You get my point? If you were my student, I’d urge you to find some unresolvable issue that will instantly guarantee tension and debate over your work. Tension: Stories That Spin into Madness
This next type of story is among my favorites. They’re short. They have to be short to prevent exhausting the reader. They offer the chaos and illogic of Kafka, but with the humor of satire. I won’t spoil the surprise, but will save you a lifetime of hunting, for they are rare birds, indeed.
“Dusk in Fierce Pajamas” by E. B. White. A bedridden man, delirious with fever, becomes obsessed with the lives and images of the effortlessly rich celebrities he reads about in the pages of fashion magazines.
“My Life with R. H. Macy” by Shirley Jackson. A young woman, possibly Jackson herself, becomes a lost, nameless cog as she trains for a job in the faceless bureaucracy of the world’s largest department store. The antidote to her horror story “The Lottery.”
“And Lead Us Not into Penn Station” by Amy Hempel. A litany of everyday absurdities and insults suffered in New York City.
“Reference #388475848-5” by Amy Hempel. The funniest attempt to get out of paying a parking ticket by anyone, ever.
“In Hot Pursuit” by Fran Lebowitz. A very chatty, snotty, gay Sherlock Holmes jets out to Los Angeles in search of an organized ring of pedophiles.
“Loser” by Chuck Palahniuk. A fraternity pledge takes LSD and is selected from the studio audience to play the game show The Price Is Right.
“Eleanor” by Chuck Palahniuk. A long string of malapropisms follow a logger as he escapes the deadly tall trees of Oregon only to meet his violent destiny in the stucco subdivisions of Southern California.
“The Facts of Life” by Chuck Palahniuk. A father attempts to teach the birds and the bees to his seven-year-old son, in a sex education lecture replete with self-immolating genitals and Sally Struthers.
If you were my student I’d assign you the following writing prompt.
Write as if you were the collective voice of a film review board that’s been asked to assign an audience rating to a yet-to-be-released movie. Speaking in the collective “we” you cite increasingly absurd inferences the board members believe they are seeing. Clouds that look too phallic for comfort. The maybe-not-accidental way that shadows cast by people and animals combine and interact. Doughnuts being eaten by children in a possibly suggestive manner. In your report to the filmmaker, you cite how individual viewers first recognized each transgression, but when it was pointed out all reviewers seized upon each as a blatant offense. The story should be a snowballing litany of “projection” as the self-righteous viewers protest about subliminal horrors that demonstrate more about the reviewers’ sick imaginations than anything actually depicted in the film.
Good luck. Keep it short. Go nuts. Tension: Create Suspense with Denial
In old-fashioned literary terms, anytime you broach a subject yet refuse to explore it, that’s called occupatio (in Greek paralipsis). For example, “The first rule of fight club is you don’t talk about fight club.”
But the technique also covers statements such as, “You know I’d never kill you, don’t you?”
Or, “He told himself not to slap her.”
Anytime you deny a possibility you create it at the same time. Such statements introduce the threat they appear to be denying. For instance:
This ship is unsinkable.
The canned salmon is supposed to be safe.
Please don’t mention Daniel’s murder. We’re not going down that road.
As a writer, anytime you want to introduce a threat, assure the reader that it won’t happen. Cross your heart and promise that that terrible, looming, unthinkable event will never take place. Instantly dismiss the possibility. That seems like a guarantee of safety, but it’s a great way to introduce the promise of chaos and disaster.
A Postcard from the Tour
The first time it happened I didn’t know it had happened. The room felt warm and crowded with people so no one was too surprised.
My goal was to match the power of Shirley Jackson’s story “The Lottery.” When it was first published in The New Yorker in 1948, hundreds of readers canceled their subscriptions. Nowadays the story is taught to children in school. That left me wondering: What would a story have to depict to generate the same level of anxiety today?
In Jackson’s day I suspect that her story resonated with the military draft. The idea that we all live in peace and security due to the fact that randomly chosen young men are destroyed in the most torturous ways science can devise. Nobody ever says as much. When a book like The Stepford Wives hits big, people react to the surface details. No one dares mention how it keys off the ominous threat of a male backlash against the push for women’s rights.
“The Lottery” is a classic, and people still ignore how its terror is the terror of millions of young men who hope for high draft numbers in some inevitable lottery. To name the thing, we’d be forced to deal with it.
Incidentally, I owned a portion of Jackson’s cremated remains. Her daughter Sadie was friends with friends of mine through the San Francisco Cacophony Society. Sadie had been selling the cremains online, branded as “ShirleyBone,” and she sent me a batch when she heard I was a fan of her mother’s work. I opened the box at the kitchen table over the objections of my housemates who were eating breakfast. Ashes and crunched-up bone. Such a relic is too good to hoard so I found two antique boxes, carved wood inlaid with ivory, and divided Shirley between them. One I sent to my agent with a letter of provenance. The other to my editor.
All the while, I wondered what modern story could match
