GOING DEEPER
Your process for the last chapters called for you to read, and then reread, the short stories “The Dog in the Van” and “Visitation” and to make an assessment of whether they fit the dramatic arc, the traditional shape of a story.
In Greg Hollingshead’s “The Dog in the Van,” from his collection White Buick, the Crossleys, husband and wife, work at a university. One day, Jan notices a dog locked in a white van in their parking lot. The van is there before them. It leaves after they leave. When they first notice it, the dog has a graze mark—a bullet wound, maybe—on its leg. This moment could be of no consequence in the lives of many, but Jan Crossley is deeply affected by this dog, deeply concerned.
For Jan, checking on the dog becomes part of what she does. Her interest, her worry, grows until it verges on obsession. Or that’s how Dick Crossley sees it. He would rather ignore the dog as someone else’s business.
At the story’s centre, there is a problem: the welfare of an abused dog. In the traditional story arc, a problem, identified near the beginning, intensifies. If we ask does the problem of the dog get more difficult and complicated in this story, the answer is, yes, it certainly does.
Jan ascertains that the dog is locked in the van for as many as seventeen hours a day. Then a day arrives when the dog is out on the pavement tied to the wheel, an improvement, but when Jan approaches the dog, it has a fit and falls over. She calls the SPCA. The dog disappears. The next time the dog shows up in the van, Jan is more relieved than angry.
Then Jan meets the owner of the dog, Larry, and amazingly, they get on well—too well as far as Dick is concerned. Finally, in a violent electrical storm, Dick sees that the dog is throwing itself against the windows of the van in fear. In the story’s biggest scene, Dick attempts to help the dog. He gets as far as the van in the storm, sees the dog leaving bloody smears on the glass from smashing its body there. He opens the door, but slams it quickly closed, just as the dog’s body crashes against it. Dick walks away, repeating the belief with which he began this story: the dog is not his problem. Now, he absolutely means it.
After this climax, Jan seems inclined to continue the friendship with Larry, but Dick won’t stand for it. He won’t allow her to even speak to Larry on the phone, and that is seemingly the end of it, except that the dog is in the van in the parking lot at the end of the story, still part of their lives.
Without straining too hard, you can see the traditional structure in the story of the dog and the van. The story has an early development that shatters the main character’s equilibrium and creates the problem. The search for a solution moves from crisis to crisis. The action is always rising. Finally, it comes to a climax. But however easy this rising and climaxing structure is to decipher and map, it is also a deception. Unlike a Lassie episode, this story is not about a dog. It is the story of a marriage going wrong.
In creative writing classes the world over, a frequent question is: Whose story is it? At first glance, promoted by the deception of the traditional arc that stands above it as its primary feature, “The Dog in the Van” might seem to be the dog’s story. But if that were the case, the story would end with some transforming incident in the life of the dog. The dog would die. The dog would decide to move in with the Crossleys. The dog would run away. But what ends the story is the confrontation between the married couple, because the story has been about them all along (and more about Dick than about Jan).
What the dog is to the story is its catalyst. From the moment the dog enters their lives, it forces upheaval. It reveals opposing values. It forces them into collision. Jan’s natural instinct is to throw herself into the problem, ready to inconvenience, even endanger, herself to help the dog. She knows what is right for the dog, and she wants to see justice done. Dick’s attitude is that, though he doesn’t wish the dog ill, he doesn’t want any involvement with it. Everything Jan says about helping the dog, or understanding the problem, Dick counters with a statement about how its circumstances may not be as serious as they seem; how inevitably it is the owner’s dog, not theirs, and that they should stay out of it—meaning Jan should stay out of it. It is not far-fetched to say that this story is about Dick’s need to control Jan and about her need not to be controlled.
By the end of the story, the dog is even more than a catalyst. It has become the language of Dick and Jan’s marriage, the language Dick is attempting to speak when he tries and fails to help the dog in the storm. He is speaking it again when he demands that Jan not go on any further with Larry as a friend. Finally, the story speaks back to Dick in the language of the dog. At the end, the dog, still part of his life after his many attempts to be rid of it, comes to him and smiles.
