How to Develop Page 4

  The following scene could be both plot arc set-up and inciting incident. She can reflect here on why she sets him up (her setting up not to be confused with the plot arc set-up).

  She has him ‘accidentally’ meet her ex- rich and handsome flame to see what happens. But the meeting leaves her present lover unmoved and she knows it isn’t just surface ‘coolness’. She can think of no better word than ‘coolness’ to explain her observation. She’s not even absolutely sure what she is seeing, but something is certainly missing in a way she never experienced before with a lover.

  Could he be seeing someone else? Could it be as simple as that? Could that explain the ‘coolness’? Or is this just the way he is? But what does that mean?

  She knows she cannot fully trust and love him unless she knows his heart better. She knows if she doesn’t have the answer soon, she’ll break up with him.

  She never gets the answer and she breaks up the relationship. He accepts it with good grace, no drama, no tears, wishes her well in her future plans and disappears.

  (Last scene)

  Months later, she meets him at a party. He has a new girlfriend. They greet each other naturally and he is happy and relaxed introducing his new girlfriend. Did he have another woman all this time? Is this her?

  Then the epiphany comes.

  While still with him and his girlfriend, she glances in a mirror and catches her own eye, momentarily freezing. The look she spots in her eye is unmistakeable. It is fear. Not panic, not discomfort, but fear. Once she sees this emotion looking back at her from the reflection, she is able to name it easily as part of the mix of feeling sweeping through her as raw emotion. She knows what has put it there: a flash of memories of her time spent together with him. These memories had just raised the emotion of nearly falling in love but not quite getting there. And that feeling of nearly falling in love, that dizzy feeling is mixed up with the feeling of fear which is a feeling she always experienced with love but had never quite recognized it as such until now. It is nothing like the nervous fear of a first date or the first time in bed with a new partner. It is the deep feeling that something powerful and life-changing, something that is pulling you right out of your comfort zone and taking away your self-control, is beginning to overwhelm you. This was how she had felt with two other men she had been with in a deep relationship.

  But in his eyes she sees no fear, not a hint of it; just a casual, relaxed look, the one he’d always had with her. He feels nothing in particular on seeing her again, she knows. Now she understands what had been missing in him all this time: the fear associated with love. The ‘coolness’ she had always felt in him was a lack of fear because he had never been anywhere near falling in love with her.

  Fear is an integral part of the potent emotion of loving, she understands clearly. If she had never glanced in that mirror she might never have made the connection in herself. Discovering it is like discovering a brand new dazzling colour.

  She wonders if this man has ever had any of this type of fear for any of his partners, and understands now that if he has not, neither has he ever had the ability to love any of them.

  A fair part of the story can deal with her trying to work out what’s missing in him. Tension and suspense will arise out of this. Is he seeing someone else? Or can we throw another possibility into the mix? This works from the inciting incident highlighted above right up until the last scene which is the meeting with him a few months later.

  Or we can take a slightly different structural approach and make just two scenes out of the story which will really help tighten it. In the first scene, she introduces him to the ex-boyfriend, and here she is reflecting on his ‘coolness’ and also deciding on whether to break up with him or not. This scene will work into rising levels of tension where she is getting more exasperated at her new boyfriend as he shows no signs of any jealousy toward her ex. Then the second scene will be the party one. The reader will only find out here she had dumped him.

  The story can certainly work on a humorous level or on only a serious level or even on both a serious and a humorous level. The light humour will work especially well in the ex-boyfriend scene and the serious tone in the last scene.

  ANOTHER IDEA

  Let’s also make this one a third person woman’s perspective.

  She attends a party with her fiancée. We can have a little bit of an introduction here about this woman and her partner.

  At the party, an outgoing and flamboyant man, a French perfumer (an expert on creating perfume compositions) maybe jokingly nicknaming himself le Nez (nose), boasts that his nose is so sensitive and skilful at detecting smells that he can smell people’s moods. As a result of this ability, he claims to be able to know their emotional state even if they are unaware of it themselves. Others at the party reckon he’s just good at reading body language.

  But some people want to call his bluff. So he accepts a test to prove himself.

  A woman asks him whether she’s in love with her boyfriend standing beside her. A small bet is made on the outcome, though no one really takes the perfumer seriously. He seems to be serious enough, but is he pretending and just having fun? Everyone else is having fun with this unusual parlour game. He smells her neck. Everyone laughs at this. He tells her she is in love with her boyfriend. She asks if he is in love with her. The answer is yes. This gets le Nez a round of applause.

  But how can you smell love? someone asks.

