Aug 062016
 

Margaret Nowaczyk

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Just a little intro: A few months ago Caroline Adderson wrote to me about a student of hers who had just produced a stunning short story based on my exercise model in “How to Write a Short Story: Notes on Structure and an Exercise” in my book Attack of the Copula Spiders. Caroline was right about the story, and I am delighted to publish it here.

But it’s not the first successful story written off that exercise. I am gradually collecting some great examples. So look at “Shame” by Benjamin Woodard and “Gunslinger” and “Angel of Death” by Casper Martin to get an idea of the range of styles and subject matter that can evolve from a simple prompt.

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Bentley watched Adèle pass without a glance at the hydrocephalic skeleton of a five-year old child hung on a yard-tall metal pole, alien-headed, lights glaring on its glass case. She entered the next room down the corridor that curved to his right. Der Narrenturm, The Tower of Fools – not very PC back in the 17th century, were they, Bentley thought. The Museum of Anatomy and Pathology in the old psychiatric ward of the Vienna General Hospital was housed in a round, four-story tower separated from the main building by an expanse of lawn. The physical specimens of contagion and birth defects in two-hundred-year-old glass jars filled with murky fluid only compounded the barbarity of the place. Bentley had to admit that as far as medical horrors go it was a fitting setting – thick, whitewashed brick walls separated tiny cages of rooms on the outer wall, a circular corridor surrounded an inner courtyard where he imagined the less affected inmates had been allowed to take air. He had expected the place to reek of formaldehyde, like the pathology departments in all the hospitals where he had worked, but the building was odorless, sterile.

He didn’t want to come, not at all, but from the moment she learned about it Adèle became obsessed. Once here, she went from room to room, her eyes drawn from one specimen-containing jar to another – she never did anything half-way. Studying, work, sex. Having a baby. In the Contagion Room Bentley was reminded of the story Adèle told about the plasticine models of a syphilitic she saw as a child a French venereology clinic. The new nanny her mother had hired made Adèle promise not to tell anybody as she pulled her into the dark hallway and up the steep, wooden staircase. When the woman disappeared into the examining room, Adèle – curious, and a precocious reader – went from display case to display case, and made out the words letter by awful letter. Gumma, congenital syphilis, primary chancre. She was six years old. She had not been able to sleep for months afterwards, the speckled fetus and the caved-in nose floated in front of her every time she closed her eyes. Fifteen years later, during a medical school lecture on sexually transmitted diseases she darted out from the lecture hall, her chair clanging to the floor. Bentley found her in the quadrangle, sucking on a cigarette. “I’ve seen those before,” she choked out before the story tumbled all out.

But today she marched past them. Two rooms later she stood, transfixed, and stared at a preserved baby with its intestines floating outside its abdomen, its little fingers interlaced as if in prayer, put in that position by some well-meaning – or was it morbid? – mortician, and slumped forward, its nose flattened against the glass of the jar. The look on Adèle’s face must have been the look the child Adèle had – mouth slack, eyes darting about the specimen, taking in all the gruesome details. An anencephalic newborn in a jar behind her stared at Bentley from beneath half-closed eyelids.

He knew that he wouldn’t be able to sleep that night.

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A few days after she ran out of the lecture hall Adèle dragged Bentley into Fairweather’s at Yonge and Eglinton. A rack in a back corner held a clutch of cocktail dresses, their cheap-looking fabrics glimmered in the bright ceiling lights.

“Ooh, can you imagine anything worse?” Adèle sung out.

Bentley eyed the dresses.

“I gotta try them on!” Lemon yellow, violent pink, green, and neon mauve tumbled off the rack into her arms and she disappeared into the fitting room.

“Stupid cheap zipper,” floated over the partition. “How’s this?” She flung the curtain aside and twirled out in the green dress. It cinched her around the waist, the straps drug into her shoulders; even though she was slim and toned she looked like a boiled ham in a netting. On a bed of stewed Boston lettuce. And yet, she was still beautiful.

Bentley pumped his index finger in his open mouth and made gagging sounds. He reached for the zipper. She weaseled out of his arms and ducked back behind the curtain. Soon she popped out in the neon blue.

“This color does nothing for you.”

“The color? What about the cut? Those flounces! Whoever came up with this deserves to die a long-drawn out death in the seventeenth circle of hell. Drowned in tears of women who had to wear this horror.”

“There were only nine circles of …” he begun, and Adèle rolled her eyes.

“I know that,” she said.

The next dress, the mauve, made her pale, freckled skin look like she had secondary syphilis. He bit his lip as he remembered Adèle’s shaking voice.

When she disappeared into the fitting room for the fourth time he was ready to walk out and never come back.

“Did you have to try all of them?” he asked long after they left the store. Something in his voice made her stop and look at him.

“I thought it was funny,” she said.

“You have no sense of proportion.” He stomped off, leaving her standing alone at the entrance to the subway.

The following morning, he waited for her at the same spot – she was late. He had studied way past his bedtime to make up the time, and was feeling grouchy and unkind. But he couldn’t go a morning without seeing her. He waved when he saw her in the crowd.

“Ready for the gynie exam?” Adèle asked when she reached him.

Bentley looked up at the trees just coming out in leaves – greenish mist hung around the branches. No apologies from Adèle, ever. A sparrow trilled and went silent over their heads.

“I’m totally not,” Adèle said. “This fertility crap. I have to put up with it every month, I don’t want to study it, too.”

“I thought procreation was every woman’s passion,” Bentley said carelessly. Adèle’s cheeks went brick red.

“I’ll have you know that I am not constantly thinking about babies and nursing and lactating and gestating and bringing life into this world and whatever other cliché crap you chauvinist misogynes think women are about.”

“Sex?” Bentley asked just as Adèle inhaled to continue. He wiggled his black eyebrows like a beetle. Adèle snorted and punched him in the shoulder.

“Hah! I am like a guy in that respect, eh? Men think about sex…”

“…every eight seconds,” Bentley finished with her.

Adèle laughed and leaned into him, her head on his shoulder. His penis stirred and thickened – obviously he was one of those men.

“You must have gotten too much testosterone exposure during your fetal life,” he said. He kept his arm around her shoulder the rest of the way to the hospital.

The first time he saw Adèle she was dancing on a chair at their med school orientation party. She wore autographed boxer shorts from an upper class man, the prize token for the scavenger hunt; a wide grin – all teeth – split her face, thick brown hair parted in a bob on the right. As she shook it off her face her eyes met Bentley’s and she winked at him, her face an invitation. Bentley felt his face grow hot.

They were sleeping together a month later. Bentley, virginal, realized right away that Adèle was much more experienced than he would allow himself to imagine. Her lipstick on his penis – kissing it, biting it, sucking it she smeared the crimson on the pearly pink of his shaft and foreskin. He pushed aside thoughts of the unnamed men, their greedy hands, their probing tongues and dicks that knew Adèle better than he did.

He realized then that he would never let go of her.

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What are we doing here, Bentley wondered as he followed Adèle into another low-ceilinged room. And another. She had to see every last atrocity, every last crime nature committed against itself in forming these monsters. Teratogenesis – the study of monsters – he remembered from their genetics lectures. She shouldn’t even be here – after all those miscarriages what could be going through her mind, for god’s sake. What was she thinking as she stared at the specimens – better no baby than one of those? All that blood she had lost with the last miscarriage, she almost needed a hysterectomy. It took her months to recover but still she wouldn’t allow a transfusion. She was still hoping she’d get pregnant after five years of tests and fertility treatments.

He loved her so much.

That night, after he rolled off her, Bentley lay supine on the king-size hotel bed, arms splayed. The neon sign from the cafe across the street flickered blue shadows across the curtains.

“I want to try IVF.” Adèle rubbed her face in his hairy chest, a greying patch extending from nipple to nipple. “This… this isn’t working.”

“This?”

“I’m not getting any younger.” She had turned thirty-six this past January.

“I’m not good enough?”

Adèle lifted her head and stared at him, unblinking.

“That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it?” Bentley always lowered his voice as his temper rose.

I had all those miscarriages.” Her voice sounded wet. “We still don’t know why I can’t carry a baby to term.”

She rose from the bed and stood by the window, her body dark against the sheer curtain. Outlined in blue, the curve of her hips and butt, broad as if made for bearing children, made him want her all over again. He grabbed her waist and pushed her face down onto the bed.

“I’ll show you,” he hissed through his teeth as he lowered his face beside hers. Adèle turned her head and Bentley saw her perfect profile. A tear streaked down across her cheekbone. He kissed it, tasted salt. His body sagged.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

Adèle squirmed beneath him, turned over, and wrapped her arms around him, scissored her legs across his buttocks.

“Don’t ever leave me,” she said.

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The next morning Bentley woke up with an erection. Something tugged at his consciousness. A nagging, unpleasant something. Adèle, in a backless, shimmering silver-grey gown, the even beads of her spine bisecting her back with such grace it took his breath away. She turned and his penis flatlined. Bentley shook his head to dislodge the image – a line of blood down Adèle’s belly, from the ribcage to the pubic bone, in a perfect parallel to her spine, the dress gaping open, muscle and fascia slashed, a glistening globe of the uterus exposed. The bottom half of a baby hung out from the incision, buttocks and legs hanging. Pulsating coils of umbilical cord dangled down to Adèle’s knees, blood stains splashed down to the hem of the gown.

The bisected Adèle lifted a champagne flute at him. “Cheers.”

Bentley shot upright on the bed. Adèle slept peacefully next to him, wrapped in the white linen sheets crushed from last night’s sex.

As he padded barefoot to the bathroom the cold marble floor bit at his soles. The wall tiles were weeping long droplets of moisture when he stepped out of the shower, but he still felt the cold sweat on his back.

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A week later, back in Toronto, Bentley had performed two kidney transplants and five bladder resections. Adèle finished a paper reporting her new research on gene therapy, and reviewed – and rejected – three others. They taught entitled surgical and medicine residents, they gave lectures to medical students who played with their smartphones. They attended patients in clinics and on the wards. They worked late and hardly spoke over their take-out dinners.

It was as if they both held their breath.

At home the crib grinned its slats at Bentley every time he passed the nursery they set up during the second to last pregnancy, when Adèle went beyond the twenty-week mark and they thought the pregnancy would keep. Once, when he came home from a late night in the OR, he stood outside the nursery door, his forehead against the cherry wood of the door jamb, and tried to imagine the snuffles, the mumblings of a just woken baby, but all he heard was Adele’s soft breaths in the darkness of their bedroom.

Two weeks later Bentley came downstairs as Adèle stood at the kitchen counter waiting for the water to boil, teabag label hanging over the rim of her mug. He had seen the tampon wrapper and the blood tinged applicator in the bathroom wastebasket. He reached for her, and she burrowed her face in his neck, her arms around and up his back like a vise, hands together, pushed against his spine.

Neither spoke until the kettle whistled.

“Not even a romantic interlude in Vienna,” Adèle said then. Not quite how Bentley remembered it – the pickled fetuses still haunted his dreams. He reached over and poured the boiling water into the mug, dunked the teabag in and out.

“You’ve always taken such good care of me,” Adèle said.

“I don’t want a baby,” he lifted her face up by the chin. “I just want you. I went along with all this, but I don’t want you bloated with hormones, needles stuck in your belly, rushing off at 6 am to have an ultrasound up your hoohah.”

Adèle chuckled, but a tear slid down her cheek. Bentley bent down and kissed it dry.

“We’ll be all right,” he said. “Just the two of us.”

