The Things We Don't Do - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора Andr és Neuman (DODECALOGUES FROM A STORYTELLER) #7

DODECALOGUES FROM A STORYTELLER

These dodecalogues do not claim to be rules for writing stories; they are personal observations that arose during the writing process. They do not constitute a restrictive poetics that excludes in any way; they are happy to contradict each other. In no way do they aim to define the book they accompany; they are simply reflections on short-form narrative. Each of them has twelve points, to avoid the absurd perfection of ten. They would like to be, above all, a playful way of approaching the essay.

DODECALOGUE FROM A STORYTELLER

To tell a short story is to know how to keep a secret.

Although told in the past tense, stories always happen now. There is no time for any more and no need for it.

III

An excessive development of action paradoxically produces anaemia in a short story, or chokes it to death.

In the opening lines, the life of a short story is at stake, in the last lines its resurrection.

Characters do not present themselves: they act.

Atmosphere can be the most memorable part of the plot. The gaze, the main character.

VII

Restrained lyricism creates magic. Unbridled lyricism, tricks.

VIII

The narrator’s voice is so important that it is not always advisable for it to be heard.

Revise: reduce.

Talent is rhythm. The most insidious problems begin with punctuation.

In the short story, a minute can be eternal and eternity can unfold in a minute.

XII

To narrate is to seduce: never completely satisfy the reader’s curiosity.

NEW DODECALOGUE FROM A STORYTELLER

If it does not stir the emotions, it does not tell a story.

Brevity is not a question of scale. Brevity requires its own structures.

III

In the strange edifice of the story, details are the foundations and the main theme, the roof.

The beautiful needs to be precise just as the precise needs to be beautiful. Adjectives: seeds of the story writer.

Unity of effect does not mean that all the elements of a story have to converge on a single point. Distract: organize attention.

Virtuous circle: things happen to people who write stories, people to whom things happen write stories.

VII

Characters appear in a story as if by chance, pass us by and go on living.

VIII

Nothing more trivial, in terms of narrative, than a dialogue that is too transcendental.

Good plots rarely waste time explaining themselves.

Penetrate the outside. Descriptions are not detours, but short cuts.

A short story knows when it is reaching an ending and takes care to show it. It usually ends before, long before, the narrator’s vanity.

XII

A decalogue is not set in stone, or necessarily applicable to others. A dodecalogue even less so.

THIRD DODECALOGUE FROM A STORYTELLER

Far more urgent than to knock a reader out is to wake a reader up.

The short story has no essence, only habits.

III

There are two kinds of story: those that already know the plot, and those that go in search of it.

The extreme freedom of a book of short stories derives from the possibility of starting from zero each time. To demand unity from it is like padlocking the laboratory.

Stillness as the art of imminence.

The voice determines the event, rather than vice versa.

VII

The short story is pursued by its structure. That is why, every so often, it is pleased when it is dynamited.

VIII

A completely rounded story encircles the readers, does not let them out. In fact, it does not allow them in either.

Every short story is oral in the first or second instance.

While short-story writers perpetrate symmetries, their characters forgive them through their imperfections.

Sensationalist temptation of the open ending: cut it short at a too dazzling moment, close it as it opens.

XII

Every story that ends at the right moment begins again in a different way.

FOURTH DODECALOGUE: THE POST-MODERN SHORT STORY

Any brief form could be a short story, provided it succeeds in creating a sense of fiction.

Lack of a vanishing point: the frontier between yesterday’s story and tomorrow’s.

III

The resolution of the plot and the end of the text keep up an invisible tug of war. If the first prevails, the structure will tend towards Poe. If the second prevails, it will tend towards Chekhov. If the result is a tie, something new might arise.

At this stage in workshops, bringing disorder to order tells more than ordering disorder.

The lack of main characters gives birth to the Main Character: the self that narrates itself.

Story upon story, omniscience deserts.

VII

We have become such hybrid authors that any day now we’ll make a purist revolution.

VIII

Dispersal as plot, the random crossing of branches as tree.

The speaker raised to the level of discourse, the narrator as plot.

The absolute present as the only history: the short narrative of reset.

From the story with a twist to the story with a doubt.

XII

Some short stories would deserve to end with a semicolon;