Last week we had a short story club - the selection was the magnificent C.L. Clark's short which has been nominated for awards recently.
Unanimously our group loved how well this was written. The only point we debated was whether the editor made her tack on an unsatisfying happy ending instead of letter her leave it at a sad ending. As an athlete, I found her descriptions of the bodies of women athletes inspiring, particularly how present and connected the characters were in their bodies.
My journey starts with a call for submissions by friends who are putting together an anthology. Shortly after having this inspiration, then I saw a recent report about another abuse by university sports medicine, and revisited our sports medicine doctor who we were required to see before receiving any therapy. The theme of the anthology was "Summer" so the pieces fell together for me - which is how I start a story. For me summer means training, and this was what the story was going to be about, so I wrote it. Then I felt like it does not meet the requirement of being "family friendly" if it is about sexual assault.
This week a friend also asked me to critique their short. While I was looking through journals and magazines and short submission process, I found one that had some similar crossover to the short story of the friend.
The beautiful subtext and use of the surroundings to create tension was what I wanted more from the piece I was critiquing.
With my short, I see huge literary potential. As I sent it out to a few friends who offered to beta read, one of them got this internal conflict of the MC, However, I became frustrated when there wasn't a full connection or understanding to the conflict in the story. I thought surely compared to my high concept epic fantasy speculative fiction invented world history novel, a contemporary realistic piece would be much easier to critique? The question was how to increase tension, and one party said it was between differing motivations of characters in a scene. That can't be true, if you can have stories purely of one character internal conflict. So I thought about this one:
Addn: Critique group this morning included people with experience with the short literary genre who were able to see the shape of the story and workshop specific changes that was really helpful.
Did this author add bullies to a scene to add to the tension as if her internal self-loathing projected onto her younger self wasn't enough? Was this a cop-out?
What do you think? How do you create tension in a story about internal conflict? Even if there are other external characters around your main character? Do you have any additional short stories to recommend as examples?
I should add if anyone knows me, you know I rarely read short stories I like. The short stories we had to read in literature class like Hemingway "Hills like White Elephants" are taste memories I don't want to relive. Then of course there was my literary paper on Edgar Allen Poe for a literature class that made me dislike an author I had previously found interesting. Is that just a case of - if you want to find a way to make yourself hate an author, make yourself do a literary analysis of their writing? Of course famous short stories are by the Brothers Grimm, or the photo inspiration of Strewelpeter. (which is just a later iteration of the game German cautionary tales to children by horrifying them)
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