Feature Writing

UNIT 2 SHORT STORY WRITING

Structure

2.0 Aims and Objectives

2.1 Introduction
2.2 How to Make a Short Story Interesting
2.2.1 Need for Design
2.2.2 Manner of Telling
2.2.3 Message and Comment
2.3 Atmosphere
2.3.1 Setting it in Time
2.3.2 Setting the Locale
2.4 Character
2.4.1 Choosing Characters
2.4.2 Developing Characters
2.5 Experimental Stories
2.5.1 Anti Hero
2.5.2 Anti-Plot
2.5.3 Open-Ended Narrative
2.5.4 Innovations in Style
2.6 Summing Up
2.7 Answers to Check Your Progress

2.0 AIMS AND OBJECTIVES

This Unit deals with such basic elements of a short story as plot and structure,
atmosphere, character, and narration. While none of these is indispensable, a
judicious combination of all these will make your story interesting, authentic
and readable. We also introduce you to a new kind of contemporary short story—
the experimental story. In this story we encounter the emergence of the anti-
hero and the anti-plot. Open-ended narratives and other innovations in style
characterize such stories.
By the end of this unit you will have a good idea of what elements form a good
story and you will be in a position to write short stories of your own.

2.1 INTRODUCTION
The creative artist seeks to capture the inchoate world in a certain form, so that it
could make some sense. Thus, there has to be a formal structure to the short
story you wish to write⎯an arrangement of characters interacting with incidents/
situations ⎯ for greater effectiveness. However, your skill lies in making it
appear that it is no conscious arrangement, no contrivance, no ‘plot’ to deceive
the reader, and that it could well have happened that way.
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Modes of Creative Writing It is not possible to devise a plot which would interest everybody. There are
some readers who hate to think, while there are others who want their stories to
be no more than escape sessions, in between the serious business of their daily
life. There is also a small minority who would go to the other extreme and insist
on their money’s worth of nutrition, such as philosophy, morality, knowledge
and what-have-you, with each story. So the best you can do is to attempt enticing
an adult of more-than-average intelligence who has a zest for life as well as for
learning. This implies that you are a serious writer, but not a philosopher or
saint. All you can do is to try to make your stories acquire the status of serious
literature, and yet hope that they will sell. Discussed below are some factors that
give form to your story and make it interesting, plausible and meaningful.

2.2 HOW TO MAKE A SHORT STORY

INTERESTING
You must have lived through a storm sometime or other in your life, but if your
story is based on it, you could embellish it with a fury of such dimensions that it
will savour of a new and exciting experience. Perhaps you have seen a fight
between two stray bulls in a small town you happen to be passing through. In
your story you could weave this fight into a pattern⎯show how it threw the life
of the townsmen around the street corner into total disarray. Again, you must
have seen death. You may have been overwhelmed with grief, or merely forgotten
all about it after a while depending upon whether the deceased was a close friend,
a relative or a stranger. But couldn’t you ask of a certain dying man in your story
to suffer a spell of introspection as well, and comment inwardly on the falsity of
the living world around him as Tolstoy did in his Death of Ivan Ilych? And
when you bring a pair of lovers into the range of his thoughts, wouldn’t you help
your reader to gain new insights into the thing that passes for love?

2.2.1 Need for Design

Your story must have a beginning and an end. In other words, a promise and a
satisfying conclusion, like your grandmother used to tell you when you were a
child. The best kind of structure is that which would make the reader look forward
to a ‘finding’ at the end of his labours ⎯ the glimpse of a god, a demon, a patch
of the blue sky or whatever.
Hence the need to design an ascending structure, the process as well as the peak,
before you set out to write a story. Otherwise, your story may turn out to be flat,
round or labyrinthine, etc. What is important at the designing stage is that you
should be clear about the direction. For instance, in a love-story, are you going
to introduce the conventional triangle, followed by misunderstanding and end it
up with an easy sentimental reconciliation? Or would you like to carry the couple
through the complexities of love-and-hate cycle without the aid of a third party,
and make them finally arrive at some understanding? Or would you rather that
they move through more and more loving to the grand finale of a deception?
Your options are numerous, depending on your world-view, or may be your mood
at that point of time. But let the direction be clear right at the beginning, so that
both characters and incidents would know which way to go and thus produce the
results you have in mind.
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You should have formulated, in advance, howsoever vaguely, the climax in your Short Story Writing
story. That is, what exactly would be the nature of interaction between the
character(s) and the closing incident? Or, if there is no incident, what would be
the contours of the situation yielding the final reconciliation? Or the grand
understanding? Or for that matter, the tragic deception?

