WHAT’s a STORY, ANYWAY?

by Steve Steinbock

As this column is being posted to the Criminal Brief webpage, your frumious host is bandersnatching in New York for the Edgar Awards. Among the people I look forward to seeing is Criminal Brief founder, custodian, and grammar cop James Lincoln Warren.

A few weeks ago, JLW republished a piece of his called Mystery Short Story Writer Disses Papa in which he challenged the notion that “Papa” Hemingway’s six-word story (“Baby shoes for sale, never used”) is not a story at all.

As much as I’d like to challenge James on this, I believe that he’s correct. It isn’t that a story can’t be told in just six words (although I consider it unlikely and I’ve certainly never seen one), but that there are elements missing from Hemingway’s one-liner that are needed to make it a story.

“Baby shoes for sale, never used” is, as JLW pointed out, not a story but a headline. It’s a teaser. If you push the definition a little, it may even be a vignette.

The word vignette is apt. It comes from the French for “little vine.” It once referred, in a literary context, to the little vine-like decorations in books. The perfect modern example of this sort of vignette are the little “Marginal Thinking” cartoons that Sergio Aragones designs for the margins of Mad Magazine.

A vignette is, if you will, a sub-story. It is a snapshot in words. It may bear fruit, but separated from the vine, it has no roots, no trunk, no plot.

A novel is like a tree. Its roots are the backstory that never see print. Its branches are the many subplots, scenes, and characters that comprise its story. Its plot is like a long, sturdy trunk, able to bend, but strong enough to support all the characters and subplots. Climb to the top and you see many things beyond its branches.

A short story is a small bush, plant, or flower. A story varies in size. Its stems lack the woodiness of a tree, but still retains the apical dominance of plot. Depending on the talents of its creator, it may be colorful and aromatic.

If you break off a flower or a leaf or a twig from either, you have a vignette of the order of Hemingway’s “Baby shoes.”

One of the enduring vignettes of the mystery genre is the Flitcraft parable. In chapter 7 of Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, P.I. Sam Spade tells Brigid O’Shaughnessy about a man from Tacoma named Flitcraft, who, after a close brush with death (a near miss by a falling beam) walks out on his comfortable suburban life and becomes a drifter before eventually settling down to a life in Spokane not terribly unlike the life he left behind.

It isn’t clear whether Spade is using the Flitcraft parable to explain the randomness of life or the inescapability of fate. That’s the beauty of the parable. It can be read both ways, like a good haiku.

Vignettes can be beautiful. They are like flowers or poems. They give us pause to think, or chuckle, or be surprised. But they’re not stories.

A story needs plot. That means characters and action, driven by motive and conflict, led to some sort of resolution. Over the years I’ve read some very fat vignettes disguised as novels. Some of them, shelved in the literary fiction aisle, use anger, depression, or angst as a substitute for plot. Others, found in the science fiction section, use clever ideas or concepts in place of plots. As I read, I can almost hear the author – as the page-count reaches 400 or 500 or 900 – thinking “okay, how am I going to wrap this up?”

I still enjoy good science fiction as well as so-called “literary fiction.” But whether it’s the gardens of short stories or the forests of novels, I keep coming back to mysteries, where plot and storytelling reign.