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That was before the nightmares started. Before Adèle stopped going to work and just lay on the living room sofa, the pillow beneath her cheek sodden. Before Bentley was able to count the ribs beneath her disappearing muscles. And before he found her lying in a lukewarm bath, her white arms and legs floating just beneath the surface, nipples poking through the surface of the pink water, twisted wet hair snaked around her neck like a coil of umbilical cord.

But at that moment, surrounded by the aroma of the mint tea, in the orange light of the setting sun puddled on the slate tile floor, Bentley truly believed that they would be all right.

—Margaret Nowaczyk

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Małgorzata (Margaret) Nowaczyk, a pediatrician and a clinical geneticist, is a professor at McMaster University and DeGroote School of Medicine in Hamilton, Ontario. Her writing has appeared in Geist, The Examined Life Journal, and Canadian Medical Association Journal. Her short story “Cassandra” will appear in Prairie Fire. She is a co-editor of an anthology of short stories from the Canadian-Polish diaspora to be published by Guernica Editions in 2017. She lives in Hamilton with her husband and two sons.

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Jun 042015
 

NicoleChuNicole Chu

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Ray Bradbury reminds us that the plot of a story is contingent upon characters chasing after their desires. “Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations,” he says in Zen in the Art of Writing: Essays on Creativity. “It is human desire let run, running, and reaching a goal. It cannot be mechanical. It can only be dynamic” (152). What makes the difference, then, between a mechanical plot and a dynamic one? Bradbury suggests that characters will write your story for you if you simply get out of the way and let them go. But I know my characters’ footprints reveal more than just a direct trail to their desires – by charting the plot steps of any story, I can discover what makes a plot dynamic.

I begin by looking up the definition of plot in J.A. Cuddon’s Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory:

The plan, design, scheme or pattern of events in a play, poem or work of fiction; and, further, the organization of incident and character in such a way as to induce curiosity and suspense in the spectator or reader. In the space/continuum of plot the continual question operates in three senses: Why did that happen? Why is this happening? What is going to happen next – and why? (To which may be added: And – is anything going to happen?)

Cuddon defines plot as a pattern of events organized to arouse curiosity and suspense for the reader. He implies that the organization of incident and character must continually incite the reader’s interest; we are not just wondering what’s going to happen next, but we’re left wondering why these particular events are important to the characters and the story. He mentions E.M. Forester’s example of plot versus story to highlight the emphasis on causality: “‘The king died and the queen died,’ is a story. ‘The king died and then the queen died of grief,’ is a plot’” (Cuddon 676). Plot is not just the ordering of events but the ordering should be accompanied by the cause or motive of why an event occurs.

Cuddon’s definition also includes Aristotle’s ideas on plot. In Poetics, Aristotle sees plot as ‘the first principle’ and ‘soul of tragedy’ (Cuddon 676). Aristotle calls plot ‘an imitation of the action,’ as well as the arrangements of the incidents (I learned from Stuart Spencer’s The Playwright’s Guidebook that ‘imitation of action’ is not a physical action but rather “an internal, psychological need.” In other words, we can discuss plot in terms of a character’s need or desire and the related incidents that occur). Aristotle requires the plot to be ‘whole’ (to have a beginning, middle, and end), and he also distinguishes between simple and complex plots: the complex has a crisis action that involves recognition and/or reversal, and the simple has neither (Cuddon 676). Aristotle’s ideal plot, therefore, ends with a moment of revelation to the protagonist that coincides with the protagonist’s sudden change of fortune.

aristotleAristotle

Douglas Glover further explains how dramatic narrative can be developed after the initial desire and resistance have been established. In Attack of the Copula Spiders and Other Essays on Writing, he states: “A character first acts on one impulse and then the other, goes forward, retreats, reels back, makes compromises with necessity, concedes a position out of politeness, ponders his own reactions, realizes that he prefers disorderly love to antiseptic order and changes his behavior” (Glover 26). Put simply, the short story form consists of a character going after something, being blocked from getting it, and changing his behavior to get it another way, and this sequence is repeated over and over. Glover emphasizes that this pattern of conflict must occur such that the opposing forces (A and B) “get together again and again and again” (three being the critical number or minimum). He notes that in the repetition of these poles conflicting, writers are “forced to vary the conflicts in a dramatic and interesting way and you are forced to go deeper into the moral and spiritual complications of the conflict and the relationships” (Glover 27). Glover argues form opens up more possibilities in that writers must create new material related to the same conflict.

In the following discussion on plot, I focus on the repetition or pattern of conflict. In three example short stories, I trace the pattern of character desire and resistance within a story. I am interested in how increasing pressures force characters to “go deeper into the moral and spiritual complications of the conflict.” After I identify the pattern of conflict, I see how each story’s sequence of plot events build to a climax and forces characters to “go deeper” and eventually change significantly.

Charles D’Ambrosio’s “The Point” is about 13-year-old Kurt Pittman who, at his mother’s request, agrees to escort his mother’s friend, Mrs. Gurney, back to her home. Kurt is used to chaperoning drunk locals home, but he quickly realizes that Mrs. Gurney will be difficult. Before they can get across the playfield, she falls on her ass twice and begins to sift through the sand. Kurt finally gets her onto the boardwalk and, despite her protests, dumps her on a wagon to pull her. When he takes a break to breathe, she disappears further down the boardwalk, takes off her nylons, and runs towards the sea. When Kurt repeatedly tries to redirect them to get her home, Mrs. Gurney vomits over herself, babbles on about her age and beauty, threatens to commit suicide, and finally comes onto him by undressing herself, throwing both her blouse and bra into the wind. Kurt at first refuses to look, but he ends up looking at her aging body and expressionless eyes. She presses against him, and he must decide whether to take advantage of the situation or take her home. He decides to bring Mrs. Gurney to her house and tucks her into bed. When Kurt returns home, he can’t sleep and decides to read an old letter written by his father, a Vietnam veteran who has committed suicide. In the letter, the father describes being a medic during the Vietnam War, trying to save the wounded, including a 19-year-old soldier who eventually dies from an explosion. Kurt walks out to the playground, sits in a swing and recalls finding his own father’s body with a bullet wound in the head.

the point

“The Point” is approximately 7,700 words and is told in first-person from Kurt’s point of view. D’Ambrosio breaks up the story into five sections, using line breaks. The major conflict steps between Kurt and Mrs. Gurney (opposing forces A and B) take place in the second, third, and fourth sections. By major conflict, I mean the structure of desire and resistance: Kurt’s desire to bring Mrs. Gurney home and Mrs. Gurney’s resistance to this desire. The first four sections are chronological, moving forward from the party to Mrs. Gurney’s house in about an hour. D’Ambrosio ends the last section with a scene outside of the main plot, a scene that shows Kurt reading his father’s letter and remembering his father’s suicide (thus it is backfill, not plot).

The conflict really begins at the opening of section two when Kurt attempts to walk Mrs. Gurney across the playing field, and Mrs. Gurney plops herself down in the sand, “nesting there as if she were going to lay an egg” (7). She takes off her sandals and tosses them behind her, which prompts Kurt to fetch them. This is Mrs. Gurney’s first action to derail Kurt from his goal. He responds by reiterating his goal (the plot desire): “The problem now is how to get you home.” As if Kurt’s goal isn’t already clear, he thinks to himself, “I’ve found that if you stray too far from the simple goal of getting home and going to sleep you let yourself in for a lot of unnecessary hell.” They start walking again and take “baby steps” across the playing field before Mrs. Gurney falls back “on her ass into the sand” again – another hitch that prevents Kurt from reaching his goal (10).

Once on the boardwalk, Kurt decides to bring Mrs. Gurney home another way: drag the drunkard in a wooden wagon. Despite Mrs. Gurney’s protesting, he somehow gets her into the wagon and starts pulling. When Kurt pauses for a break, he finds “Mrs. Gurney was gone” (11). She slips down the boardwalk, farther from her home, and tries to engage him in drunk talk about Mr. Crutchfield, another local who died earlier that summer. This is Mrs. Gurney’s second major resistance against Kurt’s attempt to bring her home; she no longer sits in the sand but makes it more difficult for Kurt by fleeing the scene.

In section three, Kurt repeats his desire to get Mrs. Gurney home four different times in the span of four pages. The first time is after she pulls her nylons off and he runs and fetches them. He says, “We’re not too far now, Mrs. Gurney. We’ll have you home in no time” (14). She then vomits between her legs, he consoles her with a cigarette, and he again repeats, “We just have to get you home” (15). When she asks him to guess her age, he reminds her, “You’re going home, Mrs. Gurney. Hang tough” (16). When she continues with her drunk talk of how bad life can get, he says, “We need to get you home, Mrs. Gurney … that’s my only concern” (17). In Mrs. Gurney’s four separate attempts to derail Kurt from his goal, he responds with four clear affirmations of his desire.

In section four, Mrs. Gurney poses the most resistance by trying to seduce Kurt. At the beginning of the section, Mrs. Gurney lies down in the sand and takes off her blouse and bra. Kurt looks away and tells her they should go. When she tries to get him to sit, he thinks: “I’d let us stray from the goal and now it was nowhere in sight. I had to steer this thing back on course, or we’d end up talking about God” (19). He says to Mrs. Gurney, “This isn’t good. We’re going home,” once again repeating his goal (for the sixth time, not counting the times he thinks it). He also mentions he can see the house, observes it’s only “one hundred yards away,” and that they’re “so close now” (19-20). Mrs. Gurney, however, tries to engage him in conversation again by offering her house to him after she dies, threatening she’ll kill herself, and babbling about how she met her husband – all her ways of resisting going home.

When none of Mrs. Gurney’s attempts seem to faze Kurt, she tries to seduce him. Mrs. Gurney steps closer and leans in – he resists by saying, “Mrs. Gurney, let’s go home now” (his seventh time). He looks into her “glassy and dark and expressionless” eyes, and he then feels her hand brush the “front of his trunks” (23). He wonders whether he should go “fuck around” and “get away with it.” In the climactic moment, he chooses to resist Mrs. Gurney and hands her his t-shirt to cover up. They move away from the shore and cross the boardwalk to Mrs. Gurney’s home. The plot ends when Kurt leads Mrs. Gurney by the elbow into her house.

Kurt comments at the beginning of his journey that “everything … had a shadow and this deepened the world, made it seem thicker, with layers, and more layers and then a darkness into which I couldn’t see” (9). I had a similar experience of seeing layers and more layers of this story after I separated the plot from the rest of the story. The repetition of the same desire and resistance makes up the main conflict: Kurt wants to take Mrs. Gurney home, but she does not want to go home. Kurt repeating his simple desire versus Mrs. Gurney’s increasing resistance drives the story forward – there’s nothing unclear about what he wants (since he says it seven times). The protagonist doesn’t hint at or suggest his desire –Kurt uses the phrase “I want…” to make the reader aware of his concrete desire.

Glover states that the repetition of the same desire and resistance forces writers “to vary the conflicts in a dramatic and interesting way … [writers] are forced to go deeper into the moral and spiritual complications of the conflict and the relationships.” Kurt’s desire to take Mrs. Gurney home may seem humdrum or routine at first – he doesn’t have any stake in his relationship with Mrs. Gurney since he’s just doing his job. The tension rises with Mrs. Gurney’s increasing resistance: she first falls over, then wanders away, then takes off her nylons, and starts to babble nonsense. But her dialogue in the third section begins to take on an ominous tone: a threat to kill herself is more loaded than her previous statement of how bad life can get. Notice how the tension increases in the following dialogue right before the climax:

“I’m thirsty,” Mrs. Gurney said. “I’m so homesick.”

“We’re close now,” I said.

“That’s not what I mean,” she said. “You don’t know what I mean.”