2.2.2 Manner of Telling

You have now laid down the outlines of the structure. You know the direction in
which your plot will proceed. And you have a fairly good idea of the climax-to-
be. Now you may go ahead with the telling of the story. But how are you going
to ensure that the reader also goes along with you and does not give up in the
middle? Leaving aside the thought-content which we will discuss later, the manner
of telling is of utmost importance. It involves certain considerations of pace,
tone and colour, which are of particular relevance to a short story, as distinct
from a novel.
These considerations are:
Make sure that there is a constant sense of movement in the plot. There is little
scope in a short story for long pauses, reflections, observations on nature,
comments, etc. Such pauses are necessary only as breathers, not as relaxing
interludes which may weaken the tone of urgency in looking forward to ‘what
comes next’.
In this context, you would do well to follow a few guidelines in unravelling the
plot: (a) adopt a direct and conversational tone; (b) avoid verbosity; try to charm
the reader with an elegant turn of phrase rather than an impressive parade of
words; (c) try not to be obscure as it may give the impression that you don’t care
for the reader; (c) enliven your narrative with flashes of humour, share your
jokes with the reader even at the expense of the character(s), as if you and your
readers are a shade wiser than these poor character(s). The general idea is that
the reader should be with you in the plot – as a sort of co-conspirator.
Try to build up a certain suspense in the mind of the reader. We are not talking
here only of mysteries and thrillers, but of modern short stores in general, including
stories of literary merit, which attempt to reveal the truths about the human
condition. The key-word is ‘revelation’, and it does help if, while working out
the plot, you somehow suggest that ‘what comes next’ is not what your reader
would expect in the normal course, but something vastly different. The idea is
that you may occasionally throw a hint to the reader, that things are not what
they seem to be, and that he would better wait and see.

2.2.3 Message and Comment

And finally, you should remember that all meaning is not limited to a certain
notional response in the mind of the reader which you may have pre-
determined⎯amusement, wonder, anger, disgust, or whatever. Surely you can
write stories that way if you want to. But they will be richer if the meaning
carries a message too, an implicit commitment on the facet of the human condition
that you have brought out in your story. In other words, it will be a better story
if you could marry the desired emotional response to a certain intellectual
understanding in the mind of the reader. Modern literature is growing more and 71
Modes of Creative Writing more cerebral, hopefully as a part of the evolutionary process. Your story will,
therefore, fall short of your legitimate aspirations, if the end-result of the plot is
merely a chuckle or a sigh, and does not provoke the reader to pause for thought.
But in order to carry the intellectual message effectively to the modern reader
the message should be implicit in the story. The authorial voice should be
muted, for nothing repels a reader more than the didactic tone, the impression
that you are seeking to place yourself on a platform. Also whatever you have to
say should better be derived from a complexity of ideas yielding some food for
thought, e.g. – could there be jealousy between a mother and her daughter?
Couldn’t one be noble without being absurd? How could two sentinet beings
cause such pain to each other, in spite of the best of intentions? Does the class-
character of a man have to dominate over his individual psyche? Thus you
would be making an intellectual overture to the reader, charming him with its
subtlety, and provoking him to thought.
Check Your Progress 1
i) What are some of the ways in which you can make a short story interesting?
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(Check your answer with that given at the end of the Unit.)

2.3 ATMOSPHERE
Atmosphere is an integral part of fiction. It enables a writer to establish life
likeness and win the reader’s willingness to accept the world created by the
storyteller. Atmosphere is as necessary for fiction as it is for our planet. Life-
forms and characters would not be able to survive without it. Atmosphere is,
therefore, one of the basic elements in a short story. It creates the mood as well
as the psychological and physical effects appropriate to the theme of the story.
By setting a story in an appropriate time and place, you lend it verisimilitude and
authenticity.
Atmosphere binds the story together; sets the time-frame⎯past, present or future;
creates the psychological mood in the reader; and establishes the locale. Thus,
atmosphere helps the writer in creating the texture of his imagined world, with
its characters, locale and environment.

2.3.1 Setting it in Time

Any work of fiction has to be set both in time and place if the story is to sound
authentic. Most fiction nowadays deals with the present, the recent past or the
imaginary future. In all stories, the time setting must immediately be recognizable,
due to reasons of space. Take for example, the following passage:
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 Switching off the air-conditioner, he leant back and stared at the blank screen. Short Story Writing

Hopelessly, he even turned a few knobs, waiting for a picture, any picture, to
appear. He rotated the antenna and pushed the set at a new angle. Now he
had missed the opening of the Festival of Russia.

