Short Story Dissection, Part 1

OK, so I’ve thoroughly dissected eleven short stories now, all winners of Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy and/or Locus awards over the last eight years.

The stories in question are:

Acronym IDs

To keep these eleven stories brief as I write through my thoughts here, I’ve given each one a basic acronym/ID:

Questions with Intent

As per two weeks ago, when I printed these out to study, I had very clear “questions with intent”. Again, they were…

Let’s answer these questions now.

Scene Lengths & Uses

The first one that I can knock off quickly is the scene length question. my hypothesis was completely wrong on it being 3-5 scenes assuming average scene sizes of approximately 1000 words. Short stories at even the <4000 word level had up to ten scenes. Let’s take a look at the numbers…

Both OHHH and TCM match my original hypothesis of scene length, but it’s clear you can be very flexible here. While I’m not sure 9NT counts, because it’s really a listcle of nine micro-stories, you could technically make the same argument for TDIS… except, not really? I mean, several of the final scenes are deals with the snake made quickly in the same timeframe. It’s only the first four deals or so that are huge time jumps. LRLS and WGE is more of the somewhat-timebound kind of story I’m interested in writing… stories that are under 5k. And everything above 5k in this list are timebound narratives. (They happen within days).

With that said, because of this analysis, I have a lot more potential tools to work with here. I like the listicle of items structure that Clark used for 9NT. You still get a strong impact with the final item/micro-story. I also like the early scene time jumps in TDIS. It’s one of my favorite story-tricks in literary fiction. I still get frisson when I think of the final scene in Lolita where Humbert the hebephile, for a brief moment, realizes the damage he’s done. Same goes for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows with the 20 year time jump.

Ultimately, scene sizes was the original exercise.. While they do average 500-1000… final scenes can be 1000-2000 even in a short story. And <500 word scenes can be the penultimate scene prior to the conflict or just short transitory/punctuation scenes. Or sequels I guess. They’re used for telling or reactions after a dramatized scene to make time jumps. There were two brief ones in HDMS where Aiko makes an appearance to remind the daughter of normalcy before she goes to her mom, and secondly to Seo-Yun’s party. (Which is a very clever way of contrasting before the next scene).

Condensed Structures & Plot Threads

So when I did a short story study earlier, I think I might’ve simplified it too much as:

I think the second and third point holds up for the most part. It’s the first that I question now. I think it’s more accurate to say that it’s one relationship (or mechanic) with multiple encounters/situations/variations.

But does a short story have only just enough time to reveal “one thing” (a hidden cost, a secret truth, an escalated cost)? I think so… but not the way I thought of it previously. I think it’s more of an EGP, the “emotional gut punch” moment… which I’m starting to grasp is one of a few KEY ELEMENTS that you need in order to build the core engine of a story.

Key Ingredients to Build Story Engine

Ever since I listened to Craig Mazin’s Scriptnotes episode 403 (notes here and here), I’ve been questioning everything I’ve previously learned about fiction. The frame and lenses I have on these days is: there is a difference between MAKING a story versus ANALYZING a story in retrospect. The Hero’s Journey analyzes a story retroactively and cannot teach you a damn thing about CREATING one. Ditto with Save the Cat’s 15 beats.

So I’ve been thinking deeply about what CORE ELEMENTS or KEY INGREDIENTS I need to build a story’s engine. What do you need? The obvious answers that are taught to us over and over again in any writing class are: character, plot, and setting. But I’m not sure that’s useful. It’s… too familiar, to the point of misunderstanding. What’s more – because I’m aiming for short stories first here… character is almost… overkill. I don’t need a long arc. I need to get them to make one decisive action. I feel like if I do too much work on them, I will be wasting time and/or procrastinating.

Anyway, I think I’ve identified three “key elements” here for short stories. They are MECH, PROG, and EGP. It’s similary to Sanderson’s Promise > Progress > Payoff, but the promise in this case is tied into the world’s setting. Since you can’t do too much character arc in a short story, you let the world/setting/premise of the story do the heavy lifting. PROG remains the same. You need to show progress for the character as they explore the world. It has to move the story forward either by releasing more clues, shortening the time, or any of the plot thread tools. Finally, the payoff is an “emotional gut punch”. While we don’t get a nice long arc for the character, the interaction between them and the world, plus dripping their backstory over the course of the short story, we can still do a EGP via several methods, like revealing a secret, having them realize the hidden cost of a deal they made, or making a sacrifice.

Let’s go into more detail for each.. The first of which is…

1. The Concept Is King (MECH Element)

In dissecting these award-winning short stories, it’s clear to me that CONCEPT IS KING. Each of these winners (minus one or two) have a very clear CONCEPT, or MECHANISM, and what I mean by that is, they have clear RULES in their WORLD BUILDING. These rules define what the characters can or cannot do, what limits them, what the costs are, and what they need to uphold. This forces the “setting”, which in this case is the world building, to INTERACT with the characters immediately. It becomes a character almost. This creates a triangle of two characters interacting, and the characters interacting with the setting.

