Scott, James. "The Strings Attached". One Story. VI: 6, 2007.

Jim Scott's a friend I made at Sewanee, and he's very funny. He's the sort of funny guy one wants immediately to work up to the level and quickness of, to match jokes with jokes of your own that make him giggle as you also are giggling. This story I thought was going to be sad—it opens with the death of three-week-old twins—but then turns funny and silly in the ways of many standard quirky stories you run across these days. A strange town name (Tangent) and offbeat hobbies and jobs (philately, meatpacking, a bowling alley named Kegler's Paradise, etc.).

The story meanders in a nice way, unmoored subtly from the tug of a plotline, or maybe better said the ticking of a plot's clock. And then Arthur, its central character, decides on a whim to get a dog and the dog needs a names lead to the twins who never got names and the story gets all knotted again.

In the end it's a story about needing for one reason or another to stay put in the place you live your life. Arthur could leave Tangent. He should, probably, but he won't. There's those titular strings. And so because of this, I think Jim's able to take it easy on plot; rather than rush everything toward one character's conflict-resolution, we're given a town, and the people in the town.

It's a good new rule for writing: Give Us The Town And The People In The Town.

Speaking of rules of writing, I never did finish my Christine Schutt post. Essentially what I learned from her is what I think (according to another Sewanee funnyguy) she learned from Gordon Lish and according to the notes I took is this:

When you're writing a story, you aren't looking ahead to see what will happen next. You aren't adding new elements to make a story more complex. Instead, you look behind yourself. You're always looking back at the last sentence you wrote, and as you look back at it you ask yourself: What can I extract from this sentence that will darken or deepen the story? That's it. Every time you need to move forward it's a matter of darkening the story. It's a matter of going to a place you don't know anything about. It's a matter of surprise, and turning away from what you've previously written again and again, to the point where you've turned 180 degrees and come to the exact opposite of where you've begun, and but then turning away even from that, so that at the end of the story you are where you begun, except that everything's changed.

Despite the use of the blockquote tag that's not a quote or anything, but it pretty much sums it up. What's great about this is that it not only gives you an idea of how Christine puts together a story (or Gary Lutz or Diane Williams are any others of that ilk), but it applies even to "classic" or "traditional" stories we've all already talked about a thousand times before. It becomes a whole new way of thinking about structure.

Here are "A&P"'s opening sentences:

In walk these three girls in nothing but bathing suits. I'm in the third check-out slot, with my back to the door, so I don't see them until they're over by the bread....

Christine reads the girls in nothing but bathing suits as the element Updike extracts to darken the story, because here of course is the danger. You have all sorts of issues surrounding dress and decorum and sex and gender and class and privilege here, and so, she argues, while you think in this story these girls will be kicked out is it the narrator who leaves the store in the end. And this is the turning away from what's been written into places that will surprise you.

There's another great example in another canonical story (O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find") but I don't have the text handy to quote from it. Just pay attention to what the grandmother says in the opening paragraph and what happens at the end.

Here's an example from All Souls:

Damn. Her mother was in the dressing room. "Mom!"

"I'm sorry, I couldn't wait. You were all so beautiful." Mrs. Van de Ven, jostled, backed away from the door, watching. Far-fetched hair, lots of hair, spectacularly flying free of popping hair bands, hair astonishingly clean and glassy. If she could touch it..."

"Mother, please, we're all getting changed here."

"All right, all right, all right, all right," and she walked out to where the other parents were waiting with flowers."

Lisa said, "Everything looks like shit to me after my mother has seen it. (158, emphasis added)