TheBanyanTree: how to write a short story

[Tobie Shapiro]

September 10, 20000000006



Dear writers' group,

	My mother is an avid reader.  Like me, she's always got some 
book that she's reading and she'll be generous enough to let me in on 
what's happening in the folds of all the pages.  Right where the 
bookmark is.  Lately, she's been reading a collection of short 
stories by Michael Chabon, who lives in our neighborhood.  (Yes, we 
see him with his kids at the local mom and pop grocery store).  My 
mother told me that she was thinking as she read these short stories 
that Chabon had a way of constructing them.  She said he began with 
an incident from a life, either real, stretched or invented, and then 
wove the story around that by adding people, ornaments, details and 
twists, then left the story with the reader hanging somewhere near 
conclusion.  She decided she could try to construct a short story 
from an incident in her life, and she told me about it:  She was 
talking to her grandfather, this is Goodman Brodofsky, the maternal 
grampa, my great grampa, and he asked her, with a heavy Yiddish 
accent, "Tell me, Mickeleh.  Do you like your Mama or your Papa 
more?"  She was a little surprised at the question, and answered, 
"Grampa, I can't answer that.  That's like if I should ask you which 
of your grandchildren you liked better, Doris or me?"  (Doris was my 
mother's cousin, her mother's brother's daughter).  Grampa Goodman 
thought for only a second before he spoke:  "Well, I've known Doris 
so much more.  I've spent more time with her, and she's always been 
around me......."

	My mother proposed making a short story out of that incident. 
She told it to me, and, as they say, it was good.  It didn't linger 
on that scene, but travelled to when Doris and my mother were going 
to the University of California together and all the men followed 
Doris like puppy dogs, but didn't look twice at my mother.  (My 
mother was shy, not unbeautiful, and Doris was a flirt.)

	After I thought about it, I realized that there are hundreds 
of incidences in my own life that could be whipped into short 
stories, and just for the fun of it, I started writing down incident 
after incident in my journal every day.  They are just sketches, but 
I'm having a grand old time writing them down.  Many of them are just 
things that happened in the blink of an eye, and some of them are 
legends that I tell sometimes with great elaboration and waving 
around of hands and arms, the making of faces and the raising and 
lowering of voice.  I thought I would give you a taste of some of 
these.  But I won't bore you.  I'm just going to give them one or two 
at a time.  Bite sized chunks.  Bite sized chunks.   That is what you 
will hear from me for a little bit now.  I ask the same of you all. 
Write down things you remember from your lives.  Send them in.  What 
is the first thing you remember from your life?  I remember standing 
up in my crib, looking  down the hallway, crying, and throwing my 
bottle down the hall.  My mother came out of her bedroom, tying the 
belt of her robe.  She picked up the bottle off the floor and came in 
to pick me up.  I was a little over a year old.

	Here are two stories from round about the same era in my 
life.  We are talking about the late 1960s:

Romancing the Stoned:

	Dweller and I were car camping.  He'd fixed the VW van so 
that we had a double bed in the back seat, elevated over a storage 
area where I stashed my guitar and we put our suitcases and supplies. 
I was 21, and Dweller was teaching me how to drive.  We were on a 
windy mountain road in California.  I was at the wheel.  Dweller was 
a bad teacher, as are all family and spouses.  He kept criticizing 
me, advising me way beyond my current level.  I was still concerned 
with steering the car on the road between the lines, simply staying 
in my lane and operating the gear shift.  Basics.  And he was telling 
me to focus further down the road, the finer points of down shifting, 
how to stop the car more smoothly by working the brake in that very 
special way.  Eventually, I got good and fed up with him.  I swerved 
the bus over to the side of the road, stomped out of the car, went to 
the side of the bus where I yanked open the door and dragged out my 
guitar.  Then I stalked off across the road, and into the forest.  I 
kept hoofing away, knowing that Dweller's job was to come after me, 
crazy with drama, to fetch me and declare h is undying love.  This is 
how the story would have to be written.  But Dweller was slow in 
chasing after me.  I imagine him carefully neating up the van, then 
meticulously locking all the doors, having changed into something fit 
for a hike, and finally setting off after me.  He caught up to me in 
a field of yellow grass, waist high.  We professed our love for each 
other and wound up making love in the field, because that's what the 
script called for.

What My Husband Does:

	I joined the faculty wives club in 1969 or 1970, and felt 
like an alien.  I was the youngest there, and was awkward with my, 
"Hello, my name is . . . ," name tag stuck to my shoulder.  All the 
women identified themselves with their husbands.  Note:  there was no 
faculty husbands club.  A woman came up to me, introduced herself by 
her name and husband's department at the University, then asked me 
what my husband did.  "I'm a musician," I answered.  "Yes, that's 
nice," she said a little confused, "but what does your husband do?" 
"He married a musician," I said.

	Love to you all, and all of your stories,

	Tobie




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Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net