THE RHETORICAL SITUATION
Purpose Fiction writers often write stories to entertain, but many also write to share insights into the human condition. For example, Edgar Allan Poe, in the “The Tell-Tale Heart,” looks into the world of a paranoid madman. Amy Tan, in her short stories about Chinese Americans, shares perspectives on what it’s like to live in the United States when one’s cultural and familial heritage clashes dramatically with everyday life.
Among the goals of short story writers is to offer a compelling narrative about memorable characters—characters that invite readers to identify with them or that challenge readers’ assumptions. To achieve these goals, authors work with a variety of literary techniques. (For more on these, see “Style.”) Some fiction writers (such as the late David Foster Wallace) play around with the form, using alternative techniques and styles, with the purpose of creating experimental literary art. Whatever short story writers’ purposes are, they must achieve them within a limited page count.
Do you read formula fiction, such as romances or mysteries? What do you like about these stories? What rhetorical choices do the romance and mystery authors make in terms of character, plot, depth, and style?
Audience Authors may aim their work at a broad, popular audience looking for fun and escape, such as Stephen King does, or at a narrower audience of literary readers, such as Alice Munro or Sherman Alexie do, or at audiences along that spectrum. Some fiction authors (such as J. M. Coetzee or Ralph Ellison) write (or in Ellison’s case, wrote) for audiences looking for intellectual stimulation and depth. Other authors who embrace various subgenres of fiction—such as horror (Stephen King), fantasy (J. R. R. Tolkien), sci-fi (Ray Bradbury), romance (Jackie Collins), and mysteries (Agatha Christie)—aim(ed) to connect with readers who want entertainment. These authors follow certain established formulas for writing fiction; it’s what their readers want and expect.
Rhetorical appeals Most fiction authors connect to their readers primarily through pathos. Because they want readers to understand and sympathize with (or, sometimes, loathe) their story’s protagonist, they need readers to see things from that character’s point of view. They need readers to form an emotional connection to that character. Edgar Allan Poe accomplishes this, for example, in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” partly by telling the story in the first person. This allows his readers to experience the unfolding drama of a murder at the same time that the protagonist does.
Modes & media Short stories usually appear in print form in collections of short stories or literary journals. Occasionally, a short story is reimagined as a film, as was the case with Minority Report, based on a Philip K. Dick story, and Brokeback Mountain, based on an Annie Proulx story. In retelling these stories as feature films, the filmmakers had to invent backstories for the characters and create new material to flesh out moments that are not mentioned in the stories.
THE GENRE’S CONVENTIONS
Elements of the genre
Plot. Short stories are structured around a few main elements, one of which is a plot. The plot is the series of events that shape the action of the narrative. The plot in Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” for instance (spoiler alert!), involves the narrator caring for the old man, becoming disturbed by the old man’s eye, murdering the old man, defending his sanity to the police officers who arrive to investigate, and finally, being discovered as the murderer.
Characters and conflict. The plot involves the story’s characters and revolves around a central conflict or struggle that drives the plot and builds it toward a climax, ultimately resolving in some way by the end of the story. The main character (protagonist) in “The Tell-Tale Heart” is the one telling the story (the narrator). Sometimes the conflict is internal, between a character’s sense of right and wrong, for example; other times the conflict is external, between a character and an outside force, such as another character, or a tornado or political upheaval. The narrator’s conflict in “The Tell-Tale Heart” is between his desire to be seen as sane and the fact that he murdered an old man because the old man’s eyeball bothered him. The story’s characters, the people in the story, are inventions of the author.
Setting, symbolism, and theme. Fiction authors also provide a setting (the time, place, and atmosphere in which the story takes place), use symbolism (the use of a person, object, image, word, or action that has a range of meaning beyond the literal), and convey a theme (the story’s central meaning or main idea).
Many first-time novelists write in the first person; that is, their narrators speak from the I point of view. Why do you think this may be?
Narrator. Every work of fiction is told by a narrator, and from a specific point of view. For example, if a story is narrated by a particular character and told from an “I” point of view, it is described as first person. One example of a work with a first-person narrator is James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” told by the main character, Sonny’s brother.) Most stories are told from a third-person point of view (from the he, she, it, or they point of view) because this is the most flexible type of narration. Very few works are told from the unwieldy you point of view, but there are some examples, including Lorrie Moore’s “How to Become a Writer,” and Dennis Lehane’s “Until Gwen.” Some works of fiction shift points of view, depending on the type of narrator the author uses, and through which character’s consciousness the author wants readers to receive the story (such as Jill McCorkle’s story, “Magic Words”).
Style
Detail. Fiction writers use detail to enrich their plots, provide a setting, convey believable characters, and bring their stories to life for readers. This sentence, from Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” gives a sense of the relationships between men and women in the town where the story takes place and creates for readers a visual image of the women:
The women, wearing faded house dresses and sweaters, came shortly after their menfolk.
Techniques. Authors use dialogue, vivid descriptions of the story’s location, metaphor, simile, imagery, and other techniques to engage readers’ imaginations. Dialogue is conversation between characters, as in this passage from Ernest Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”:
“Here’s to the lion,” he said. “I can’t ever thank you for what you did.”
Margaret, his wife, looked away from him and back to Wilson.
“Let’s not talk about the lion,” she said.
Wilson looked over at her without smiling and now she smiled at him.
“It’s been a very strange day,” she said. “Hadn’t you ought to put your hat on even under the canvas at noon? You told me that, you know.”
“Might put it on,” said Wilson.
“You know you have a very red face, Mr. Wilson,” she told him and smiled again.
Authors use metaphors and similes to show comparisons, so that readers can understand something in terms of another thing, as in Sherwood Anderson’s story “Hands”:
In the dense blotch of light beneath the table, the kneeling figure looked like a priest engaged in some service of his church. The nervous expressive fingers, flashing in and out of the light, might well have been mistaken for the fingers of the devotee going swiftly through decade after decade of his rosary.
Imagery refers to sensory details that put a mental picture (or sound or smell or taste or tactile sensation) in a reader’s mind, as this passage from Isabel Allende’s “Clarisa” does:
Clarisa was born before the city had electricity, she lived to see television coverage of the first astronaut levitating on the moon, and she died of amazement when the Pope came for a visit and was met in the street by homosexuals dressed up as nuns.
Tone and voice. The writer’s persona comes through in the voice (often specifically through the voice of the narrator). The voice is the personality the reader hears; in the sentence above from Isabel Allende’s “Clarisa,” the voice we hear is whimsical. The tone is the attitude that comes through in the writing. We could describe the tone of Hemingway’s narrator in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” as detached.
Design
Print. Most short stories are published in collections in book form, in magazines (hard copies or online) that feature short fiction along with articles, or in literary journals. In all of these, the central focus is the words themselves.
Length. Short stories can be as short as a single paragraph or as long as thirty or forty pages. Most short stories can be read in one sitting, although of course, there’s no standard definition for “one sitting.” Extremely short stories are called “flash fiction.”
Form. Short stories are written in prose form, meaning sentences organized into paragraphs.
Sources Sometimes fiction writers need to conduct research to make their stories realistic. A story set in the past would probably require the author to research the time period. An author writing about a character who is a scientist might need to do research to find out what a typical workday for a scientist is like.