“Maybe not,” I said. “Please put your shirt on, Mrs. Gurney.”

“I’ll kill myself, “Mrs. Gurney said. “I’ll go home and kill myself.”

“That won’t get you anywhere … You’d be dead … then you’d be forgotten.”

“My boys wouldn’t forget” (21).

This dialogue serves two functions: 1) The back-and-forth between opposing forces A and B creates the suspense that plot should incite (according to Cuddon’s definition), and 2) The content of the dialogue foreshadows Kurt’s flashback at the end of the story since Kurt did not have any forewarning of his father’s suicide, and he could never forget the bloody and emotional mess.

These previous plot steps build to the climactic moment in which D’Ambrosio must escalate Mrs. Gurney’s resistance dramatically: the drunk woman takes off her bra and tries to seduce Kurt. Her actions force Kurt to “go deeper” into himself and reveal what Glover calls the “moral and spiritual complications of the conflict and relationship”– on the surface, Kurt must decide whether to stick to his goal of getting Mrs. Gurney home or give in to her seduction. On a deeper level, the adolescent questions his beliefs by asking himself, “What is out there that indicates the right way?” (23). In a later flashback, Kurt mentions he misses “having [his father] around to tell [him] what’s right and what’s wrong, or talk about boom-boom, which is sex … and not worry about things” (31). Kurt finally expresses his emotional need for his father after the plot ends, but the main plot between Kurt and Mrs. Gurney allows us to see how his internal conflict plays out in their actions.

The main conflict between Kurt and Mrs. Gurney only takes up three of five sections. D’Ambrosio could have ended the story after section four when Kurt gets Mrs. Gurney home, but the author ends with the backstory of Kurt’s father – specifically, the ending focuses on the father’s mission as a medic during the Vietnam War and his suicide. The father’s story ties in with Kurt’s story because they both have a “mission” to carry out: the father helped the wounded in Vietnam, and Kurt helps the drunk (and wounded) in his hometown. Kurt considers himself a “hard-core veteran” ever since his father assigned him the job when he was 10 years old (5). Both Kurt and his father mention the “job” and what happens when you “lose sight” of the job or “stray too much from the goal” (28). D’Ambrosio includes the backstory of Kurt’s father to resonate with the main plot structure: Kurt’s “mission” to escort Mrs. Gurney home.

By extracting the plot from the rest of the story, I notice what is left on the page: the subplot of Mr. Crutchfield’s death, the root image of the black hole that splinters into white image patterns, Kurt’s internal monologue expressing thematic motifs, and the backstory of Kurt’s father’s suicide. I mention these non-plot devices to point out that if I hadn’t previously traced the plot beforehand, I would have naïvely assumed that the father’s story or Kurt’s flashback to his father’s suicide were all part of the main plot instead of devices that enhance the plot. In many stories, ancillary devices can echo the structure of the main plot, which, in this story, deepen the meaning of the protagonist’s desire to get his job done. “The Point” portrays character desire and resistance mostly through dialogue and action, but the next story shows how another writer captures the main plot in internal monologue.

In “Under the Surface” by Slovene writer Mojca Kumerdej, the narrator is a woman who desires to be alone with her lover and have him all to herself. When she sees an attractive woman flirting with him, she gets pregnant in hopes to keep him forever. She gives birth to a daughter, but the new daughter seems to steal her lover’s attention. The little girl interrupts their Sunday mornings in bed, and on the narrator’s birthday, they celebrate as a whole family – not romantically and privately. One day on vacation, the narrator goes to up to the house while her lover and daughter remain by the shore. She watches her lover napping in the sun while the daughter gets dragged out into the ocean. She lets her daughter drown, drinks brandy, and falls asleep on the bed. Her friend wakes her up and tells her the news. The narrator reflects that she may have let her daughter die, but the narrator now has her lover all to herself.

The story is 3,000 words and is written as an interior monologue mixed in with dramatic monologue. A retrospective narrator reveals to the reader her secret that she withholds from her lover, but Kumerdej uses the second person “you” to direct the monologue at the narrator’s lover. This story covers the span of more than eight years (pre-baby years, five years with child, and three years after the child’s death). Kumerdej also uses a conventional circular structure to the story: the beginning of the story is also the end of the story that takes place three years after the narrator’s daughter drowned. The rest of the story is told chronologically and focuses on the narrator’s relationship with her lover and daughter.

The plot, the pattern of desire and resistance, is created from the narrator’s desire to be alone with her lover and the apparent threats that the narrator sees as a danger to her relationship. I say “apparent” threats because we only see the story from the narrator’s perspective (from an outsider’s perspective, she needs professional help to separate her delusions from reality). The pattern of conflict plays out in the following steps: 1) the narrator has a baby to gain her lover’s attention, but the little girl cries and steals the spotlight, 2) the narrator wants to sleep in with her lover on Sunday mornings, but the little girl physically gets in the bed, 3) the narrator wants to be alone with her lover on her birthday, but the lover wants the whole family together, and 4) the narrator wants to be alone with her lover in the future so she lets her daughter drown.

The set-up of the conflict starts when the narrator sees another woman flirting with her lover by “calculatedly moving around [him] … and “licking her lower lip” (7). The narrator never thought to have a baby – what two people in a relationship who love each other usually do – until now. The real action starts in paragraph two when the narrator announces she “had to take action” and get pregnant (7).

But when the baby comes, the narrator notices that the child doesn’t solidify their love but instead comes between them. The narrator observes that the lover first kisses and plays with their child, leaving the narrator to “wait [her] turn” (8). Even at night when the narrator is woken up by the daughter’s “piercing screams,” the lover rarely gets up to spend time with the narrator. The narrator becomes so angry that she slaps the child, which in turn angers the lover. She considers her baby competition, which drives the couple further apart thus propelling the plot forward.

In the next plot step, the narrator describes again how the daughter intrudes on her alone time with her lover. On Sundays, which were usually reserved for sleeping in, the little girl would run into the room and jump on the bed to hug her father. The narrator thinks: “Our time was becoming more and more the little one’s time, she was the one giving rhythm to our mornings and nights. You didn’t want us, as I suggested once, to lock ourselves in” (10). When the narrator tries to regain alone time with her lover, the lover responds, “That isn’t good … she needs us.” This prompts the narrator to ask, “But what about us?” The narrator feels reproached by him and looks “towards the door in fear … wishing not to hear the tiny footsteps coming towards our bedroom” (10).

In a third plot step, on the occasion of the narrator’s birthday, the narrator suggests to her lover that she wants to celebrate her birthday differently, just “the two of us together” (11). She suggests that they drop the girl off with his parents, but the lover opposes the suggestion “both times.” The narrator assumes he prefers to be with the “whole family,” and he acts as if his parents would be insulted if they didn’t invite them. Each time the narrator tries to be alone with her lover, she feels her lover straying further away.

The last five pages of the nine page story focuses on how the narrator finally gets her lover all to herself: by letting her daughter drown in the ocean and allowing the lover to take the blame. She watches her daughter chase after an inflatable dolphin and get dragged out to sea. The narrator knows she could alert her lover by screaming, but at that moment she “saw a chance for things to be the way they used to be. Me and you, the two of us alone …” (13). The plot ends when the daughter’s body is “sucked into the depths” (13). In this moment, the narrator achieves her goal at the expense of a dead daughter and a guilty conscience that she suppresses by taking showers.

Kumerdej-foto Joze SuhadolnikMojca Kumerdej

When I met Mojca Kumerdej in Slovenia this past summer, she mentioned that her readers – regardless of what country they’re from – want to argue about the mother’s actions in “Under the Surface.” Kumerdej said many readers attack the narrator because they think the narrator’s actions are highly unbelievable – “no mother would ever do that!” they claim. I would argue that the narrator’s obsessive desire partially explains her psychotic actions (or rather lack of action to save her daughter). A closer look at the plot, however, shows a carefully crafted sequence of events that makes the narrator’s actions seem justified in her own mind.

Unlike “The Point,” Kumerdej’s chosen point-of-view brings us into the mind of the narrator, in which we are only presented with her perspective. Plot is not entirely made up of scene as it is in “The Point” where D’Ambrosio uses dialogue and actions to express desire and resistance. Instead the narrator in “Under the Surface,” in a stream-of-consciousness-like confession, proves how far she will go to be alone with her lover. At first glance, the story appears to be a long rambling about the narrator’s undying devotion to her lover (she says she loves him five different times in the span of the story). But the story still includes a clear desire and resistance pattern; the narrator articulates immediate obstacles that become clear plot steps creating tension in the story. The baby arrives, cries and steals attention, grows up and physically and emotionally gets in the way of the narrator’s relationship with her lover. In these plot steps, Kumderdej builds to a crisis action that forces the narrator to commit the unthinkable. The only “logical” action in the narrator’s mind is to permanently get rid of her daughter – as soon as the narrator has the opportunity, she lets her child drown in order to have her lover all to herself.

The narrator’s internal monologue at critical points in the story adds even more tension to the main plot. Kumerdej creates a pattern in which every other paragraph leading to the climax ends with the narrator’s intense desire for her lover and the sacrifices she made:

When for the first time you put your hand on my stomach I knew I had you, and that’s when I decided to have you forever, wholly and completely, without intermediary, disturbing elements that could jeopardize our love (second paragraph).

But no woman in the world is capable of loving you as much as I do, no woman in this world would be capable of doing what I did … (fourth paragraph).

And precisely that is what I did for you, and once in my life took away what meant the most to me … (sixth paragraph).

These lines are not directly part of the main plot structure, but the narrator’s repeated thoughts emphasize her fixated desire. The narrator justifies killing her daughter as a form of her devotion and love. To clarify, the opposing forces aren’t the narrator and her daughter but rather the narrator’s desire to be with her lover (A) versus the narrator’s apparent threats in her mind preventing her from having her lover all to herself (B), which repeat in four distinct steps.

In the climactic scene of “The Point,” the plot steps lead up to a moment that forces Kurt to take action: he ultimately chooses to rebuff Mrs. Gurney’s romantic offering and takes her home. In “Under the Surface,” the plot steps lead to a climax in which the narrator chooses not to take action and leaves her daughter to drown: “I didn’t do anything – and by doing so did everything” (7). Similarly in both of these climactic scenes, each character wrestles internally, even if briefly; both D’Ambrosio and Kumerdej include the characters’ internal thoughts that allow us to see how the pressure forces them to change (or not). Kumerdej writes: “At that moment, I saw a chance for things the way they used to be. Me and you, the two of us alone … I was watching the scene, and it seems to me I didn’t feel anything. No pain, no kind of fear, I was only watching what I thought as things happened” (13). Interestingly the narrator doesn’t “feel anything” in this moment but expresses her emotional transformation after the plot ends.

After the narrator has her lover to herself, Kumerdej includes five short paragraphs that reveal the narrator’s change of emotions. The narrator still desires her lover, but she’s also haunted by the image of her drowning daughter dragging her “into the depths.” The narrator feels isolated because her lover will never know the truth, and she wakes up in “terrifying pain” from guilt-ridden nightmares (14-15). Both D’Ambrosio and Kumerdej could have ended their stories when the plot ended, but they chose to include backstory and internal monologue that illustrate how their characters transform after the crisis action occurs. In one last story, we see again how the sequence of plot events builds to a climax that significantly changes the characters, especially in regards to their emotional and mental state.

