Insights from a person of questionable sanity

Knowing the ending at the beginning


Katherine Anne Porter stated that 'If I didn't know the ending of a story, I wouldn't begin.' Her story endings are not only foreseen, they are fixed points to steer by: 'I always write my last lines, last paragraph, my last page first, and then I go back and work towards it.' The Short Story: A Critical Introduction by Valerie Shaw.

The Short Story: Perfect for the modern world[


I find it rather ironic that though short stories in the modern world don't sell, they nevertheless explain our very 'modern' predicament perfectly. The short story is perfect for expressing fragmentation in the modern world. The following passage is also from Valerie Shaw's book:


' "our modern attraction to the short story" wrote Chesterton in 1906, "is not an accident of form; it is a sign of a real sense of fleetingness and fragility; it means that existence is only an impression, and perhaps only an allusion [...] we have no instinct of anything ultimate and enduring beyond the episode. The brevity of the form, that is to say, is directly imitative of the modern experience of being alive" '


What I find most striking from the above quote is '...existence is only an impression, and perhaps only an allusion....'. I think its quite self-explanatory and I am not eloquent enough to do it justice or explain its effect.

A thought on definitions

What is a short story? I'm sure we're all aware that a) definitions are arbitrary b) they are not static. So the 'definition' of a short story has evolved and I firmly believe it will continue to do so. Some people use 'time' to define a short story, for example a short story is something that can be read in one sitting, but as many prominent critics have pointed out numerous time-some people sit for longer or shorter periods of time! Some of us will finish a short story in one sitting, others will read a little and come back to it.


I am with L.A.G Strong on this one, who accepts the 'variety' and elasticity by this art form: 'We not only do now know what a short story ought to be, but we do not want to know. The only safe thing is to allow each writer to call his work what he likes and to judge it severely, and without favour, by its own standards'


Amen to that! So enough of these futile arguments on what a short is and what it isn't! :-)

But nothing happens in them!

'A good deal of the meaning of life and of art lies in the apparently dull spaces, the pauses, the unimportant passages' Lawrence.


The following quote is from Time and the Short Story by Jean Pickering (I can't remember exactly but I'm sure this was an essay and not a book).

' H.E. Bates said "The method by which the story is told is not by the carefully engineered plot but by the implication of certain isolated incidents, by the capture and arrangement of casual episodic movements. It is the method by which the surface, however seemingly trivial or unimportant [my emphasis] is interpreted in such a way as to interpret the individual emotional life below" '


I can only think of Beckett's play 'Waiting for Godot' as an example, though not a short story, in which nothing happens and yet....it is so bloody 'fabtastic' and emotional and so meaningful. I'm sure there are plenty of short stories in which 'nothing happens' on the plot level but volcanoes erupt beneath the surface.




That's it for now.
Goodnight and Goodluck.

Opti.