1 CHAPTER ONE

One Great Way to Write a Short Story

When I was a graduate student at Kansas State my stories tended to run sideways: a series of scenes upon scenes with turns and twists and lots of reveals, but something about the whole process felt like I was in search of a structure, or hoping everything would just work out. I knew stories were about change and I just kept adding scene upon scene hoping somewhere along the way the change would just happen. There was a random episodic quality to my stories and all of them ran 30 or so pages. As a writer I was just trying to survive the story, inventing more and more stuff to keep going.

Needless to say, none of these stories “worked.”

During the beginning of my second year at Kansas State I had the opportunity to work with Professor Ben Nyberg (then the Fiction Editor of Kansas Quarterly), sitting in and helping to teach his Beginning Fiction class, and it was there I discovered a scaffolding to hang my stories on. His approach was rooted in the modernist era, the works of Sherwood Anderson, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, Katherine Mansfield, and John Steinbeck.

Instead of approaching stories from a theatrical vantage point: the Freytag triangle with its rising action (a series of battles), climax, denouement (falling action and resolution), Nyberg threw out this upside-down V-shaped architecture for a three act structure: exposition, crisis (with a deflection), and resolution.

Realist stories are about ordinary people placed in extraordinary circumstances. It’s about a day where a pattern is broken. Every morning a husband awakes late, kisses his wife on the cheek as she rushes off to her academic job, and then hurriedly drinks orange juice and gobbles down cold eggs. He then goes to his job at WKBW Buffalo as a television newscaster. He starts at point A and goes to point B. But in Nyberg’s model, he never gets to point B. On this one particular morning the newscaster’s wife appears distracted, making little eye contact, and then says things aren’t working between them, ‘I feel like there’s less and less of me here, and let’s try a trial separation.” Instead of B the newscaster is headed to a new dimension C (the story’s crisis phase). Instead of going to work he heads to Niagara Falls and visits a series of wax museums and meets a woman who has got a sure scheme to win at the casino. She invites him to join her. Now the stakes are much higher and we are in on a different day, a day full of drama, a day worth exploring.

Stories are about life and death stakes (real or imagined) and how characters react while under duress. Hollywood of the neoclassical period (1930-1960) believed in the following storytelling premise: “a noble character overcoming a series of obstacles to achieve a worthy goal.” In writing realistic fiction characters don’t have to be noble. They just have to be interesting. Act One begins the process of creating an interesting lead character.

This is the expository phase of a short story (the first act) where something creates a destabilizing condition, a shift from the every day that throws the lead character into chaos. A person you haven’t seen in years arrives at your doorstep. Your boss tells you to close the door, we need to talk. Your doctor says we need to do further tests. Rational order and calm break down. The narrative escalates, and some empathy is created for our lead character who is in some way beset upon.

During the crisis phase (act two) the protagonist is in conflict with another person who wants something different from the protagonist and this push/pull creates not only tension but moments of genuine connect and disconnect between them. At some point, during this emotional struggle, a deflection happens. A character makes a choice, acts on it, and the scene spins in a new direction. This deflection can include saying something that has never been said before; seeing something in the other person that the protagonist has never noticed before; taking an action that is new and pushes the lead character out of her comfort zone; etc. The possibilities are endless. The spin should direct the protagonist toward a resolution.

For Nyberg, that resolution (act three) often leads to an epiphany (the lead character coming to some sort of insight about herself or the situation or the other person or the human condition), but an epiphanic ending isn’t necessary. The protagonist can realize something has shifted between her and the other person (notice I didn’t say antagonist: not all stories are a fight between good and evil) without fully realizing what that shift is. Or the protagonist is taking baby steps at the end. The story can even end at a precipice where the protagonist has undergone change but still faces further changes to come. For example, two people sit in a car while the motor’s running, and the man realizes something about the woman he had never realized before (he has an epiphany). He wants to build on this moment, to apologize for his boorish behavior and some inappropriate comment he made about her at a party earlier that evening. He struggles to find the words, where to begin, and the story ends as she waits, the motor choogling, and the light in the parking lot intermittently flickering.

Some nuts and bolts: these stories are very often scene driven, involve three to four characters, and take place over a short period of time (a few hours in a day or events over two days). The crisis scene often takes place in twenty minutes or less and the resolution, following on the heels of the crisis, is even shorter. In terms of length, the exposition and crisis phase are usually of similar length and the resolution about half to a third as long. Stories in this format usually run from anywhere from 12–15 pages.

Crime and romance novels and classic films have an “M” shape to their narratives. They too have a three-act structure but two major deflections, plot moments that spin the protagonist off in a new direction. William P. McGivern’s The Big Heat is a prime example. The novel begins with a suicide and Sgt. Dave Bannion investigating. But he’s disengaged, distant, not completely focused. A third of the way through the novel his wife is killed by a car bomb meant for him. Suddenly, the stakes are higher and Bannion spins off into pure vengeance mode. He wants to punish and target those who killed his wife. He no longer feels connected to humanity. Two thirds of the way through the novel Bannion uncovers the root of evil, but he’s powerless to do anything. He tells Debby Ward, the novel’s good-bad girl, of his dangerous desires and she kills the person that Bannion, because he’s a cop, can’t. She even uses his gun. This is the novel’s second deflection. Her actions cause the “big heat to fall” (names of the guilty are released to the press and police) and Bannion, now healed, is reintegrated into society.

I usually find the hardest component of the three act story is getting the exposition right. Once I have the deflection, the resolution writes itself, but in the expository phase I have no idea where the story is headed so I often have to go back and set up things to earn my ending. The main thing to remember is that the character in the end must be different from the character at the beginning but the change must be slight. We must believe that the character in the expository phase is possible of the change revealed in the resolution stage. Moreover, the ending should be inevitable but not predictable. That’s a lot for a writer to handle, but always strive for what Aristotle called the consistent inconsistencies of character.