Gabriel García Márquez’s “The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother” is a novella about fourteen-year-old Eréndira who survives her grandmother’s cruelty and, with the help of a young man, becomes free. The story begins in the grandmother’s ornate mansion where Eréndira exhaustedly completes her endless chores. When she falls asleep, the wind knocks over a candlestick she left burning and destroys the property and the grandmother’s possessions. The grandmother decides to prostitute the girl so she can pay off an impossible million-peso debt she has incurred by causing the fire. During her servitude, after countless encounters with men and paying customers, Eréndira meets a young man Ulises who falls in love with her. Among other adventures, a group of missionaries kidnaps Eréndira to protect her, but the grandmother pays an Indian boy to marry Eréndira and free her from the mission. Having fallen in love, Ulises disappears from the story for a while but inevitably returns to run away with Eréndira, but they don’t get far; the grandmother captures Eréndira and chains her to a bed to prevent a future escape. Eréndira entertains the thought of killing her grandmother with boiling hot water but has no confidence in her ability to kill her oppressor. Ulisses returns, and she begs him to murder her grandmother. After two failed attempts with rat poison and a bomb, Ulises slaughters the grandmother with a knife, and the old woman finally dies. Instead of turning to Ulises, Eréndira runs in the direction of the wind and is never heard from again.

The novella is approximately 16,200 words and is divided into seven sections with line breaks. Márquez uses a third-person omniscient narrator with the exception of a two-page transition to a first-person narrator who tells his personal account of seeing Eréndira and her grandmother with his own eyes. Unlike “The Point” and “Under the Surface,” we get to see, from a limited distance, the perspective of multiple characters. Márquez tells the story chronologically (Eréndira is 14 at the beginning and 20 by the end), and his use of the techniques of magic realism creates a fable-like quality. The story also carries the “wind of misfortune” motif that governs Eréndira’s actions– first it blows at Eréndira and causes the fire, then the wind brings along the missionaries and also incites her to run away, and, in the end, she runs into the wind and beyond it.

The main plot takes up only a small portion of the entire text and concentrates on Ulises’s and the grandmother’s conflict over Eréndira. Ulises falls in love with Eréndira, but the grandmother prevents him from being with her. The following plot steps occur between Ulises (A) and the grandmother (B): 1) Ulises wants to sleep with Eréndira, but the grandmother denies him entry into the tent so he sneaks in and sleeps with the girl anyway, 2) Ulises falls in love and convinces Eréndira to run away, but the grandmother captures Eréndira and dog-chains her to a bed, and 3) Eréndira magically summons Ulises, and he attempts to rescue her by killing off the grandmother (third time’s the charm). With the grandmother dead, however, Ulises doesn’t end up with Eréndira since she runs into the wind and disappears forever.

Marquez portraitGabriel García Márquez

Márquez delays the main plot, the pattern of desire and resistance, until the third section of the story. The grandmother’s unrelenting abuse of Eréndira seems like a one-sided conflict until Ulises, the son of a Dutch farmer and Indian woman, poses a threat to the grandmother’s scheming. In the first plot step, Ulises lines up with the other soldiers to sleep with Eréndira, but the grandmother prevents him from seeing her: “No, son … you couldn’t go in for all the gold in the world. You bring bad luck” (298). He later sneaks into the tent and manages to sleep with Eréndira while the grandmother talks in her sleep. Eréndira loves Ulises “so much and so truthfully” – their connection solidifies the continuation of the main conflict. The two lovers are separated after this point since the missionaries kidnap Eréndira in order to protect her.

In the second plot step, Ulises’s mother notices he’s “lovesick,” and he sets off to trek across the desert and reunite with Eréndira. When Ulises finds Eréndira sleeping with her eyes open, he tries to convince her to run away by tempting her with his father’s homegrown diamonds, a pickup truck, and a pistol. He tells her, “We can take a trip around the world.” Eréndira says, “I can’t leave without [my] grandmother’s permission,” but that night her instinct for freedom leads her to flee with him (316). Their romance is short-lived; the grandmother initiates a car chase to get her granddaughter back. The grandmother then dog-chains Eréndira to the bed slat so the girl can no longer escape (325).

Ulises doesn’t reappear until six pages later when Eréndira calls out Ulises’s name “with all the strength of her inner voice.” This time, Ulises crosses the desert and instinctively (or magically) knows where to find her. While the grandmother sleeps, Ulises kisses Eréndira in the dark and they both hold “a hidden happiness that was more than ever like love” (329). After sobbing in her pillow, Eréndira asks him to kill her grandmother, and he says for her he’d “be capable of anything.” This reunion sets Ulises up to encounter the grandmother for a final time.

In the last major plot step, Ulises and the grandmother meet face to face, and he attempts to kill her on three separate occasions. First, Ulises lies to the grandmother and says he’s come to apologize on her birthday. The grandmother concedes and devours his cake that’s secretly baked with a pound of rat poison. Instead of dying, the old whale sings until midnight and “went to bed happy” (332). Next, Ulises tries to blow up the grandmother with a homemade bomb, and the woman was left with her wig singed and her nightshirt in tatters “but more alive than ever” (334). In Ulises’s last attempt, he grabs a knife and stabs the grandmother’s chest, her side, and a third time for good measure, but she doesn’t go quickly and yells, “Son of a bitch … I discovered too late that you have the face of a traitor angel.” Covered in the grandmother’s green blood from head to toe, Ulises manages to cut open her belly, avoids her lifeless arms, and gives “the vast fallen body a final thrust” (336). The plot ends when the grandmother finally dies, but Ulises doesn’t end up with his love since Eréndira runs into the wind never to be heard from again.

As I mentioned earlier, Glover states that plot is a repeating desire-resistance pattern between two poles A and B. Readers may at first confuse the grandmother’s abuse and sexual exploitation of her granddaughter as the main plot. It’s not. Márquez begins “Innocent Eréndira” with a lengthy dramatic set-up that isn’t part of the main plot structure: a meek, soft-boned girl cannot escape her grandmother’s horrible exploitation. In the narrative set-up, Márquez keeps our interest by pushing the limits of the grandmother’s brutality: she negotiates Eréndira’s virginity for 220 pesos, she orchestrates a bazaar – complete with musicians, a photographer, and a circus tent – to attract hundreds of solicitors, and not until Eréndira shrieks like a frightened animal and thinks she’s dying does the grandmother give her a break. Eréndira doesn’t fight back and consequently doesn’t pose a formidable resistance to her grandmother. Márquez can only sustain readers’ interest for so long (before they ask, “will anything else happen?”) and introduces Ulises in the third section as the real resistance to the grandmother.

Once Márquez establishes the two opposing forces in conflict, he increases the pressure and varies the conflict in an interesting way (he also interrupts the plot steps to reinforce the grandmother’s malevolent behavior and the granddaughter’s helplessness to escape). Notice that in the first two plot steps, Ulises tiptoes and sneaks behind the grandmother’s back in order to physically interact with Eréndira. In these scenes, Ulises doesn’t face any real confrontation with the grandmother other than their first brief encounter, but the old woman and her command over Eréndira still pose a threat. Márquez intensifies the pressure when Ulises comes into direct physical contact with the grandmother; the boy quickly fabricates a story in order to save himself and carry out the grandmother’s murder. This confrontation forces Ulises to take greater risks: he poisons her, fails, blows her up and fails again. Ulises’s actions follow Glover’s definition of plot when the character “first acts on one impulse and then the other, goes forward, retreats … realizes that he prefers disorderly love to antiseptic order and changes his behavior.” Only when Ulises notices Eréndira’s “fixed expression of absolute disdain, as if he [doesn’t] exist,” does he finally carry out the murder. In this climactic moment, Ulises has the choice to either kill the grandmother in order to win Eréndira’s love or he can retreat – he, of course, chooses “disorderly love” over “antiseptic order” and kills for love.

Just like “The Point” and “Under the Surface,” the plot ends with the crisis action, and the author includes the transformation of characters in the aftermath of the climax. In a final scene, Márquez describes Eréndira watching with “criminal impassivity” the final fight between Ulises and the grandmother. In fact, the girl embodies “criminal impassivity” throughout the entire story. Not until after the grandmother dies does Eréndira suddenly “acquire the maturity of a [20-year-old]” and escapes into the wind where “no voice in this world could stop her.” Eréndira’s bold action is the exact opposite of the once cowering, servile girl who couldn’t live on her own freewill. Ulises, on the other hand, suffers greatly after he kills the grandmother. The crisis action leaves him “lying face down … weeping from solitude and fear” since he has just lost the love of his life and is “drained from having killed a woman without anybody’s help” (337). Márquez deliberately arranges the plot steps to finally reveal the emotional and dramatic reversal and recognition that the characters experience.

Márquez’s novella reads like a fairytale because of his use of magic realism (not to mention the similar overtones to the Cinderella story-line: note the use of threes – three plot steps, three murder attempts, very much like a fairytale). In particular, Márquez utilizes magic realism to bring characters back together “again and again and again” in order to continue the main plot. For instance, when Ulises falls in love, every glass object he touches turns blue; Ulises then runs to find Eréndira and tempts her with his father’s magical oranges that contain “genuine diamonds.” Ulises also reunites with Eréndira for a third time when she summons him by calling out his name; in his plantation house, he hears her voice “so clearly” that he knows exactly where to find her. In a last example, Márquez uses magical realism to prolong, rather humorously, the conflict between Ulises and the grandmother. Instead of the grandmother dying after Ulises’s first (or second) murder attempt thereby ending the plot, the old woman lives on to croon her songs and babble in her sleep. Ulises even knifes her open and gets splattered with her green blood, but she’s not yet dead. Although Márquez seems to randomly pepper magical realism throughout the story, he strategically uses the technique to reunite characters and advance the plot. These moments defy our expectations and incite the very suspense and curiosities that plot should stimulate. Márquez’s story exemplifies how imaginative qualities, engaging characters, the combination of horror and humor, and a narrative set-up can coexist with the main plot structure so long as it sustains the reader’s interest.

The example stories I analyze may follow the same form or pattern, but the writers construct the plot in three distinct ways. In “The Point,” the plot is straightforward – Kurt and Mrs. Gurney battle it out until Kurt overcomes her resistance. The unreliable narrator in “Under the Surface” muddles the plot steps in her internal monologue, but she still articulates her desire and competition. In “Innocent Eréndira,” the plot is delayed for nearly a third of the story and yet still manages to mold into the same structure in the end. Plot, however, is not the same mechanical formula applied to every story – plot is a dynamic form that we identify as a pattern of desire and resistance between two opposing forces, but infinitely varied by each writer.

These stories were also originally written in different languages (English, Slovene, and Spanish, respectively), which suggests that in any culture (and time period), plot translates to the same pattern. Why do stories follow this particular pattern of desire and resistance? If plot is to “induce curiosity and suspense” in the reader, writers must invent new ways for characters to pursue their desires, charge through increasing resistance, and come out of a crisis action significantly transformed. No matter what the native language or nationality is of a reader, he or she will inherently invest in characters who chase after their desires, fail, get up and try again. We root for characters who, in our minds, allow us to imagine what it is like to step into their skin and travel to “incredible destinations.”

— Nicole Chu

Works Cited

Ambrosio, Charles. “The Point.” The Point and Other Stories. Boston: Little, Brown, 1995. Print.

Bradbury, Ray. Zen in the Art of Writing: Essays on Creativity. Santa Barbara: Joshua Odell Editions, 1994.

Cuddon, J. A., and Claire Preston. A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. 4th ed. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1998. Print.

García Márquez, Gabriel. “The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother.” Collected Stories. New York: Harper & Row, 1984. Print.

Glover, Douglas H.. Attack of the Copula Spiders and Other Essays on Writing. Emeryville, Ont.: Biblioasis, 2012. Print.

