Sometimes known as the American Maupassant, O Henry\u2019s stories are tightly plotted narratives of ordinary lives with lots of humour that usually end with a classic sting in the tale that, while surprising, flows with unerring logic from the story\u2019s premise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In this classic tale, we know the whole set-up within a few lines. It is Christmas and Della has no money to buy a present for her beloved husband James. In their whole house they possess only two things that they really value: his gold watch and her golden hair. In a formula that has been much copied since, we watch Della sell her golden locks to raise money to buy a fancy fob for James\u2019s watch, while unbeknownst to her he has pawned his watch to buy her a set of ivory combs that she has long coveted for her (now departed) hair!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is a tale that sounds tragic, but is actually heartening, because in the end the couple are confirmed in their real gift: the love they bear each other. (Plus, of course, Della\u2019s hair will grow back!) But it all stems from a single telling detail: that opening cinematic detail of a tiny sum of money, piled up in pennies and scrimped from tense negotiations with tradespeople, that is all Della thinks she has to show James how much she loves him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. The Paradox<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIn the beginning, Sanford Carter was ashamed of becoming an Army cook. This was not from snobbery, at least not from snobbery of the most direct sort. During the two and a half years Carter had been in the Army he had come to hate cooks more and more. They existed for him as a symbol of all that was corrupt, overbearing, stupid, and privileged in Army life\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
From \u2018The Language of Men,\u2019 by Normal Mailer<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Published in 1953, \u2018The Language of Men\u2019 tells the story of an over-sensitive, frustrated serviceman who, after years of being passed up for promotion and never finding his niche in the army, ends up as a cook \u2013 the thing he hates most about the army. Immediately we are curious: What will happen to a man who becomes the thing he most despises?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Carter feels that he never manages to understand other men, to feel either equal to them or able to lead them. \u2018Whenever responsibility had been handed to him, he had discharged it miserably, tensely, over conscientiously. He had always asked too many questions, he had worried the task too severely, he had conveyed his nervousness to the men he was supposed to lead.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even after starting to enjoy his work as a cook, the story builds to an incident where the men come to him and ask for a tin of oil for a fish fry-up they are organising \u2013 a party to which he is not invited. Carter stands his ground, and earns some grudging respect, but then undercuts it all again after the event with his \u2018unmanliness\u2019 \u2013 the true source of his self-disgust.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The whole drama of a man failing to fit in with and gain respect among other men is foreshadowed<\/a> in the paradox that\u2019s set in motion in the story\u2019s opening lines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cParis was blockaded, starved, in its death agony. Sparrows were becoming scarcer and scarcer on the rooftops and the sewers were being depopulated. One ate whatever one could get.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As he was strolling sadly along the outer boulevard one bright January morning, his hands in his trousers pockets and his stomach empty, M. Morissot, watchmaker by trade but local militiaman for the time being, stopped short before a fellow militiaman whom he recognized as a friend. It was M Sauvage, a riverside acquaintance.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n From \u2018Two Friends,\u2019 by Guy de Maupassant<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n A protege of Flaubert and the author of the novel Bel-Ami<\/em>, Maupassant wrote over 300 short stories, many of them \u2013 like this one \u2013 set during the Franco-Prussian war, and showing how innocent lives are swept up and crushed by futile, brutal conflict.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This story starts with a brief paragraph of context and another telling detail: the absence of sparrows. At this point in the conflict, the Prussian army has established a blockade around Paris and is seeking to starve out its citizens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The two friends of the title were passionate fishermen in peacetime, and after a chance encounter they convince each other to go off and fish once again. As well as the hunger they feel, they are motivated by a hankering for a return to the innocent pleasures of their pre-war lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n They slip out past the French lines, to an area where they think they will be safe, but after a brief interval of bliss the Prussians detect them, with tragic consequences\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n The opening line describes the war situation in vivid, journalistic terms, after which we are plunged into the tale of these two innocents. In a few telling phrases, it provides context and general background for the very particular tragedy which is about to ensue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cMargot met Robert on a Wednesday night toward the end of her fall semester. She was working behind the concession stand at the artsy movie theatre downtown when he came in and bought a large popcorn and a box of Red Vines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThat\u2019s an\u2026 unusual choice,\u201d she said. \u201cI don\u2019t think I\u2019ve ever actually sold a box of Red Vines before.