Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

I heard Alice Adams give a lecture on the short story once, one aspect of which made the writing students in her audience so excited that I have passed it along to my students ever since… She said that sometimes she uses a formula when writing a short story, which goes ABDCE, for Action, Background, Development, Climax, and Ending. You begin with action that is compelling enough to draw us in, make us want to know more. Background is where you let us see and know who these people are, how they’ve come to be together, what was going on before the opening of the story. Then you develop these people, so that we learn what they care most about. The plot – the drama, the actions, the tension – will grow out of that. You move them along until everything comes together in the climax, after which things are different for the main characters, different in some real way. And then there is the ending” what is our sense of who these people are now, what are they left with, what happened, and what did it mean?

-Anne Lamott

The Swim Team, Miranda July

Written almost as a confession to her ex, the narrator recounts a year spent in Belvedere where she takes on the identity of a swim coach in a city with no place to swim. In her living room, with bowls of water placed beneath the faces of her three enthusiastic students, gives swimming lessons.

I know it's hard for you to imagine me as someone called 'Coach.' I had a very different identity in Belvedere, that's why it was so difficult to talk about it with you. I never had a boyfriend there; I didn't make art, I wasn't artistic at all. I was kind of a jock. I was totally a jock - I was the coach of a swim team. If I had thought this would be at all interesting to you I would have told you earlier, and maybe we would still be going out.

"Miranda July's characters are so unafraid to be human, it hurts. But from the pain, magic emerges, and in that magic is the essence of what it means to be human."

-Mark Flanagan

JD SALINGER

A Perfect Day for Bananafish

Introduction

Short stories are most often works of fiction written in prose. They tend to focus on one incident/event, with a single plot, few settings, and few characters. These stories span over a short period of time.

They usually contain a fully developed theme but are shorter and less complex than a novel

I'm definitely interested in further exploring this genre through examples- revisiting favorites and hopefully discovering some new.

Some examples of writing I plan to examine are Nine Stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You, The Book of Other People, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness

(authors include JD Salinger, Miranda July, Richard Yates)