Kumerdej, Mojca, and Laura Turk. “Under the Surface.” Short Stories Collection:

Fragma. Berkeley, Calif: North Atlantic Books, 2008. 7-15. Print.

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Nicole Chu is about to receive her MFA in Fiction from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is originally from California and currently lives in New York City, where she teaches English Language Arts at a public school in the Upper West Side.

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Sep 182012
 

Here is another text in a series of posts on how to read like a writer. This time it’s a work of fiction, Elizabeth Tallent’s very short story “No One’s A Mystery.” You should read the annotations in conjunction with my essay on short story structure in Attack of the Copula Spiders, also Gwen Mullins’ essay on plot structure published here on Numéro Cinq. For more on the contemporary use of  classical rhetorical devices see my essay on Mark Anthony Jarman in Attack of the Copula Spiders. Repetition and parallel construction are dealt with helpfully in Viktor Shklovsky’s essay “Plot Construction and Style” in his book Theory of Prose.

This is the second annotated text I’ve published here. I am including them in the NC collection we call The Numéro Cinq Book of Literary Craft & Technique.

Annoyingly enough, I find that this pdf doesn’t “play” on all pdf viewers. It was written on an elegant pdf viewer called PDF-XChange Viewer which is free and can be downloaded here: http://pdf-xchange-viewer.en.softonic.com/ If you have trouble seeing the comments, and have the patience, please download and install the viewer.

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Tallent – No One’s A Mystery w comments

Jun 142011
 
Casper Martin & friend.

Casper Martin & friend.

Here are two witty and hilarious short stories by Casper Martin, a student of mine at Vermont College of Fine Arts this semester. It’s a rare student who delights me this much, makes me chuckle and admire, but Casper has an outrageous sense of humour and a slightly pomo aesthetic that puts a premium on reversal and surprise and jokes that make you think. Both these stories were written from an exercise I sometimes give students. If you want to try to look it up, the exercise along with an essay on the short story (“Short Story Structure: Notes and an Exercise”) can be found in my book Attack of the Copula Spiders and Other Essays on Writing (Biblioasis, 2012). It will also be reprinted in a book of my essays coming out next year. In any case, these two stories, brief and stripped down, are elegant in their simplicity and concept. Both stories turn a genre on its head. The kid gunslinger (practicing his chops on the town’s ONLY tree) and the encounter with the Angel of Death. The Angel of Death story is particularly intriguing because it manages to combine a tale about death with a story about sex, seduction, comedy and the spirit of life. I’ve never seen such a positive, lively and unsentimental death bed scene. This is something else.

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Gunslinger

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Ambitious, young Mathew Singleton lusted to be a gun fighter—Kid Matty—but he had never killed a man.  He saw that as an obstacle to his success, an obstacle he had to overcome as quickly as possible, while he was still young and his reflexes were still sharp as needles.

He rolled a forty-five-caliber cartridge between his thumb and forefinger, thinking he wanted to be the one to deal out those round-nosed lead bullets in a time without safety or protection.  The only defense was to shoot faster and hit your target.

Mat didn’t worry about getting killed.  He thought everything would take care of itself if that happened.  When he thought of the possibilities, he understood that he couldn’t kill a drunk or a storekeeper.  He had to kill a gunfighter.  He didn’t want to be known as an assassin of ordinary people.

Young Mat walked into the Still Water Saloon and surveyed the crowd.  His eyes fell upon Davey McBride, a gunfighter so famous he could be found in his own dime novels.  Mat’s heart jumped inside him.  McBride sat at a poker game with his back to the wall.  Young Mat walked over and began staring at McBride.  Mat wondered if this would be the moment of his death.  McBride said, “Take a seat.  This game needs new blood.”

Mat resisted saying he didn’t have the money.  Money hadn’t seemed important until this instant.  He said, “I want to kill you.”  And he almost fell over in fear of what he had said.

McBride looked him over, measuring.  He said, “You get right to the point, don’t you, kid?”  When Mat didn’t answer he said, “Why don’t we play poker instead?  There’s less tears in poker than gun play.”

Mat thought he had gotten around playing poker, but there it was right in his face again.  He still didn’t want to admit he had no money.  Mat almost closed his eyes, but he knew he had to keep his eyes on McBride.  He thought this would be the moment of his death.  He said, “I mean it.  I want to kill you.”

McBride studied the kid.  He said, “Ever body wants to kill me.  Don’t worry about it, kid.  It’s OK as long as you don’t act on that desire.  Come on.  Take a seat.  Play some poker.  You might get to like me.”

Mat thought of drawing and shooting, but now he kind of liked McBride.  McBride was shuffling the cards.  He thought he could kill him right then.  With McBride’s hands above the table and away from his gun Mat knew McBride would be slow on the draw, but Mat wanted to win a fair fight.  Mat decided he couldn’t get out of being broke.  He said, “I don’t have enough money to play poker with you.”

McBride said, “Well then, you should get a job, earn some money and come back and play poker with me.”

Mat heard laughter behind him.  He held his hands out to his sides like he was going to draw his gun and fire.  He said, “Are you making fun of me?”

McBride said, “I don’t make fun of people.  I have enough people who want to kill me.  I’m just giving advice on how to get money so we can play cards.”

Mat was back to not knowing what to say.  He said, “I want to kill you.”  And he walked out between the swinging saloon doors.

Two days later Mat was back at the Still Water.  He sat down at the poker table with McBride.  McBride said, “You took my advice.  I can see it in your eyes.  You got a job, you earned some money and now you want to give it to me.  Very good.  That’s much better than wanting to kill me.”

Mat said, “I took money from the offering plate in church.  If you have fast hands, you can put a little in with one hand and take a lot out with the other and nobody notices a thing.”

McBride said, “I better watch you, kid.  You must have really fast hands.  I don’t like that in people who want to kill me.”  McBride paused.  When Mat didn’t answer, he said, “How much did you get from the church?”

Mat didn’t want to say that he made up the story and still didn’t have money to play poker.  He said, “I don’t think I want to give you the money I stole from church.  I think I better hang onto it and put it back in the offering plate on Sunday.”

McBride smiled at him.  He said, “I think I like you.  You’re an upstanding citizen.  You probably don’t want to kill me.”

Mat didn’t hesitate.  He said, “I want to kill you.”

McBride said, “What you got for a gun?”

Mat said, “A Colt 45 1873 Peacemaker.”

McBride said, “You want to kill me with a Peacemaker?  That just doesn’t sound right.”

Mat said, “Forty grains of black powder moves a 255-grain round-nosed lead bullet right along.  I been practicing on the old elm tree just outside of town.  You should see the holes in it.”

McBride said, “So that’s you who’s killing our tree.  It’s not an elm.  There isn’t an elm in this whole state.  It’s a cottonwood.  Maybe if you kill it, you’ll get a taste for killing, but a tree’s not a man.”  McBride paused.  Mat said nothing.  McBride went on, “I have no passion left in me.  I don’t hardly want to draw a gun, but I will.  Don’t make me do it boy.”

Mat said, “I seen your book, The Merchant Of Death.  I know all your tricks, old man.”

McBride laughed.  He said, “Learn to read.  That book’s not about me.”

Mat said, “Yeah, well I know all the tricks in that book.  That’s all I need for you.”

McBride laughed again.  He said, “That book’s about Whiplash O’Keefe.”  McBride paused and then said, “I killed him.  Are we going to play cards or not?”

Mat walked out of the Still Water through the swinging doors.

The next day, as Mat shot the cottonwood tree, he began to wonder whether killing McBride might be a bad plan.  Mat put a bullet into what looked like a squirrel hole and a dove flopped out dead.  He saw its blood where it fell on the ground.  The sight shocked him.  He wondered how it would feel to kill a man.  He could move his gun hand quickly and his aim was sure, but he wondered about aiming at a man instead of a tree.  He saw McBride’s face in his mind and he nipped a small branch from the cottonwood, catching it precisely where it met the trunk, just where he imagined hitting it.

Mat liked to shoot things, but he didn’t know if he loved it.  He never sighted down the barrel, always shooting from the hip.  He wondered whether that was what he was doing with McBride, shooting from the hip.  Maybe he should take his time and study the situation before going any further, but shooting from the hip seemed to work against the cottonwood.  He sighted down the barrel at a small branch and hit nothing.  He had no idea where the bullet went.

The next day, Mat was back at the Still Water and McBride was sitting at the same poker table.  Mat said, “Do you ever move?  This is the only place I’ve ever seen you.”

McBride said, “I been known to move pretty quick.”

Mat couldn’t see McBride’s hands.  His heart sped up.  He said, “Put your hands where I can see them.”

McBride said, “Why should I?”  When Mat just stood there with his hands out to his sides like he might draw, McBride said, “Don’t be afraid.  I don’t want to kill you.”

Mat said, “Yeah, well, I want to kill you.”

McBride looked like he was getting angry.  He said, “What’d I ever do to you?”

Mat said, “It’s nothing personal.  I just want your job and killing you is the only way I know to get it.”

Clearly angry now, McBride said, “Are you stupid?  Killing a man is as personal as it gets.  You’re taking everything he ever had and everything he’s ever going to have away from him.”

Mat said, “It’s just business.”

McBride said, “What business you in?  It doesn’t pay very well.  You have to steal from the offering plate in church to get money to play poker.  My job’s sitting here playing poker.  How you going to do my job with no money?”

Mat was getting angry.  He thought of pulling his gun right then, but he couldn’t see McBride’s hands.  He suddenly realized that McBride wanted him to pull his gun.  McBride wanted to kill him right then.  Mat said, “So long.”  And he turned to walk out.

McBride called after him, “Don’t go away angry.  I’ll buy you a whisky.”

Mat turned around.  He said, “I never could understand why men drink whisky on a hot day to quench their thirst.”

McBride said, “Thirst’s got nothing to do with it.  Have one.  You’ll see.”

But Mat wasn’t listening.  The desire to live pulled him through the swinging doors.

Mat was back at the cottonwood shooting it again.  Someone in town yelled at him.  “God dammit, stop killing this town’s only tree.”

Mat shouted back, “Fuck you sod buster.”  Then he said quietly, “Or storekeeper, fuck you too.”

Mat understood for the first time that it was the only tree in the whole town.  It wasn’t right in the town, but he couldn’t think of another tree in the area and he was killing it just so he’d be able to kill McBride.  He wondered if he would be able to kill McBride.  He put his Colt 1873 Peacemaker in its holster and then drew and fired as fast as he could.  It felt very fast and he hit the squirrel hole the dove had been in.  He could see splinters come out when the bullet hit.  He did it time after time.  Each time seemed faster than the last and he hit everything he aimed at.  It felt smooth and effortless.  He knew he could do it all day, but then when he went to reload the Peacemaker, he only had two bullets left and no money to buy more.

Mat had to wonder what he was doing.  Why did he want to kill MacBride?  Did he want to be the one sitting at the poker table talking to kids who wanted to kill him?  He only had a vague idea how to play poker.

And did he want to be in a town that only had one tree?  He was ready to pack it in.

As Matt walked back into town, he saw McBride in the street.  He said, “Glad to see you’re not stuck to that poker table.”

McBride said, “You still want to kill me, kid?  Now’s the time.  I heard you say you want to kill me one time too many.”

Mat began to take in the situation.  He was in the middle of the street.  McBride was in the middle to the street.  They were about twenty yards apart, facing each other.  McBride had his hands out at his sides, ready to draw.  Mat had only two bullets in his gun.  He couldn’t help but worry he might need three shots to kill McBride.  He said, “Wait a minute.”

McBride said, “You turning yellow after saying you want to kill me so many times?”

