A Little Catch: Writing the Short Story Including Nine Original Stories

By Saylor D Smith

A Little Catch begins with a short instructional section on the art of writing the short story, then includes nine original stories by the author.

Mike, the main character in A Little Catch, is a teenage boy focused on perfecting his skills in baseball. Living above a railroad depot with his family, Mike befriends a traveling hobo who encourages him in his drive for baseball excellence.

In The Long Slide, Don battles demons in his own family with a midnight trip back to his hometown. There, he revisits the site of many of his middle school and high school escapades, the long fire escape slide that falls from the buildings third floor to the ground at the rear of the school.

A failed, garrulous gold miner leads a boy and his father on an attempted lifesaving mission through a heavy blizzard in Ol Ben. Fighting for their lives, the boy and two men struggle against a storm that was to become known as the Blizzard of 14.

These and five other stories, plus a true-life scene, make up the collection, tales mostly of middle Americans facing small issues of quiet desperation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Nov 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9781491714683

Saylor D Smith

Saylor Smith spent most of his working career as a high school English teacher and publications adviser in Southern California and Oregon from the late 1960s until the spring of 2002. He has published four other books, including one with his daughter Evynne. He lives in Eugene, Oregon with his wife Karen.

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Copyright © 2013 Saylor D Smith.

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ISBN: 978-1-4917-1467-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-1468-3 (e)

iUniverse rev. date: 11/22/2013

Contents

Dedication

Introduction

1. A Little Catch

2. The Long Slide

3. A Place to Hide

4. Teresa’s Christmas Carol

5. Ol’ Ben

6. The Patriot

7. Saturday Warriors

8. Evasive Action

9. Flight: A Christmas Memory

Flight, A Christmas Memory

Acknowledgments

Other books by Saylor D Smith

Novels:

Serpent’s Tooth

Stealing First

Whistling on the Stair

The Lemonade Gang and the Mysterious Stranger

(with Evynne Smith)

Dedication

For Mom and Pap, voracious readers who sparked my interest in good literature more than sixty years ago.

Introduction

Scenes, Stories, Short Stories and Plain Folks

story n

a factual or fictional account of an event or series of events *

short story n

a work of prose fiction that is shorter than a novel *

* Microsoft Word dictionary

We all tell stories. Sometimes they are made-up tales for entertainment purposes; sometimes they are fabrications intended to deceive; sometimes they are remembered experiences that seem worth relating. Sometimes they are formal, written pieces; more often they are randomly narrated tales. And even more often, they are merely episodes or scenes within a larger story. Novelist John Irving captures the essence of storythrough the observations of the main character in his novel, The World According to Garp. One night as Garp is telling his son Walt an after dinner tale, the weight of storytelling strikes him. He has begun a story about a dog, a seemingly vicious dog that was chained to a truck in an alley. At about this point, Garp’s wife interrupts with a meaningless comment. Impatiently, Walt says to his dad, ‘Go on with the story. What happened to the dog?’

Irving writes Garp’s thoughts: "The responsibilities loomed for Garp, every time. What is the instinct in people that makes them expect something to happen? If you begin a story about a person or a dog, something must be going to happen to them."

So that’s it: in a story, something has to happen. It need not necessarily be earth shaking or terrifying or even comforting or satisfying. But something, indeed, has to happen. If it’s a good story, written or spoken, someone will say or think, at some point, Go on with the story. What happened?

A person rushes up to a friend and says, excitedly, Guess what?

The listener or reader waits, expectantly, to find out what he or she was supposed to guess — what has happened. Thus a story — or a scene or episode within a story — is born.

The written or spoken answer to Guess what?is not necessarily a short story, although the inspiration for the question does have within it the germ of a full-fledged short story. A short story, however, is a particular thing, a clearly defined, specific sort of tale. It’s not enough that something happens.

***

For three-and-a-half decades as a public school English teacher, I shared my understanding of what makes a successful short story with high school students of every age, motivation and intellectual level in six secondary schools in three states. Among those students, of the stories I shared with them, Ernest Hemingway’s The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomberwas clearly the most popular of the genre (and, it is said, Hemingway’s favorite), but I always liked William Faulkner’s Two Soldiersthe best. I almost always read it aloud in class, and whether the students were freshmen or seniors, non-readers or high achievers, that story, with its unnamed boy, caught their fancy. And in the story’s darkest moment, when the boy looks up to his older brother and says, It hurts my heart, Pete,I had to swallow the lump in my throat every time.

But, too, there were J.D. Salinger’s odd but moving The Laughing Man,Arthur Foff’s vicious Sawdust,Milton Kaplan’s touching Feels Like Spring,Ray Bradbury’s bizarre but strangely honest The Veldt,O. Henry’s surprising The Gift of the Magiand Hemingway’s simple and wonderful A Clean Well-Lighted Place— these stories and many others caught the interest of readers (and non-readers) of all ages. They contain rare but real moments of truth, pathos, wonder and/or sentiment, and they display that most irreplaceable quality of all, excellent writing.

