I’ve been taking my writing more seriously lately and convincing myself that, at 32 , I can somehow make a transformation into being a short story writer. Often, I’ve mistakenly believed that good writers form short stories immediately; instantly transforming their idea into a structured plot. The truth is pretty different from that. Most short story writers will write about a dozen, maybe two dozen, short stories in their lives. They carve those stories from the marble of their life. The process can take a day or it can take a week or it can take a decade: a single seed of an eye slowly sprouting.
So I’m trying to think more critically about the things I’ve written in the past. I’m tying to look at what works and what doesn’t. Some of that’s plot-wise: reverse outlining things and seeing where action is happening VS where it’s not. Some of that is characterization: what’s the motivation, why should we care. Some of that is structure: are you being too wordy, too poetic, using words the correct way?
Because I’ve been posting less and less here (hello bluesky fame) I thought I’d do some of that work out in the open by looking over a short story I wrote years ago and dissecting it, in more or less real time.
An intro
I’m going to start with a “short story” I wrote years ago, Big Bend, primarily because I was talking about Big Bend with the barista this morning. I put short story in quotes because, realistically it was more of a screed of grief, written closely after I broke up with the first man I ever loved, and was a pretty 1:1 connection with the actual trip we took to Big Bend on Thanksgiving.
The story starts:
First there was an ocean that stretched from Arkansas and Oklahoma, spilling out into far west Texas and emptying its shale into beds of solid stone. Then there was a collision. A smash. A showing of monumental force which rocked the continents and carved out deep valleys and tall mountains which loomed underwater, sinister and full of spite.
As far as openers go, I think this is fine. I’ve made 5 variations of this over the years and barely touched the opening. When I was first fashioning this story, I wanted it overall to be a story about the inevitable decline of a relationship between two people and to juxtapose that against the nature of this old place. To me, it was about the nature of how we live and love, that when put up against geological time, it felt at both insignificant and the most significant.
The point was to also get into the jaggedness of the story, which you can see by the word choice. spilling out, stretched, collision, monumental force, carved out deep valleys, and of course the final bit: tall mountains looming, sinister, and full of spite. Hints that something beautiful but also terrible is hidden, waiting to come out.
The next paragraph reads:
Next, a shallow sea and some deposits. Life. Or God. Clay and cells, plants which sprung from dirt, and creatures which crawled from the sea. And finally, there was us: halfway up the Emory Peak Trail in the Big Bend Basin, covered in sweat and sighing.
I don’t think this works. I think the life or god or god distracts from the previous paragraph, structurally. Ultimately the point of this second paragraph is to act as a foil to the first. This is NOT a story about the landscape of Big Bend, but about the small and intimate moments between two people, covered in sweat and sighing halfway up a trail. I think the crawling creatures from the sea or plants springing from the dirt work, but if I were going to seriously restructure this I might strip all but the last sentence and merge the two paragraphs.
A plot
Again, because this was more catharsis and less story, the plot here is paper-thin. As I originally wrote it, here’s your first indication of what the story is about:
We came here on a whim. Or, to be more accurate, on his whim. I was suicidal for one year, forty-seven days, three hours, and who knows how many minutes or seconds. It’s almost Thanksgiving and already the temperature is strange: dropping in bursts before returning to high 90s. I wear two shirts and a thin sweater that I sweat through and tie around my waist. He wears an overshirt and rolls the sleeves up, a backpack on his back (to cover the sweat) and enough confidence to keep us climbing despite my weak legs.
We’re here for a last ditch effort at civility before the crushing pain of separation. The vacation was planned before the separation of course. Now we are all distance and vague communication: outlines of a relationship long past its prime. We don’t sleep in the same bed and any prior arrangement feels like a dream. Instead I sleep on the fold out couch in the middle of our off-the-grid bungalow in Terlingua, Texas.
There are parts of this I like and parts I don’t.
We came here on a whim
That doesn’t really make any sense, because they didn’t come here on a whim, you learn later it was a planned vacation with their parents (which is real btw, I was on a vacation with his parents)
It being Thanksgiving
Think there’s something here I didn’t explore, but the idea of it being a holiday around giving thanks is pretty valuable to the story. Again, it was too real so I didn’t want to explore that.
Last ditch effort at civility before the crushing pain of separation.
I don’t really explore this in the piece but I think it’s the most interesting bit. As it stands I sort of took a one-sided (I wonder why) approach to this. The boyfriend never really talks, instead they march in silence up a hill as he recounts his tragic past.
