  Short Stories
This week: Edited by: Robert Waltz  
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Robert Waltz here, this week's guest editor! I'm usually found over in Comedy, but I'm just a versatile kind of guy!
Today, we're going to take a brief look at characterization - because in a short story, brief is all you get! |
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On the Virtue of Illogic
Most of us like to believe that we act in a reasonable, if not logical, manner when confronted with life's daily conflicts. I'm sure it's perfectly reasonable to give the driver who cut you off the Universal Gesture of Contempt; that your boss deserves a sneer as soon as she turns around; and that you know you should be eating salad yet stop by McDonald's for lunch anyway.
The thing is, if we all did what we knew we should do all the time, life would be pretty boring. I was discussing this with a friend of mine who occasionally writes; she insisted that her main character would, oh, I don't remember the exact situation she'd contrived, so let's say: never cheat on his wife. Now, most of us (especially wives) would agree that cheating on your wife is a bad thing, and men shouldn't do it (and vice-versa, of course). And certainly, stories have been written around a person's temptation, and refusal to yield to that temptation. To not cheat on your spouse is the reasonable, rational thing to do - and, ultimately, in a story, it's boring as hell. Want to grab readers? He cheats, and she gradually finds evidence of it, and there's a big blowup, and at the end - well, that's up to the writer. Divorce? Death? Reconciliation? Or how about the wife and the lover become friends and the guy spends the next year looking nervously over his shoulder?
To further illustrate this idea, this same friend - let's call her Nora - was in a situation recently that could have ended well, but didn't. A mutual acquaintance who, for the sake of this anecdote, shall be called Alice, was recently in a bad spot and Nora agreed to help Alice out.
Alice is not the world's best housekeeper. To be blunt, she's an utter slob. The reasonable, logical thing for Alice to do would be to clean up her house - if not for her, then for the sake of her young son. But she does not. If Alice were a fictional character, we already have a hook: she's messy. So, since Alice was very sick, Nora chose to go over to Alice's house and scrape the mess into trash bags. She spent the better part of a day over there, working hard but barely making a dent in the unbelievable mess. Before she began, she took off her nice, pricey shoes to put on old ones, not wanting to get the nice ones messy.
That was a perfectly rational action. But then Nora forgot that her shoes were on the trunk of Alice's car, and only recovered one of them when they discovered this five miles down the road. Nora had no time to retrace her path to find the shoe, and Alice agreed to look for it and hold it for her. Turns out Alice found the shoe; it had fallen off right there in her driveway.
Since then, occasionally Nora has tried to recover the shoe. Now, the logical thing for Alice to do would have been to, oh, I don't know, drop it by Nora's house, or at least arrange a time for Nora to come pick it up. Instead, Alice got caught up in her own problems - the illness, work problems, custody issues concerning her son, and other stuff - and did nothing about it despite calls from both me and Nora. (Alice is also remarkably self-absorbed.)
This all came to a head recently - about five months after the shoe fell off the car - when Nora came by Alice's work at the end of her shift and asked for her shoe. I still wouldn't be relating this if Alice had simply walked out to her car, dug around in the unholy mess and extracted the shoe. No, that would have been too logical. Instead, she accused Nora - who, you might recall, helped Alice out rather selflessly - of harassing her at work, causing a loud scene there in a retail outlet with customers and other employees looking on. Not logical. But if it were a story, I'd read it just to find out where it's going and just how unreasonable Alice could get.
The story doesn't have a resolution, though, not yet. It could end with Nora getting her shoe back somehow. Or it could end with Alice chucking the shoe out her window in a fit of spite, there to join the several million other single shoes I see by the side of the road. This one will stand out, though - it's reportedly a bright fluorescent pink. |
This week's picks don't have a common theme; they're all listed as "short stories," and selected pretty much at random. When reading them, think about how the authors use characterization - do the characters behave rationally, or do their quirks pull the story in odd directions?
Give your muse a boost with this contest - 1000 GP daily prize for the best short story (or poem):
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| How do you use characterization to move your story along? Do your characters do things you would never do yourself? Don't be logical - be outrageous! |
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Short Stories: November 21, 2007 Issue [#2073]
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