First: hi, this is the official Kaijuville entree into RSS Club. 👊 Email subscribers to this site got a second ping last week, because somehow while proofing my previous entry I managed to delete the last image and had to send a postscript. So not a very big bonus, but if you’re reading this via syndication, it seems only fair to send you something extra too.
Second: this is a reply to Nate’s post “How to write a short story in five sentences.” (If you are Nate, reading this: hi Nate!) I only came across his site recently but I like it, and his writing provoked some thoughts in me. Go read that link before you finish the rest of this post! It’s not long.
Ready? Okay.
I love constrained writing. I think the five-sentence story is a cool and useful format, and I like the way Nate further assigns constraints of function for each of those five sentences. The one about invoking sensory impressions makes me think of haiku.
Once upon a time, I undertook a project of writing 101-word stories on a daily basis, and kept at it until I had written about two thousand of them. I got very tired of that formal constraint. But I also learned a few tricks.
My favorite trick is this: come up with a story that ends on a twist, then turn that ending into a beginning.
I’ll try to show you what I mean. To start, I wrote five sentences (uh, if you don’t count too closely) following Nate’s structure:
When the scarecrow, netting, coyote urine, polite sign, rude sign, and air horn failed to dissuade the geese, Greta retained a professional.
"I understand I'm on the migration route," Greta said, watching their procession with harrowed fatigue, "but I thought they'd go over, not... through."
"Okay, you wanted a bird expert, but I keep telling you I'm an ophthalmologist," said Winslow, between attempts to gnaw through the ropes.
Greta brightened. "Maybe I don't need a goose scientist—I need a scientist goose!"
"You need more help than that," honked the nearest one, plapping through the green-black ruin of Greta's rug.
That was fun! A good framework.
You can probably tell that there’s a lot of surrealist and slipstream influence on the way I write. A common dynamic for sci-fi stories involves extrapolating a second- or third-order ripple effect from technological change (trying to predict the traffic jam). I like sci-fi; I am not feeling very inspired by technology these days. But I will always be fascinated by the way a slipstream writer like Kelly Link does ripple effects. She often builds her focal characters around feelings of great desire, then examines how desire can cause both reality and that character’s life to fray.
But back to the trick I was trying to show you. Let’s take our concluding twist from the five-sentence story and use it to write something else. I don’t have a concrete formula like Nate offered, but I can suggest a general direction: move from the general toward the personal. Then pick a word count goal, and stop as soon as you get there.
The wing of a goose can break your bones, but their words will really hurt you. Residents of the Migration Belt learn this firsthand.
"You guys can't go around the outside? Just tonight?" Greta pleads. She got a cute dress and contoured her cheekbones. Sweat is wrecking both.
"We talked about this," a goose answers, as the V-shaped march continues through her front door. "Dating isn't going to fix your life. Did you call the car insurance people?"
"Come on, I'll do it tomorrow!"
The goose just looks at her. The worst, thinks Greta, is when they say nothing at all.
There are some similarities to Nate’s five-sentence structure here. We introduce a conflict by way of a problem that one character is trying to solve, followed by a second character taking a different tack. We even ended up with five paragraphs.
But in this format, I get to use more short declarative sentences. I also get to play a little more with the idea of what counts as a conflict and a resolution. If I’m not careful, my story endings tend toward the pat. Aiming toward a personal glimpse instead of a climax helps me avoid that habit.
Where would you take this technique? If you’re a fanfic drabble writer, maybe you could start with the consequences of one half of your pairing acting out to provoke the other. If you’re more into mystery, what develops between the protagonist and their primary suspect when the alibi proves true? If you try this out for yourself, I’d love to hear about it.
Thanks to Nate for the inspiration here. I hadn’t written anything like this in a while, but this was a great reminder that there are endless ways to tell a tiny story. I love microfiction and I am always excited to see a new way to explore it.
If you like this kind of thing, I cannot recommend enough that you check out the work of my old friend Andrew, who has just returned to posting stories after a long hiatus. And if you’d like to read a gorgeous longer piece of speculative nonfiction, please see my friend Erin’s “The Centenarian Bur Oak.”
