I wanted to try something… something different for our writing workshop back then.
Not something funny (or was it?). Not something in the psychological horror line. Not a genre piece, not an obviously literary piece. For that matter, none of the things that would pop into workshoppers’ heads when they sat down to read it and started to answer the question, What sort of story has John written?
I wanted to overturn expectations. They knew what sort of story I wrote, after all, or so they thought: a story with some quirky protagonist at center stage, acting out some strange mental drama in a world which stubbornly resisted his or her preconceived ideas of the way the world should work. A story with a lot of… of… thwarting going on.
They’d expect a story, furthermore, that went on for thousands of words.
It’s been a while since I perused a copy of Writer’s Market, so maybe standards have changed. But back then, the trend among respectable literary magazines and legitimate contests was in the direction of short short stories. Maximum 1,000 words… Length, 100-500 words… If you can’t say something important in less than 750 words, you’re not really trying…
My typical stories ran 6,000 to 8,000 words. I couldn’t (still barely can) imagine writing anything at all less than 750 words long, much less something important.
But maybe I could do something at least interesting, if not important, in no more than a thousand words…
The result was “Just So You’d Know,” a tiny (for me) little bundle of around 900 words. As you’ll see if you follow the link to it, below, it’s written from a first-person point of view, and employs one other blindingly obvious stylistic gimmick (I almost said “literary device”: poseur) for nearly the entire length.
But the workshop’s response to it really interested me, almost more than the challenge of writing it: they debated what it meant.
A notoriously messy language, English provides opportunities for misunderstanding at every turn of phrase and punctuation, and through any stretch along the way. Even those for whom (like all of us in that workshop) it’s their native or only language often wield it in ambiguous ways — not always (nor even mostly) intentionally:
- Some words sound or look like other words, so that a passage’s effect can alter radically when read aloud. Idioms, jargon, and catchphrases obvious to one audience soar over the heads of others.
- Worse, utterly innocent phrases and sentences — innocent in their authors’ minds — can seem practically to steam with significance to readers just because those phrases and sentences use words and structure which unintentionally echo the language of insiders.
- Pop culture generates language at a dizzying rate, so you can have a hard time even finding (let alone using effectively) a clever phrase that is truly and inarguably yours. And if you inadvertently use a Burger King slogan, you want to bet some reader won’t wonder why you’ve introduced fast food into the story?
As I said, “Just So You’d Know” doesn’t go on at great length. But compression can exaggerate English’s naturally ambiguous nature even further, and maybe — maybe — that’s what happened with “Just So You’d Know.”
I won’t spoil the effect of the story (to the extent it has one) by telling you anything more about it as such. But I will say that back then, all along, during its writing, and right up to the moment the first critique began, I’d thought that the meaning was clear. But no, evidently — not in the workshop’s eyes. One reader thought it “meant” one thing, and three thought it “meant” something else entirely. Both sides argued their cases equally effectively.
Me? I was flattered they’d found so much evidence for their cases at all. Flattered, and a little confused: Could I have put meanings into the story that I didn’t intend?
So now it’s your call, if you’d like. What — really — what happens in this little story? And finally, what does it mean?
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The image at the top of this post is of artist Nathan Sawaya, with his sculpture called Gray. Sawaya’s work is (almost?) exclusively in one medium: LEGO® building blocks. You can see more information at his Web site, The Art of the Brick. As for why I’ve included the image here, well, it’s obvious… isn’t it?
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