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n From \u2018Cat Person,\u2019 by Kristen Roupenian<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n \u2018Cat Person,\u2019 reportedly the first short story ever to go viral, tells a simple tale of a doomed romantic encounter. Margot, a student, meets an older guy, Robert, and they begin a flirtation that turns into a date that turns into a rather unsatisfactory (for her) sexual encounter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Robert starts off as rather funny and charming, but over time we see that he is needy, insensitive, possessive, and utterly unaware of what Margot is thinking or feeling. Margot regrets the whole thing but doesn\u2019t know how to tell him; Robert, when he is let down, turns all-too-predictably toxic. In short order he goes from mooning after her to demanding who she\u2019s slept with to calling her a \u2018whore.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n This sequence of events struck a chord with many, many people because it is clearly so familiar. The story emphasises the banality of the whole progression by narrating events in a straightforwardly chronological, anecdotal style, right from the opening paragraph. This approach serves to underline the depressing banality of Robert\u2019s misogyny while implicitly asking the question: Why should women have to accept this as normal?<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n \u201cAnd after all the weather was ideal. They could not have had a more perfect day for a party if they had ordered it. Windless, warm, the sky without a cloud. Only the blue was veiled with a haze of light gold, as it is sometimes in early summer. The gardener had been up since dawn, mowing the lawns and sweeping them, until the grass and the dark flat rosettes where the daisy plants had been seemed to shine. As for the roses, you could not help feeling they understood that roses are the only flowers that -parties; the only flowers that everybody is certain of knowing. Hundreds, yes, literally hundreds, had come out in a single night; the green bushes bowed down as though they had been visited by archangels.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n From \u2018The Garden Party,\u2019 by Katherine Mansfield<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Literally \u2018in the middle of things\u2019, an in media res<\/a> <\/em>beginning is where the story drops us into the middle of the action of the narrative, so that we are instantly caught up in events. In this case, we are plunged into the excited bustle of a well-to-do family preparing a sumptuous garden party, and the story does a fantastic job of building up the anticipation and painting a picture of the affluence of the hosts. There is a marquee to put up, a band on its way, an enormous delivery of fancy flowers, fifteen kinds of sandwich, and a retinue of servants to ensure everything is ready.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Beginning with \u2018and\u2019 adds to this effect, giving us to understand that garden-party fever has been going on already for days, and seeming to hark back to earlier worries about what the weather would be like on the day. But against all this blithely affluent gaiety comes the story\u2019s turning point: news that a poor workingman living in a cottage nearby has died in a sudden accident.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Laura, a daughter of the house, wonders if it appropriate to continue with the party, especially as all the noise and music and bustle will carry to the grieving widow (who also has six children, we later discover). But just as happens to the reader with the introduction, she is swept along by the occasion, and only really reconsiders the incident at the end of a successful party, when her mother suggest she take a basket of sandwiches from the party down to the widow. Laura\u2019s reaction to this difficult task is initially ambiguous, but ultimately it seems as if again she finds a way to paint the tragedy in complacently optimistic colours, choosing to find a serenity and beauty on the dead man\u2019s face and so blind herself to the grim reality of the tragedy and the agony of the grieving wife.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe thing about being the murdered extra is you set the plot in motion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You were a girl good at walking past cameras, background girl, corner-of-the-frame girl. Never-held-a-script girl, went-where-the-director-said girl.