Do you need to be told that it is the very recent past that’s being talked about?
Again, read this:

The spaceship had taken off just a minute ago. The bushes were still shaking
and the dust hadn’t settled down. Now he was stuck, for good, on this
unfamiliar red planet since the next space-shuttle would land there long after
his energy tablets were finished.

Clearly, this deals with the future when interplanetary travel will become a reality.

Historical fiction, of course, requires its ‘period setting’, costumery and the use
of language current in that period. The prejudices, modes of thought and beliefs
of the time would also have to be given due consideration.

2.3.2 Setting the Locale

A fictional world always has to be set both in time and place. While a novel has
considerable scope for creating ‘atmosphere’, the short story is, however,
handicapped because of its length. A novelist can build up the locale at leisure
and give his characters lengthy pasts, detailed ancestries and legacies, a description
of their school-days, their first loves and even the emotional crises of their
childhoods. But a short story writer cannot afford to linger on the past for too
long. His brushstrokes have to be economical and yet evocative. All references
have to be to the point and revealing. Even a cursory glance must reveal the
place of action. The reader does not always have the patience to wait until the
last page to be told that ‘Delhi’ or ‘London’ or ‘Singapore’ is where it all happened.

Check Your Progress 2

i) You may be familiar with the following ghost story:

There are two men sitting in a train compartment. After some time the first
man asks the second, “Do you believe in ghosts?” “No”, he replies, and
vanishes.

Now expand this into a short story of 200 words.

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(Check your answer with the hints given at the end of the unit.)
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Modes of Creative Writing
2.4 CHARACTER
When planning a story at what stage does one start thinking about its characters?
The question resolves into a consideration of what comes first at the conceptual
stage⎯the plot, i.e. the total framework, or the characters, who are but a
component of the plot. This is largely a matter of strategy. In a conventional
short story it would be useful to lay down the structure first, as it is the turn of
events that provides the result, and then summon the characters. But if the result
consists in the surprise provided by the twists or turnabouts of the characters, or
in an essentially intellectual or psychological revelation, it would be better to
choose the characters carefully before setting out the plot. This is because the
mental equipment and conditioning of the characters is relatively more important
than the situations they are required to handle. In choosing your characters you
have to bear in mind that there is hardly any place in a short story, as distinguished
from a novel, where a character is not called upon to make a substantial
contribution to the story.
Thus you should exercise utmost economy in the number of characters you choose
for a story; and you should choose only such characters as you can visualize in
fairly clear dimensions right at the start; or are confident of making whole and
full-bodied during the course of the story.

2.4.1 Choosing Characters

The parameters you will do well to adopt in the choosing of characters are,
however, common to all fiction, novels or short stories and would lead you to
formulate answers to the following questions, among others. Do you know your
characters? You must know the likes of them, so that you may write about them
in realistic detail, and articulate their thoughts. They must be credible to you,
before you can expect your readers to fall for them as ‘real’. William Faulkner
had said that experience, observation and imagination are the three sources you
have to draw upon for your fiction, and the deficiency in one can be made up by
generous supplies from the rest. But this is not to say that you can depend on
your imagination to substitute entirely for experience and observation; a balanced
use of material is always to be preferred for any construction. So you should
recall the men and women within your knowledge, and see if one or more can fit
in with the general idea of the plot and whether they react in a manner which
suits the purpose of your story.
You need not look for exact prototypes, unless, of course, the story itself is
suggested by a vastly interesting character you know in real life. More often
than not, it would be convenient to create a living collage, e.g., the facial
expressions of A combined with the social habits of B and the philosophical
outlook of C, and thus present a character, both familiar and fascinating. And in
so far as central characters are concerned, you should not fight shy of projecting
bits of your own personality too into him/her for the best results; it will seep
through any way if you are not insincere in your story-telling.
For reasons of social motivation, you may sometimes feel compelled to choose
characters from a totally different milieu. Thus a confirmed urbanite may wish
to write about rural people, an affluent businessman, smitten with sympathy or
74 remorse for the slum dwellers, may wish to write about them and so forth.
As regards fantasies, the characters must necessarily be ‘incredible’ in a facile Short Story Writing
sense. But unless they are written entirely for children, the apparent nonsense
must make sense by being in purposeful juxtaposition to the real. Like Goya’s
paintings, you may deliberately distort reality, so as to provoke in the reader a
certain awareness of the realities that he tends to ignore. But such demons and
fairies that you may create must relate intrinsically to recognizable modes of
human thought and behaviour. In this context, you may recall Swift’s Gulliver’s
Travels, or clever parables designed to hold the interest of children and adults
alike, at different levels, like Alice in Wonderland.

