Storytellersunplugged

by George Guthridge

I sometimes think that, when it comes to writing short stories, I have too much time on my hands.

When I was writing short stories full-time back in the late ‘70s, short story checks often meant the difference between feeding my family something substantial and having my daughters endure another of my creative soups. Because I now am a professor and a business owner, I no longer consider the occasional checks I receive from short stories to be part of my income. It certainly is not a substantial part. The world is composed of creators and consumers, and I happen to be among the latter. Given my propensity for spending money – I am a closet architect, for nearly all of my income-after-necessities goes into my house (which now has eleven bathrooms, so we are talking considerable expenses here) – a couple of hundred dollars for a story is not going to make a world of difference to me.

So when I write short stories I do it strictly for fun.

And that is where the problem lies.

I like to fool around with form a lot. I rarely write short stories anymore, but when I do I often find myself treating it as an intellectual exercise. My last story consisted of nine parts, each with specific word lengths. It happened like this:

Bruce Holland Rogers and I met at the Nebulas one year and found, much to our delight, that we love the poetry of Richard Hugo. I had an advantage, if that is the appropriate term, of having taken a graduate class from Richard – a truly extraordinary poet, teacher, and human being.

Perhaps spurred by his love of poetry, Bruce had developed a story form that consists of nine parts. The first and ninth are told in first person and must be extremely short. The second and eighth are in second person and are also short but not as short as the first. Sections three through seven are in third person.

Richard used to tell us graduate students that poetry has internal form, and in his usual dazzling way he would show us a poem’s internal workings. So during our discussion, I suggested to Bruce that we also emphasize form, though with short stories – and see what happens.

We decided that each section would be a specified length, easy to verify given software’s ability to count words. Sections one and nine of my story, for example, were exactly 100 words, two and eight were 200, three, four, six, and seven, were 400 each, and the middle section was 800 words. Moreover, each section would be a short story in and of itself, containing a science fiction idea that would contribute to the story’s overall idea and yet stand on its own. To make matters more complicated, we agreed that the story would fit some kind of image, such as a clock or a map. I chose a map of Alaska, with each section being from a different part of the state; except for the first and last sections, each also was from a different ethnic group. I set the middle section, incidentally, on the top of Denali – Mt. McKinley to you non-Alaskans. It is fairly close to the state’s exact geographical center.

The story sold to F&SF but it did not earn much notice among readers, nor was it ever picked up by anthologies. Parts of it include some of the best writing that I feel I have ever done, but overall the story lacked an emotional drive necessary for a satisfying reading experience.

So what is the point of all this? Well, I think that we sometimes can write too tightly, or with too much craft. I suspect that the cat is more interested in the ball of yarn that has begun to unravel than with one that is very tightly wound. Like my good friend Janet Berliner, I love The Great Gatsby; but Moby Dick, for all of its structural flaws, is almost certainly the more powerful piece.

Last week I was paid $500 for a sonnet, by far the most I ever have earned from a poem. I don’t think I would have made anything close to that for a less-structured piece. I am guessing here, an educated guess, but it may show the difference of the role that form plays with readers. Those who read poetry may like seeing the form as part of the experience, whereas readers of fiction very well may prefer having the form hidden.

–George Guthridge