To some extent short stories can be sorted into those that rely on rising action, suspense, and climax for their structure and those where the movement in the story is toward a new understanding. Both kinds of movement can be present in a story, woven together, and this is the case with “The Dog in the Van.”
Let’s look at the story again as a progression toward new understanding. Jan’s desire to help the dog is simply that: a desire to help the dog. She even has to say as much to Dick when he implies that she is acting out some kind of pantomime whose meaning is that she wants a replacement for their own dog: a dog that was killed.
“I want to help the dog,” she says.
If Jan’s goal is to help the dog in the van, can Dick say that his desire is as simple as not wanting to help the dog? His motivation is more convoluted and harder to pin down. He wants to avoid complication in his life and commitment to anything that might turn messy. He is full of fear of the dog and of its unseen owner. When the dog keels over, Dick thinks rabies. When Jan wants to confront the owner, Dick imagines some criminal, capable of harming them.
But above all, Dick is full of criticism of the way Jan does things. She’s like a dog herself he even suggests at one point, in her singularity of focus. She imagines the dog has emotions the dog doesn’t have. She is easily obsessed.
When he goes to the van in the storm, what is Dick trying to do? Is he trying to confront his fear and surmount it? Is he trying to gain Jan’s approval so she will prefer him over Larry? Or is he just trying to help the dog? He is certainly not following his rule of staying out of things.
And, finally, he is changed by it: not by his success at helping the dog, but by his failure to do so. Instead of trying to convince Jan to stop with the dog and its owner by circuitous and often deceitful argument, Dick comes right out and demands it. To his satisfaction at least, he is facing up to the way things really are between Jan and him, and he is facing up to the way he is. He is not a reasonable, calm man who can accept the tribulations life throws at him or the eccentricities of his wife. He is brittle and bothered, and not very brave, and he might as well let it all hang out.
But having done so, the world will not necessarily go along with what Dick wants. Jan is not necessarily convinced or changed by his wish to change her. And the dog has not gone anywhere.
In the beginning decades of its life as a literary form, the short story adhered to the traditional dramatic arc and the bang-up ending we call a climax. Around the turn of the twentieth century, things changed. In James Joyce’s only book of short stories, Dubliners, he replaced the traditional action climax with what he called “the epiphany,” a moment in the life of a fictional character after which all is different, even if the moment itself is barely noticeable to others. In a story called “The Little Cloud” the epiphany is the protagonist’s sudden failure of patience with his baby. He’s been left to sit with the baby by his wife. The baby will not stop crying. He gives it a big shake. Everyone including the reader and “the little cloud” himself would say such an act is completely out of character for him. Now, on the other side of this epiphany, it is not. It has undeniably happened. In one of my short stories, I call these points of epiphany “the small hinges where life bends sharply.”
In the Hollingshead story, the action/ adventure/ suspense arc (involving the dog) and the subtle move into greater self-awareness, the Joycean epiphany (involving Dick’s understanding of himself and his ways within his marriage) work in tandem. If you study modern short fiction, looking for these features, you will find many stories with this plurality of structure, and you’ll notice as well many catalysts. I can remember two stories where the catalyst was a household infestation of bugs. As it gets out of control, the problem of the bugs weighs on the family, reveals the flaws in the marriage. In one of my stories, “Bill’s Sperm Count,” a sperm test that Bill can never seem to get around to becomes the catalyst that reveals the flaws in and ends a marriage.
Before we leave “The Dog in the Van” and move on to “Visitation” another relationship between “The Dog in the Van” and the traditional structure of stories is worth pointing out. Because the traditional structure of drama is so drilled into our heads (about four times nightly for those who watch a lot of TV), a fiction writer can bargain against readers’ expectations. There is a lot of playfulness in the way “The Dog in the Van” does this, much dramatic irony in the progression of events. The traditional expectation for the dog in the van is that things will go from bad to worse. Against this expectation, the dog is suddenly out of the van one day and tied to the wheel. (It’s not much of an improvement, admittedly, but the dog, the Crossleys, and the readers will take what they can get.) Then just when things are looking up, they look down. The dog falls over. Sick.
