No Idiot Savant Yet

Been reading Chekhov over the last few days and admire him so much. But what I’m finding to admire is not the canned short story structure I may have mentioned yesterday but the haphazard way he wanders back and forth to get the story told. He hops off here or there, mentions a character or an animal (like the little dog in the LADY WITH THE TOY DOG) and may never bring it up again in the story. And the next thing you know he chops off what you expected was the next valued piece of exposition, and probably proves that the dropped fillip wasn’t needed anyway. That ellipsis would probably be treated as an issue by the writing teacher. Yet there are no required features, apparently, in successful stories that others have written.

The wretched truth is critics will lift factors from this or that story and turn them into rules. It's their job. As if every critic one wants to publish rules they can sell to the high bidder in the world of creative writing, or creative criticism. Any rule I’d offer must be some kind of antidote for the poison delivered by the compulsive critic who wants to be identified as the master of the master. That critic, however, admit few names to the list of deserving contemporary writers. And when a modern critic does say something nice about a new movie, for example, I notice the blogs sport crowds who want to tear the straw man down. Like beauty taken to be an average of all the faces or noses in the world, fiction probably has a beauty to brag about that is no more than an average of all the stories every told, all the endings ever ended. You could hope for more, but the truth lies in the next paragraph.

And here it is: What is most important is the story that succeeds and to hell with the analysis. The best model for the fiction you are trying to tell about is the one in the last story that worked well doing that particular kind of work. The story you should write about some lovely lady vacationing in the Crimea may not have a toy dog to kick things off. But if your tale holds the reader in rapt attention, who needs a puppy? Your successful story is the winner on all counts.

Not that I know how to write that story. But I’d rather find out it did not come from a menu of ingredients, a recipe for success, and maybe that goes without saying. If it filled out the list of all the ingredients mentioned in the recipe and did succeed, the reader or critic in this case might do well to ignore the list of requisites and figure out what else worked. The real things that mattered may have been someplace in between the items that contributed to the success. Hell, I don’t’ know. But I think I’ll learn more from examining successful Chekhov stories than I will most of the rest of the stuff picked as ingredients of stories by the ingenious. I certainly don’t know for sure what will work ahead of time. But I’ll keep writing, or trying to write spontaneously about humans, or what they see/hear/know. Whatever is human in me is my best helper at the keyboard, and not necessarily whatever comes from a list. I want to keep soaking up Chekhov’s and others’ techniques by reading him/them carefully, and then letting my need for ventilation drive the tale, and provide entertainment for the reader. Does that cover the topic for this morning? Hell, I don’t know, but I do know I’m now on page two and my freewriting sample is done for the morning.

Next: On Rewriting Seven Times