Prompt #32

Deliver!

Hello, What Now-ers. And Happy Monday!

Photo by Pim de Boer on Unsplash

Recently, I checked out a book of Stuart Dybek’s short stories from the library—Ecstatic Cahoots. It’s a slim volume (192 page) of fifty stories, so each is a short-short, or a flash fiction, or whatever you want to call a tiny story. In each, Dybek gets right into things, no beating around the bush. Here are some of his amazing opening lines:

From “Cordoba”:

While we were kissing, the leather-bound Obras completas opened to a photo of Federico Garcia Lorca with a mole prominent beside a sideburn of his slicked-back hair, slid from her lap to the jade silk couch, and hit the Chinese carpet with a muffled thud.

From “Vista Di Mare”:

In Genoa, as she packs to leave, he tells her that he doesn’t want it to end, and she replies that if he really knew what he wanted, she wouldn’t be leaving.

From “I Never Told This to Anyone”:

I never told this to anyone—there wasn’t anyone to tell it to—but when I was living with my Uncle Kirby on the Edge—the edge of what I never knew for sure (“Just livin’ on the Edge, don’t worry where,” Uncle Kirby would say)—a little bride and groom would come to visit me at night.

So many wonderful and completely original opening sentences! All of them setting up a reader to wonder what is going to happen next.

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Many of you, I’m sure, are subscribers to George Saunders’ “Story Club,” where recently he touched on the idea of how a story has a “set-up,” and then “delivers” on that set-up. This happens not only on the story level, but on the sentence level as well. As George puts it:

“We might understand a work of fiction as a series of set-ups followed by deliveries. The first challenge is to create the set-up such that the reader is put into a state of expectation. The second step is to deliver on that set-up, in such a way that the expectation is acknowledged, and then a new expectation is put into play. The meaning of the story will have to do with this pattern.”

Here’s how I understood George’s words (your take may differ!):

A first sentence gets written and starts things rolling. The writer then creates the next sentence based on that first one. That second sentence had many places it could have gone. But once the writer chooses which road to go down (the “delivery” on the first sentence’s “set up”), all other roads are now closed. With two sentences written, the writer continues with Sentence Number Three—which delivers on the expectations that were set up in Sentence Number Two AND provides a set-up for Sentence Number Four. (This may all sound very obvious and silly but stick with me here. Unless you don’t want to—prompt is at the bottom of the page!)

Take a look at the opening sentence of Dybek’s story “Alms”:

After Mr. Kronner’s daily constitutional down Eighty-sixth to the river and back, Mattie wheeled him under the scaffolding and into the lobby.

That’s the sentence-level set up. This is the moment when Dybek must answer the question: What now??? So far, he’s got two characters, one in a wheelchair, the other, seemingly, that person’s caretaker. They are doing something they do daily, which is to walk down a street in Manhattan to the river and then back again, at which point they enter the lobby of a building. The detail of the scaffolding—as a reader, we can’t be certain if this is important or not. It may only serve to spark something in our mind’s eye, but we notice it.

Now that we’ve analyzed what is happening in that first sentence, where do you think Dybek will go with what he’s set up? (Really, take a moment and think about it before you read on.)

Okay, here’s Sentence Two:

Workmen had been refurbishing the building for months and the dark scaffolding had come to seem like a permanent feature.

Aha! So, it seems mention of that scaffolding IS important. The set up of Sentence One has been delivered upon. And now we are again set up—we are wondering “why is that scaffolding important?”  (And also: What now?)

Okay, here’s Sentence Three:

At least they’d installed an automatic door and ramp so that Mattie no longer needed help pushing the chair through the entrance and up the short flight of stairs to the elevator.

Interesting! It turns out that mention of the scaffolding is what gave Dybek the opportunity to mention that new automatic door and ramp. And in so doing, he provides another set up: We now see that before the new door/ramp arrived, she needed help with Mr. Konner’s wheelchair. And now I’m wondering: Who is the person who used to help her? Dybek has set me up to wonder!

 Sentence Four:

Valentine, the doorman, still would usually push the chair along with her as if the incline required his added muscle.

Delivered!

This story is getting good. Now we have a third character, and he’s helping Mattie even though she doesn’t need the help. That sounds like another set-up to me.

The point is—one sentence leads to the next, and not just for a reader but for a writer. You can write an entire story this way. Write a sentence, look at it (softly, without overthinking), just to see what it has set up, and then deliver. And so on. You don’t have to plan in advance. You can simply see where each sentence takes you.

Here are those four sentences altogether, in case you’d like to read them as a whole:

After Mr. Kronner’s daily constitutional down Eighty-sixth to the river and back, Mattie wheeled him under the scaffolding and into the lobby. Workmen had been refurbishing the building for months and the dark scaffolding had come to seem like a permanent feature. At least they’d installed an automatic door and ramp so that Mattie no longer needed help pushing the chair through the entrance and up the short flight of stairs to the elevator. Valentine, the doorman, still would usually push the chair along with her as if the incline required his added muscle.

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TODAY’S PROMPT

1. Write a sentence that begins with the words: “I never told this to anyone, but….

2. Remember that if you’ve “never told this to anyone,” it’s a pretty big secret you’re about to reveal. Give us something interesting!

3. And now that you’ve given us your great set-up—the big, amazing thing you’ve never told anyone—see if you can deliver!

4. Write a story, letting one sentence lead to another. Really, try it. Don’t plan in advance, if possible. See what happens.

5. Have fun. No stress. It’s just an exercise! There’s no such thing as failure around here.

(Yes, yes, this “story start” is similar to one we used recently: “You may not believe this, but…” But… it’s different! Try it and see.)

400 words max.

See you next Monday!