Some lists of great short stories include what has been characterized as the shortest short story Ernest Hemingway ever wrote; it is six words long: For Sale: Baby shoes, never Worn.Saying a lot in a few words was the essence of Hemingway’s work (and may have grown out of his training and experience as a newspaper writer); this shortest short storyepitomizes his economy of style. (I always suspected author John Knowles to have been inspired by Hemingway’s idea of a shortest short story when in his novel, A Separate Peace, Brinker spouts his version of the shortest war poem: War is a bore.)

I taught my students that a short story is a formulaic piece of literature, unlike, say, a novel, which may take just about any form the writer chooses, include unlimited numbers and types of characters, settings, points of view and be from a few dozen to over a thousand pages in length. Whether it is the character-centered novels of Charles Dickens and Mark Twain, the powerful and effective plot-driven tales of F. Scott Fitzgerald and E.M. Forster or the complex story developments of James Joyce and Herman Melville, to consider a few noteworthy examples, the great novels cover varied times and places, as well as, in most cases, spotlighting a myriad of characters.

Almost every short story, on the other hand, consists of six well-defined parts. First, it has one main character on whom the story focuses like a laser beam. Whereas in a novel the number of main and secondary characters is limitless, a short story concentrates on a single character and includes a small number of secondary characters, seldom more than one.

Second, a short story maintains a single consistent point of view. A novel may switch from third person to first person to omniscient, but a short story — with rare exceptions — is told from one point of view.

Third, the main character has what might be called a determining or ascendant trait that becomes apparent to the reader quite early in the story. In a sense we could see the main character in a short story as a one-dimensional personality who is shaped by that one quality and whose every move is affected by it. Real people are multi-dimensional; the main character of a short story is one-dimensional.

Fourth, the story must include a conflict, that is, a problem or challenging issue the main character faces.

Fifth, the conflict is infinitely more challenging because of how profoundly it correlates with the main character’s determining trait. If, for example, the main character, a teenage boy, faces the necessity of giving a public speech as the story’s central conflict, the author will have already established the fact that the young man has a particularly dramatic fear of standing up to speak in front of people. When the main character, then, comes face-to-face with the necessity of giving an oration to a crowd, the reader immediately thinks, Oh, no! Big problem!The conflict becomes more than a small, irritating predicament for the main character; it is, in fact, a major, often life-altering obstacle for him or her to attempt to overcome.

Sixth, ultimately, in a short story, the conflict has to be resolved. Resolvedis not the correct term in every case. Of course, the conflict does have to end somehow. Perhaps the main character overcomes some obstacle and does, indeed, thereby resolve the conflict — the standard happy ending.The young speaker manages to conquer his fear and successfully gives the speech. Perhaps he or she fails completely in the effort to win the day, walking away defeated by the conflict; in such a case, the circumstances of the conflict may have overwhelmed the main character. The reluctant speaker finds himself humiliated by his inability to give the speech to the gathered crowd.

Perhaps, indeed, the conflict, because it is entirely too much for the main character to face, causes his or her death. I always argued — and still believe — that a short story writer who kills off the main character has taken the shortest cut possible in resolving the story’s conflict. Creative genius, I contend, requires more of the writer; he or she must find an original way to end the conflict — death, as any modern viewer of TV dramas and/or Hollywood movies will attest, is too common and almost always unoriginal (please forgive my own unoriginal ending in one of the following stories).

Again, unlike what may happen in a novel, in a short story the main character does not change; his ascendant trait remains the same throughout the story; he or she doesn’t throw it off and become a new manor new woman.The character battles the conflict and wins or loses with the same personal strengths or weaknesses displayed at the beginning of the story. He or she may triumph over the conflict in spite of the natural human trait, but the trait itself does not change. In our sample plot above, for example, the speaker temporarily fights off his demons and gives the speech; however, the demons remain. In fact, it becomes a tribute to the power of his will that he is able to give the speech after all.

So, a short story is more than merely a shortstory; it is a story told in a particular manner that includes the six ingredients outlined above. In most of the following stories, I’ve tried to abide by the strictest short story requirements I laid down for all of those students over all of those years in all of those classrooms. I’ve tried, but as the discerning reader will note, I failed in that effort in several of the stories. Is the resulting effort, then, really a short story? I argue (self-interestedly, you might note) that we can allow exceptions to the generally agreed-upon short story definition without diminishing the usefulness of that definition. You will note, however, that the book’s subtitle is Nine Stories…not Nine Short Stories…It is my acknowledgment that the eight narratives and one short scene herein are not all, in the purest sense I’ve outlined above, short stories.

I wish I’d written Two Soldiers.If I had, you can be sure I would have included it with the following nine I did write. I have a deep-seated preference for stories about simple, honest folks; I submit these for your consideration.

sds

1. A Little Catch

A Real Pro

The Mikeof this story was inspired in my mind by my father, Milo Smith — Papto my brother Mike and me — who lived with his parents, two brothers and a sister above a train depot beside