2. The Idea

This seems to be the worry for many novices; that they need a big idea, but think they’ve all been done. The first mistake is to even try to think of a big idea, because they’re really just scenarios. Boy meets girl. Aliens attack earth. Priest loses faith. Short stories are rarely created in this way. The idea will emerge from the scenario. In Boy Meets Girl, let’s say that Boy and Girl are such opposites that they can’t stand each other, but they’re working together inside a pantomime horse. In Aliens Attack Earth, let’s say that the Aliens are peace-loving but Earth is going through a militant phase even though it needs help from Aliens. In Priest Loses Faith let’s imagine that the priest’s crisis hits when he is about to give a speech that could unite a country. Nobody expects you to come up with everything fully formed – it’s a process, A to B to C, and each stage adds something new and fresh. At the end, you’ll look back and see the idea is there, and that hopefully the theme has emerged. Sometimes it’s hard to spot where the idea is. Joyce Carol Oates wrote a tale called ‘The Bingo Master’, and if I tell you that the idea is simply about a young woman winning at bingo, you’d not be interested. But the woman is lonely and from a small town, the bingo master is handsome and charming, and the two must meet for her to accept her prize. So the idea is to describe a budding romance? No – because the bingo master spurns her advances and makes her feel ashamed; she has misread the signs and thought he was interested in her. So is the idea then about how you can be mistaken in love? No, because in her haste to leave his room, the young woman forgets the prize cheque. The bingo master manipulated the situation to shame the woman and leave the money behind – he is a confidence trickster. So the idea is about a scam. But you can’t get there without thinking the process through. So – the big idea is that, at this stage, there are no big ideas. This seems like heresy, but we’ll encounter a few of them in this course. The shape of the story is built by the aim, the scenario, the characters, the plot, the style – and through them the idea emerges. The danger is that by not constructing a short story this way around, by starting with what you want to get across, you end up with something plodding, worthy and manipulative, because you’ll have to keep tugging at your characters to get them back on track. Stories and films about fascism, race, politics and other large issues often end up doing this because they don’t unfold in a natural progression – they start with the aim and the idea ruins the characters. So, having established the story’s aims - to entertain, to surprise, to reveal a truth, to touch the reader – we should go to the scenario, which runs concurrently with plot and character – but we have to start somewhere, so let’s give it priority. J G Ballard wrote came up with a pure high-concept scenario for ‘Concrete Island’, in which a man crashes his car off a motorway flyover and must survive for days in the long grass at its base, eating the food thrown from car windows. This tells you nothing of what the man is like, or what will happen to him. It’s simply a scenario. Ballard used it to explore our alienation in modern society. But he could have used it to explore the man’s humanity, or he could have turned it into an incredible adventure. The scenario allowed him to take the story in any direction he wanted, I wrote a story called ‘Starless’ for my anthology ‘Old Devil Moon’. The scenario: Two men are caught up in a London bombing. The characters: Both hate their existing lives. The plot: They switch identities. To my mind, these three elements are dependent on one another. But many courses will teach you that you don’t need all three. They’ll say you can describe a sunny morning in the countryside, or the anger you feel from becoming disillusioned with the world – but these aren’t stories, they’re simply moods. I regard mood as essential, but it’s the side order that comes along to flavour the main course. Let’s get to the meat and potatoes first. So this week’s task is to pick a scenario. Two women meet on a beach. A pair of schoolboys play a trick on an old man. An African girl arrives in a big city for the first time. An idiot tries to impress a sophisticated girl at a party. Whatever you come up with, try to stay with it through the course, or at least return to it from time to time. The best collection of scenarios I’ve ever found in a single volume was in the anthology ‘Black Water’, edited by Alberto Manguel, a veritable encyclopedia of great tales. The book contains a famous story; David Garnett’s’ Lady Into Fox’, where the scenario is actually embedded in the title. Let’s not get prosaic about these scenarios, though. Tennessee Williams said ‘I don’t want realism. I want magic…I don’t tell the truth, I tell what ought to be truth.’ So your scenario can be as grand as you like, or as small. Tiny moments can reveal great truths. But sometimes it’s fun to be big. The important thing is to keep this opening tale simple and clear. The other point is that you might try and make your scenario fun to read. In Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘The Bottle Imp’, a sailor buys a genii and has to sell him for less than he paid – which proves impossible. Stories are much more enjoyable when the main character is having a terrible time. Panic breeds action, and action gives you pace – when I read tales in which a lonely man stares out of a window at the rain, my heart sinks, because I know we are off to a slow start. It’s often the case that the reader is way ahead of the writer. He’s thinking about the likely outcome of the tale, playing over all the possibilities – and how awful for the writer if the reader has already thought about where he’s going and dismissed it as boring? I read a story recently about a man visiting a dead relative’s house and becoming frightened by a scarecrow. I was counting down the pages until the scarecrow came back to life, inhabited by the soul of the relative. For now, though, concentrate on the scenario – the plot surprises will come later.