Mat was getting angry.  After the way he had been shooting at the cottonwood, he thought he could probably beat McBride, but he knew many men, including Whiplash O’Keefe, had thought that.  He tried to remember The Merchant of Death.  Maybe it contained a secret that would save him, but his mind emptied.  He said, “Can’t we talk about this?”

McBride said, “I want to kill you, you yellow dog.  And it’s personal.  You understand that now?”

Mat could see the round-nosed lead bullets in McBride’s gun belt.  He wonder whether he feel it when one hit him.  Mat said, “I don’t want to kill you any more.”

McBride said, “Too late.  I want to kill you.  Draw or turn around and walk out of town with nothing but the shirt on your back.”

Mat didn’t know why, but he said, “OK.”  And before he knew it, he saw McBride’s hand going for his gun.  It looked slow, but Mat knew it was fast and without thinking he felt himself going for his gun.

Mat expected to see his bullet hit McBride the way he had seen his bullets hit the cottonwood, but he saw dust kick up in front of McBride and then he saw blue sky.  He watched a dove fly over.

Mat didn’t know what had happened.  Nothing hurt, but he was lying on his back and couldn’t sit up and he had to cough a little.  Then he saw McBride standing above him.  McBride said, “I got you through the lung.  I’m losing my touch.  I was aiming at your heart.”

Mat said, “Why’d you draw on me?  I wasn’t ready.”

McBride said, “The one who draws first wins.  Remember that, kid.”

Mat didn’t say anything.  He thought about shooting McBride.  Mat wanted to put a bullet through McBride’s Adam’s Apple.  He still had one bullet, but he didn’t know where his gun had gone.  McBride said, “What’s your name?  I should know who I kill.”

Mat said, “Call me Kid Matty.

§

The Angel of Death

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Old Gustavo Kintenilla lay in his deathbed in Holy Family Hospital.  He thought, Jesus, I wish I could get laid one more time.  Maybe if I take Viagra and grab the nurse.  But wait a minute — I don’t have any Viagra and the nurse is stronger than I am.  She lifts me up to bathe me.  That’ll never work.

She bathes me, so she’s seen my naked body and it had no effect on her.  Christ Almighty, the body that used to drive women crazy had no effect.  She could have been doing the laundry.  That’s how exciting she found me.  I might as well be dead.  She sees me as dead, just waiting to be carried off.

Maybe if I could get a boner, if she saw my manhood in its glory, maybe that would change the context from bath to sexual encounter.  He began to fondle his penis, hoping to make something happen, but he got no response.  It felt like something soft and warm that had nothing to do with him.  He thought, Jesus, I wish I had just one Viagra pill.  But then he thought again and wished for two or three, but he began to worry that he would never see even one.

 ♣

At midnight that night, a beautiful apparition appeared in the room with him.  He said, “Are you bringing me my Viagra.  I knew my prayer would be answered.”

She said, “I heard no prayer.  I am the angel of death.  I am here to take you.”

He said, “The grim reaper?  Here for me?”

Hovering above the bed, she said, “You don’t rate the grim reaper.  You’re an ordinary man.  You get an ordinary angel.  Me.”

Gustavo felt some dissatisfaction on the angel’s part.  He said, “Do you love your work?”

She burst into laughter that sounded bitter and said, “I won’t have to do it forever.”

Gustavo worked the bed to get himself into a sitting position.  He felt a touch better.  He said, “How long have you been doing this?”

The angel looked puzzled.  She said, “I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t doing it.  I walk the endless corridors of dead, but that doesn’t matter.  I have to take you now.”

Gustavo thought he heard tears in her voice.  He said, “What’s the rush?  Why not take a little time?  Make your job enjoyable.”

When she didn’t answer him, he said, “You could fuck me and then take me.  You might like it; increase your job satisfaction.”

She hesitated and then said, “Mr. Kintenilla!  We have standards.  I can’t do that.”

He was sitting up, almost leaning forward toward the angel.  He said, “You had to think about it.  I saw you considering it.  Call me Goose.  All my friends call me Goose.”

The angel of death was touching herself in a provocative way.  She said, “You’re not my friend, Mr. Kintenilla.”

He smiled at her.  He said, “No wonder you’re unhappy.  You have no friends.”  He paused.  “You could fuck me if you wanted to.  I know you want to.  I see you touching yourself.  Wouldn’t you like a man to touch you?”

Still touching herself, the angel said, “Who wants to fuck an old man on his death bed?”

He said, “You could restore me and fuck me as the man I used to be.  I was a handsome man.  I know how to pleasure a woman.”  He felt his groin coming to life.  He said, “Look here.” And he pointed to a bulge in the sheets.  He said, “Just talking to you is bringing me back.  I haven’t had a boner in years without Viagra.”

Breathing hard, she said, “I have to go now.  I’ll be back for you, Goose.”

 ♣

The next night at midnight the angel was back.  She looked lovelier than Gustavo remembered, heavenly.  He said, “You look so beautiful.  I could die happily in your arms.”

She said, “You mean in my pussy, don’t you?”

He said, “I think I’m in love.”

She said, “You don’t know what love is.”

He said, “What do you love?”  She looked down and didn’t answer, so he said, “I could rub your shoulders.  They do that for me.  I know how they do it to me.  I could do it to you.”

She hesitated again.  Then said, “No touching allowed.”

He said, “You’re the hesitant angel.  You know what you want.  Why not take it?  The touch of a man’s hands won’t hurt you.”  And he felt himself growing stronger, more in control as she turned her back to him.  He kneaded her shoulders with fingers that hadn’t felt so strong in years.

The angel said, “Oh.  Ooh.  Ooooh.” And pulled away from him.

He pulled her back to him.  He said, “Just a little more.  This is good for me too.  Don’t deny me this.”  He pushed more deeply into her shoulders.  He said, “Too deep?  Does it hurt?”

She said, “I feel no pain.”  And she leaned into him.

He cupped her breast.  He could feel no bra under her robe.  He slipped his hand beneath her robe and caressed the warm roundness of her breast.  His arms felt firm and strong.  He played with her nipple between his thumb and forefinger.

She pulled away and said, “Stop that!  Mr. Kintenilla, I told you, no touching.  Now I have to take you.  Your time is up.”

He said, “Call me Goose.”

She said, “Brace yourself.  This always comes as a shock.”

He moved to embrace her.  She backed up.  He said, “Don’t take me now.  I know you want me.  I felt the passion in you.  Let me make you feel good.”

She said, “Damn you, Goose.”  And she was gone.

 ♣

Goose thought, I am dead already.  This is heaven.  Or is it hell, with a cock-teasing, beautiful angel who let’s me fool around, but will never go all the way?  Lordy, I want her pussy so bad I could cry.  I would love just one more fuck before I die.  But instantly he knew that was a lie.  As he felt his blood moving inside his body for the first time in years, he knew he wanted more than one fuck.  He wanted to go on fucking forever.  But then he thought he might be a delusional old man playing out his last fantasies in his mind, that he might be dreaming all of this.  Then he thought, if it’s a dream, please let me fuck her in my dream.  At least, give me that.

The next night at midnight, she was back.  He said, “Is midnight my time?  Half past is just as good, don’t you think?”

She said, “You’re overdue.  I’m behind schedule.”

He said, “Heaven can wait.”

She looked him in the eyes.  She said, “How do you know you’re going there?”

He felt stronger than ever.  He jumped up and out of the bed as though he were a youth.  He stood behind her with his arms around her, a hand on each breast.  He said, “Hell can wait forever.  Let’s run away together.  Love will provide.”

She scoffed.  “What do you know of love?  You just want to fuck me.”

He said, “You want it too.  You’re restoring me so you can enjoy it.”  He got one hand under the front of her robe and began massaging her pudendum.

She said, “Oh.  Ooh.  Ooooh.”  And she tried to pull away from him, but he pulled her back and pressed his penis up against her buttocks.  He got one finger into her.  He nuzzled her ear lobe and then bit it gently.

He said, “Are you ready for this?”

She jerked away from him, much stronger than he thought.  He knew he could never control her.  She, “I can’t do this.  I am the angel of death.  Damn you, Goose.”  And she was gone.

 ♣

Goose cursed himself for asking.  Why didn’t he just do it?  He could feel her desire, her willing it to happen, but he had to say something and bring her rational mind into it.  How stupid could he be?

He dreamt of her that night.  He said to her, “Your pussy is exquisite.”

She said, “What did you expect?  I’m an angel.”

Then she turned ugly and became death.  He wanted to look away, but he didn’t.  He knew his death was coming.  There was no hiding from it.

Then she became beautiful again and he was a young man pursuing her, wondering if he would ever get her.  He thought he would.  Getting a finger in was a good sign, but then he thought it might just scare her away.  She hadn’t left him on the best of terms, but she did call him Goose.  He felt warm and full of hope.  Then he slept without dreams.

 ♣

The next night at eleven twenty five she was back.  She said, “Your time is midnight.  You’re going tonight.  We have half an hour.”

He said, “I love the word we.  I think that’s thirty-five minutes we have.  Maybe we can do it twice.”

She said, “Gather ye rosebuds, Goose.”

And he did.

The next morning the day nurse who had come to know Gustavo Kintenilla saw his empty bed.  She looked at the framed picture of him as a young man his children had brought in and she said to the night nurse who was leaving, “Goose was a handsome man.”

The night nurse looked at it and said, “He was.  He must have broken some hearts.”

The day nurse said, “Did he go peacefully?”

The night nurse made a face.  She said, “No.  I checked on him just before midnight and he was writhing around the bed.  I couldn’t restrain him.  Who knew he was so strong.  And then at midnight he was gone.  Just like that.”

The day nurse said, “I hope he wasn’t in pain.”

—Casper Martin

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Retired from software development at Bell Labs, Casper Martin lives in Andover, Massachusetts, with his wife, two dogs and four cats. A binge writer who hesitates to talk about the muse, he tries to understand what it is that moves him or leaves him stagnant as he fails to write on a regular schedule. After he heard the poets read at VCFA, he thought he might be able to fake what they were doing so he embarked on a three-semester jaunt through poetry where he discovered his voice tended to be invective. He now suspects faking it is no easier than producing the genuine article, and hopes to demonstrate the truth of that assertion by producing a real poem some day. Probably the kindest thing that can be said of his writing career (which began in 1973 in a creative writing course at Indiana University) is that he has great stamina. He hopes to graduate from VCFA in January after 7 (yes 7!) semesters.

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Jan 122011
 

Gwen Mullins and her son Ben, Montpelier, January 2011

This is Gwen Mullins’ graduate lecture, delivered at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Gwen does a  fine job of laying out the theory and craft and then doing close textual analysis to show how the theory of plot works in practice. Readers are always having a difficult time parsing plot and separating it from ancillary material and devices, but Gwen goes a step beyond simply analyzing the plot by showing how some of the ancillary devices work in conjunction with plot. Since it’s a lecture, an oral presentation, Gwen actually planned asides (aside from the asides she spoke extemporaneously which were hilarious) and the asides appear herein in italics.

