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Welcome to the Slow Story Course.
Please do say hello in the comments and let us know where in the world you are joining from. I’m looking forward to getting to know you and your writing.
There are six workshops in total for this course designed to help you draft a new short story. They are being released once a fortnight over the next few months. We will be going slowly to build a story with deep foundations.
I’ve designed the course so that each workshop builds on the previous ones so it’s better to work through them in order. But you can of course use them in whatever way best suits your practice.
Workshop 1
Workshop 2
Losing the plot
As I mentioned in the last workshop, most short stories are not plot driven. They’re rooted in character and emotion. But that said, you do need a storyline. A narrative drive. A reason for the story to be told and to move it forward. These are often small, quiet elements rather than big action-filled scenes, which is what many people associate with “plot”.
In Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx (the version published in her 1999 collection expands slightly on this one from The New Yorker, which was published in 1997, and has a short prologue) the plot could be described as two young men, Ennis and Jack, work together one summer looking after sheep at a seasonal grazing range on Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming. They form an intense emotional and sexual bond but have to part ways at the end of the summer. Over the next twenty years, they reunite occasionally for brief liaisons on camping trips in remote settings.
But that description of the plot, doesn’t in any way tell you what the story is really about.
Brokeback Mountain is a story of forbidden love. Of suppressing your desires to conform to society’s expectations, and the soul-destroying reality of living in abject poverty and feeling powerless to direct the course of your life.
Ennis and Jack come from a culture that accepts and even celebrates toxic masculinity and anti-gay sentiments. Coming from poor families and lacking education, they both find it hard to break free from a life of short-term, poorly paid jobs. Due to the way they were brought up, both men have an unfulfilled need for love but also have difficulty recognising it when it comes along, or expressing it. Despite their feelings for each other, they both marry women have children, and keep their love a secret from everyone, even from themselves.
So as you can see, the plot of the story is minimal and its power comes from the characters and themes, and the emotional impact of those two elements working together.
So how has a feeling of forward movement been created in this story?
It’s to do with atmosphere, tone, connection to character and time and place. It’s about immersing the reader from the outset and emotionally connecting them to the characters.
If we look at the opening paragraph in The New Yorker version, which doesn’t have the prologue:
They were raised on small, poor ranches in opposite corners of the state, Jack Twist in Lightning Flat, up on the Montana border, Ennis del Mar from around Sage, near the Utah line, both high-school drop-out country boys with no prospects, brought up to hard work and privation, both rough-mannered, rough-spoken, inured to the stoic life. Ennis, reared by his older brother and sister after their parents drove off the only curve on Dead Horse Road, leaving them twenty-four dollars in cash and a two-mortgage ranch, applied at age fourteen for a hardship license that let him make the hour-long trip from the ranch to the high school. The pickup was old, no heater, one windshield wiper, and bad tires; when the transmission went, there was no money to fix it. He had wanted to be a sophomore, felt the word carried a kind of distinction, but the truck broke down short of it, pitching him directly into ranch work.
We’re not even directly in the point of view of either character here, starting far out with this omniscient narrator. But the setting, the background of the characters that is revealed, and the images created in our mind, instantly connect us to them and make us feel compassion. So we want to read on to find out how these two drop-out country boys will come together and what will happen to them when they do.
Symbols and motifs
We touched on this briefly in Workshop One but we’re going to look at it in more depth here. Motifs and symbols can bring more layers and depth to our stories, more meaning. They can elevate them to make sure the reader feels immersed as they make stories feel more intricate, more intimate.
What is the difference between the two? A symbol is usually used to illustrate a larger truth that the story is alluding to and it appears just once. A motif recurs and is tied to the emotional truths at the heart of the story and characters. Both can be physical objects, sounds, smells, ideas, locations, words, whatever your imagination makes them within the story.
In Brokeback Mountain, the mountain itself, which both characters return to in their minds, but never in real life, is a symbol of forbidden love. It’s the location of their idealised and private love where they feel far from the judgements and expectations that they know will await them when they leave if they were to be open about their feelings for each other. As they leave the mountain, the description of it foreshadows that the love it represents will be forever unattainable: “The mountain boiled with demonic energy, glazed with flickering broken-cloud light.” I find the name of the mountain to be full of symbolism too — broke meaning poor, and as both men’s backs are metaphorically, and spiritually, broken over and over again during the story.
Shirts are motifs within the story and used to signify much about the two men’s feelings for each other and the ways in which their relationship will unfold. In the opening of the story, when Ennis and Jack first meet in Joe Aguirre’s office, Ennis is wearing a “button-gaping shirt” with the use of gaping foreshadowing the loss to come, the wounds that the men will inflict on others, the wounds that will be inflicted on them.
When Jack is coming to visit for the first time after they leave the mountain, Ennis wears his best white shirt. Signifying how pure he feels his love for Jack is despite what society says and how they hide it. After Jack dies, Ennis visits his childhood home and discover that Jack’s mother has kept his room as it was. Looking in the wardrobe, he finds Jack’s shirt from their summer on Brokeback Mountain tucked away in the corner. The shirt has Ennis’s dried blood on the sleeve. Inside that shirt, is one of Ennis’s that he thought he’d lost. These shirts, fitted one within the other, symbolise their love for each other and its secrecy.
Ennis smells the shirts hoping to catch a scent of their time together but there is nothing there after so long, showing again the impossibility of returning to that summer. Ennis takes the shirts and hangs them in his trailer under a postcard picture of Brokeback Mountain, making a private shrine to their lost love.
Writing Prompts
So now we’re going further develop the story we’re working on so that the plot fades into the background and the character and emotion come to the fore. There are four writing prompts this week to get you applying everything we have just been discussing to your draft. Please do share your thoughts, feelings, ideas, and any snippets of writing you’d like to in the comments below. I will read and respond to them all!
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