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Photo by Kenneth SurilloToday’s post is by novelist and writing instructor Lesley Krueger.
A few years ago, a friend and I were walking past a renovation project. A complete gut job of a two-story brick house across the street from ours.
“Did you know the people who lived there?” she asked.
“I never spoke to them. They weren’t exactly sociable. But one day, something really strange happened.”
The man had moved in sometime in the late 1990s or early 2000s. I didn’t see him very often, but occasionally he’d arrive home after a trip to the Blockbuster store around the corner.
Remember Blockbuster? He’d be carrying a couple of dozen videos stacked on his outstretched arms, a bearded man in his late 30s or early 40s, a little scruffy, always wearing jeans. The lights were never on in the front part of the house. Watching him from my upstairs study, I figured he lived in the rooms facing the backyard and went in and out the back door for less important things than videos. Say, food.
A woman moved in more than a decade later. She was probably in her 30s: a slight woman, similarly dressed. They seemed like a fond couple. The door of their house had a small curtained window near the top, and whenever one of them left, the other would stand behind the closed door holding the curtains apart and waving. The person outside turned and waved several times as they walked away. As soon as they disappeared from sight, the curtains fell closed.
After several years of this, the woman came out the door one day awkwardly pushing an old-fashioned baby carriage. As usual, the man watched from the window in the door and waved, not helping her maneuver the carriage down the steps.
When she was safely down, the woman turned and waved back in the usual fashion as she walked away. Then the curtains closed and she continued pushing the baby carriage down the street. I was surprised, not having noticed that she was pregnant.
This went on for a while. Several months? Then one day, I happened to be walking up the sidewalk as the woman came toward me pushing the baby carriage. I smiled at her, and as I passed the carriage, I leaned down ready to goo and gaw.
Inside was a doll. A life-sized doll, a plastic baby with cupid’s-bow lips and blushing cheeks. The woman still didn’t look pregnant. I don’t think she was practicing. She was pushing a doll in a baby carriage, and she didn’t acknowledge me as she continued walking.
“They sold the house a few months later,” I told my friend. “Not that I think there’s any connection to the fact I saw the doll.”
“That’s so weird,” my friend said. “You should write it down and put it in a story collection. I mean, you barely have to write it. Don’t people publish short short stories?”
Yes, they do. But this wasn’t a story, it was an anecdote.
“What’s the difference?” my friend asked.
A lot, actually. There are ways to turn anecdotes into stories, but there’s a trick. You can’t make the mistake of thinking a piece of fiction arrives on your doorstep like a restaurant delivery, already cooked.
My friend wanted to know how.
The ending is a good place to start
The anecdote about our former neighbors led up to the punchline about the doll. Without it, I would have had nothing memorable to say about my former neighbors. They waved at each other from the window in the door. They seemed to live in the back of the house. But mention the doll and boom.
A hundred years ago, a surprise twist at the end of a story was both popular and critically acclaimed. Short stories by O. Henry—the pen name of a rogue named William Henry Porter—started appearing weekly in the New York World Sunday Magazine in 1902. The publisher of the World was Joseph Pulitzer, founder of the prizes, but his newspaper was a rag, specializing in lurid stories about sex and scandals. Yellow journalism.
O. Henry’s stories were on the same level. In one of his most famous, “The Gift of the Magi,” a broke young wife wants to give her beloved husband a spectacular Christmas present. We follow her as she sells her long and beautiful hair to a wigmaker. Afterward, she uses the windfall to buy a platinum fob that will set off her husband’s prized gold watch. (Adjectives used in period style.)
Christmas morning. Time to unwrap presents. Opening hers, the young wife discovers a set of jeweled hair combs that, we’re told, she had long worshipped in a Broadway window. Her broke young husband has sold his prized gold watch to buy her the combs. And of course she can’t use the combs in her hack-off hair, while he no longer has a watch for the fob.
Boom.
O. Henry wrote in the style of (i.e. copied) the French author Guy de Maupassant also wildly popular, who had started publishing his short stories 20 years earlier. In one of his most famous, “The Necklace,” a young woman borrows a diamond necklace from a rich acquaintance to wear to a ball, hoping to impress her husband’s superiors. On the way home, she discovers that she’s lost the necklace. The young couple can’t bring themselves to confess the loss to the rich woman, so they go 36,000 francs in debt to buy an identical diamond necklace to give back.
Afterward, the couple toils for a decade to pay off the enormous debt. At the end of this time, the woman (who has lost her youthful beauty) runs into her acquaintance (who doesn’t recognize her). The woman confesses everything—at which point the horrified acquaintance reveals the diamond necklace was a fake worth only 500 francs.
Boom.
What’s wrong with those stories?
Do you actually believe either “The Necklace” or “The Gift of the Magi?” Would either of those things ever really happen? The writers are working toward a punchline and, in both cases, a moral. O. Henry goes all sentimental in his last paragraph about giving up your most precious possessions for love; de Maupassant advocates ’fessing up.
But the authors have sacrificed both subtlety and realism to get there. More than 100 years later, we want a story to ring true. We also want our characters to develop, not simply progress through the narration to reach a pre-determined ending. These days, I would classify both as something closer to anecdotes.