  He makes his pitch. Love always carries with it a slight smell of fear. I smell the fear mixed in with the emotion of love. Love is such a powerful emotion and so much is at stake with it! How can a lover not fear their love may all be in vain? And fear, even the very low level but continuous fear mixed in with love, has a definitive and easily caught smell to a sensitive nose like mine. It is the release of certain chemicals, you see, just like with perfumery. If I were to create a perfume true to the smell of love, I would need to include a small measure of the chemicals of fear. Just a touch, mind, but it would be noticeable by no one except by the very best experts. Sometimes, of course, this fear flares up and comes out as jealousy, anger or even worse, and then it is recognizable by everyone, even if some would not put the word fear to the root of the condition. Fear in love is natural, unconscious and often uncontrollable. Remember this! If you had no fear you wouldn’t survive long in this world; fear is part of our make-up. And if love didn’t involve fear, love would never flourish.

  Many seem impressed by his pitch.

  The woman he’s supposedly smelt fear off points to a couple close by and asks him about them. Is he in love with her? The perfumer smells the man’s neck, and starts to shake his head. But in a half moment, he notices the man’s engagement ring, the woman’s engagement ring and the woman’s pale face. His head morphs from a partial shake to a sharp nod and he smiles broadly. Ah, yes, definitely! This gets a round of applause.

  Here we jump into the woman’s mind. The whole story is seen and interpreted from her perspective so she noticed the perfumer was going to shake his head but changed his mind when he spied the rings and noticed her face. Now doubt has set into her mind. But the twist isn’t that she now thinks her fiancée doesn’t love her, but that she knows she feels none of this healthy fear within herself, and whether the perfumer can smell it or not doesn’t matter. The perfumer rang a bell for her. That’s why her face paled. She has always known something was missing in her feelings for him. So is this it? Does it mean she never loved him?

  Her boyfriend whispers in her ear, what a fake! This makes her jump. I don’t believe a word he says, he adds. She relaxes slightly; she’d thought he’d meant her.

  Be very careful in writing a story like this. Don’t try to make the perfumer more than an enigmatic and flamboyant character. The fact that the act is under the cover of a parlour game keeps the whole thing credible because it remains just that: a game. You can even ham the perfumer up a little with his dress code, mannerisms and a little technical perfumery language.
Anyway, it wouldn’t be of any importance whether the perfumer’s skill is genuine or not. What matters is that he has kicked the plot into gear and forced the woman to have her epiphany. But if you pushed hard to make his skill appear really genuine, you would destroy the credibility of the story because many readers simply wouldn’t believe such a thing possible.

  Once again, the saying has done the groundwork for an unusual story plan with some psychological depth to it. This sort of tale can be told easily in a few thousand words. The plot is simple. The inciting incident is the perfumer’s boast. Because we are seeing it from the woman’s perspective, we can have her feeling increasingly uneasy as he smells the first neck and then gives his pitch. Even if things are light between everyone on the surface, her growing discomfort creates underlying tension and suspense in the story because we want to know what’s going on with her.

  SUMMING UP

  Choose the right kind of saying, one that can be analysed for some of the most important elements of the short story. Look for sayings that resonate with universal nuanced truths never expressed elsewhere in quite this way, ones delivered with wit and irony. These nuanced ones not only offer us a fresh perspective on a topic, personality type or theme but also allow us a certain amount of flexibility in the interpretation. The fresh perspective will help us to create an original idea of our own, while the irony embedded in the saying will guide us toward developing irony in our own work. Often, the twist closely follows the irony.

  Look out for anchor words like ‘price’ and ‘value’, for example. These anchor words represent two opposing contrasts, are very much theme related and help greatly to deliver on the irony of the saying. They will help us keep a sharp focus on the development of the story’s theme, help deliver on the story’s irony and even help structure the story’s plan.

  The saying is an incredibly short literary form, and yet, when handled well, can be a powerful tool for the short story writer in the search for fresh and ironic perspectives on topic, character and theme. The reader now knows the process involved in analysing and working with sayings and with some practice will get efficient at spotting the useful ones and then making full use of them.

  CHAPTER 3

  Fables

  Here we appraise the fable as a means of both an inspiration and a blueprint for developing short story ideas. We will analyse a fable, work an idea inspired and guided by the analysis into a story plan and then write the story of 1,000 words. We will also consider a second idea encouraged by the fable.

  In order to make sure we have a firm grasp of working with the fable, we will examine two other examples, but without going so far as writing up two more stories. We will turn the last fable into a modern style fable and see whether this technique is successful in helping create a fresh story idea.

  We are also going to turn the theme or message of all three fables into sayings. As we discovered in the sayings chapter, wordplay can work as a powerful incentive in helping create ideas, as well as help conceptualise, control and sharpen our story’s structure and theme. Here, we are not just word playing but moving the theme from one literary medium into another.

  THE FABLE

  The type of fable used here is the Aesopic fable, the fables of Aesop, an Ancient Greek storyteller believed to be the originator of a collection of fables known as Aesop’s Fables, and which has survived in popularity down to the present age.

