Alastair Mayer’s T-Space Blog

Last week I said that perfect manuscript formatting and making a great first impression is useless if you’re not submitting an actual story. It’s like showing up professionally attired for an interview — for a job you’re utterly unqualified for.

So how do you know if you’ve got story?

Well, do you have a plot? You can’t have story without plot. You can paint wonderfully descriptive word pictures, or slice-of-life vignettes, but those aren’t stories. There have been many attempts to categorize plots, with arguments about how many basic plots there really are. Thirty seven? Twelve?

Heinlein argued that they could all be boiled down to only three: boy meets girl (or these days, and in speculative fiction, sentient being meets sentient being); the man (or woman, or android, or small furry creature from Alpha Centauri) who learned better; and the little tailor (man–or whatever–succeeds against incredible odds).

I’m going to tell you that there’s only one plot that matters: stuff happens to someone. (Note, though, that the best stories involve that someone not just passively accepting the stuff that happens, but reacting to it, or proactively making stuff happen.) What kind of stuff? Well, as Heinlein said, meeting a girl, learning better, or overcoming tremendous difficulty. Or any permutation, combination, or variation thereof.

Now, a plot is necessary, but it is not sufficient. I said “stuff happens to someone,” but is that someone worth reading about? You need an interesting character. The longer the story, the more interesting the character needs to be to sustain the story. Let me give a couple of counter-examples.

The “shortest SF story ever told,” by Fredric Brown, goes: “The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door.” We know nothing about the character, except that he is the last man on Earth. That’s interesting but it tells us nothing else about him. It doesn’t need to, that’s all we need to sustain the story. But don’t try to get away with retelling I Am Legend with that little characterization.

Or take Hemingway’s classic six-word story: “For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.” Arguably that’s not even a story. Where’s the stuff happening? And to whom? That’s off-stage. This kind of story is sometimes called hint fiction; the real story is merely hinted at. But Hemingway’s story is a powerful hint indeed. Ask any parent.

However, if you’re reading this, you’re probably not a Hemingway or a Fredric Brown — and even they didn’t try publishing stories that short early in their careers.

Is that it? An interesting character, and stuff that happens? No, we’re still not quite there. It should be interesting stuff, too, and it should happen in some logical sequence. Algis Budrys, author of many books and short stories and who taught at Clarion and the Writers of the Future workshops, had a seven point “formula” for successful stories. (It’s not the only such formula, there are others, and indeed it’s possible to come up with a successful story that doesn’t fit a formula — but it’s easier to learn the rules of the road in a car than on a unicycle. Get the basics down pat, then experiment.) Budrys’s formula begins with (1) a character, in (2) a context (or setting), with (3) a problem. The middle of the story covers the character’s repeated attempts to (4) solve the problem, which (5) fail. Finally (6) he succeeds (or fails permanently). The end of the story is (7) validation of the character’s solution.

This is all described in far more and better detail than I can put here, in Algis Budrys’s short book Writing to the Point: A complete Guide to Selling Fiction. I highly recommend it.

Prolific pulp fiction writer Lester Dent (among other things, as Kenneth Robeson he wrote most of the original Doc Savage stories) had a formula for writing his sort of action tale. If that’s of interest, search the web for “Lester Dent master fiction plot” and you’ll find his explanation of it on numerous sites. As Dent puts it, “no yarn of mine written to the formula has yet failed to sell.” That’s no guarantee these days, since sensibilities change and that was Lester Dent writing those yarns in the first place, but his points are still relevant.

So after some practise you’re ready to submit your story — show up for that job interview — dressed for success and with some knowledge of what the job is about. The first words out of the interviewer’s mouth are “Bonjour. Comment allez-vous?” Oops. Better make sure you (your manuscript) and your interviewer (editor or first reader) are speaking the same language, which if you’re reading this is presumably English, not French. And not something that only looks vaguely like English.

Next week: grammar, spelling, and why you should never trust a computer.