By Annie Guthrie

 

Annie Guthrie: What is a problem that students might have in creating the short story that you see over and over again, and how do you help them see their way around it?

Ted McLoof: The most universal problem that fledgling writers encounter is how to begin and end a piece. It seems like an obvious problem, but a surprisingly large amount of writers dive into a story without a clear starting point, and they don’t plan out what needs to be accomplished in order to reach the end. This is because a lot of writers start from concept rather than narrative. They’ll say, “I want to write about family,” or, “I want to write about a break-up,” and it’s very difficult to decide how to tackle those concepts narratively because they’re so sprawling. The easiest way to solve that problem is to concentrate on story first: what tangible thing does my character want, and how will that be achieved?

Annie: The list of writers in your "Short Fiction" class description (Antonya Nelson, Tobias Wolff, Raymond Carver, Lydia Davis) all have in common a clear, “clean” direct prose style; operating under the guide of simplicity, these stories achieve profundity and grace. Can you speak to why you chose this lineup and what these writers mean to you as a writer and a teacher?

Ted: One of my students once complained to me that he felt a burden to choose between “literary prose” and “fun prose.” In other words, he felt that if he wanted respect he needed to write dense, difficult stories, but if he wanted to be entertaining no one would admire his work. The authors I choose to teach all walk a very delicate balance between those two. Their subject matter is complex, meaty, substantive, but they don’t feel a need for their style to reflect that.

Annie: What do you mean by efficiency in storytelling? And what are these ten elements of short fiction that you refer to? Would you give us some spoilers?

Ted: Efficiency in storytelling means just that: that we learn in the class how to trim the fat out of stories but keep the meat. Many writers don’t know exactly what they want to say, or don’t know what the story they’re telling is, so they write extra sentences around the point they want to get across in an effort to find it. The aim of this course is to help burgeoning writers draw readers in by never wasting a single word on the page.

Those ten elements of short fiction help in that regard. One of the ten elements is this idea of when a story can start and when it can end. Another important one is “why now”—why has the author chosen to tell this character’s story at this particular moment in time? Why this night rather than any other night?  You may remember in It’s a Wonderful Life that great concept of George seeing what the world would look like had he never been born

—it’s a big idea, but it’s all hung on a very tight, very clean story structure. That what the class is all about.

Ted McLoof teaches fiction at the University of Arizona and the Poetry Center. His work has appeared in various journals including Hobart and Kenyon Review. He’s recently been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.