List Stories: How they work, what they offer

This post is about short stories written as/around lists. It is based on notes from my short-story reading posts. (For background on the three-mood story structure, see Story Shapes — Three Mood Stories.)

Outline of this post (it should link to the relevant section):

• What is a list story?
• What makes a list into a story?
• A writing activity
• Some things lists can do (to a story)
• Some notes on specific stories
  • Advice stories
  • A numbered list
  • A list with its own structure
  • The metaphor-list
  • Using external structures to modulate distance
  • Fainter list structures
  • Sub-structures
• Some three-mood story shapes
• Patronise the arts

I hope to write a shorter version one day.

Text Journal publication — Retelling Tales

My short piece “Some Ways to Retell a Fairy Tale” has been published in TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses!

It began as a series of observations about retellings that I’d encountered in the short-story reading project, but quickly grew into its own… direction? reference guide? invocation? invitation? litany?

En Route — notes from a train

Some trips are easier to communicate from than others, and as previously expressed, I find it very difficult to work on trains.

Last week, I rode from New Orleans to NYC, a two-day trip (in a roomette!). I stared out the window almost the entire time, and made these notes.

They form two lengthy (linked) threads on Twitter, but I will edit them for elegance soon.

However, if you prefer a little more brevity, Travelogues contains 9 substantially shorter train journeys:

Short stories: Rites and rituals and structure

As part of this year’s short story reading project, I’ve been noticing the strong structural and structuring pull rite or rituals exert on stories.

Structurally (and that’s how I’m talking about them in this post), rituals can be a way to first summon a story and peel apart a world, and then at the end to stitch through many layers, to mend and make new. And of course ritual brings with it layers of language, formulation, knowledge, history, time, family, the numinous brushing the physical, a way of altering the world or being acknowledged and changed by it, and (rendered bureaucratic) all the ways that can be made soulless.

This post is lengthy… (among other things, after the initial draft I injured myself in a way that made editing very difficult).

Inventing rites and rituals — some lists from the observation journal

I’m planning a post on how rites and rituals show up in short stories, and wanted to refer back to this observation journal page. So I’m posting it earlier than it would otherwise have appeared! (Edit: the post on rituals and short story structure is now up.)

I was thinking about the way rites and rituals — as human an urge as covering surfaces with patterns — can shape a story or be the base for building a world.

I wanted to play with these ideas and effects without using the most obvious existing rituals, or ones I didn’t fully understand. So I made a little ritual-generator out of two (non-comprehensive!) lists: purpose and subject. You can expand the lists with your own interests and knowledge.

Purpose of rite/ritual/invocation/ceremony/sacrament/etc

evoke	encircle	hide	confer	sever	transform
invoke	farewell	recognise	transfer	separate	renew
summon	welcome	acknowledge	steady	remove	improve
avert	remember	identify	support	transition	reform
banish	remind	pledge	seek	prevent	return
shame	mark	sacrifice	request	bar	reset
remove	own	gift	petition	acknowledge	bless
honour	possess	invest	accompany	protect	heal
secure	join	partake	harmonise	ease	speed
protect	disguise	approach	beautify	liminal	ease

Subject

life	crops	journey	freedom	future	holy
death	plants	partnership	seasons	past	unholy
ages	vehicles	marriage	days	present	phenomena
roles	houses	relationships	tides	meteorology	legend
human	tools	adoption	times	disaster	deities
animal	utensils	disowning	celebrations	hopes	health
bird	endeavour	roles	events	aspirations	processes
fish	jobs	teaching	memorials	departed	industrial
weather	calling	ruling	history	children	war
land	commission	serving	government	elders	domestic
business	contract	vow	promise	physical	abstract

The writing/illustration exercise

• Take one or two items at random from each list and combine them (e.g. gift/legend or renew/own/animal).
• Then expand them into a rite or ritual, getting more specific (e.g. a generational ritual to pass ownership of a community’s founding legend or an annual rite to renew ownership/stewardship of draught-animals).
  (Note: Keep an eye on where these brush against or trample on rites and rituals actually in use, and on places you might want to push against expectations, use discretion, avoid stereotypes or come down hard on (or redeem) a ceremony you’ve suffered through.)
• If you know the world in which this story will happen, you can draw details and aesthetics for the ritual from it — weaving it into the substance of the world. Or you can start with the ritual and add details and aesthetics from things you like or notice around you (art deco/modernist!), and discover more about the place and people that way.
• Then, if you’re using this to build a world or story, ask what could go wrong (or more right than was anticipated!), and follow the implications. (Control, enforceability, cost and benefit are some other interesting if cynical questions to ask — or consider e.g. the evolution and varied iterations of the ritual, and what it means to different people.)
• Make a quick sketch (written or drawn) of a scene.
• Bonus round: Note where the story or world started to grow, or where it didn’t. Repeat the process, and see if there’s a pattern, or if there are questions that helped grow it. Is there a echo among the ideas that resonate for you? Are there more entries you’d add to the lists?

