Keeping it short
Everything you need to know about storytelling in 99 words
Word count, oh, word count.
If you write, and publish what you write, word count is that simpering angel sitting on your left shoulder telling you to make sure you don’t write too much.
The devil varies from writer to writer. For me, it’s Nic Cage in gigantic, lucite dentures and a fringed leather jacket the color of a bad LSD trip pushing me to indulge in the limitless fecundity of my imagination.
No doubt, it’s aggravating to have to conform to the arbitrarily concocted word limits of editors and clients, when all you want to do is write the story you’ve got inside your head, whether it’s 2,000 or 6,000 words.
But what if you could tell the 6,000-word story in 2,000 words? Or even 100 words?
Actually, you can.
Which is great news for most web writers, who are used to keeping it short, but may not realize that you can tell a compelling, nuanced story in just 100 words.
Excellent micro fiction isn’t that hard to find online. Sites like 100 Word Story and Monkey Bicycle specialize in it. You can occasionally find a stand-out news story that takes up no more space than recipe instructions.
But when I’m really in the mood for something short and powerful, I turn to Richard Brautigan.
If you’ve never read Brautigan, he came at the tail end of the Beats and just before the hippies. Brautigan’s most famous book is Trout Fishing in America, a very odd, very funny send-up of the sort of WPA reportage his literary forebears were doing a generation before him in the Great Depression.
But my favorite Brautigan story comes from another book, A Confederate General from Big Sur, where a layabout from San Francisco teams up with a delusional flaneur who believes he’s the great-grandson of an obscure Civil War general.
Early on, the two end up in a boarding house in San Francisco populated by the kinds of characters you’d expect to find at a San Francisco flophouse circa 1960.
Here’s Brautigan’s story. It’s so short I can quote it in full.
“The other room on the second floor was occupied by a man who always said hello in the morning and good evening at night. It was nice of him. One day in February he went down to the community kitchen and roasted a turkey.
He spent hours basting the bird and preparing a grand meal. Many chestnuts and mushrooms were in evidence. After he was finished he took the bird upstairs with him and and never used the kitchen again.
Shortly after that, I believe it was Tuesday, he stopped saying hello in the morning and good evening at night.”
And with that, this 99-word chapter, number four, melts into the picaresque stream of adventures that is A Confederate General from Big Sur. It’s so quiet you might not even notice how well it’s constructed, so let’s take a look.
1. If you can sketch a character in a sentence, then don’t write two.
Writing economically means being able to zoom in on the kinds of details that sustain interest, and weeding out the ones that do nothing. Brautigan knew at some point in the writing, or editing, process that investing too many words in his character would detract from the deadpan humor and pacing. Keeping it brief, on the other hand, would let him shine the spotlight on the true driver of this very short story: the man’s weird behavior. Which brings us to point two.
2. Always plant a carrot.
Our brains have to be figuring something out while we’re reading, even if we’re just parsing a billboard ad. When we solve the problem, our interest nosedives. Brautigan’s carrot comes at the end of the first paragraph. A nice man roasting a turkey in a flophouse? What’s going on there? We know something’s going to happen, so we’re invested in reading to the end. Reading is purely selfish that way. Of course, entertaining our brains isn’t enough. When we get to the end of the story, our brains have got to fit all the pieces of the puzzle back together in a way that satisfies us.
3. Your audience shouldn’t be asking the two questions no writer ever wants to hear: “Huh?” or “So what?”
The first means it didn’t make sense. The second means your story had no impact. Brautigan not only nails the ending. He adds a brilliant, absurd nuance in the very last sentence that forces you to rethink everything you’ve just read. The “friendly” neighbor hasn’t just hoarded a turkey. He’s completely transformed into, or revealed himself as, a misanthropic recluse.
The take-away
You can see just how much story you can fit into 99 words. How much of it was conscious effort on Brautigan’s part? Maybe very little. Brautigan was a master storyteller.
But Brautigan didn’t get there overnight. I’m sure he had many late-night conversations with his angel, word count, before he learned to tell short stories like this. (He probably had a very good editor, too.)
In the meantime, the next time you hear the devil on your right shoulder telling you to lay on your descriptive genius like McDonald’s pancake syrup, think twice, take a deep breath, and bend your ear to the other shoulder.