As you can probably see, from my above comments, when it comes to writing literary fiction I’m a pantser (a seat of your pants writer) not a plotter (I don’t pre-arrange things). However, the Nyberg model does give me a structure to fall back on: I know that at some point in the storytelling process a deflection will occur and this will create the energy or engine for the story’s dynamism and conflict. So in a way, I guess, I’m a bit of a plantser (a mix of seat of your pants writing and plotting).

One final caveat: all right, I know this all sounds pretty formulaic. And in a way it is. But if you’re struggling like I was when I first started sifting through scenes in search of a story worth telling, this structure will help you to write a story that “works.” Within four years of learning this structure I was landing stories in literary magazines. And yes, after a while, I got tired of writing the three-act story and branched out to differing story shapes. But for ten years this was a great way to hone my craft.

Case Study #1: “The Raid“

In 1934, John Steinbeck published “The Raid” in the pages of the North American Review. It tells the story of two communist labor organizers, one older (Dick) and the other underaged (Root), who arrive at a small town in order to spread their communist pamphlets. The destabilizing condition: Root has never done this before and he knows that they could very well get beat down by a raiding party who isn’t too particular about their brand of politics. He’s afraid he might fold under the pressure. Dick has done this many times before and keeps telling Root to “take hold.”

In Act Two (the crisis) they enter “a low square building” where they plan to hold their meeting and discover that they only have oil in one of their two lamps. Things are moving sideways. A stranger enters and tells them to “scram . . . The others were just going to leave you take it.” No one from the communist party will be there to support them and the raiding party is bigger than expected. This leads into the story’s deflection. The men, at this point, could run, but they decide to stay. Dick says, “Thanks for telling us. You run along. We’ll be alright.” They got their orders.

Root goes along with Dick but he’s afraid, afraid of being scared, of getting hurt. Dick repeatedly tells him to take hold, and during the confrontation with the raiding party Root begins a transformation, the story’s deflection has spun him to a new place of understanding. He’s the first to speak, calling the men brothers. They hit him with a two by four and he gets back on his feet, suddenly filled with purpose: “His breath burst passionately. His hands were steady now, his voice sure and strong. His eyes were hot with ecstasy.”

The two men are beaten into unconsciousness.

Later, they awake in a prison hospital. Dick has a busted arm and some cracked ribs. Root’s muffled with “dull pain” and reaches a mini-epiphany. This is Act three, the story’s resolution. He connects his experience to the Bible and how he wanted to forgive because “they don’t know what they’re doing.” Dick chastises the kid, telling him to lay off that religious stuff, but Root gets the last word: “It was just—I felt like saying that. It was just kind of the way I felt.” A reversal has taken place: the pupil has learned something; by contrast, the teacher remains stuck within a system of thinking that doesn’t allow for connections with anything outside communist dogma. Root is pushing back against Dick, and in a way, he is moving forward.

Case Study #2: “A Twister on Stage 14”

Here, Frannie Dove revisits classic storytelling structure. Set in 1939, Dove’s story, like Steinbeck’s, centers around an older character, Mr. Ross, a WWI veteran, and a younger character, Dane Gray. This time, however, our empathy is with the teacher rather than the pupil.​​ The story revolves around the armor men wear to protect themselves and the need to connect, and as in the case of Sgt. Dave Bannion of The Big Heat to re-integrate to humanity.

The two work in the props department (negotiating air hoses and dirt and a muslin tornado) on Soundstage fourteen for The Wizard of Oz. Dane knows that Mr. Ross was wounded in the leg during the Great War and that he cried while hearing Judy Garland’s rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Ross is taken aback by this and doesn’t really want to explore these aspects of his life. But, he does connect with Dane, covering for the kid while he has a coughing fit up in the rafters. If Dane’s spotted coughing, he’ll be sent home.

In the story’s second act, the deflection occurs: “The hose hissed, and then a thunder shook the stage. Something sparked and exploded, rattling the walls of the set, like a cannon, like a grenade. There were screams from the crew. I dropped to the ground for cover, taking the kid with me, but he wasn’t the kid anymore. He was Frank, in the flesh, eighteen years old, pale as a ghost and terrified. A thousand bullets whistled over us, and I covered our heads for protection.” Suddenly Ross has returned to the war, and his PTSD flashback has him slipping between two moments of time. It’s a private moment: all internalized.

It’s discovered that a compressor had inadvertently exploded. After work, Ross drives Dane to his aunt and uncle’s home. The kid is covered in dirt and somewhat disillusioned: “You stand in the dirt all day. Nobody thanks you for what you do. Don’t days like this seem ridiculous? It’s a long piece of stocking and a three-foot-tall house. Will people really believe it’s a twister?”

This is the story’s central theme, illusion versus reality and what does Ross ultimately believe? In the third act, the story’s resolution, Dane doesn’t show up to work the next day. Ross expected to never see the kid again—after all Dane can lean into his privilege—but Ross needs the job, and in the story’s final moments resigns himself to the magic of the dream factory, hoping briefly to find peace and wholeness: “They wouldn’t see a group of stagehands shooting dirt from an air compressor. They’d see damage and danger, nature and destruction. For a couple hours in the theater, they would be transported. And perhaps for some, when they saw the right picture at the right time, it would be all they needed to feel alive again.” The final epiphany has an outside-looking-in quality. What if Ross isn’t one of the “for some,” what if he can’t be “transported.” Then, he may never feel alive again. The ending is wonderfully strange: sad, enigmatic, and ambiguous.