Scribbled
Elemental
I mentioned earlier that in On Writing Short Stories, author Tom Bailey divides fiction into these familiar and basic elements:
character, plot, setting & time, metaphor, and voice
You could make a case for letting setting and time stand alone like the others, I suppose, but they seem rather fundamentally entwined, bonded since birth, the Castor and Pollux of fictional building blocks. Also, they’re somewhat minor-league compared to heavy hitters like character and plot, aren’t they? We have to let them slip past the velvet rope, sure, but they’re definitely B-listers.
Anyway.
In The New Rules of Lifting, authors Lou Schuler and Alwyn Cosgrove divide weight training into six basic elements or movements:
squat, deadlift, lunge, push, pull, and twist
Schuler and Cosgrove don’t claim to have invented this concept - the book credits Paul Chek - but they certainly recognize the value of reducing a daunting activity to its basics.
I rather like that approach in weight training, and in fiction writing - the reductive, stripped-down-ness of it all.
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Notes from the spiralbound
Whose story is it, anyway?
One less bell to answer
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I’m way overdue for dinner, but I’m going to launch a fervent defense for placing setting and time back on the A-list, even though you might not know all the works that have immediately come to mind:
“A Family Supper” by Kazuo Ishiguro takes place in the span of time from afternoon through the early evening, as a family has what well may be their last supper. If it weren’t set in Japan, if it weren’t in the family home, if it weren’t ending as the sun goes down, the other elements of the story would be as useful as an apple stem is to a starving man. It’s one of the most cleverly crafted stories I’ve ever read. If I were teaching creative writing, I’d assign students to dismantle that one and learn from it. (That and Mona Simpson’s “Lawns.”)
Kate Chopin’s “Story of an Hour.” Nuff said.
The present action of “Personal Testimony” by Lynna Williams takes place at a Bible camp during the time it takes to conduct the evening worship service. Significant, significant, significant. More particularly, the action takes place in a tent on the grounds, a tent that used to be a circus tent. What eventually becomes obvious is that this Bible camp is one big circus. It ends with father and daughter kneeling at the altar, although not explicitly in worship. The adept reader makes connections, however. I could go on with this one, but it’s partially meaningless if you don’t know the story. However, without the Bible camp, the tent, the altar, there is no story.
In Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, the house is literally a character.
An adept writer doesn’t just stick the protagonist in a Starbucks — unless perhaps the protagonist’s mother was gunned down while drinking coffee there.
Sometimes setting and time are less important than some other elements, but I always start with setting/time (yes, they’re Siamese twins), and narration when I begin a class discussion. Get that part straight and the other things fall into place.
That’s my heavy lifting for the evening. I’m hungry. Wonder where I could find some catfish?
A fervent defense indeed! And right off the cuff, too. Your students are lucky people. :-D
Are you not teaching creative writing, then? I thought you were, for some reason.
Nah, I teach lit, which is analysis and not the same thing. We look at how other people write (see above), but don’t try to do it ourselves.
Around here, we leave creative to the people with degrees in creative and/or relatively significantly published creatives, of which we actually have a few.