The Art & Craft of the Short Story by Rick DeMarinis

Author:Rick DeMarinis [DeMarinis Rick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504036856
Publisher: Open Road Distribution
Published: 2016-09-05T00:00:00+00:00

FORM AND CONTENT

To get an idea how form can not only determine how a story is told but become part of the story’s meaning, read Robert Coover’s “The Babysitter,” (included in his collection titled Pricksongs and Descants) a dazzling tour de force that mixes reality, fantasy, and wish-fulfilling daydreams in a mischievous montage that shifts point of view with reckless abandon. Time’s smooth continuum is lovingly segmented. Narrative is diced into packets of quanta. And yet the story has a recognizable progression, from the superficial order and good behavior of suburbia to the libidinal chaos locked in its heart. Coover puts a big arrhythmia in time’s plodding pulse while the story spins away in adrenalized nonlinearity. The story is related to cubism in art, where all dimensional perspectives are rendered in one plane.

Why write this way? Why wrench stories into shapes that are unrecognizable to the average law-abiding citizen? Robert Scholes, in his book of critical essays Fabulation and Metafiction, summarizes the argument: “The artist who wants to capture modern life … must care for form, because only appropriately new forms will be capable of representing modern life.” The realists of the late nineteenth century were influenced by Darwinism as well as unprecedented advances in physical science, advances that eclipsed myth and mystery. The modernists of the early twentieth century were influenced by Freudian psychology, Einsteinian physics, and all the great leaps in technology, such as radio, heavier-than-air flight, television, and the weapons of mass destruction. What worked in the literary arts of 1868 might not work so well in 1918.

Contemporary writers are similarly influenced by quantum physics, string theory, microbiology, genetic research, new theories of cognition, and psychopharmacology. Writers don’t work in a cultural vacuum. Their antennae are long and sensitive. What they are exposed to can’t help but find a direct channel into their fiction—not just as subject matter but in the very way fiction is structured. Jackson Pollock said an artist can’t, in the age of atomic bombs, paint the kind of picture that was painted during the Renaissance.

The form you choose puts each sentence you write to this test: Does this sentence add to or detract from the organizing principle of the story? Form makes you walk a well-defined path. Does this inhibit creativity? Not at all. T.S. Eliot once suggested in an essay that the strictures of form (paradoxically) liberate the imagination. The problems that form presents are purely technical. The part of the brain that seizes the opportunity to solve problems is also the part that interferes with creativity. It is the “censor,” the “critic,” that worries about every irrational impulse the imagination is subject to. But without these irrational impulses (also know as intuition, insight, and inspiration), there can be no creativity. Form distracts the censor with a technical problem while the irrational engines of creativity rev up. Recent studies of right-brain and left-brain function support this notion.

I am no literary critic and therefore won’t attempt to discuss the theoretical aspects of form.

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