Short-Shorts Should Be Short:A Mock Workshop

On Thursday, Dr. Bailey asked us to read some “short-shorts,” really brief pieces of writing, a paragraph to a page, that just capture the essence of something. Then he asked us each to write a short-short of our own.

On Tuesday, we discovered our short-shorts all failed pretty miserably, including my own three-page not-so-short-short about an old woman playing the piano. It was more of a short story than a short-short, and this became obvious as my piece went through a sort of mini-workshop. As I read the thing out loud for the class to comment on, it became clear my short-short was two pages (that is, three times) longer than everyone else’s, and I felt naked.

My classmates were polite, though, and they pointed out some of the strong descriptions I had in the piece. Then Dr. Bailey quickly singled out the paragraph that held the essence of my story, the paragraph I have to go chisel out and shape into my second draft. The rest of the details were all right, he explained, but they were just too much for a short-short.

I have a pretty clear picture now of what a short-short is and an even better picture of what a short-short is not. I guess you learn from your mistakes. I think that’s something the whole class found out Tuesday. There were one or two other short stories hiding among our short-shorts, and in general we discovered as a class that our writing tends to suffer from flat characters and vague details.

Don't Use The Shotgun Approach:More on Short-Shorts

Dr. Bailey started class today by apologizing for “roughing us up” on Tuesday, for acting like one of his son’s football coaches, the big guys who bark and shout so they can “make men” out of ten-year-olds. Then like any good coach would, Dr. Bailey launched into something like a pep talk to keep us from dwelling on our defeats and get us focused for the big game coming up (that is, the next short-short he assigned us for Tuesday).

“There is no reality on the page,” Dr. Bailey began. “It’s all the trick of reality. It’s all the dream of a reality.” As writers, he explained, we can’t assume a reality exists for our stories. We can’t have vague details and generic people in our stories and assume the reader will fill in all the blanks. We have to carefully construct a world on the page, and these worlds are built from strong specific details.

“You can’t make it up!” Dr. Bailey is always saying.

Then he grabbed a piece of chalk and scribbled a shotgun and a goose on the board. In large capital letters above the barrel he wrote “KA-POW!” and then he peppered the board with shot that killed his poorly drawn goose. This was not how a short-short should work, Dr. Bailey explained.

Then below the shotgun, he drew a rifle firing into a bull’s-eye. That was how a short-short should work, he said, like a bullet. Most of us were having trouble with the short-shorts because we were employing the shotgun approach, firing all over hoping to bag all sorts of ideas. A short-short should be like a bullet shot out of a rifle, tightly focused on one target, one idea.

I Hate It When Bailey's Right:My First Conference

I had my first one-on-one conference with Dr. Bailey yesterday. He had a little table and two chairs set up by the bookcases in the corner of his office so he could conference with students about their work. The shelves were crammed tight with books like The Things They Carried, Lonesome Dove, The Road, and a lot of Hemingway, books with cracked, creased spines fattened from having been read—not like the crisp, sharp-spined books I've got on the bookshelf in my dorm room.

We discussed my first attempt at a short-short, the three pages about the old arthritic woman who loved playing the piano. He had long black slashes and notes I couldn’t read all over the draft (in class Dr. Bailey told us one of his students at Harvard said his handwriting was like Sanskrit).

He turned to the third page and started talking. “This is the story,” he said as he bracketed in my final two paragraphs. “It just took you a while to get to it.”

Then he pointed out a sentence that said “Her knuckles began to cry” and suggested using a word more specific than “cry.” “Creak, crack, complain?” he quickly jotted on the paper. Overall, though, he said it was good. It would look nice in my portfolio once I got it revised.

My second short-short, one about a boy looking at a girl, didn’t fare so well. The voice was too “writerly” Dr. Bailey explained. I could get away with it in the first one but not the second one. The tone of the narration has to fit the character. He encouraged me to reread Damian Gessel’s short-short “Short Skirts” and to rework mine as an exercise in voice — because the first short-short would work for my portfolio, but the next assignment for class, a short story in the first-person perspective, would need a strong narrative voice.

After the conference, I headed back up to my dorm and very reluctantly cut over two pages of piano story. Then I read what was left, smoothed a few details out, and decided I hate it when Bailey’s right.