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You\u2019ll be found in an alley, it\u2019s always an alley for girls like you, didn\u2019t-quite-make-it girls, living-four-to-a-one-bedroom-apartment girls. You\u2019ll be found in an alley, you\u2019ll be mistaken for a broken mannequin at first, you\u2019ll be given a nickname. Blue Violet, White Rose, something reminiscent of Elizabeth Short, that first girl like you, that most famous one. The kind of dead girl who never really dies.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n From \u2018Being the Murdered Extra,\u2019 by Cathy Ulrich<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Cathy Ulrich\u2019s extraordinary \u2018Murdered Ladies\u2019 flash fictions<\/a> present a series of stories \u2013 there are 40 of them in her collection, Ghosts of You<\/a><\/em> \u2013 which always begin with the same line: The thing about being the murdered extra\/girlfriend\/moll\/classmate\/witch\/dancer [etc] is you set the plot in motion.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s a thought-provoking line, which grows in power with every repetition. On the face of it seems strange to see these women as setting the plot in motion, when they are all victims of male violence. But we start to see that what they set in motion is actually the story that the people who survive them will appropriate from their lost lives, and blithely relate in their absence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Each woman may set her plot in motion, but in each case she is not alive to explain how everyone gets her wrong, or projects their own version of events to absolve themselves too easily. We see that this theft of each woman\u2019s own story is another violence that is done to them, something the stories seek in some small way to redeem. As Ulrich says: \u2018Every story is looking for the lost girl from the title [\u2026] I am looking for the lost in these stories. I don\u2019t know if I will ever find them.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe north and the west and the south are good hunting ground, but it is forbidden to go east. It is forbidden to go to any of the Dead Places except to search for metal and then he who touches the metal must be a priest or the son of a priest. Afterwards, both the man and the metal must be purified. These are the rules and the laws; they are well made. It is forbidden to cross the great river and look upon the place that was the Place of the Gods\u2014this is most strictly forbidden. We do not even say its name though we know its name. It is there that spirits live, and demons\u2014it is there that there are the ashes of the Great Burning. These things are forbidden\u2014they have been forbidden since the beginning of time.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n From \u2018By the Waters of Babylon,\u2019 by Stephen Vincent Ben\u00e9t<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n In any story that seeks to build a world that is not ours, there is some work to be done in establishing the reality of that world \u2013 its customs, its landscape, its people, its rules. World-building stories can sometimes fall down when they indulge in too much of an expository info dump, as the accumulation of background detail can quickly dent narrative momentum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What\u2019s so clever about the start of this story is that the rules are themselves the engine of the plot. We pan cinematically across the edges of the story\u2019s territory, and understand the legends and forbidden areas of this world. But the quest of the narrator \u2013 who is indeed the son of a priest \u2013 will take him east, into the forbidden Place of the Gods (about which, of course, we are already very curious). At the outset of the story we do not the time in which the story is set, what kind of being he is, or where he lives. But all these things will be revealed as the narrator\u2019s journey through a post-apocalyptic, post-technological world takes him to places that gradually start to seem very familiar\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe day my son Laurie started kindergarten he renounced corduroy overalls with bibs and began wearing blue jeans with a belt; I watched him go off the first morning with the older girl next door, seeing clearly that an era of my life was ended, my sweet-voiced nursery-school tot replaced by a longtrousered, swaggering character who forgot to stop at the corner and wave good-bye to me.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n From \u2018Charles,\u2019 by Shirley Jackson<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Screenwriting guru Robert Mckee describes the inciting incident as a moment that \u2018radically upsets the balance of forces in your protagonist\u2019s life\u2019. It\u2019s the moment when our main character is plunged out of their normal routine and a challenge or quest appears which will shape their journey, and with it the rest of the story. It\u2019s common to locate this point near the start of the story after some introductory \u2018normality,\u2019 so that we can understand how the main character\u2019s life is to be disrupted. I won\u2019t spoil the ending, except to say that there is perhaps a clue in the mother\u2019s lament in the opening paragraph about the end of an era of innocence\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cMY LOVER IS experiencing reverse evolution. I tell no one. I don\u2019t know how it happened, only that one day he was my lover and the next he was some kind of ape. It\u2019s been a month, and now he\u2019s a sea turtle.