2.4.2 Developing Characters

Obviously a plot denotes movement in time and space, and when the characters
are but actors in the plot they cannot remain static. But the movement appropriate
to a character goes beyond the time-space dimensions. Any character, howsoever
well-conceived, would appear to be wooden and static if he just moved along
with the demands of the plot and reacted predictably. It is essential that he must
grow, and seem to grow. That is, his personality must unfold itself in the process
of his thoughts and action, so that he reveals himself fully, and often surprisingly,
only at the end of the story.
Consistent as he may be on the whole, as a character distinguished from an
average man-in-the-street, you should subject him to the pains of growing up,
and make him go through a measure of inconsistencies, anxieties, contradictions,
et al, revealing new facets of his character each time he deals with a situation.
You should make such unfolding possible even within the smaller canvas of a
conventional short story.
A clever storyteller should maintain an even flow in developing his character in
such a way that the reader’s interest is not only sustained all through, but an
element of suspense is also built into his absorption, so that the revelation at the
end appears to be quite logical and yet eminently satisfying as a surprise.
Check Your Progress 3
i) What factors does one have to keep in mind in choosing charactors for a
short story?
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ii) In the limited space available in a short-story is there room for developing a
character? If so how can it be done?
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Modes of Creative Writing ........................................................................................................................
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(Check your answers with the ones given at the end of this Unit).

2.5 EXPERIMENTAL STORIES

Experimental stories are stories where the modes are reversed due to the result
of change in sensibility over a period of time.

2.5.1 Anti-Hero
The anti-hero story is a marked feature of the twentieth century. It is closely
connected with changes in traditional values and life styles. The term ‘hero’
normally brings to mind a person somewhat larger than life (the heroes of Greek
tragedies or the heroes on the screens of our Hindi films). He is usually someone
of a commanding presence, as great in life as in death⎯noble, proud and almost
overwhelming. Such nobility of human beings has become increasingly dubious,
if not outright comic in our age, where wars can be triggered off by someone
pressing a button, and computers are made responsible for planning our lives,
our careers, our industry, and even our marriages.
Human nature is seldom, if at all, uni-dimensional. Stories with what we call an
anti-hero offer greater opportunity to the writer to depict human nature in all its
complexity. R.K. Narayan’s characters in his Malgudi stories belong to this
category. The anti-hero is complex, variable and ambiguous, in contrast to the
traditional hero of romances who is handsome, fundamentally decent and good-
hearted, even when he defies law and order.
The anti-hero story is mainly a twentieth century development and is the product
of a people’s awareness against the forces of oppression and injustice. He is the
despised and the disinherited: a peasant, a farmer, a coolie or an untouchable:
the ‘scum’ of society, one who challenges the concept of ‘noble descent’, of
racial, feudal and class superiority. He struggles to assert his identity as a human
being. He wishes to be treated on par with others. The protagonists of Premchand,
Gorky and Anand are anti-heroes of this kind.
Late twentieth century fiction is significant, because it presents before us a society
that has endured unforeseen technological and material innovations. Ironically,
as this society has become richer, the human soul has become poorer. The hero
as spy, in the works of some of the best writers of murder mysteries today, is not
the traditional hero like the ever-optimistic James Bond who is loyal to the crown
and to the traditional values. In the hands of authors like John Le Carre, he
becomes both a political analyst and a sad and lonely individual in the decadent
field of international espionage. He reveals to us the basic futility of his
supposedly noble trade, and his yearning for the common, daily world of family
affection and traditions, friendship and love, which are almost outdated. The
very title of the novel, A Perfect Spy, is bristling with irony, as is the hero narrator,
76 who unfolds its complex world.
2.5.2 Anti-Plot Short Story Writing