To simplify all this, I’m simply calling this the MECH moving forward. Mechanism works for me, as I’m borrowing it from my copywriting world. It’s how the product/solution works. And in the fiction world, it’s the rules for which the magic, technology, ritual, culture, process/procedures, or power dynamics of the world works. This way, it’s not just for SFF stories, you can apply it to literary writing as well. Power dynamics always prefigure into literary stories. Cheever, Lahiri, Adichie, and Saunders are the ones I’ve studied the most. (Gotta read Munroe soon)… but point is… in their stories, they still have a MECH element. The underlying themes can be betrayal, immigration, colonialization, affairs, regret, maturity, whatever… but within the world of their short story, the characters have rules they have to follow, or if they break them, a cost to pay.

Back to SFF stories, let’s look at what’s in these eleven stories:

OK, so having a clear concept for the short story is number one. Number two is…

2. Countdown, Mystery and/or Relationship (PROG Element)

The second element is how the story progresses once you’ve defined the MECH rules in the first or second scene. First if you need to get the story moving fast, second if the first scene was pure hook, dramatization, and setting up the mysteries and teases. The PROG can be a ticking time bomb (TTB), or it can be a mystery (what’s happening and why) (MYS), or it can be a relationship that’s about to change (REL).

Pure relationship PROGs are interesting to me because they can be romance (lovers, friends, allies) or it can be antagonists (villain, rival, stranger, attacker).

In the former, it can also be parent/child relationsihps, teacher/apprentice, boss/employee, rivals, self/society, self/flaw. Maybe “romance” is not the correct terminology if I include the working and self relationships. But they are interesting in the sense that they have to be tied to a Mystery (MYS) and/or a Ticking Time Bomb (TTB) plot. I’ll talk more about emotional gut punches and payoffs in the next section… because I guess this isn’t 100% clear to me right now. Whereas, the latter, the antagonist PROGs are straight forward. If we’re being attacked, then you can evade, deceive, hide, gamble, and fight. If you’re being betrayed/exploited and don’t know it (or even if you do), you just get a series of worst and worst circumstances.

Maybe breaking them down via example will clarify things better. I mean, going back to what I wrote on plot threads above, “it’s one relationship (or mechanic) with multiple encounters/situations/variations”… that’s sorta what PROG is right?

OK, so that’s the second ingredient needed to build a story’s engine. The final one is…

3. Reveal, Payoff, or Twist (EGP Element)

So the MECH is the concept, and within that, is a promise. The PROG is progress, exactly as Brandon Sanderson teaches it: Promise>Progress>Payoff. Which means, this final element is the Payoff, and to ensure we have a strong emotional finish, we want it to be an emotional gut punch. Something that wrenches a feeling out of our readers. The MECH itself won’t do it. It’s always how the MECH interacts with the characters, and pushes them through the PROG until the story BREAKS the character so that we can get the pay off.

That’s important. The MECH’s job – once the disruption event (inciting incident) occurs, is to put us on the path of PROG and keep grinding down the relationship b/w the characters breaks. That’s the “anti-theme limit”.

The disruption event in the stories are…

OK, back to the EGPs though. In my original short story study, I found that there were a few recurring EGPs…

After dissecting these eleven award winners, I found a few more. And I’m thinking that EGPs are much more varied. Or not. Maybe there’s a few categories I haven’t figured out yet. Let’s type them out to see if I see it.

PMB (Powerful Magic Being)…

DWD - Deals with the Devil

REV - Releationship Reveal

As I review the above two lists of EGPs, there are a few recurring patterns. A lot of short stories seem to rely on a few similar MECHs:

I mean, these stories, albeit exemplarary… given these eleven short stories are all award winners… it’s still ultimately a very small sample size. And they’re all SFF.

If I look at some other stories I’ve studied in depth… do I see the same types of MECHs?

Hmm… maybe these aren’t useful for the <5000 exercise. All of Bacigalupi’s stories are first, novelettes. But secondly, that gives him a lot of room to be a more immersive world and we’re travelling through them. We get tons of interesting tech, world building, and weird interesting ideas. But it’s not one simple MECH that drives the story. That seems to be what’s in fashion.

Plot Thread Condensation

So it seems like we have three key elements: MECH, PROG and EGP. I feel like that’s a very strong foundation for writing stories. We have multiple structures we can use here too. I feel like plot thread length is the only question I haven’t fully answered here. From what I can see, whether you dramatize in the first scene then explain the MECH in the second… or frontload everything in the first… you want to start as late as possible so there’s a good rush to the moment of decision and EGP.

What I’m learning here is there’s very little room to establish “STASIS”. The MECH is the stasis really. And the moment the DWD is made, or the dynamic character is introduced to the PMB (almost right away), if not the second scene… You’re off on the PROG. The PROG is the B-World I guess, but we’re not going to a new setting. We’re just setting things in motion. The DISRUPTION starts the PROG train. There’s not really a MIDPOINT mirror moment really. But the MIDPOINT does have something important revealed to carry us into the ALB/LOWPOINT and then final CLIMAX.

MIDPOINT REVEALS:

And what we really want is to get to the FINAL SCENE. The scene where the MECH<>PROT relationship finally crashes the PROG train. There’s an ANTI-THEME LIMIT BREAK. (ALB). It usually occurs at the 70-75% mark where you need to start wrapping things up.

First 30 to even up to 50% is establishing all the stakes, rules, costs. Next 30-40% is the PROG. And the final 25% is the major conflict.

Hmm… Still not sure I have this nailed down. Giving this more thought.