ON WRITING

Looking at Short Stories Looking at short stories as readers and writers together should be a companionable thing. And why not? Stories in their bardic and fairy-tale beginnings were told, the listenersand judgersall in a circle. E. M. Forster, in Aspects of the Novel, described the great age of the narrative: Neanderthal man listened to stories, if one may judge by the shape of his skull. The primitive audience was an audience of shock-heads, gaping around the camp-fire, fatigued with contending against the mammoth or woolly-rhinoceros, and only kept awake by suspense. What would happen next? The novelist droned on, and as soon as the audience guessed what happened next, they either fell asleep or killed him. That suspense is still with us, but it seems to me that now it exists as something shared. Reader and writer make it a double experience. It is part of the great thing in which they share mostpleasure. And it is certainly part of the strong natural curiosity which readers feel to varying degree and which writers feel to the most compelling degree as to how any one story ever gets told. The only way a writer can satisfy his own curiosity is to write it. And how different this already makes it from telling it! Suspense, pleasure, curiosity, all are bound up in the making of the written story. Forster went on to distinguish between what Neanderthal man told, the narrative thread, and what the written story has made into an art, the plot. "The king died and then the queen died" is the narrative thread; "The king died and then the queen died of grief" is a plot. We have all come from asking What next? to asking Why? The word "which," of course, opened up everything, or as much of everything as the writer is able to handle. To take a story: Jack Potter, the town marshal of Yellow Sky, has gone to San Anton' and got married and is bringing his bride back in a Pullman as a dazzling surprise for his hometown. And while the train is on its way, back in Yellow Sky Scratchy Wilson gets drunk and turns loose with both hands. Everybody runs to cover: he has come to shoot up the town. "And his boots had red tops with gilded imprints, of the kind beloved in winter by little sledding boys on the hillsides of New England . . . The only sounds were his terrible invitations . . . He comfortably fusilladed the windows of his most intimate friend. The man was playing with the town; it was a toy for him." The train comes in, Scratchy and the marshal are face to face, and Potter says, "I ain't got a gun on me, Scratchy," and takes only a minute to make up his mind to be shot on his wedding day. "If you ain't got a gun, why ain't you got a gun?" "I ain't got a gun because I've just come from San Anton' with my wife. I'm married." "Married? Married? . . . Is this the lady?" "Yes; this is the lady." " 'Well,' said Wilson at last, slowly, I s'pose it's all off now.' He was not a student of chivalry; it was merely that in the presence of this condition he was a simple child of the earlier plains." He picked up his starboard revolver, and, placing both weapons in their holsters, he went away. Two predicaments meet here, in Stephen Crane's "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky." You might say they are magnetized toward each otherand collide. One is vanquished with neatness and absurdity; as he goes away, Scratchy's "feet made funnel-shaped tracks in the heavy sand." Here are the plainest equivalents of comedy, two situations in a construction simple asWelty, Eudora is the author of 'ON WRITING', published 2002 under ISBN 9780679642701 and ISBN 0679642706.