The earliest storytellers were not bothered by considerations of form. They simply
spun a tale⎯ ‘Once upon a time….’, and narrated the story in a straight line, the
chronology and the plot progressing together. In the course of storytelling they
would often put in their own ideas and comments and close the tale with a moral.
Form, or the shape in which a story was presented, became a serious consideration
when stories began to be recorded in print.
In the traditional story, a major element is the plot which, as we all know, refers
to the sequence of related incidents which make up a narrative. Plot is the easiest
element in a story to understand, and beginners often tend to think that the plot is
the story. For a mature writer, however, this is not so. He or she writes a short
story, not to demonstrate how b follows a, and c follows b, but because the whole
story ultimately presents a deep insight into human life or character. The writer
may begin——‘Let’s suppose that a shy, timid, but romantically imaginative
young man is invited to a party, at which he receives an eager kiss in the dark
from an unknown young woman, who has mistaken him for her lover.’ (‘The
Kiss’ by Chekhov). Here the author of the story challenges the conventions of
the traditional story-form by allowing his narrator-writer to make the statement
that the plot of the story he is writing is imaginary. The reader is warned against
implicit belief in the story as a form that relates events as they actually happen.
The traditional plot having a beginning, middle and an end, with a chronological
progression of events was too patterned and artificial to reflect the complex nature
of modern reality. The revolutionary impact of science and technology on life,
breakdown of faith in Providence and the Divine scheme of things, researches in
depth psychology, and man’s continuing struggle against different forms of
oppression, gave rise to several new insights. The traditional plot thus became
an insufficient and imperfect medium to express the many-sided realities of
contemporary life.
A writer of a modern short story is more self-conscious. We now realize that
there are many ways of telling a short story. The writer, for instance, may choose
a method, and even set up his or her own rules. The plot of the story and whether
it is the author, the characters or one special character who spins it, becomes less
important, than how it is spun. The viewpoint presented by the story is here the
single most important factor, and not the moral of the tale: messages are rarely, if
ever, clearly stated.
The ultimate purpose of every short story writer is to communicate an aspect of
the truth of life as seen and experienced by himself, and personal truth rarely has
a beginning, middle or an end.
Thus authors naturally find a creative outlet in stories which challenge the
commonly held concept of a plot as a sequence of happenings, with a beginning,
a middle and an end. Their aim is basically interpretative, and not the recounting
of the factual details of our daily lives, or a narration of complicated happenings,
all unraveled at the end (as in a detective or a romantic adventure story).
Frequently, the ultimate appeal of the anti-plot stories to the reader’s sense of
truth, is made through symbolism or allegory. Consider, for instance, Kafka’s
well-known story, ‘The Metamorphosis’ where a man finds that he has changed 77
Modes of Creative Writing suddenly into a hideous insect. Do we disbelieve the story because this does not,
and cannot happen in real life? The writer, by depicting an impossible chain of
events, is however able to present an imaginative study of human behaviour
which is undeniably truthful and absorbing. By breaking up the traditional
structure of the plot he is able to transform seen reality into a felt experience.

2.5.3 Open-Ended Narrative

One of the sacred or crucial elements of the traditional short story was its ending,
which built on the expectation of the reader that a meaning would be lent to the
preceding narrative in the way it ended. Experimental writers found this to be an
impediment, among other things, in fully communicating to the reader the
complexity of much that was narrated⎯and of life itself.
So they took recourse to the ‘open-ended narrative’, where conclusions are not
clearly stated; they are not even always left for the reader to infer from elements
that have been developed in the story. Quite often, the stories have no conclusions.
They leave the reader with a dangling ambiguity, which he has to resolve with
his imagination, in the light of his own perceptions and experience.
Interestingly, the trend for open-ended narratives was set by Anton Chekhov. In
his story, ‘The Lady with the Dog,’ Chekhov has two central characters who are
strangers at the beginning but soon fall deeply in love with each other. The man
and the woman meet when they are on separate vacations in Yalta and grow
increasingly infatuated, although there is a big difference in their age and social
status. When the vacation is over, they return to their respective towns and
homes; both are already married, and the man has children almost the same age
as the woman with whom he has fallen in love. Much as they try, neither can
treat what has transpired as a casual affair. We hear it mainly from the man’s
viewpoint. He has shaken off other affairs before, but this one he cannot. He
goes off in search of her, finds her, and discovers that she too cannot put him out
of her mind. They resume their affair, in stealth from the rest of the world,
especially their families. They know the deception would have to end, but cannot
figure out how. Chekhov ends the story when it is tantalizingly poised; seemingly
the lovers are ‘within an inch of arriving at a decision,’ but in their heart of hearts
both know the end is ‘still far, far away, and that the hardest, most complicated
part is only just beginning.’ Chekhov seems to have developed the complication
to a nicety⎯ covering the beginning and the middle of the classical story ⎯but
he leaves the denouement or ending to his readers.
Krishna Baldev Vaid, the well-known Hindi short story writer, does something
similar in ‘My Enemy’. In this story, the narrator runs into an old crony, with
whom he has been long out of touch. Their stations in life have changed since:
the narrator has become a married, respectable man who lives in orderly affluence,
while the friend has stayed a bum and a derelict. Despite this distance, and the
distance in time since they were friends, the man has sufficient hold on the narrator
to move in with his family. A series of incidents follow and the narrator’s wife,
Mala, moves out of the house with her children threatening not to return until the
‘friend’ has been thrown out. Five day pass after the narrator’s family leaves
him. And he sits there merely contemplating the options available to him, telling
himself: ‘if Mala were here, she’d come up with a third alternative. But she’s
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not here and I don’t know what to do.’ On that note of self-realization, the story Short Story Writing
ends. The reader is no wiser as to how the tangle is resolved, but he is left free to
make his guesses from what has been revealed of the narrator’s personality.
Other experimenting writers go even further. Instead of the closed ending of the
traditional story, or the open ending we just discussed, they may use a multiple
ending (in which there are several possible endings), a false ending (in which
what you first think of as the end is not quite it), or mock ending or parody
ending.