Later, the story bargains against several expectations concerning the owner of the dog. First, we assume the owner will be a fiend, a pet-abusive violent criminal. We also assume that Jan will hate him, and, because Dick disagrees with Jan’s every thought and decision, that Dick will at least pretend to like him. What happens is that Dick stumbles on Jan and Larry having a merry chat. Larry is reasonable. Jan likes him. They share an interest in the well-being of the dog (as compared to Dick, who is always insisting he does not care). The story’s problem shifts suddenly from Jan’s interest in the dog to Jan’s interest in Larry. The humour of these shifts would not be possible if it weren’t for readers’ assumptions that stories will unfold according to the ancient rules of storytelling.
Rachel Wyatt’s “Visitation” is part of a linked short-story collection Mona Lisa Smiled a Little, in which the main character, Almeida, decides to leave her husband of many years, Joe, and live alone. She discovers just how conservative her family and the world are about an older woman’s quest for freedom and a better life.
The story “Visitation” is about the grief Almeida and Joe experience when one of their two daughters dies. The story is a good example of how much can happen in a story without resort to any kind of action/adventure/suspense arc at all. It shows that, without leaving the house, a story can still emotionally intensify into something almost unbearable, can still lead you on with questions about what will come next. In a story of action and suspense, the questions are typically about how to escape or what the bad guy will do next. The questions in a literary short story like “Visitation” tend to be closer to those asked in everyday life. Almeida (and readers) wonders what Almeida’s cousin Martha wants with her. Is it possible that she really is there to sell her grieving cousin a stay on a health farm? What will Almeida do to get rid of her?
One of the great sources of power in good literary fiction is that readers create fictional lives and fictional dilemmas of such fidelity to the world that we can imagine ourselves in them, and that is what produces the spell of fiction, the suspension of disbelief that allows us to enter the fiction and feel pain and elation along with the characters.
It would also be wrong to say that “Visitation” has no relationship to the traditional structure of drama because it happens over a piece of cake instead of on K-2. Rachel Wyatt demonstrates the opposite: that a story can create dramatic tension out of escalating agony brought on by the clueless conversational gaffes of another. The story is about grieving, and all the silly things that others do to allegedly relieve us of pain that can’t be relieved; pain from which we don’t even want relief. What we want is for Superman to fly backward around the world reversing its spin, as he did to reverse time and bring Lois Lane back from the dead. Failing that, we don’t want a casserole in a covered dish. We don’t want visitors with an agenda.
For the sake of drama, Cousin Martha turns her visit into a device of torture that she twists tight and then tighter. “Martha had come to ask the usual appalling questions,” thinks Almeida. Then later, “Every once in a while a clown appeared on the stage, to distract, annoy, leave you feeling worse off.” And still later, “Why not the rack, oh Lord! Why not a plague of frogs!” There is an escalation happening: an escalation of pain inside Almeida. It searches for an ending, a way to stop the pain.
And that’s before Martha begins to sell the merits of her and Erwin’s rest farm for the grieving.
Readers looking for a climax of the exterior dimensions of an electrical storm and a self-damaging dog won’t find it. As Almeida said, the clown came; the clown annoyed, distracted, and left her feeling worse—except that, in the Joycean sense, an epiphany is signalled by Almeida’s being subtly different after Martha goes. All her anger over the sympathetic acts she has been putting up with roars to the surface. She sits down and cries until exhausted. Then Joe comes home. She focuses his attention on a practical task, fixing the swing for their grandchildren. She then puts all her thoughts and energies into making a blue-cheese soufflé that her cousin said was on the menu of the grief farm. Somehow, inadvertently and ironically, the cousin has in some small way helped Almeida move to the next stage of pain.
