Greetings, writers—
How are those story drafts coming? Do you have 400 words? 1000? 2000? 20? However many you’ve got, you’re doing great.
And if you’re not attempting a short story at all, I’m sure you’re doing great at something else. Maybe you’re writing a poem or painting a portrait or sewing a quilt. Maybe you’re being a good parent or a thoughtful neighbor, or maybe you’re volunteering, reading an excellent book, calling your mother, or in one way or other way putting positive energy into the world. Whatever it is1, you’re doing great.
And guess what—you can still start a story if you want to. We’re only on week three of eight. Plenty of time to catch up.
So let’s say that I have 2000 words of the story that I talked about last week.2 I’ve got a story I’m interested in telling and invested in telling well, and I’ve got a new point of view that I’m eager to explore. So what do I want now?
I want a clock. Which means you want a clock. This is the third assignment.
You probably don’t want a literal clock, counting down the seconds like in the SNL Macgruber videos my kid thinks are so funny. What you want, really, is a constraint—a time limit on the story that the reader understands from the get-go, or at least can sense. Okay, I will have X amount of time to spend with these characters. X amount of time before the conflict is resolved or transformed.
A clock can be a day (Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf; They Both Die at the End by Adam Silvera), or a road trip (On the Road by Jack Kerouac; First Love by James Patterson and yours truly), or a summer weekend (Seating Arrangements by Maggie Shipstead; someone help me with another title?).
A clock can be the arc of a marriage or a journey toward sobriety. In a very bad dance movie I saw when I was sick, it was the countdown to the big competition. And yes, the clock could also be the timer on a bomb. 3
The point is that you deliberately use time to add urgency to your story. And your clock, whatever it is, should arise naturally out of the anecdote that you began with.
I’m not sure what the clock for my story will be yet. It could be the long, hog-smelling summer I mentioned last week. (In August, the “me” character would quit darkening Danny’s euchre table and go back to a teacher and a dorm parent.) But if I go that route, then the rabbit’s death becomes one event among many, and I want it to be more important than that.
So maybe the clock is a single day, a day that Danny and Troy and their friends are getting ready to host one of their giant barbecues. Everyone from the Iowa City co-op is coming, even the guy who used to come up close behind me when I was stocking wine and drawl “Murder ya,” as he slid past.4
And I don’t know, maybe someone suggests that Troy and Danny cook the rabbit5. Maybe they do. Maybe that widens the rift between the boys and the “me,” or maybe somehow it closes it up a little. Or maybe story isn’t about the “me” as much as it is about Danny and Troy, and their friendship, and the world they lived in, a world that I was a part of only briefly. I’ll have to wait and see what happens when I write it.
Tell me what it is!
I don’t. I wrote a bunch of chapters on an entirely new novel for some inexplicable reason.
Here’s writer Lee Martin on clocks: “I feel it’s my job in any narrative I write to exert pressures on my main characters until something significant that’s been submerged rises to the top. Sometimes, though, we forget the role time can play in that pressure. For the purpose of illustration, let’s say you’re on a shopping trip with a family member. It’s a beautiful spring day, you have no pressing obligations, you’ve got all the time in the world. That doesn’t make for a very interesting story because there’s no tension and there’s no pressure on the characters. For the purpose of contrast, let’s say you’re on this same shopping trip, but this time it’s late in the day and you have to be home by six o’clock because if you’re not, you’ll miss a very important phone call. Now the clock is ticking, and you’re feeling the pressure of time, and what might have been your husband’s good-natured attempt at a joke becomes irritating and you realize you’ve always disliked that part of him… A time constraint will always add pressure to your characters.”
This is true. It was not actually threatening, but it was super weird.
This did not really happen. But I just remembered that one of the other teaches at the Quaker school had trained her dog to catch rabbits out on the school prairie so she could put them in stew. Even more shocking to me was that she’d grown up in the suburbs—not usually a place where one learned those skills.