Forming Short Stories

 I repeat myself: I sprawl too much for writing a good short story

That I persist is why I read articles like Alix Ohlin on How to Map the Shape of Your Short Story. Like Ms. Ohlin, it is a fascination with the form - I do not think I can fit within it. That is one reason why poetry eluded me - I got hypnotized and intimidated b y the forms. 

This is especially true for me with short stories. Perhaps it’s because the short story is where I feel most engaged with questions of form, where I experience writing at its most dynamic and malleable. Sculpture, painting, installations—all of them are encounters with form, and because of how they inhabit physical space, they help me conceptualize forms I might work with myself.

When it comes to form, I’ve never felt at ease with the narrative arc as it was taught to me in high school, the Freytag’s pyramid that leads from inciting incident through rising action to climax and denouement. It doesn’t seem to capture the essence—or the breadth—of the kinds of stories I love or the kinds I’m trying to write. So I’m always seeking out different ways of thinking about story form. In recent years, I’ve found aesthetic resonance in Jane Alison’s exploration of narrative structures like the meander or the spiral. I’ve been intrigued by the use of kishōtenketsu in the work of writers like Ocean Vuong. I’m continually thinking about where my own stories might go, what shapes they might take.

She also may have a technique that might help me (you) understand the short story form:

When I read stories I admire, I’ve found mapping their forms visually to be extremely helpful, similar to the process Martin Solares describes here. For me, story mapping is a kind of reverse outlining that helps me understand the story better, how it progresses and how it’s engineered, and it keeps me attuned to the possibilities inherent in the genre. As Jerome Stern writes in Making Shapely Fiction, a book that also ascribes narrative meaning to visual forms, “These shapes aren’t rules that you follow so much as ways to create.”

I will come back to this idea when I get back to writing short stories.

 sch 7/23