—dg

 

I never planned or desired to deliver a lecture on that most mundane of topics: plot. The very thought of talking about plot smacked of the self-evident, obvious, even amateurish. The word itself is dull. Plot. What could I possibly say about plot that you do not already know? To be honest, I did not actually know what plot was, or even, sometimes, how to see it skillfully threaded through a story I was reading, much less one I was writing. I have read novels and stories and loved them even without ever seeing the plot. Rather than checking my vision, I assumed the plot was missing, of secondary importance, or perhaps even unnecessary. I have heard literary fiction defined as “character-driven” and popular or mainstream fiction defined as “plot-driven.” In the end, I found those descriptions to be unhelpful ways to approach a story. I must begin my graduate school lecture the same way I began my first speech in junior high school, that is, with a definition. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms defines plot as:

the pattern of events and situation in a narrative or dramatic work, as selected and arranged both to emphasize relationships – usually of cause and effect {Here, let me note: Cause and Effect in plot is not like Cause and Effect in, say, physics or certain branches of philosophy. In plot, Cause and Effect may simply mean telling or showing your reader why the character is doing what she is doing … that is, what is the motivation (cause) that is causing the character to act or behave (effect) in such a way — so let me begin again:} Plot is the pattern of events and situation in a narrative or dramatic work, as selected and arranged both to emphasize relationships – usually of cause and effect between incidents and to elicit a particular kind of interest in the reader or audience, such as surprise or suspense …

Aristotle saw plot as more than just the arrangement of incidents: he assigned the plot the most important function in a drama, as a governing principle of development and coherence to which other elements (including character) must be subordinated. He insisted that a plot should have a beginning, middle, and an end, and that its events should form a coherent whole… (Baldick 195-6)

Aristotle

Some important phrases to note in the definition are “selected and arranged” and “a governing principle in which other elements must be subordinated.” In other words, character development is plot. Characters are defined by what they do, and that process of defining, of actions and reactions, grows out of plot. Yes, the writer may not know precisely what will happen and exactly how the characters are going to react until she writes it out, but clearly articulating what a character does, says, or thinks during a series of events pushes the fiction forward so that it gathers momentum and tension. Until I actually read the definition of plot, I thought character development meant rolling around inside the characters’ heads and writing what they saw or remembered. That part is important, sure, but development happens when the characters react to events or ideas or other characters and think and change as a result. In other words, “Shit happens, Susie and Jack handle it, and then it happens again and again until the shit is dealt with or not.” Along the way the reader’s understanding of Susie and Jack has probably changed.

Aristotle has been dead for a while now, so we might assume that plot and the ancient Greek ideas of drama are obsolete. They are not. In his essay, “How to Write a Short Story: Notes on Structure and an Exercise,” in his book, Attack of the Copula Spiders and Other Essays on Writing,  Douglas Glover defines a story as

a narrative involving a conflict between two poles (A vs. B). This conflict needs to develop through a series of actions in which A and B get together again and again and again.

He provides an alternative definition when he writes:

By a story I mean a narrative that extends through a set of articulations, events or event sequences, in which the central conflict is embodied once, and again, and again (three is the critical number here – looking back at the structure of folk tales) such that in these successive revisitings we are drawn deeper into the soul or moral structure of the story.

Aristotle talks about the “beginning, middle, and end;” Glover says “again and again and again.” It seems a successful story involves, at a minimum, a conflict hat trick.

I routinely observe student writers (including myself) demonstrate a reluctance to be too “obvious” about plot. I have news: We are not being too obvious. I have seen my own tendency to focus on characters, descriptions, or background information so much that I can overlook the point of telling a story — things happen. The development of plot is the story. In dissecting a couple of stories by writers I admire, I’ve finally begun to “see” the plot and how the “selected and arranged” development of a story includes characters in conflict rising to climax. I’m going to talk about a couple of short stories. I will provide a summary of each story and then walk through the way they each demonstrate plot point by point.

Tobias Wolff’s story “Bible,” published in The Atlantic and included in the Best American Short Stories 2008, is about a high school English teacher, Maureen, who leaves her friends at a bar to go home alone on a cold Friday night. As the slightly drunk Maureen walks to her car, she searches the faces of the crowd outside a dance club looking for her twenty-something-year-old daughter, Grace, who Maureen hasn’t seen for two years since Grace left college and moved in with one of Maureen’s former colleagues. When Maureen gets to her car, a man comes up behind her and takes her keys. He forces her into the driver’s seat and gets in the car with her. She doesn’t know if he’s going to rob her, rape her, or kill her, but she drives the car. The man directs Maureen to take a turn on a deserted, unplowed road. When she stops the car, the man begins to talk and Maureen figures out that he is the father of Hassan, one of her students whom she is failing for cheating. The man wants his son to become a doctor; Maureen informs the man that Hassan will never be a doctor and she is going to report Hassan for cheating. Maureen asks the man if he is planning to kill her, mocking him by placing his hands on her neck. Maureen realizes the man will not hurt her but she remains angry at being kidnapped even while she begins to feel sorry for the man. She drives back to the parking lot. The man apologizes. Maureen asks how he was going to make her keep her promise (if she had even agreed to make such a promise) not to turn his son in for cheating. The man pulls out a pink Bible he has picked up at Goodwill. She lets the man go and leafs through the Bible while wondering what happened to the long-lost girl who owned it and then the story ends. The story is about 3,000 words and is told from the point of view of third-person narrator, Maureen.

Tobias Wolff

In “Bible” most of the plot occurs in the car, where the two main characters are trapped together by the author. On the second page of this twelve-page story, nine paragraphs into the story text, shit really starts to happen. Maureen gets to her car in the dark lot with no parking attendant, drops her keys, curses, and a man comes up behind her saying, “Don’t curse!” (Wolff 314) The ensuing drama is played out in a series of conflicts between what Maureen wants (A) and what the man wants (B). She wants to escape, stay alive, be safe; he wants her to save his son. Remember Glover’s definition, “a narrative involving a conflict between two poles (A vs. B). This conflict needs to develop through a series of actions in which A and B get together again and again and again.”

Our Story Begins, by Tobias Wolff, with a version of “Bible” included (entitled “The White Bible” in this collection)

Maureen is approached in the parking lot by a man who demands her keys. The first thing she does is close her eyes. She hands over the keys but resists the order to get in the car. The man half-pushes, half-lifts her into the car. Maureen wants to escape but fails, and this is first in the series of conflicts between A and B which is resolved with Maureen’s failure to escape.

The man orders her to drive, and Maureen thinks about the self-defense classes she took when her husband left and she was alone with her teenage daughter. She cannot make herself fight, and Maureen feels the failure of this inaction in her bones, but this knowledge calms her and she drives. This is the second iteration of conflict; she doesn’t want to drive, but she does anyway. She slows down or speeds up when ordered to do so by the man. When she realizes how cold she is, she turns the heat up. She tells the man she has seventy dollars in her purse and that she can get more. He says, “This is not about money. Drive. Please.” (315) She keeps driving along Frontage Road, remembering picking strawberries with her mother and making out with her boyfriend by the pier. The man tells her to turn into a deserted, unplowed road. Again she obeys, even though she does not know if the man is planning to kill or rape her since it does not appear that he is planning to rob her. The plot in the car is played out through Marlene’s step-by-step growing awareness of who the man is and what he wants from her.

Maureen and the man are still in car as it idles on the deserted road. In a move that becomes a small parallel conflict, Maureen tries to turn the heat down but the man stops her and turns the heat up. She asks what he wants, and he says, “This is not about sex.” (317) His phrasing echoes his prior statement, “This is not about money.” Maureen thinks about running for the road and decides not to. The man tells her he was a doctor in his home country and that she has destroyed his family. Maureen says she does not know who he is or what he’s talking about. He refers to her scornfully as the “the great lady teacher.” (318) And finally Maureen realizes that the man is the father of her student Hassan. In a flashback, we learn Maureen had caught Hassan cheating on an exam after repeating warnings. The man continues to accuse her of hypocrisy, of lying and cheating but showing no mercy on others since she has threatened to turn Hassan in to the principal of the school.

Now that Maureen has placed her kidnapper, her choices change from obeying him to defying him. The plot and character {See how you cannot even separate them out? Is it character development when Maureen decides to turn Hassan in for cheating? Or is it background for the plot? The particular memories Maureen experiences on the drive must have been selected and arranged to meet the demands of the plot – to support, clarify, and help not just the reader but also Maureen learn what she will do next. The choices she makes in reaction to the kidnapping are forms of character development where the character must be “subordinated” to the plot. All of these character choices and reactions taken together constitute plot} okay, so the plot and character grows from Maureen’s new knowledge. Her desire and actions change as result of this knowledge. We know Maureen will reach a tipping point with what she will allow because she has told us during all the driving around that will be how she react. She had acknowledged, “She hated calling people on their offenses … all the rituals of grievance and reproach were distasteful to her, and had always held her back up to a point. Beyond that point she did not spare the lash. But she was always slow to get there.” (Wolff 319) Maureen remembers how she accepted the gambling of her husband, the recklessness of daughter, Hassan’s casual cheating, and then no longer accepted any of these things in turn. She divorces her husband, alienates her daughter, and chooses to turn Hassan in for cheating. Maureen’s interaction with Hassan’s father illustrates the way she behaves when being pushed around or taken for granted. In the story Maureen actually acts the way she always has when confronted with conflict, but it is played out in the car with Hassan’s father as a detailed microcosm of all that has happened before – as live conflict, as plot.

Maureen and Hassan’s father are still in the car, their conflict escalating, clarifying, but still remaining unresolved. Hassan’s father says he will not allow it – “it” being, presumably, the ruin of his son’s academic career by being accused of cheating. He talks of the woman’s place (in the home) and how she should have helped Hassan, not just warned him. He quotes what appears to be scripture and Maureen gets fed up, and the mini-conflict, the one about whether to turn the heat off or on, becomes the turning point in the story. At a deeper level, Hassan’s father wants his son to be successful and unmarred by a black mark on his academic record. At a more immediate level, he wants to stay warm and have the heat left on. The next mini-scene with the heater pares down the essence of the surface conflict.

“I’m turning the heat off,” she said.

“No. Leave it warm.”

But she turned it off anyway, and he made no move to stop her. He looked wary, watching her from his place against the door; he looked cornered, as if she had seized him and forced him to this lonely place. (Wolff 320)

In the next paragraph, the deeper conflict is brought out, and because of the mini-scene with the heater the stage is set for Hassan’s father’s larger conflict to end in a similar fashion. This is Maureen speaking: “‘Okay, doctor,’ she said. ‘You’ve got your parent-teacher conference. What do you want?’” Hassan’s father replies, “You will not report Hassan to Mr. Crespi.” Hassan and Maureen argue about whether or not she will report Hassan to Father Crespi, the principal. Hassan’s father restates that Hassan will be a doctor (remember the father was a doctor in his own country). Maureen states in clear, definitive words that Hassan will never be a doctor. She stares at the man and holds eye contact with him. The scene is the final forward action sequence, the climax of the story. Maureen asks if he had planned to kill her and he remains silent. She questions him – did he have a knife, a gun? Then, in the climactic moment, she places his hands, which he has been rubbing together in the cold car, on her neck. She asks if he planned to strangle her. He did not plan to strangle her and is anxious to remove his hands from her neck.

Remember the dictionary definition of plot? It should have a beginning, middle, and end. The beginning occurs in the parking lot with Hassan’s father, and the middle occurs in the car as the A vs. B conflict is played out: she wants to get away (she fails), she wants to escape and to figure out what will happen to her (she stays but figures out who her kidnapper is), and then she gets fed up and is strong against Hassan’s father (she succeeds). Hassan’s father had brought a pink bible he picked up at a thrift store for Maureen to swear on when he thought he could convince her not to tell Father Crespi about Hassan’s cheating. The plot, that conflict between Maureen and Hassan’s father, is bookended by the opening of the story where Maureen is thinking about her own lost daughter. The story closes as Hassan’s father leaves in the dark while Maureen looks at the bible and the inscription and wonders where that girl, the one who owned the bible but also, of course, her lost daughter, has gone.

