A shape invites you to fill it. The shapes of fiction inspire by presenting ways to embody your experiences, memories, and imaginings. Some of these shapes are particularly suited to the creation of individual scenes, short stories, or single chapters. Others could be extended to develop
entire novels.

The shapes form a sequence. Each will help you with the ones that follow. The first three, Facade, Juggling, and Iceberg, show how to handle thoughts, dialogue, and action—techniques you’ll use over and over. The next two, Last Lap and Trauma, concern ways of beginning short stories. Specimen, Gathering, Day in the Life, and Onion explain how to form awkward material into focused narratives. Journey, Visitation, Aha!, and Bear at the Door are the natural shapes that are at the heart of almost all fiction of any length. Snapshot shows how to transform a visual technique into narrative form. Blue Moon tells how to make fantasy or improbability convincing. Explosion suggests ways of testing the limits of fiction.

Facade

For this technique, tell an anecdote in the voice of a character who is not you. But as the character tells his story have him unknowingly undercut or discredit his explanation.

For example, our character, Shroub, tells the story of an argument he had with his roommate about whose fault it was that the cat threw up on the carpet. Shroub is explaining how irresponsible his friend was, and how he should have noticed it before it dried. But the more Shroub talks, the more garbled
and excited he gets, and we realize it was Shroub who accidentally let the cat get out to eat grass that morning. We begin to sympathize with the roommate and believe that Shroub is unconsciously denying his own responsibility. Not only can we see through his story, we can see through Shroub, and realize he’s the kind of person who distorts events without even knowing it.

Facade is the first shape because it focuses on creating characters through their own voices. You want your people to live on the page, but you can’t make them live by writing about them. Readers need to hear the characters speak for themselves.

Length of sentences, choice of words, sources of images, amount of repetition—all help create character.

McKivey came over to the house and said let’s get going, don’t ask no questions. I had about two dollars, grabbed what my mama calls my little thin jacket—where do you think you’re going in that, she says butting in, and I say, so long, we’re out of here. So I say what happened was entirely McKivey’s fault. I didn’t take no knife or nothing with me,just that little thin jacket and the two dollars.

You want your readers to think, I could hear that person talking. The more you capture the rhythms of speech, its hesitancies, its phrases, its long, winding, run-on sentences, and its non-sentences, the closer you come to the feel of a real person. You’ve made the readers believe in the character. You don’t have to be grammatical or correct if your speaker isn’t.The character is talking, not you. Let that distinctive voice come through.Facade is also our first shape because it creates tension. A story doesn’t happen unless there is some problem, some oddity, some incongruity. In this shape the discrepancy between the image the character wants to project and what actually comes across creates tension.

This way of creating character isn’t a trick exercise. It goes on all the time. Friends, enemies, and cosmeticians try to make us see things their way. But we don’t always believe them. We try to see through their words.

In order to embed information so that readers see more than the character, you have to have your character tell anecdotes with rich detail.

Suppose you have Morgan telling a story about what an admirable person his mother was, but you want your readers to realize that Morgan’s mother was not so wonderful:

I would always run the bath for Mama. She was so tired from trying to get the maid to do what she was supposed to, and Mama said I was the only one who could get the water just right, and she let me bring in her fluffy bathrobe. Daddy said he was too tired from work, but Mama said that was all right we could do fine without him, and I did her back better than he did.

Even if Morgan interprets Mom’s behavior one way, readers have enough specifics to make their own judgments. Facades can be parts of stories or stories in their own right.

You don’t even need a listener. (Actually, it may get in the way to have another character say, “What happened then?” or “Uh-huh” or “Really?”) You don’t even need to establish a setting. Voice alone can create the story.