THE SHORT STORY: A LEGENDARY OF STRUCTURES

HANK WILLIS THOMAS

Answering a question from our CORO / OFFICE HOURS. Shiv asks: I'm wondering about how you structure your short stories. Do you use a checklist (similar to your Persona one?) while writing? How do you know that the chosen structure is working in service of the story?

Shiv, thank you for your question. Here’s an attempt at an answer. Forgive me if I misunderstood anything.

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Short story structures fascinate me, truly and deeply. I doubt I would write short stories if not for my structural obsession.  If plot might be understood as a system for distributing conflict, then structure might be understood as a system for distributing narrative (though that’s not all that structure distributes – more on that in a future post). 

In my writing practice I deploy three approaches to structuring my stories.  Nothing surprising, standard stuff.  First is the exploratory approach where I work out the story’s structure by actually writing the story.  This is a slow intuitive labyrinthine work with more frustration than results, but what can you do?  I’m no short story savant.  Most of the time I have an inkling for a story, a fragment and nothing else, and in order to complete the work I need to divine both the story and its structure.  There are stories that I’ve rough-drafted over and over again because I never land on the right structure for them -- and even now I have a trio of stories cooling in the lab whose structures never hit.  Hopefully one day I’ll cypher these suckers out. 

When it comes to the exploratory approach, I use the above labyrinth analogy intentionally.  In this mode I feel like I’m on some Theseus shit, slowly picking my way through an infinite maze comprised of all story structures ever imagined, and it is only by hitting a bunch of dead ends and unproductive circles that I finally map the precise pattern that will get me out of the labyrinth. 

(The labyrinth analogy naturally invites the question: who or what is the Minotaur?  In my case my desire to rush the story in order to curry approval / rewards, my capitalist vampire squid ambition, is what chases me in the dark, threatening to devour me and my art.)

That’s the exploratory option.  The next approach I rely on is more executive, more structure-forward, a direct product of my reading.  Like every other writer in existence, there is a pantheon of published stories whose structures I want to imitate or re-imagine.  I want to imitate / re-imagine because I love these stories and want to partake in what makes them genius.  In this model mode, instead of seeking out my structure in a stumbling fashion, I have the structure already set, and what I’m looking for is the right story that will inhabit that structure beautifully. 

Easier said than done. 

Both approaches – the labyrinth and the model – require lots of experimenting and it’s difficult to say which is harder – stumbling around in the dark in search of a structure, or trying to equal the soaring awesomeness of an accomplished model with one’s paltry talents.  Different aesthetic challenges, different emotional tasks.   

As for the third approach, it’s a blended strategy: sometimes in the middle of the labyrinth I will recall a model structure that might help me defeat the maze – and sometimes when I’m working with a model structure I need to get lost, need to take this pattern for a trip to the labyrinth for it to work.    

 

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I’m sure other folks have different approaches.  But no matter what your preferred strategy is, I do urge short story writers to keep an archive of all the story structures you’ve encountered that you love, that you envy, that you wish to imitate, that completely flummox you, that can serve your craft – and annotate it. 

To assemble, in other words, a legendary of structures¹.

I’ve been amassing my legendary of structures since I was in my MFA program and have about three dozen models filed – though only a score of these I could ever imagine working with.  The other dozen or so are edge cases, exotics that serve me in other ways: as aspirations, as ways of demarcating the difference between what I love as a reader and what I’m capable of as a writer. 

In case you’re wondering – of the three dozen models in my legendary, I’ve only succeeded in reproducing four or five to my satisfaction.

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I’m sure all of you have assembled your own legendary, but in case you’re interested here’s part of mine.  Please note: I don’t spell out everything that is important to me about my models — for that type of comprehensive insight you’ll have to read the stories themselves.    

Edwidge Danticat, Children of the Sea

The ever-awesome alternating point of view story, the ever-reliable double-helix story.  A structural staple.  But Danticat’s version is the most useful for me, each narrative thread longing for the other, both “out of time” in real, heartbreaking ways. 

Edwidge Danticat, New York Day Woman

A daughter secretly follows her mother on a NYC street and across scant pages their relationship, with all its dreams, longings, and distances are revealed.  Another braided dual-narrative story but this one is a conversation of sorts between the daughter’s narrative and the mother's koan-like declarations.  Shows you how to build characters through perfectly selected revelatory lines:

I follow my mother, mesmerized by the many possibilities of her journey: Even in a flowered dress, she is lost in a sea of pinstripes and gray suits, high heels and elegant short skirts, Reebok sneakers, dashing from building to building.

     My mother, who won't go out to dinner with anyone.

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If they want to eat with me, let them come to my house, even if I boil water and give it to them.

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My mother, who talks to herself when she peels the skin off poultry.

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Fat, you know, and cholesterol. Fat and cholesterol killed your aunt Hermine.   