The lost daughter theme frames the story and ties in with the father and “lost” son story so that the scenes of conflict and discovery in the car are more than a struggle between a teacher and a deluded parent. These side plots (of Maureen and her lost daughter, of Hassan and his father) function not as part of the main plot but rather as resonating devices that give the bones of the plot extra meat and meaning. Without the main plot line that occurs in the car, the parent/child information would have nothing on which to hang. The scenes in the car could stand alone without the information from the ancillary plots. The side plots give weight and resonance to the plot but not structure or forward movement. Perhaps I should mention that I find in my own writing that the spark that begins the story may not end up as essential to the main plot, but rather only a bolstering device or background theme. Realizing that the character must be subordinated to the plot and, when necessary, editing away the fat of background information so that I can see the bones of the plot more clearly, help me ensure I am writing a story instead of a character sketch. I am still working on plot every time I write.

With the Aristotle and Glover explanations in mind, I re-read a story by Ken Smith, my first writing teacher. Smith’s stories have appeared in a number of anthologies, including the The Best of Crazyhorse edited by David Jauss. Tim O’Brien once said of Ken Smith:

Ken Smith’s stories are simply wonderful. Without tricks or gimmickry, Smith shows us the world of real things – trees and rivers and animals and human beings caught in crisis. The writing is clear, direct, modest, and always dynamic. What I liked best about these stories is the old-fashioned, or out-of-fashion emphasis on plot. Things happen. Event causes event, and the reader is pulled along by the question: “What next?” For me, at least, this is what story-telling should be. (Decoys, back cover)

This is a gorgeous accolade. I want things to happen in my stories. I did not fall in love with stories because of their beautiful, lyrical sentences; I fell in love with stories because something happened in them that made something happen in me. Don’t get me wrong, I love me some beautiful, lyrical sentences, but if I had to choose what to read next: beautifully drawn sentences or character-rich plot, I’d go with plot almost every time. Of course, I would never make it as a poet.

Ken Smith, 2003

In Ken Smith’s story, “Meat,” originally published in The Atlantic, {Incidentally, I had written a first draft of this lecture before I realized the both of the stories I’d chosen had a number of similarities and were both originally published in The Atlantic. I have since acquired a subscription to The Atlantic. C. Michael Curtis has been (and I believe still is) the fiction editor there for the past 30 years} a widowed old rancher named John Edward Walker sits at his table in the morning listening to gunshots some distance away in the hills. He is sick to his stomach and he knows that no one has any business shooting upcountry but Walker is too old, sick, and tired to go check it out. He remembers finding one of his yearlings butchered along the side of the road a few days previous and the police officer had remarked that it was because of the strikes at the copper mines. Walker has lived on the ranch for over seventy years. In the text of the opening paragraphs, he remembers an incident involving his brothers, his father, and his grandfather who once caught two rustlers stealing a dozen head of cattle. The Walkers had let the rustlers go but had taken back their cattle as well as the rustlers’ horses. This memory is all part of the preamble. Incidentally, this particular technique – that of writing backstory, especially a story within a story, before kicking off into present action — is one that must be used with full awareness and a measure of caution so that the story does not get sidetracked by background information that does not advance the present action of the story or support the plot. Smith makes it work for this particular story since the memory is interesting, relevant (it’s about cattle thieves and the protagonist), and actually tells the reader how the larger story will likely play out without taking any tension away from the main plot. This technique is similar to the one employed by Wolff in “Bible” when Maureen draws on memories of her past and her lost daughter.

The Best of Crazyhorse, edited by David Jauss

The actual plot of “Meat” begins on the sixth page of this fourteen page story. While Walker is sitting at his table with his coffee, two men pull up to the house. Walker goes out to greet them and ask if they had been the ones doing the shooting upcountry. The men, Arnold and Willy, join him at the kitchen table for coffee and Walker talks to them. He likes one of the men but is distrustful of the other. Walker learns that the men have been on strike and Arnold, the one Walker doesn’t like, says they came for meat. Walker goes to the bathroom, contemplates getting his gun, and when he returns the men are drinking whiskey. Arnold knocks Walker down then Walker passes out and wakes up tied to a chair. Walker works his way over to the door where he sees the men load up a fattened steer and drive it to the butchering shed. Walker imagines hungry people walking and driving up to his barn to collect the butchered meat. Walker struggles free, collects his .30-.30, and sights the pick-up where the two men have loaded his meat as the truck is driven up the hill. The truck begins to slide in the fresh snow and Walker hopes they make it. He does not shoot them. Later he sees they have left him enough more than enough beef from the butchered steer to last him through the winter. “Meat” is about 3,500 words and is told in third person from the point of view of John Edward Walker.

I mentioned that both stories originally being published in The Atlantic was one of several similarities I came to see as I fought my way through to seeing the plot lines of these stories. Another is that in each story the protagonist’s conflict comes from a source outside him or herself – a tangible, imminent threat to the physical well-being of the main character. In both stories the protagonist considers taking action (Maureen wants to run; Walker wants to get his gun), acquiesces, and then tries to figure out what the antagonist wants while simultaneously thinking how to defend him or herself. As soon as I understood the essence of plot and recognized that there can be a great deal of story material that is NOT plot, I realized I had picked two variations of the same story. I am not too surprised that I also ended up writing a couple of stories that played on these same themes while actively writing and revising this lecture.

In “Meat,” the plot seems to begin in the third paragraph. After two opening paragraphs that have Walker listening to the shooting upcountry, he decides not to investigate.

If I was any good anymore, he told himself, I’d get my rifle and go see about this. But he was cold, his guts churned and growled and threatened to grow beyond the boundaries of his skin and burst, like the stomach of a cow that had eaten dewy alfalfa. At that moment all he wanted to do was sit and wait for his coffee to cool. (Smith 38)

Rather than pitching forward with the tension introduced by something potentially dangerous going on outside, Smith writes a page of background information regarding illegal cattle slaughtering over the past weeks and then over three pages of a reflective-plot sub-story in which Walker remembers a time when he and his brothers, father, and grandfather captured cattle thieves but let them go free. By “reflective plot sub-story” I mean a fully articulated story that uses the main plot sequence (Walker handling cattle thieves) to tell a story that is made different primarily by virtue of it occurring in the past with different cattle thieves. Rather than come across as redundant, it serves as a mirror and a set up for the main plot. We also saw this in “Bible” where Maureen told us exactly how she would react to being pushed around and then handled the main conflict with Hassan’s father precisely the way she told she would. In “Meat,” the set up, background, and reflective-plot take about four pages of a fourteen story and runs a risk of derailing the tension, but in this case it deepens and enhances, and dare we say it, foreshadows, the plot, as does the mother/lost daughter references in “Bible.”

Angels and Others, by Ken Smith (includes “Meat”)

Regardless, the plot actually begins in earnest in Walker’s kitchen when the two men come to take his cattle. Walker wants to protect himself and his cattle; the two men want to steal meat. Like “Bible,” the story takes off when the protagonist finds himself in a compromised situation trying to figure out what the exterior, threatening force is seeking. After Walker has invited the men into his home for coffee, he talks to them and comes to like one of them, Willy. He realizes the other man, Arnold, is one “who would steal and kill his cattle. If he wasn’t the man who had done it already, he was capable of such things.” (45)

The three men continue to talk, and Arnold, the one Walker distrusts, even acknowledges that they came for meat. Walker brews another pot of coffee, then excuses himself to go to the bathroom. He passes his bedroom and sees his gun leaning in a corner. The first present-action plot point (second if you count the decision to stay inside and drink coffee rather than check out the gunfire upcountry), is revealed when Walker notes, “You could pick that up and go run them off, he told himself. But what would be the reason? You can’t just say, holding men at gunpoint, that they make you nervous and you want them to get.” (46) Walker does not wish to be rude or act strange since the men have not yet done anything to cause him harm, just as Maureen considers but chooses not to run away or act out when she is initially kidnapped.

As it turns out, the situation turns dark soon after Walker returns to the kitchen. The men are drinking whiskey with their coffee and Walker refuses to join them. They knock him down, knock him out, and tie him up. In the A versus B definition, Walker (A) wants to protect himself and his cattle, but the men (B) want meat. So far, Walker has failed to protect himself or it’s not looking good for his cattle.

When Walker begins to come to, he has a vision (at least I think it’s a vision) of hungry people coming by the hundreds for the meat from his cattle and how even if he tried to stop them he could not. Walker rests, then manages to untie himself. Once he has freed himself, he gets his gun and goes to the front porch to sight the men who have loaded the butchered meat into their truck. As Arnold and Willy drive up the steep hill away from Walker’s ranch, he watches the truck knowing he has plenty of time to get off several shots. It has begun to snow, and the truck begins sliding across the hill. One of the men gets out and jumps on the bumper to help the truck gain traction. Walker has the perfect opportunity to take a shot. “How easy, he thought, to kill these men. They had already forgotten about him.” (50) Although it’s too late to protect that particular steer, Walker can kill the men who hurt him and stole from him, maybe even prevent others from doing the same thing. Instead, he hopes they make it up the hill safely, as illustrated by the following passage:

The tires caught and the truck gave a sudden lurch, and the man on the back almost fell.

“Hold on,” he said to himself. “Goddamn it, just hold on.”

In a few seconds he heard the cousins whooping in triumph as the truck eased on up the hill. How easy, he thought, to let them go, to allow them to sit tonight with their grateful wives and children in a warm kitchen, the air dense with the smell of cooking beef. (50)

Walker lets the men go, and the truck makes it up the hill. When Walker tries to uncock the rifle, it goes off and shoots a hole in the porch rail. He realizes they have left him enough butchered beef to last him through winter and that he has been beaten and robbed and all he managed to do was shoot up his own place.

In “Meat,” the true beginning of the plot occurs in the kitchen with Walker, Arnold, and Willy. The middle occurs while Walker is alone in the kitchen and the men are butchering then stealing his steer. The A versus B conflict is played out like this: Walker wants the men to leave his kitchen (they leave, but only after knocking him out and tying him up), Walker wants to protect his steer and himself (he fails), and then the conflict goes interior and Walker has to decide to stop the men or let them go (he lets them go). The plot and the story and the character {remember how I talked about how character and plot could not be separated?} come to climax and reach their full potential at the point when Walker can choose to shoot the men or let them go. Rather than a sickly, mourning old man with more beef than he needs he becomes benevolent, or rather, he comes back to himself as a man with the power of wisdom and kindness. The plot, the conflict between Walker and the men, is mirrored in the reflective, pre-main-plot story of the Walker family dealing with cattle thieves. In that reflective-plot story, even though the Walkers take the thieves’ horses, young Walker is respectful when he hands a hat back to one of the men. The reflective-plot deepens the unveiling of Walker’s character so that the reader knows, even before Walker does in the text of the story, that he will not shoot the men.

It took me writing and re-writing this lecture to begin to see the plot in these and other stories. That conflict, that A versus B tension, was not, prior to this exploration, apparent to me in well-written stories. Rich, good stories have so many distractions – sub-plot, description, dialogue, reflective plots – that I struggle seeing the bones of the story for the other wonderful stuff that add to the story’s meaning and beauty. That struggle with identifying plot reflects itself in my own stories as meandering structure, meandering to the extent that I tend to shy away just when the story has the potential to become interesting, to become a story. Of course, now that I have put together a graduate school lecture on plot, of all things, it seems really simple. Plot – how can a writer overlook that? And then I try to write again, or I read a story and wonder how that writer managed to convey what she did, and A versus B doesn’t seem so simple anymore, so here I am, trying to explain it to you so that it makes sense to me.

—Gwen Mullins