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n From \u2018The Rememberer,\u2019 by Aimee Bender<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Aimee Bender\u2019s story begins by asking the reader to imagine something extraordinarily counterfactual: that her lover is regressing through millennia, going through the evolutionary process so fast \u2013 a million years a day, in reverse \u2013 that we can actually track his progress by the day. One day he is a baboon, another a salamander; eventually he is no longer even visible to the naked eye.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As with so many of Bendee\u2019s stories the result is mournful, strange, poetic and profound. She takes a surreal thought like this and turns into a powerful meditation on memory, the difference between evolution and maturity, speciesism and loss. And it all begins with that challenging idea which confronts us in the very first sentence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201c1-0. Who would expect the Embassy of Cambodia? Nobody. Nobody could have expected it, or be expecting it. It\u2019s a surprise, to us all. The Embassy of Cambodia!<\/p>\n\n\n\n Next door to the embassy is a health center. On the other side, a row of private residences, most of them belonging to wealthy Arabs (or so we, the people of Willesden, contend). They have Corinthian pillars on either side of their front doors, and\u2014it\u2019s widely believed\u2014swimming pools out back. The embassy, by contrast, is not very grand. It is only a four- or five-bedroom North London suburban villa, built at some point in the thirties, surrounded by a red brick wall, about eight feet high. And back and forth, cresting this wall horizontally, flies a shuttlecock. They are playing badminton in the Embassy of Cambodia. Pock, smash. Pock, smash.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n From \u2018The Embassy of Cambodia,\u2019 by Zadie Smith<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n This subtle and absorbing story from Zadie Smith opens with a mystery: an embassy, set in a leafy north London suburb rather than a grand central district of the city, and a wall, behind which a mysterious game of badminton is being played. The rest of the story picks at this mystery and uses the imagined score in the ongoing game-playing as a backdrop to the unfolding tale of Fatou, a domestic servant to the affluent Derawals, who has escaped servitude and dodged abuse in Africa only to face privations and hardships in London.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Each mini-chapter of the story is headed with a score from the badminton match \u2013 from 1-0 up to 21-0. This mechanism provides a rhythmic framework to the tale. We may never learn who actually holds the rackets, but we see that the back-and-forth motion behind the wall of an embassy \u2013 an institution with the power to grant deny or people access to whole a country \u2013 is a fitting counterpoint to the enforced travels of impoverished migrants, and to the desperate movements of Fatou\u2019s hopes and fears in a world where she has little agency or resources, and only one friend.<\/p>\n\n\n\r\n Edit your short story to perfection<\/p>\r\n <\/a>\r\n <\/div>\r\n Get actionable and professional editorial feedback on your short story or a collection up to 50,000 words. We’ll match you with an editor who can help you polish your manuscript ready for submission. Express Services and Premium Member discounts are available.<\/p>\n<\/div> 3. The Historical Backdrop<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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4. The Anecdotal Approach<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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5. In Media Res<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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<\/figure>\n\n\n\n6. The Refrain<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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7. Setting The Rules<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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8. Beginning With The Inciting Incident<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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But here the inciting incident is placed by mystery and horror writer Shirley Jackson \u2013 best known for The Haunting of Hill House <\/em>\u2013 at the very start of the story. Everything that happens flows from Laurie starting kindergarten. Laurie gets cheekier and less innocent with each passing day, as he brings home increasingly hair-raising tales of an even naughtier boy called Charles. The whole story deals with the comic escalation of Charles\u2019 behaviour, as reader and narrator alike become ever more curious to meet the errant child and speculate on what his parents are like.<\/p>\n\n\n\n9. The Thought Experiment<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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10. THE CONUNDRUM<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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\r\n Working on a short story or collection?<\/h2>