In Breach of Story: Breaking the Shackles of Traditional Fiction

I have undergone the trauma of too many undergraduate creative writing teachers, too many books on the craft of short stories. Though I am sure all of them have been well intentioned, I am still distressed. In my own writing, the time-honored rules of the traditional short story have served as shackles confining my creativity. When writing my short stories, I have always felt compelled to stay in one point of view, to include that essential epiphany, to make the story's length substantial, to have a linear, causal plot, and to see the actual events of my story perfunctorily correspond with the points on Gustav Freytag's plot structure pyramid. As an artist, I want to have the entitlement to be liberated and limitless in my work, yet in so many writing courses, anthologies, and fiction craft books, these seemingly indisputable story regulations prevail. After studying numerous authors who defy conventional story standards, I have come to realize that the option to break the traditional rules is always there. And rule breaking or not, experimental stories typically succeed in achieving ends similar to the conventional pieces: concentrated emotional impacts, examinations of universal themes, and fulfillments of implicit contracts between the writer and reader. Edgar Allen Poe provided a footing for short stories that "paved the way" for future writers of short fiction. His review of Nathaniel Hawthorne's TwiceTold Tales (1842) is viewed as his "theory of fiction." In it he states that the special goal of the writer of a piece of short prose is "to create a concentrated emotional impact." This impact, presupposing that the writing is of high quality, results directly from the succinctness of the narrative, which Poe says "can and should be read in a single sitting" of perhaps no more than two hours. (1) If the early aim, then, of a short piece of fiction was to achieve the aforementioned concentrated emotional impact, the manner in which the writer gets there is of no consequence. In the anthology Anti-Story, Philip Stevick states that in the early part of the twentieth century, "short fiction challenge[d] the received notions of time and space, continuity and coherence, artistic illusion and psychological process just as powerfully and successfully as longer fiction [did]. It puzzle[d] and trouble[d] its readers with its artistic audacity. And it include[d] some of the most extraordinary art of our time, as passionate in its craftsmanship, as controlled in its structure, as penetrating in its vision as any art of any kind. But then a kind of fatigue over[took] the form, changing short fiction into perhaps the most conservative art of mid-century, during the nineteen-fifties probably the single mode of artistic expression most self-imitative." (2) This period can be pinpointed as the source of the rules that stifled me and many other creative writing students before and after me. Stevick goes on to say how "disturbing and ultimately tiresome" it is "to find so many patterned and rather obvious symbols" in these English and American works of the half century. He points out how few distinct voices there are to be found and how "in an age in which every other art continued to extend its own possibilities," short fiction "became rather predictable and formulaic." (3) Many writers, however, by the 1960s, felt liberated to try new techniques after the torrent of anti-stories. (4) John Gardner refers to the "rules of fiction" in this way: "the search for aesthetic absolutes is a misapplication of the writer's energy. When one begins to be persuaded that certain things must never be done and that certain other things must always be done, one has entered into the first stage of aesthetic arthritis, the disease that ends up in pedantic rigidity and the atrophy of institution. Every true work of art--and thus every attempt at art (since things meant to be similar must submit to one standard)--must be judged primarily, though not exclusively, by its own laws. …