Tag Archives: short-story

But…

Imagine our protagonist has invited a date for dinner.

They take a shower, get dressed, check their appearance in the mirror.

The smell of cooking fills their home. They open a bottle of wine and leave it to breathe next to two glasses, they choose some music to play softly in the background.

They straighten the cutlery on the table and check their watch.

There is a knock at the door.

Now what?

What happens next is the difference between a story and real life.

In real life the protagonist will open the door. Their date will be standing there, they’ll invite them in and they’ll have a meal together. Maybe they will enjoy each other’s company, maybe they’ll find the experience a little dull.

Either way, this isn’t a story, just a sequence of events. The person showers and they get dressed and they cook a meal and they open a bottle of wine. To make this into a story we need a but.

There is a knock at the door…

… but there is a police officer standing there
… but their date’s partner is standing there
… but their date is standing there in tears
… but their date says “We need to talk”

If the writer has just spent two pages setting the scene and building anticipation of the knock on the door, the reader will be very disappointed if the person standing there smiling is just the protagonist’s date.

Writing this, it seems so obvious. You might wonder who would make such a mistake. Well, I for one. Sometimes I’m so taken up by the loveliness of the world I’m describing I forget to add a story. And it was definitely a fault of mine when I first began writing.

Howard Suber said it much better then I can…

What Do All Great Stories Have In Common?

The word “but”. Which is to say inexperienced or poor storytellers structure their material with the words “and” or “then”. So “They did this, and then they did that, and then they did this, and then they did that,” which produces an episodic structure that doesn’t build on anything, and there’s no relationship between what came before and what came after.

Lip Salve

The tin of lip salve in the picture has sat there by the crossing for a few days now.

How did it get there? That’s the sort of question we like to ask on Inspiration Thursday.

The most likely explanation is that someone dropped it, then someone else found it and placed it on the box so that the owner might see it and retrieve it.

Of course, it could be a spy sending a signal to another spy, or an advanced monitoring device placed there by aliens. That could make for an exciting story, I suppose, but I don’t think that’s as interesting as thinking about what’s really going on here.

The crossing is just outside a local shop. I go there four or five times a week to buy bread and milk and so on, and I imagine that the owner of the lip salve does the same. They must have seen it by now, so why haven’t they taken it back?

Examining motives always makes for a better story. Why would they take it back? It’s lip salve. It’s been sitting out in the bad weather. Kids might have done something to it. Would you want to put suspect salve on your lips? Really, if the owner has seen the tin, they should have taken it and thrown it in the bin.

And what about the person who put it there? What did they expect to happen? Did they think through their actions? Did they believe they were doing someone a good turn, or were they just going through the motions, like in the bag of food waste? If they really wanted to be helpful they should have thrown the lip salve in the nearby bin. Or maybe they couldn’t be bothered to walk that far.

Or perhaps I’m just overthinking it. It was just a helpful act. Whatever, it’s the sort of thing to think about when writing a story.