  Aesop’s fables are short pithy tales consisting of characters that are usually animals, though plants, humans, inanimate objects or natural forces are also used. The characters are anthropomorphized (given human characteristics) and act as props for human character traits and expression. In the fable, each character fulfils a very narrow set of consistent characteristics. For example, the wolf is always a clearly defined predator with the nature to go with it; the fox is cunning, tricky, not to be trusted. Character is kept within simple boundaries so as not to interfere with the clear purpose or moral of the fable: to reveal a single aspect of the universal weakness of human nature.

  ANALYSING THE FIRST FABLE

  The Fox and the Grapes

  A hungry fox saw some fine bunches of grapes hanging from a vine that was trained along a high trellis, and did his best to reach them by jumping as high as he could into the air. But it was all in vain, for they were just out of reach: so he gave up trying, and walked away with an air of dignity and unconcern, remarking, “I thought those Grapes were ripe, but I see now they are quite sour.”

  Not surprisingly, this fable has many of our storytelling elements: character, plot, theme, conflict, setting, and even irony, a twist and humour.

  First let’s examine the fable’s message.

  When we can’t have what we want because we fall short of the capability of gaining it, we must compensate our pride by belittling it and pretending to ourselves it was never worth the trouble to begin with.

  Let’s play around with the message a little to make it pithier.

  Pride compensates for failure with contempt aimed at the object that reflects that failure.

  This message or moral of the fable is also its specific theme. Pride is too vague a theme for our needs. Our specific theme is clear and simple and offers a powerful insight into a single and universal aspect of the human condition. Because the theme comes across clearly in such a short tale, which is actually the whole point of the fable, we know that this type of theme can fit easily into the parameters of a short story. With consideration to the fact that characterization is only a stereotype in the fable, we can say that the theme is also the most important part of the fable for our purposes, though we must be careful not to neglect other important aspects of the fable.

  Usually, a lack of character nuance in a story is a sign of weakness, but in the fable it is its strength. To deliver the simple message about human nature clearly, the fable must not develop individual character, but use simple props to carry out straightforward tasks. With the message, the fable is powerful. Without the message, the fable is worthless. The fox’s character must remain a simple stereotype.

  But we are not writing a fable yet; we are using it as inspiration and guide for a story plan. We must produce individual and nuanced character. The most important thing we can take from the fox’s character is his attitude to his set of circumstances which is tightly bound up with the theme. Our characters will be tightly bound up with our theme, too, but the trick we must perform is to make this universal expression of human nature originate from individual and recognizable personalities. As our characters will be human, this should automatically happen. But we need to be aware of the significant difference in character development between the fable and the short story.

  The fox’s physical struggle to reach the fruit involves some conflict. But it is in his internal struggle that real conflict occurs, where only with the palliatives of bitterness and lack of self-awareness is he able to accept failure. The fable cannot explore this internal struggle, but we can do so in the story.

  As for plot, the fable’s distinct advantage over the saying is that a plot actually exists here. An examination of the plot in the abstract will allow us to spot other potential ideas more easily, as well as manipulate the plot more easily. The abstract plot has a physical as well as an emotional side.

  Here is the abstract physical plot: A struggles to possess B. After several failed attempts, A gives up. This is the abstract psychological or emotional plot: A desires B; B holds back from A’s persistent advances. So A goes off in a huff, accusing B of being worthless to cover for his own sense of inadequacy.

  We won’t be using the fable’s setting. Our setting will depend on storyline.

  The fable’s wit mocks the fox.

  The human condition is full of irony because it is full of contradictions. It is ironic that having failed desperately to possess the grapes, the fox suddenly turns up his nose at them. Of course, this is down to his lack of emotional self-awareness and is the fable’s twist. Once again,
irony paves the way for the twist.

  Drama is lacking here because of the fox’s simple character. As we know, drama is conflict fuelled by the addition of moral choices (not to be confused with the moral or message of a fable). If the fox had character depth, having failed to snatch the grapes, he might fight internally against the decision to diminish them, and instead, he might walk away with a philosophical approach to his failure. With character depth, the potential for drama is strong.

  THE SAYING

  We have played around with the message a little to make it pithier.

  Pride compensates for failure with contempt aimed at the object that reflects that failure.

  As a saying, it must sound more dynamic and ironic.

  The following is much better:

  The more successfully a man ridicules what he craves but cannot have, the less successfully he voices his self-awareness.

  The saying has thrown a different light onto the theme, and added wit and deep irony to it. This new approach may in itself prompt our inspiration to dream up new ideas around the theme. It is certainly a good exercise in keeping focused on the theme.

  Don’t sweat blood over writing these sayings! They are supposed to be an aid not a hindrance, and are just one more tool at our disposal for helping us develop our work.