starts with the given line.
“Where were you last night?” Tommy asked.
“Nowhere,” I said and realized it sounded like a lie. “I went for a walk.”
“I stayed up until eleven. Where did you walk?”
“Nowhere,” I said again and cringed down at my coffee. When I had slipped in the side door around one in the morning, muddy shoes ditched out back in the garden, I noticed Tommy had set the coffee-maker for me. That was always something I did. He’d also set the dishwasher, which I normally did, but forgot to click ‘START.’ “Down the road and back.”
“You’re acting very guilty,” Tommy grinned. His teeth used to be whiter before he started drinking coffee with me. “Did you go see your old boyfriend?”
“He doesn’t live there anymore,” I said and sipped my coffee. “But yes, I went by the old house.”
“Reliving your wild youth,” Tommy chuckled. His chair screeched as he shot it back. The dog jumped. “I’ve got to go fix the rest of that fence before Maybull kills herself.” He stepped out the side door, into the garden. I winced again when I realized he’d certainly see my muddy boots out back. No sense in hiding them now.
I shuffled in bare feet across the wide-planked wooden floor, toward the front of the house. We had bought it from my grandmother six months ago. She died three months later in a nursing home. From the front room I could see out onto the wide, quiet road. I had actually gone to Jared-Amos’s house last night. His parents still lived there. All the lights were out. I’d gone around back, over the hill, to the sandlot. It took a while to find in the dark, when I only had the flashlight on my phone to light the way. I had sought the place where we’d buried his cat’s collar and my dog’s collar. I took them out of the earth, but I don’t think I should have.
Reflection
Jared-Amos is a weird name, but we’re rolling with it for now. There’s a gulf between the narrator and her husband, Tommy, and it seems to center around this house, and their past.
I’m picturing now that the narrator’s grandpa, long ago, killed the neighbors’ cat, and they retaliated by killing the narrator’s dog. This pulls in a lot of strong openings from Exercise 3. But How many openings does a story get? Five? Six? No. It gets one. Which is that one?
The opening here in exercise 4 starts us focused on the tension between Tommy and the narrator. The past is sealed; it’s done. But opening it up might save the present, if there is anything to save. It feels like Tommy doesn’t have the sense of unhappiness in their marriage the narrator carries. Which could be part of his problem.
Given first line #2, from Shirley Jackson’s “The Man in the Woods:”
Wearily, moving her feet because she had nothing else to do, Christina went on down the road, hating the trees that moved slowly against her progress, hating the dust beneath her feet, hating the sky, hating this road, all roads, everywhere. She had taken to wandering instead of sleeping since they had bought the house. Most nights she would wait until Tommy fell asleep beside her with a dramatic, full-body twitch, then wait another ten minutes or so, staring at the too-bright digital clock she’d bought to keep her phone away from her in bed, then get up, slip out of their bedroom, creep down the stairs she had crept down a hundred times before, knowing before they bought the house even which steps to skip, and where to place each foot on every plank to make the least sound, step over the dog so he didn’t stir, pass through the kitchen, to the side door because it wasn’t as loud as the front, slip on her clogs, and disappear with a quiet whisk. They had bought her grandparents’ house from her grandmother three months before she died. It was next door to the childhood home of the only boy she’d ever loved—before Tommy, of course. Jared-Amos didn’t live there anymore, but she walked past his house every night. She hated to look at it. Just as she hated Old Stump Road underfoot.
Tommy never said anything about her disappearances. He never stirred when she would slip back in around four in the morning, her body chilled from the night air but damp from the walking.
She hated the road past Jared-Amos MacDarnmott’s house because it represented her immense failure. She could not, where their sandy driveway spilled onto Old Stump, turn her feet off of the asphalt. She kept going instead. She crested the hill that dropped like cast linen into Montpelier County, which descended all in one arc to Lake Wannatuxet. She would walk Old Stump the several miles until it bisected Fox Meadow. All along her left as she walked this way lay the MacDarnmott’s fields, now as fallow and unkept as her own. Neither she nor Tommy were farmers. They had no designs on becoming them. They would slice up her grandfather’s hundred acres into as many lots as they could sell, come spring. Soon someone would probably do the same with the MacDarnmotts. No one lived there anymore: Tracy and Dale had died a few years ago. Must be the brothers owned the property together, but in three months Christina hadn’t seen anyone. At Fox Meadow she would try to force herself to turn left. There was another access road onto the MacDarnmott’s lot that way and if she walked far enough to reach it night would almost be over and if she wanted to get back home before Tommy noticed she would have no choice but to cut across their land. But she couldn’t ever turn that way. Instead her body always forced her to the right, south down Fox Meadow. She hated the drone of the empty night. It was too late in the season for crickets to chirp, but Christina would have hated the sound they made too. A quarter-mile this way, County Line Connector stemmed off of Fox Meadow. She would take it back west. The MacDarnmott property now out of sight, she still hated every road this way.
Reflection:
This gives a crisp, clear sense of geography. The shift to third person helps the reader get that, I think. But I don’t know if I like this shift. I think we need to be trapped in Christina’s head.
I can’t bear to ignore Jackson’s opening line, by the way, which actually goes:
Wearily, moving his feet because he had nothing else to do, Christopher went on down the road, hating the trees that moved slowly against his progress, hating the dust beneath his feet, hating the sky, hating this road, all roads everywhere.2
This reminds me of her essay “Notes to a Young Writer,” where she says:
Avoid small graceless movements. As much as possible free yourself from useless and clumsy statements about action. “They got in the car and drove home” is surely too much ground to cover in one short simple sentence; assuming that your characters did get into the car and did have to drive home, you have just the same wasted a point where your action might work for your story; let the process of their getting hiome be an unobtrusive factor in another, more important action: ‘On their way home in the car they saw that the boy and the girl were still standing talking earnestly on the corner.’ Let each such potentially awkward spot contribute to your total action.3
I read this essay a few times a year.
So that’s enough for this week. Thanks for hanging with me. I’m excited to keep opening up this process and see where it takes me. Please leave a comment how you like these openings. Does one grab you? Where do you see the story going? What else do you need to know?
Whoa! As of this publishing, the price for this book is $155!! There are several editions of it, all of them excellent. If you want your own, get an older, less in-demand edition for a few bucks, like this one. If you buy through these links, the FTC requires me to tell you I’ll make a penny or two.
Read this short story and some fantastic other ones in Let Me Tell You.
Found in Come Along with Me.