More to come when I post about rituals and story structure. (Edit: it is now up)

Observation Journal: Swapping characterisations and roles

On this observation journal page, I was playing with more ways to look at a story (written or drawn) with fresh eyes.

It was a process I wanted to use on my own sketches and drafts, but as usual, I tried it out on a fairy tale first.

I used “Little Red Riding Hood”, because I’d just spent a couple pages on it in another context (The Story Behind the Story).

First, I kept the characters in their established roles (Little Red Riding Hood playing herself, the Mother playing the Mother, the Wolf… well, you know). For each, I listed their obvious/easy/common traits. This is easy and fun — leaning into stereotypes and cliches in order to use their strength against them is usually a good time (see e.g. The Caudwell Manoeuvre).

Then I mixed them up.

Character	Usual personality
LRR	innocent and plucky
Mother	solicitous but hands-off
Wolf	wily & ferocious
Grandmother	frail & vulnerable
Woodcutter	taciturn & pragmatic
Washerwomen	cheerful and in solidarity

(I like the version with the helpful laundry ladies at the river)

I then moved each characteristic up by one. Now it’s a story about a cool and capable Little Red Riding Hood, sent by her ferocious mother to visit her taciturn, pragmatic grandmother. On the way, she meets a frail, vulnerable wolf…

Next, I pushed things further by keeping the story the same, but having the characters play each others’ roles. Now it’s a tale of a washerwomen sent into the forest by a wolf to visit a child, and on the way they meet a treacherous woodcutter…

You could use either approach to shake up a story for retelling. But I’ve found it useful as a thought exercise when working on projects — drawn or written! I mightn’t ultimately make these changes, but playing through these exercises can highlight where I’ve made easy instead of interesting choices with a character, or identify where my original choice was correct but needs to be done with more deliberateness or flamboyance. And it’s an interesting way to break open someone else’s story in order to analyse it, or to have fun with it.

Writing/illustration exercise

• Choose a story (written or visual). It can be someone else’s or your own.
  • List the characters. Next to each, briefly describe their obvious/default personality. Keep this simple. If it seems stereotypical, that’s fine.
  • Now, swap the characteristics around. Either randomly, or by shifting them all along one space.
  • Do a quick sketch (drawn or a paragraph) of what the story might now look like. (And make a note of any new ideas it gives you.)
• Make a table with a list of roles (key characters) from the story. In the next column, put the same characters, but shuffled.
  • Pretend each character now has to play the new role to which you’ve assigned them.
  • Do a quick sketch (drawn or a paragraph) of what the story might now look like. (And make a note of any new ideas it gives you.)
• Bonus, for each: Make a note of what worked, and what you liked, and see if you can identify why. Identify where the changes broke the story, or how robust the original idea was.

Bird and man watching plastic leaves get caught in a cafe fan

Support and/or follow

If you’d like to support art and writing and posts like this about it, here are some options:

• I have a Patreon account (patreon.com/tanaudel) where you can get behind-the-scenes process and sneak-peeks, starting from US$1.
• You could buy me a (virtual) coffee at ko-fi.com/tanaudel.
• I have shops at Redbubble and Spoonflower.
• I have a mailing list for very occasional major updates.

The Year’s Best Fantasy Vol. 1

My copy of The Year’s Best Fantasy Vol. 1 (2021), edited by Paula Guran, has arrived! It includes my short story “Gisla and the Three Favours”, first published last year in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet #43.

Here’s the table of contents. I’ve linked to my notes on each story (except for my own).