Paisley Rekdal, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee (essay)

A single moment in the Chinese-American mother’s life, told by her daughter – and yet these few pages reveal a world.  An outstanding example of the concentrated narrative.    

My mother and I watch Bruce Lee set foot on the island, followed closely by the playboy and the black man who will die after the banquet and all his women. Bruce Lee narrows his eyes, ripples his chest muscles underneath his white turtleneck.

       "I knew him," my mother tells me. "I worked with him in a restaurant when I was in high school."

       "Really?" This is now officially the only cool thing about her.

       "What was he like?"

       "I don't remember: No one liked him, though. All that kung fu stuff; it looked ridiculous. Like a parody."

We watch in the dark as Bruce Lee confronts himself, over and over. In the hall of mirrors, his bloody chest and face seem outlined in silver. He is handsome and wiry; he caws at his opponents like an ethereal avenger. I peek at my mother beside me on the sofa. In the television light, her broad face twists into an expression I do not recognize. Then the light flickers, changes, makes her ordinary again.

Jamaica Kincaid, Girl

The shortest of masterpieces.  All the mother’s instructions and warnings to “the girl” in one single perfect sentence with a few responses from “the girl.”.

Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap; wash the color clothes on Tuesday and put them on the clothesline to dry; don’t walk bare-head in the hot sun; cook pumpkin fritters in very hot sweet oil; soak your little cloths right after you take them off; when buying cotton to make yourself a nice blouse, be sure that it doesn’t have gum in it, because that way it won’t hold up well after a wash; soak salt fish overnight before you cook it; is it true that you sing benna in Sunday school?; always eat your food in such a way that it won’t turn someone else’s stomach; on Sundays try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming; don’t sing benna in Sunday school; you mustn’t speak to wharf-rat boys, not even to give directions; don’t eat fruits on the street—flies will follow you; but I don’t sing benna on Sundays at all and never in Sunday school; this is how to sew on a button; this is how to make a buttonhole for the button you have just sewed on… 

Sherman Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

Another double-helix story but in this variation a fraught present visit to the 7-11 is intertwined with the narrator’s failed relationship with his white girlfriend and his failing relationship with the world.  A triumph of oblique heartbreak and economy and how the past/present live in us all. 

Jhumpa Lahiri, Third and Final Continent

A Bengali immigrant comes to Boston, brings his wife over, and yet everything is in play for him, for his American life, until the very end.  Masterclass on how to render the confusion and tumult of arrival without over-doing it, and how you sell that moment when the immigrant realizes that America is to be his life, no going back.  

Edward P. Jones, The Store

Jones wrote the most perfect short story collection ever, LOST IN THE CITY, and this story embodies that perfection.  If you want to know how to distill an entire novel into a short story, begin here, but I’m serious—an entire novel.  A young brother comes of age, truly, working at a neighborhood store for seven years. 

Octavia E. Butler, The Evening and the Morning and the Night

Butler wrote perfect novels and perfect short stories – she’s a Black literary Ohtani – or Ohtani is a baseball Butler.  Either way this story teaches how you might credibly create an entire new category of humanity without the worldbuilding dimming the protagonist’s emotional core.   

Mary Gaitskill, An Affair, Edited

How you might use a third-person story’s clinical formalism as counterpoint to emotional volatility, and the raw honesty that’s needed to get to the heart of our vulnerable desires.

Jayne Anne Phillips, How Micky Made It

Astounding stream of consciousness character studies whose first-person voice is directed at an occulted you.      

Kevin Canty, Dogs

A lit second person story whose explicit persona is addressing a sad-sack earlier version of themselves.  Super short and organized around the you-character’s rock bottom moment. 

Pam Houston, How To Talk To A Hunter

Second person bad relationship story, but shaped as an instruction manual, a How-To Guide.  The gap between the persona and the "you" in the context of a disastrous relationship is so magnificent. 

Epistolary Stories

Katherine Taylor’s Address Unknown; Stephen King’s Jerusalem’s Lot, Joyce Carol Oates, Unmailed, Unwritten Letters. 

I could go on.  I’ve left out some favorites – Sandra Cisneros, Samuel R. Delany, Denis Johnson – but as I said this is a partial list, and for many reasons doesn’t include all my personal titans. 

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And finally, Shiv, you asked how do I know the chosen structure is serving the story?

Part of it is that when a stucture ain’t working for me the non-working is pretty obvious. Part of it is that I have readers who help me understand what works and what doesn’t. Part of it is my literary instincts, all my reading combined, which I can’t possibly remember, guiding me like an invisible hand comprised of pages and words, the only invisible hand I care about. 

But mostly it’s when the story and structure stop messing with my sleep — when I can bear the disappointment of the things that are wrong with the story that I’ll never be able to fix because I lack the talent — that’s when I know I’ve done it right and can finally let it go.

1. Legendaries were collections of legends.