This month, I’m on the lookout for writing lessons I can find in my daily life. The challenge is to experience or find something that can be applied in some way to the craft of writing.

Today was easy because I attended the monthly Writers’ and Readers’ Meeting, which Varuna Writers’ House sponsors. I particularly enjoy the last segment of the meeting, when a writer staying at Varuna talks about his or her work.

Today’s speaker was Kathryn Brewer, a former journalist and now an ESL tutor living in Alice Springs, Northern Territory. She has been working on her first novel for eight years (amidst completing other writing) and is using a week at Varuna to undertake a final edit. Her manuscript was long-listed for Varuna’s prestigious Harper-Collins program for manuscript development. It is a story about a man in the Australian Outback who is obsessed with finding a plant that everyone thinks is extinct.

I was interested in Kathryn’s response when she was asked about the problem of boredom when writing and rewriting one work over a long period. The following is my understanding of what she said.

What you first develop in the manuscript of your novel is fueled by your interests and concerns at that time.

Later, it’s tempting to change your material–sometimes substantially– so that the story reflects your new interests and concerns. But this may not be the best thing to do.

By sticking with your original impetus, which started you writing, you can retain the general framework you originally developed. Doing so can be helpful because even if you make changes to your work, you’re doing this within a familiar framework, rather than dismantling and changing the lot.

Her comments make sense. It reminds me of how many people start but do not finish a long work–whether it’s a PhD dissertation, a novel or a non-fiction manuscript–because they keep changing their ideas.

People may also find it hard to finish writing a long work because they don’t know when to stop searching for new facts and developments to include. You can’t shut yourself off completely from influences. But —to use an old saying from journalism—there comes a point when you have to go with what you’ve got.

I wrote about this stopping point in my book on business writing, using a term I borrowed from psychology: satisficing. For example, when you are researching, you reach the satisficing point when it’s clear that your investigations have diminishing returns, i.e., you are not finding anything new or important. At that point, you need to stop looking and get stuck into the writing.

Inevitably, your writing will cause you to find new areas where you need information. But by that time, you may have written enough that you can keep your new investigation focused, using the framework you’ve developed for your piece. With a whole draft of her novel completed, Kathryn said she now realises that she needs to find and include some specific technical details about botany. If she had started out thinking she needed to know everything about botany before she started writing, she wouldn’t be at Varuna this week putting the finishing touches to a novel.

The group also discussed how the computer makes it easy to keep changing a manuscript–and how this can help and hinder a writer. Being disciplined about keeping successive drafts is easy. I’ve written about it in my blog article.

There’s nothing quite like the challenge of writing a short story, unfolding a conflict within the confines of roughly 2,000-3,000 words. Australian author, Susan Midalia (speaking on Radio National) says the challenge for short story writers is to use language economically while also creating an ‘evocative tale’. Not an easy task.

The best stories shake you up. When you finish, you put down the story and all you can say is WOW!!’ Here’s how Stephen King describes it:

What I want to start with is something that comes at me full-bore, like a big, hot meteor screaming down from the Kansas sky. I want the ancient pleasure that probably goes back to the cave: to be blown clean out of myself for a while, as violently as a fighter pilot who pushes the eject button in his F-111.

But writers are often warned that they should abandon the short story, that their chances of publication are better if they write a novel. According to Midalia, short story collections don’t sell as well because readers think novels require more time and work to create. I’m not sure about this. We may go for novels not only because they’re easier to find but because they promise a long and involving read. The fictional world of the novel is often complex, with many events and changes, while short stories may often focus a single episode in the character’s life. Publishers respond to this desire for ‘big’ reads, giving us fatter books. This books-on-steroids trend means more books are running well over 600 pages.

*

Still, short stories remain a loved form for some writers and readers. What’s the attraction? Writer Flannery O’Connor described it this way:

A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is.

Some of my favourite contemporary short story writers who create this kind of depth include Alice Munro, Cate Kennedy, Margo Lanagan, and Etgar Keret.

*
What sets great short stories apart from run-of-the-mill stories? Here’s what I think. (Some authors’ quotes below are from the Story website.)

Great stories create an authentic world and keep you in it.

Every element of a great short story rings true–the characters, their conflicts, the setting. No matter how alien the story’s world is to you personally, its elements fit and support each other so well that you enter it effortlessly and can understand the main character’s needs and actions.

*
Such stories stay with you. You find yourself mulling over what-ifs for hours or days afterwards: What if he hadn’t opened the door? What if she had said this instead?

*

It’s impossible to immerse yourself in this world if the author keeps intruding, making you aware that you’re not in the story’s world but in your own, reading a story. This magical link is broken when writers become self-indulgent, less concerned with telling a story than in commenting, flaunting their knowledge, or displaying language acrobatics. Stephen King, writing in the NY Times Sunday Book Review, describes such stories as ’show-offy rather than entertaining, self-important rather than interesting….’

Great stories provide insight, and do so with subtlety and depth.

According to Midali, the writer V. S. Pritchett defined the short story as something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing.

To create this glimpse, the writer may focus on one incident and expect you to fill in the blanks. That is, when you read, you take whatever the writer gives you–actions, talk and silences–and intuit the rest. Jackie Kay, a prize-winning short story writer, calls the short story a ‘tough form’ that provides a ’space for the reader to come in and imagine and create.’ The challenge for the short story writer is to work out what, within a small story space, you will make known and what you will omit or only hint at.

Great stories dig deep.

The best stories don’t stay on the surface of the situation, leading you along a flat plain from the first sentence to the last. They dig deep into rich lodes of emotion, symbolism, and human nature to create layers of meaning, a sense of deep currents moving beneath.

They don’t preach a theme or message but let these deeper meanings unfold in a way that seems right for the subject and characters. Flannery O’Connor said a good story has its meaning ‘embodied in it…made concrete in it’, so much so that the theme cannot be easily separated from the story itself.

Great stories are strong to the very end.

Some stories start well, then fall flat right at the end. A great story’s ending does more than simply stop the story’s action. It does not offer an ending that is glaringly obvious or a cop-out. For example, nearly every introductory workshop has someone who comes up with this one: And then I woke up to discover—IT WAS JUST A DREAM!!

*

The ending of a great short story may not be dramatic or even clear. But it moves the story onto a larger stage by creating a satisfying sense that life has changed somehow for the characters. This change may not be spelled out but readers get an evocative hint about what is changing, has changed, or may change.

Great stories take chances.

Great short stories do not always follow the rules. Some writers are afraid to let a story rip from their minds. They pick something safe and think they can bring it to life by applying the CPR of writing technique. It doesn’t work that way.

Stephen King slams stories that feel ‘…guarded and self-conscious rather than gloriously open’, that seem to be ‘written for editors and teachers rather than for readers,’ or that offer up ’some fraidy-cat’s writing school imitation of Faulkner, or some stream-of-consciousness about what Bob Dylan once called “the true meaning of a pear”.’