• Marika Bailey, “The White Road; Or How a Crow Carried Death Over a River” (Fiyah #18) (notes)
• Elizabeth Bear, “The Red Mother” (Tor.com) (notes)
• Tobias Buckell, “Brickomancer” (Shoggoths in Traffic and Other Stories) (notes)
• P. Djèlí Clark, “If the Martians Have Magic” (Uncanny #42) (notes)
• Roshani Chokshi, “Passing Fair and Young” (Sword Table Stone: Old Legend, New Voices) (notes)
• Varsha Dinesh, “The Demon Sage’s Daughter” (Strange Horizons 2/8/21) (notes)
• Andrew Dykstal, “Quintessence” (Beneath Ceaseless Skies #324) (notes)
• James Enge, “Drunkard’s Walk (F&SF 5-6) (notes)
• Karen Joy Fowler, “The Piper” (F&SF 1-2) (notes)
• Carlos Hernandez & C. S. E. Cooney, “A Minnow, or Perhaps a Colossal Squid (Mermaids Monthly, April) (notes)
• Kathleen Jennings, “Gisla and the Three Favors” (Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet #43)
• Allison King, “Breath of the Dragon King” (Fantasy #72) (notes)
• PH Lee, “Frost’s Boy” (Lightspeed #128) (notes)
• Yukimi Ogawa, “Her Garden the Size of Her Palm (F&SF 7-8) (notes)
• Tobi Ogundiran, “The Tale of Jaja and Canti” (Lightspeed #135) (notes)
• Richard Parks. “The Fox’s Daughter (Beneath Ceaseless Skies #344) (notes)
• Karen Russell, “The Cloud Lake Unicorn” (Conjunctions:76) (notes)
• Sofia Samatar, “Three Tales from the Blue Library” (Conjunctions:76) (notes)
• Catherynne Valente, “L’Esprit de Escalier” (Tor.com) (notes)
• Fran Wilde, “Unseelie Bros, Ltd.” (Uncanny #40) (notes)
• Merc Fenn Wolfmoor, “Gray Skies, Red Wings, Blue Lips, Black Hearts” (Apex #121) (notes)
• Isabel Yap,“A Spell for Foolish Hearts” (Never Have I Ever) (notes)
• E. Lily Yu, “Small Monsters” (Tor.com) (notes)

Purgatorial stories — hallmarks and patterns

This post is a spin-off of the three-mood short story reading project.

I’d noticed a number of stories (and novels, and shows) with what I could only describe as a particularly purgatorial aesthetic/mood. This post is a first attempt to bring all those notes and thoughts together.

Here are the main sections:

• “Purgatorial”?
• Initial examples
• The hallmarks
• Some uses of the purgatorial effect
• Collected thoughts on some purgatorial short stories
• All the story-shapes for the short stories in this post

Observation Journal: Notes on Learning Writing

On this observation journal page, I was collecting notes on where I’d learned what I knew (so far) about writing. (If this looks familiar, the page was the basis of for the post Writing — A Short History of Lessons Learned.)

Broadly (in case you want to attempt something similar) I started dropping all the places I could think of having learned anything about writing onto the page (words in circles), and then listed off each the main lessons I’d learned there. Then I looked for patterns.

It was not exhaustive — among other things, I did it at 3am — but it was a useful exercise, for several reasons (this is not an exhaustive list):

• there are always lessons that need to be re-learned, and having them in one place is handy
• knowing how I learn has made it much easier to deliberately learn
• there are occasionally minor incidents that turn out to have been quite important, and it’s useful to know what they were and why, the better to seek out similar approaches (and thank people — the mentorship bubble is 75% Angela Slatter)
• it also made it much easier to give your-mileage-may-vary answers to questions other people asked me about writing
• there’s an honesty and humility that comes from working out from where (and how late) certain lessons were learned — quite useful when doing any amount of teaching

This page turned into the post Writing — A Short History of Lessons Learned.

The main patterns, in the order learned (more detail at the earlier post) were:

• Knowing I wanted to do it.
• Actually doing it.
• Finishing it.
• Getting stylish.
• Running with others.
• Learning structure.  

It’s also lovely revisiting this page (and the previous post) now, because I can see I’m still learning, and how, and what — particularly through the process known as “now do it again”, and the structural and style exercises from this journal, and the much more deliberate reading and learning I’m doing as a result. I might need to do this exercise again soon.

Also, I don’t think I’ve done this exercise for illustration yet, for some reason. One to put on the list.

Cleaning the ceiling after a warm can of Coke Zero fell over on the floor and sprayed everywhere

Support and/or follow

If you’d like to support art and writing and posts like this about it, here are some options:

• I have a Patreon account (patreon.com/tanaudel) where you can get behind-the-scenes process and sneak-peeks, starting from US$1.
• You could buy me a (virtual) coffee at ko-fi.com/tanaudel.
• I sell prints and products at Redbubble and Spoonflower.
• I have a mailing list for occasional major updates.

City Symphony — two days remaining

The official run of City Symphony, a location-based audio experience of Brisbane City, is just about to end.

It includes (among many other works of music and writing) my piece, “Twelve Observations Along George Street”, read by some very cool people.

It is a multilayered place-specific experience of music and words and includes (among many other works) my piece, “Twelve Observations Along George Street”.

Now that I’m back in the country, I’m hoping to go in and hear it this weekend, a sort of poem-as-tour-guide, played at the places where it was written.

The whipstrike of jasmine stitched on a chain link net,
And a hole in the wire where a tree might crawl through,
Where a shoal might slip through.
Look back, turn back! You are watched
By stone cats and curled finials,
Which guard against wildness…

(You can see another extract at my previous post.)