Returning to the way that our in-built dramatic arc machine supplies assumptions about how the story will unfold, and how a good writer will bargain against those assumptions to achieve surprise and irony, the story leads us to expect or imagine an action climax: Almeida delivering some crushing verbal indictment to her cousin’s face, or maybe even a crushing boot to her backside. Almeida encourages us to expect this climax because she would like to do it, recognizes the sweet moment it would give her. But of course, given that this is a story with fidelity, from the point of view of a grieving but reasonable person, she does not. The line we have all heard before (“It was so good of you to come”) emerges from Almeida, and that little irony is what stands in the place of some other story’s sword fight. It is the epiphany.
“Visitation” also proves that humour and tragedy are, or can be, fictionally compatible. But I’ll return to the story for that purpose in a chapter about humour.
Stories that have only rising action and suspense tend not to be found in modern short fiction. They are more likely found on TV. In television drama, the emphasis is on plot, who catches whom, who gets the money, with reasons thrown in for motivation. The better the TV show, the more meaningful the characterization that occurs within the plot.
Literary short stories tend to be like “The Dog in the Van,” where the rising action combines with a powerful emotional, psychological turmoil that is the real story. Or they are stories like “Visitation” that have an increasing tension or discomfort or inner turmoil, rather than rising action, where the progress of the story is more psychological than active.
♦♦♦ Short Story Development
Two kinds of development in a short story are rising action and progression toward a new understanding.
RISING ACTION is action taken to solve a problem. Action rises because obstacles are encountered and the protagonist may fail. For example, bugs that were only in the basement are suddenly in the pantry. A time limit helps to make the action rise: act fast before the bugs infect the children.
PROGRESSION TOWARD A NEW UNDERSTANDING involves the psychology of characters the story is bringing into conflict. The characters jostle one another and against outside forces. They are pushed toward realizations, changes, unburdenings, dead ends, breakthroughs.
Before leaving the subject, I will try, briefly, to answer the question I am most frequently asked about structure: Does it really help a fiction writer to know any or all of these things about how dramatic structure works?
The truth is that none of the writers I know, including myself, get out their protractors at the beginning of writing a story and start defining and graphing a structure on which to slap them down. On the other hand, I believe that our knowing how stories are built by others, and our discovery of the shapes of experience that authors put fictional characters through, is important to our ability to write fiction. It may not be that important for writing the compulsive, instinctual first draft, when writers often try to forget what they’re doing rather than remember it better. But later, when you are trying to improve the first draft, trying to diagnose its flaws and to rebuild it to some conclusion that feels satisfyingly like an ending, an understanding of how fiction is structured does help. For example, it can help you discover flat spots where there is no powerful reason for the reader to go on. If the highest point of action is on page two of ten, you may have built a story that disappoints rather than entices. And so on.
Though it’s not something I would know how to be prescriptive about, I also believe that a better understanding of the structure of fiction can also help in the trancelike writing of the first draft, when the writer is looking for the story as much as writing it. It probably is better that we don’t think about structure then. It would break the spell. But that doesn’t stop the process from being silently informed by what we know.
As our understanding of fiction improves, as the number of fictional structures we know enlarges, we come to the act of writing fiction better trained, better equipped. There is more for our subconscious to draw on, which is my argument for understanding structure and narration and all the other elements that combine in the craft of fiction—and recognizing not just how they work in the writing but what effect they produce in the reading.
♦♦♦ Your Process
- It’s time to move from reading to writing—or at least to planning. Think up three ideas for short stories: a story that adheres to the traditional dramatic arc (rising action); a story that leads to an “epiphany” (progression to a new understanding); and a story that you would like to both write and read that does not rely on either structural device. Write down the story ideas in no more than a paragraph. Make sure in the first two that the problem is clearly stated and that the climax and epiphany relate back to the problem.
- The next chapter deals with character: the power of character to shape story, and the techniques used by authors to convey and build fictional characters. As preparation, read Edna Alford’s short story “Half-Past Eight”