Art Taylor has won the Edgar and Anthony and multiple Agatha, Macavity, and Derringer awards for his short fiction. He is one of a very rare breed of writer these days: one who devotes most of his time to the short story.  His novel-in-stories entitled On the Road With Del and Louise won the Agatha Award for best first novel. His other books are short story collections: The Boy Detective and the Summer of ’74 and Other Tales of Suspense and The Adventure of the Castle Thief and Other Expeditions and Indiscretions. Art has managed to produce such a large number of top-notch stories while also serving as an associate professor of English at George Mason University. He made his own fiction debut in EQMM’s Department of First Stories and through his teaching he has directed to EQMM other authors who have also gotten their start in our pages. In this post he has some interesting thoughts to share about structure as it pertains to the short story, and he’s brought in examples of fiction written by his students to illustrate the points.  Don’t miss Art’s latest story,  “Dark Thread, Loose Strands,” which appears in our current issue (May/June 2024). It’s a powerful one!—Janet Hutchings

My latest story for Ellery Queen is “Dark Thread, Loose Strands,” and it’s the last word of the story’s title that I want to focus on here today. Specifically, I want to explore how the interweaving of additional narrative strands—other perspectives or other timelines, for example—might enhance a piece of short fiction.

“Dark Thread, Loose Strands” has four sections, told from the perspectives of three people: Lyman, a janitor in a large office building; Tyler, a young boy being bullied in his first year of junior high school; and Tyler’s new friend, Robbie, struggling with his own feelings of weakness and insecurity. Their stories intersect in a schoolyard—an incident that Lyman catches sight of from his car as he’s passing the school. Lyman gets two sections of the story; his perspectives and his subsequent actions begin and end the tale.

In several of my classes at George Mason University—two levels of fiction workshop (regular and advanced) and then in my special topics class “Writing Suspense”—I spend a fair bit of time talking about modular storytelling, relying heavily on Madison Smartt Bell’s terrific craft guide Narrative Design: Working with Imagination, Craft, and Form. As I explain to students, while a linear narrative might follow one character/perspective through a series of events in a chronological way, a modular narrative expands a story by adding different elements in concert with or opposition to the single storyline—a layering of what Bell calls “vectors.”

That layering might involve shuttling between different character’s perspectives on the same series of events (each perspective its own vector of the story) or interweaving a character’s experiences from many years before with their current situation and struggles (each timeline a vector) or perhaps shifting narrative distance (omniscient, intimate) or tones (humorous, somber) or even genres (story, essay) from one section to the next. Each series of vectors forms its own strand of the story, and each strand has its own weight—a fabric or a mosaic, depending on your metaphor, whose design only becomes clear when you step back and view the whole thing.

“In modular narrative design,” Bell explains, “narrative elements are balanced in symmetry as shapes are balanced in a symmetrical geometric figure, or as weights are balanced on a scale . . . At the page-by-page level, the modular unit will most probably look like a text block, separated from its fellows by space breaks.”

Many of my students jump at the opportunities here. In the semester that’s just ended, for example, several students in my Advanced Fiction Workshop submitted stories with complex structures. One story charted the tensions between an elementary school teacher and her new class—a downward spiral, deftly navigated by the writer—but that primary storyline alternated with short essayistic sections about pedagogical practices and, um, cows, and then … well, it would be a spoiler to say what else those sections contained, but the interweaving (and then intersecting) of the narrative and the essayistic was extraordinary. Another story focused on a young pianist undergoing finger surgery, but the author shuttled between the day of the operation and a second vector of past scenes that underscored the reasons why she was pursuing such a drastic procedure—offering up as well some ominous foreshadowing. A third story—coincidentally also about a pianist and perhaps the most elaborately structured—orchestrated five different strands covering the woman’s development as a pianist and her lifelong struggles with relationships: one beginning with piano lessons and following through early life toward a traumatic event; a second in the present as the protagonist battled artistic blocks and navigated a new relationship; the third and fourth about evolving relationships with her college roommate and her mother, respectively; and a final strand centering on sessions with her therapist. In each story, the students navigated the shifts skillfully and used the vectors to dramatically expand the scope and emotional weight of their stories. 

The advantages of such structures might be obvious, but they’re worth emphasizing. Learning about a protagonist at different stages of her life not only provides opportunities for developing greater depths of character but might also allow a reader to see how the past impacts present choices. Several perspectives on a single incident might lead us to question what really happened (Rashomon-styled) or else provide a richer understanding, greater context, greater complexity, possibly greater emotional weight. And from a suspense angle… well, it’s a tried-but-true tactic to cut to another scene or perspective at a cliffhanger moment, but let me also stress the benefit of dramatic irony. If the reader realizes how the arc of character A’s story will intersect with character B’s story and character C’s story—knowledge that none of the characters themselves have about one another—then that reader gets a god’s-eye view of where things are coming together and might end up on the edge of their seat waiting for the collision ahead.

That’s one of the main things I love about modular storytelling—the role of the reader in putting the pieces together and the elements of the story that rise up between the vectors, between the layers, implicit and hopefully more impactful because they’re not overexplained. As much as a writer carefully builds character and plot and setting, the reader plays an equally integral role in constructing the final and full experience of the story, and modular structures provide a clear way of inviting the reader formally into that role.

That’s kind of what I was aiming for “Dark Thread, Loose Strands,” and I hope that those loose strands—Lyman’s, Tyler’s, Robbie’s—join together into some meaningful design, the whole more than the sum of the parts. I hope that the story—in the collisions and the gaps and what’s left unsaid—delivers a multi-dimensional, immersive, and ultimately emotional experience.