And what about the doll in the baby carriage? It really happened, but it’s also pretty hard to believe.
“That’s so weird,” my friend said.
When I told someone else: “Oh, come on. Not really?”
Ironically, fiction has to be more credible than real life. Anecdotes tend to say, “You’re not going to believe this one,” and we’re not entirely sure we do. We believe stories because they go deeper than that, and because they don’t end any more neatly than life does.
Anton Chekhov was writing at the same time as de Maupassant and O. Henry, but his stories aren’t tied up neatly and they’ve lasted far better. Here’s the final paragraph of one of his most celebrated short stories, “The Lady With the Little Dog,” about a man and a woman who fall in love while married to other people.
And it seemed as though in a little while the solution would be found, and then a new and splendid life would begin; and it was clear to both of them that they still had a long, long way to go, and that the most complicated and difficult part of it was only just beginning.
Then there’s the long middle…
I was talking about this recently with a writer friend. We agreed that the other big difference between a short story and an anecdote is that in a story, something needs to change. “It can be subtle,” she said. “In fact, it probably should be. Something subtle in the main character’s understanding.”
Let’s break that down.
In the case of the baby carriage anecdote, I was relating what happened from the outside, simply telling what I’d seen. That made for a simple linear narrative. If I had speculated about what was going on between the couple, I would have been fictionalizing the situation, because I had no idea. Anyway, speculating about their relationship would have ruined my boom boom anecdote, making it too long and diffuse.
But if I were to write the baby carriage anecdote into a story, I’d stop looking at the couple from across the street and imagine myself in the house with them. Once inside, I would want to show the ways in which they behaved toward each other, some sort of dialogue and behavior leading up to a moment when one of them went out to shop. Then it would have to be clear that it was normal for the other to watch their partner head off from the window in the door. That’s just what they did.
But in order to seed the sort of change that my writer friend mentioned, I’d have to give one of them a goal. Something they were working toward. Maybe in this case, we’d become aware before too long that the woman wanted to have a child, feeling deadline pressure in her late 30s. I’ve had friends in that situation, so I could draw on that.
Maybe we’d learn that she’s frightened of failing to get pregnant, and just as scared of succeeding. The man is in his 50s and isn’t sure what he wants. But he tries to put that aside, since she wants it so much, and so far she’s failing.
With this central dilemma established, maybe I’d draw on the things I’d observed and have them play videogames in the dark front room of their house, where they’ve put blackout blinds in the window. Maybe they like cosplay? In any case, the woman dresses increasingly fem, and there are dolls in there somewhere: in the games, in her dreams, in memories. It’s a little creepy, and something fertility-related happens, which is always painful and often heartrending.
Meanwhile, the husband feels… what? Once they were happy. Now, to hack Tolstoy, they’re each unhappy in their own way.
I don’t think I’d put a doll in a baby carriage at the end of the story, because it feels a little over-obvious and unreal, even though it happened.
Instead, the increasing tension between the woman and the man would show itself in the way they watch each other out the window. In the end, I think one might watch the other leave; I don’t know which. As he or she stands inside, holding the curtains apart, they’re not sure if their partner is going to come back, or even if they want them to. Then they let the curtains drop.
The point being?
As I started out saying an anecdote isn’t a story, but you can turn it into one. In this case, I’m not going to. But if I did, you can see what I’d do:
- Set up the main characters in their house, which is a character in itself.
- Introduce a goal, with understandable obstacles.
- Have the goal create increasing conflict between the characters.
- Show a moment when this conflict changes the relationship.
- Don’t work toward a pre-determined ending, but allow the story to close earlier than the anecdote that inspired it.
Let’s finish off with another anecdote.
The other day, I was walking along the shopping street close to the place where Blockbuster used to be. There’s a bar, and out front, two guys in their early 20s sat slouched on chairs shoved up against the brick storefront. They were wearing grey hoodies, the hoods drawn down to cover their faces, their hands jammed into their jeans pockets, long legs stretched out.
Between them lay a grizzled old basset hound with droopy cheeks and big floppy ears that raised its head as I approached. You know the way dogs can look up and the whites of their eyes show? The hound dog gave me an intelligent, slightly quizzical look, and I couldn’t help but smile.
“That’s a great dog,” I called to the hoodies.
To my surprise, they both stirred themselves, sitting up and sounding unexpectedly happy.
“Great dog.” “Best dog.” “You got it.”
“I can see he’s a good boy,” I called.
“Girl. She’s a girl. She’s a real good girl.”
“Even better,” I said.
As I continued walking, cries of, “She is,” and “That’s her,” sounded behind me. When I reached the corner, I glanced back and saw the kids subsiding into their chairs. The dog’s head was already back onto her crossed paws as if nothing had happened.
Anecdote. But maybe I’ll use it in a piece I write when a character goes for a walk and something small needs to happen. It makes the character realize—what?
Anecdotes can come in handy in several different ways. That’s why I advocate taking out the earbuds, being nosy, talking to people. Afterward, you can take what happened and morph it.
Then you’ve got something new.
For a companion piece to this article, visit Lesley’s Substack.