Looking at it now though the plot is so much more interesting if they’re not going one place, if instead we’re following them throughout this planned trip and seeing what that feigned civility looks like, exploring what it means to be at the end of a relationship but still forced to participate in the shared goal of humoring the parents.
Characterization
The characters here are the weakest part of the story. I was writing solely based on my life experiences so I was basically just writing about me and my past partner while trying to pretend like I wasn’t. Additionally, I was too afraid of admitting I was drawing on my past partner so I didn’t want to use any of his characterizations or commit to fleshing him out, which results in a completely blank character built on real experiences.
This is nothing new to me. I haven’t slept with anyone in months, possibly years. That’s my own fault. Who wants to sleep with someone who is suicidal? Who wants to sleep with someone with love handles? This is my own fault because, despite being in an open relationship, I am anything but open. I am withholding and selfish, containing my grief inside me, afraid that I could rupture and turn the whole thing black and bleak.
Some of these things are good as a character building exercise, but they just describe my own anxieties. If I were making this a better short story, I’d keep some things “I am withholding and selfish, containing my grief inside me” and leave the rest. I would have him be the reverse: sleeping with everyone he can, distancing himself from the relationship through a string of casual encounters meant to reassert his control and sooth his anxiety.
The other character, “Connor” is described exclusively through the things he does wrong, which doesn’t really work. If I were rewriting this today, I’d change Connor completely. I’d allow this to be built from the foundation of a real trip I took, but just make him a completely different person. He’d probably be more timid, less self-assured, more desperate and clingy but still frustrated with the pace of the relationship. His vice wouldn’t be sex, maybe it would be drinking or cross fit or something spectacularly stupid.
I would also explore him more. I’d want the audience to understand what he felt at the end of this relationship. He should be either the opposing voice or the affirming voice—whichever makes more sense.
Connor had plans that night. He was “hanging out” with a friend he met from college. They were both high-minded people, intellectuals who studied poetry and computer science, and knew every pop cultural reference by heart. “We’re going to get a drink first.” He said, “but I might be able to hang out afterwards.”
I told him he didn’t need to worry. Hanging out was code for sleeping with, or potentially sleeping with depending on whether or not the night went right. It was something we had developed together: a communication strategy that allowed us both to talk openly about what we wanted and needed without ever saying it.
We would, in moments of sexual inspiration, lay on his bed and stare up at the ceiling, explaining in details the men we had sex with. We described their lips and thighs, their smell, the taste of their skin--too salty or not salty enough. We explained the way they held us and kissed us and breathed on us and loved us or hated us, whichever one came first.
In my mind, when writing this short story I wanted the characters to be gay and in a non traditional relationship. Partly because that was my experience at the time, but also because I think it was a good way of signaling the complexity of what they were feeling: they were able to be open about some things and not open about others.
This isn’t based on my real experience by the way, nothing more than being in an open relationship. I made a point to myself pretty early on that there are some things I can borrow freely from a past partner and things I can’t. One of the big ones of that is anything involving their sexuality.
So this whole part of them laying together and describing their sex lives is fiction, but, I think it works really well. There’s something there. They’re sharing in this very intimate act and it’s supposed to set up how, later in the story, they can’t do the same for their own emotions. But, I never get there in the story.
Plot part two
The second part of this story involved jumping frequently into the past to explore the main character’s past suicide attempts.
The suicides did not come naturally. I was a happy child who ran around and laughed and played. I imagined and created. In college I excelled and painted great canvases full of abstract shapes and imagined cities. I read Italo Calvino and had sex. I drank so much that I blacked out and then woke up the next morning to workout. No, these four suicides had been splashes of terrifying inspiration.
My first suicide involved a cocktail of medicine and a desperate phone call to Connor in the late hours of the night. It was the middle of April and rainy. I was working out of an office building right off the highway doing data entry work for a midsized company that sold accounting software to businesses.
This didn’t work at all. I tried to make it work by changing the suicides to apocalyptic visions but still it never fit the story. The story is about their relationship and the end of it and anything else just puts distance between the actual interesting part. At the time I was thinking this was a story about the main character and so I wanted to explore his fascination with suicide but it just comes across as too cliche and melodramatic.
And, because this was so close to a real world experience (not given enough fiction to stand alone) it made it seem like I was suicidal, which I wasn’t! Realistically, looking back, this was me wanting to explore that part of my childhood and forcing it into a story. But it’s another short story entirely, It doesn’t fit here.
This is already a super long post, so I’m going to call it here, but I’ll probably do a part two of this as I barely made it 1/5th of the way through the story.