Super clever blog title!

Seriously. How DO they do it? I can't ever figure out how to title blogs effectively. I assume it should be humorous. Or, at the least, it should induce curiosity. I was seriously considering titling this blog entry "Structure and the Short Story." Do you want to continue readings? I don't.

Here's the thing: This semester I wanted to get a better idea of what short stories look like now. I've read a good deal of Hemingway and his cohorts, but I wanted to know what my cohorts were writing. The answer: A little bit of everything. But there is something that irks me. Structure.

I'm reading through the Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction and at this point, about halfway through the 500 some pages, I think most of it is good. They've included Carver's masterpiece Cathedral and some lesser known stories that I read last semester by guys like Ron Carlson (go, right now, and pick up his collection A Kind of Flying. Or at least read The H Street Sledding Record and Bigfoot Stole My Wife. So excellent) and Charles Baxter (Pet Milk, in this case). I like these stories. I like a lot of these stories. Last night I read Amy Hempel's The Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried and it completely floored me. Or Andre Dubus' A Father's Story. Tons of great stories.

The writer's that do not win my affection, however, usually share a common trait. They attempt to jazz up their story with some sort of structural change. They write avant garde-ly (not a real term.) and, for me, they sometimes ruin otherwise good stories. I'm immediately pulled out of what my first semester mentor Fred Arroyo calls "the fictional dream state" (or something like that), because the author refuses to complete a sentence, instead leaving the end of a paragraph hanging and starting the next paragraph with the second half of the sentence. Interesting? Sure. Sort of. Necessary? I guess if you need a gimmick to get published in an anthology. The only story I've started and refused to finished William H. Gass' In the Heart of the Heart of the Country. He gave headings to short sections, like Politics or Place, and then writes what I would call prose poetry about those specific elements. And I cannot find a story. I will gladly admit that I might just be too stupid. But my frustration lies in this: People have been writing amazing stories in classic structure ever since people started writing stories. Could it be that the challenge that lies in writing a simple sentence is enough? That we don't need to be tricked with gimmicks? Isn't it hard enough to engage a reader over the span of 2500 words or so?

Geez. I sound like a geezer. (Did you see that, what I did there?) Maybe I'm old school at 28. I think the same thing about songs, that structure exists for a reason, that it helps people listen and interpret. Nothing new under the sun and all of that. Anybody have a great example of a story that functions outside of the realms of classic story structure? I'll read it. Maybe it's just a matter of taste. I just really believe that it's hard enough to write a good sentence; that challenge is enough for me. No reason to reinvent the wheel. Don't tear down fences until you know what they're there for. Man, I sound ancient and ornery. And maybe I haven't made a lick of sense. If you get one thing out of this:

Go read Amy Hempel's story that I mentioned. It feels new, it sound new, it's a challenge in 8 or 10 pages. But she writes without fancy gimmicks. She just writes great sentences.