The 39 Steps
I’m cleaning out my room this weekend. Over the past six years, I’ve managed to cram about three tons of papers/receipts/batwings/rubber brains/catalogs/maps/eyelashes/magazines/etc into a space about the size of a washing machine, and it’s about to explode: I can hear it creaking and shifting and groaning around me, all that massy mass, the weight of my past bearing in on me, too heavy now for the the delicate infrastructure of my present.
I’ve committed myself to shredding every piece of paper I absolutely don’t need, but that turns out to be very difficult: I have lots of copies of old stories hanging around, marked over and crossed out and crumpled up. I don’t need them anymore, I’ll never look at them again, and I have the originals on disk, backed up in several places, but still: it’s like flushing pictures of your children down the toilet.
While in the midst of this painful task, I came across a wonderful document that I picked up during one of my writing classes: The 39 Steps: A Primer on Short Story Writing. It’s a list of really useful tips on how to go about making short fiction, and manages to be irreverent, practical, and indispensable all at once. Some samples:
Step one in the great enterprise of a new and preferable you in the house of fiction is: Mean less. That is, don’t mean so much. Make up a story, screw around with it, paste junk on it, needle the characters, make them say queer stuff, go bad places, insert new people at inopportune moments, do some drive-bys. Make it up, please.
Remember: Many things have happened which, to the untrained eye, appear interesting.
At every turn, ask yourself if you’re being gullible, dopey, pretentious, cloying, adolescent, Neanderthal, routine, dull, smarty-pants, clever, arty, etc. You don’t want to be being these things.
Organize the story’s structure around the simplest available strategy. For example, if there’s no obliging reason that the story be told in flashbacks, don’t use flashbacks. Don’t use flashbacks simply because you get to a certain point and then think of something that requires telling in flashback if it is to be told at that point. Instead, return to the front of the story and add the material in its appropriate spot.
If you write a sentence that isn’t poignant, touching, funny, intriguing, inviting, etc., take it out before you finish the work. Don’t just leave it there. Don’t let anyone see it.
To repeat, there is no place for rubbish & slop in the highly modern world of today’s fiction. Every sentence must pay, must somehow thrill. Every one.
I’ve broken almost of all of these rules, and some of them I break on a regular basis. I find the last one, in particular, terrifying. Do readers really expect that of us? Every sentence? Who do we look like, Neal Stephenson?
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