Miniature Narrative

Miniature narrative is a paragraph or a page or two. It’s short form. It can be very fun for an emerging writer to create a scene like this.

Robert Frost described lyric poetry as melting ice on a hot stove. The ice melts, and that’s the poem. When that’s over, it’s over.

Telling a story as briefly as possible, that’s dramatic. The longer it gets, there are problems with pacing. If you don’t have time for character, you can work on incident.

Start with the shorter form immediately.

[Oates, 2019]

The Use of Force

The Use of Force is a story by William Carlos Williams, a poet and a doctor from New Jersey, from the days when doctors made house calls, visiting mostly poor people, many of which don’t speak English.

Coming home from work, he would go to his attic and write something that happened to him. By starting with something that really happened, he can revise and work on it to create something like this short story.

[Oates, 2019]

Informal Language

By using dialog that isn’t set off, it’s rapid and integrated, like something you dreamt or you’re remembering. It’s less formal. (It’s how Ali Smith works.) The language doesn’t call attention to itself.

[Oates, 2019]

Like a Sonnet

The miniature narrative form works like a sonnet, with a beginning and middle, but you start with a provisional start, so that by the end of the story you find something that you didn’t expect at the beginning.

Consider how Chopin moves in one of his preludes, meant to move delicately to a surprising conclusion.

It’s probably not going to have a violent end, but something that is quiet.

[Oates, 2019]

Monologue

Monologue is another short literary form, one person speaking, moving through emotions, typically three or more, in an arc or trajectory, taking us through an emotion with intensification. A monologue reveals the speaker to the reader. It takes us from a somber or funny, but grow into something intense like anger, then come back in at least a slightly different emotion than the beginning.

Theater has this everywhere. Some people think Hamlet was constructed as a sequence of soliloquies, and then the rest of the play was put together around it.

It is something that shows us enough about the character that we can find out if we want to write about them.

[Oates, 2019]

Lethal

With Lethal, a short story of Oates’, we start with desire, sexual desire. It elevates to a desire for rape, then blame, then a summation—he perceives himself as the victim.

Incantatory lines can heighten the drama in the monologue. So can using short and long sentences and other forms of rhythm.

A monologue can’t last very long, two to three minutes if performed or read out loud.

[Oates, 2019]

Write for Myself

Writing for myself develops fluency, as compared to writing for a professor.

JD Salinger’s short stories are funny, reminding us what it feels to be teenagers around pompous and hypocritical adults.

Practice by projecting imagination into another person. That unlocks the possibilities, and builds confidence in the writer.

[Oates, 2019]

Influences

Most writing has quite a few influences.

For one story, Oates used a story from Life out of Tucson, who was befriending teenage girls. Some of them figured out he was murdering people, and defended him. Oates wrote about the victim who chooses her death.

In “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?,” Connie got Oates’ sympathy, but it didn’t start that way. The story develops as the writer experiences it. It shows how much of Oates’ own experience drives the story, the layers that she’s experienced in herself.

The fairytale of Death and the Maiden is also part of this story. So, Oates’ life, the article in Life magazine, the fairytale all influenced this story.

[Oates, 2019]

Change Perspective

Something to do to become a better writer is to take a piece you’ve worked on and change the perspective. If it’s in the 3rd person, recast it as 1st person, speeding it up. Or, if it’s set in the past, bring it to the present tense. In a house, there is a front door, but you can approach it from the back window, seeing the scene differently, realizing there’s something more interesting to explore.

[Oates, 2019]

Stop Using Thinking Verbs

Stop using “thought” verbs, including: Thinks, Knows, Understands, Realizes, Believes, Wants, Remembers, Imagines, Desires, and similar verbs. Instead unpack these thoughts into action, smell, taste, sound, and feeling.

Don’t take short cuts, but give your reader a chance to experience the story themselves. Work like a lawyer, laying out your case piece by piece.

[Palahnuk, 2013]

Thesis Statements

Stop using thesis statements, like, “Brenda knew she’d never make the deadline.” Opening a paragraph with a thesis takes us out of the flow. At the very least, put it at the end, and remove the thought verb, so it works like narrative punctuation instead of cheating the reader out of the experience you’re giving them.

[Palahnuk, 2013]

Give Your Characters Company

Don’t leave your characters alone. That’s when they start thinking, worrying, and wondering. Give them action, bump them up against something or someone instead.

[Palahnuk, 2013]

Remove Is and Has

Instead of saying what a character is or has, bury that in action. Instead of having them remember or forget anything, let their actions show what’s going on. Instead of being a lazy writer, find a way to give the reader a ticket to the show.

[Palahnuk, 2013]

References:

Oates, J. C. (2019). MasterClass. Retrieved August 6, 2019, from https://www.masterclass.com/classes/joyce-carol-oates-teaches-the-art-of-the-short-story/chapters/principles-of-writing-short-fiction

Palahnuk, C. (n.d.). Nuts and Bolts: “Thought” Verbs. Retrieved October 2, 2019, from LitReactor website: https://litreactor.com/essays/chuck-palahniuk/nuts-and-bolts-“thought”-verbs