2.5.4 Innovations in Style

There has been so much innovation in the form and style of the short story,
especially in the past three or four decades, that there are difficulties in applying
the term ‘story’ itself to much of experimental fiction. The rich variety of
innovations or experimentation in style has led to the emergence of a host of
alternative narrative forms. Fictional texts, short prose works, pieces, sketches
these are some of the new arrivals on the scenes.

The dominant mode of nineteenth and twentieth century fiction was realism. As
life, both individual and social, became increasingly more complicated, realism
or the mere portrayal of surface events did not seem an adequate mode to represent
it in all its facets. Writers interested in probing the inner recesses of their
characters’ minds rather than external events per se (Dostoevsky for instance),
took the first step away from realism. Hence the turn inward, with characters not
only responding to the external world, but also turning inward to look at their
own thought processes. Yet other experimenting writers turned to earlier forms
of fiction, such as fable or romance, to recreate fantasy worlds that bore no
resemblance to the ‘real’ world. The types of fiction they wrote laid no claim to
plausibility. Instead, they indulged in the free play of the mind, coming up with
farfetched tales that seemed to have their own inner coherence in a limited world,
circumscribed only by the artist’s imaginative power.
Numerous examples may be cited here. Take the Malayalam story, ‘The Bear’,
by C. Radhakrishnan. In it there are some events, but they are only sketchily
developed and they seem to bear no direct relation to each other. The image of a
bear is first confused with the image of a man in the narrator’s mind, then with
the image of his father. The reader can guess what those associations mean, but
he is not told. The story, somewhat terrifying in its imagery, defies both chronology
and normal credibility of plot. The author seems merely to mock at ‘what happens
next’. Yet the fiction has a certain coherence, deriving its strength neither from
events nor from credible characters or plot.
To study contemporary manifestations of short stories techniques, you can read
John Barth and Donald Barthelme, (Americans, ), Borges (Argentinian), Gunter
Grass or Peter Handke (Germans), Italo Calvino (Italian), the bilingual Samuel
Beckett, Salman Rushdie (Indian), and a host of others.
If some experimenting writers tend to develop analysis and interpretation to their
tedious end, others mock at the concept of ‘developing’ a story. They write
pieces that are so brief that the stories end before the reader has a chance to
ponder where they might lead. The following short story is one such example. 79
Modes of Creative Writing Taboo
Enrique Anderson Imbert
His guardian angel whispered to Fabian, behind his shoulder:
‘Careful, Fabian! It is decreed that you will die the minute you pronounce
the word Doyen.’
‘Doyen?’ asks Fabian, intrigued.
And he dies.

2.6 SUMMING UP
In this Unit we have dealt with the basic elements of a short story like plot,
atmosphere, character and so on. We’ve also spoken about experimental stories
and how these are changing the basic perspective of looking at this genre.

2.7 ANSWERS TO CHECK YOUR PROGRESS

Check Your Progress 1
(i) You can make your story interesting by:
a) giving it a sense of movement
b) involving the reader
c) building up suspense.
Check Your Progress 2
(i) You may add details of atmosphere like:
a) Was it day or night?
b) Were there other people in the compartment?
c) Was the train passing through a jungle a ravine?
d) Was it raining outside or not?
Check Your Progress 3
i) Clarity of visualization is essential in depicting character and the characters
must seem to be familier to the writer and reader
ii) An even flow should be there while developing a character and the
development should not be jerky or sudden. It should be consistent and
evenly paced.

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