Lehman John - Around midnight : how to write a short story in one long evening

Around Midnight

How to Write A Short Story in One Long Evening

by

Jack Lehman

CAMBRIDGE, WISCONSIN 2011

BY THE AUTHOR

POETRY

Shrine of the Tooth Fairy

Dogs Dream of Running

Shorts, Brief Poems of

Wonder and Amazement

Acting Lessons

The Village Poet

FICTION

(Fiction is under the name "Jack" Lehman)

The Geography of Sleep

The Man with One Ear

Wolves beneath

Chicago

The Uninvited Detective

Tales Told in the Dark

NON-FICTION

America's Greatest Unknown

Poet: Lorine Niedecker

Everything is Changing: How to

Gain Loyal Clients and Customers

PLAYS

A Brief History of My Tattoo

The Jane Test

The Writer's Cave

Last Day of the Sixties

John Jumps

COMPACT DISKS

10 Things I Think I Know for Sure about Getting Your Writing Published

The Writer's Cave: Why Writers Write What They Do

How and Why a Poem Works / Stopping by the Woods

John Lehman is a nationally published writer, poet and playwright. The innovative, 6-step approach he presents in this book is the result of his twenty years experience teaching creative writing and sixteen years as a creative director/senior copywriter for Midwest advertising agencies. It uses techniques from acting and film editing to unlock a writer's talent and give him or her the tools to produce stories, articles and books that move readers.

John is a graduate of the Great Books Program at Notre Dame University and has a Masters Degree in Curriculum Development from the University of Michigan. He currently conducts creative writing workshops and "Decisioneering" marketing/sales seminars for businesses, besides running www.JumpStartNewBusiness. John Lehman is founder and original publisher of Rosebud , a magazine for people who enjoy good writing and he is currently the literary editor of Wisconsin People & Ideas. He's the author of five collections of poetry Shrine of the Tooth Fairy, Dogs Dream of Running, Shorts: Brief Poems of Wonder and Surprise, Acting Les sons and The Village Poet .

His nonfiction books include Everything Is Changing and America's Greatest Unknown Poet: Lorine Niedecker. His four plays are: A Brief History of My Tattoo, The Jane Test, The Writer's Cave and The Last Day of the Sixties . They have been presented in Milwaukee, Madison and Saint Petersburg, Florida. His novels and short stories are on Kindle under the name Jack Lehman. Lehman has been nominated for the Pushcart prize in fiction, non-fiction and poetry and is the winner of the prestigious Christopher Latham Sholes Award from the Council for Wisconsin Writers. For more information about him, check: www.JohnLehman.info .

Dedicated to my wife, Talia Schorr, and our wonderful life together with our dogs and cats in rural Wisconsin.

All contents copyrighted by John Lehman, 2011

Although John (Jack) is an accomplished writer, he is not one of those "how to write" gurus who deigns to deliver wisdom from on high. Instead he speaks from the perspective of a writer who struggles with works in progress and works yet to be created, while casting a reflective and critical eye on works completed in the past.

He uses his own stories as examples, not because they are great works, but because by re-immersing himself in those stories and the processes of creating them, he brings himself much closer to the reader/writers who are striving to shape tales of their own.

By providing simple structures and exercises that make it easy to begin and move forward with the story telling process, Jack is like the friendly local mechanic who will look under the hood of your story with you, and tell you what to do next.

His book is a must read for anyone seeking to be a writer of short fiction.

-- Roderick Clark, Editor/Publisher, ROSEBUD MAGAZINE

Jack Lehman's handy short-story writer's guide will appeal to both aspiring and established authors. The advice is rock solid ("Good writing doesn't tell us, it listens to us and allows us to do something life doesn't") and the writers and filmmakers that Lehman cogently discusses and dissects are first-rate storytellers (Raymond Carver, Patricia Highsmith, David Mamet, Andre Dubus, Orson Welles, Ingmar Bergman). Best of all, "Half Past Midnight" includes six of Lehman's own powerful short stories and he shares their genesis and often deeply personal secrets.

-- Bob Wake, CAMBRIDGE BOOK REVIEWS

PREFACE

" Bounce on the board...and jump! "--Jack Lehman

I was teaching my first short story workshop. We are reading Raymond Carver and I invited the participants to talk about some object--the emotions or memories it conjured up. The Carver short stories were "Cathedral" and "A Small, Good Thing."

In the first, a man who's blind asks another to describe a church by drawing a picture of it on rough paper. The blind man's hand rests on the narrator's pencil as he does this and later touches the impressions they have made. In our workroomJack recalled that he himself was asked by a blind person to describe an elm. He happened to have a Bonsai tree so he took the man to his apartment and guided that blind man's fingers slowly over its trunk, branches and leaves.

Then Annie, a forty-year old who acted seventeen, when it was herturn, reached behind her chair and plopped a backpack on the table. From it she removed a fuzzy, cartoon-like duck. As she caressed the doll that someone had left at a Starbucks where she works, she told us, "My son died when he was six, one summer at my ex-husband's house. Nobody knows what happened, only that they found him in the morning, a small rubber ball lodged in his throat." Her eyes look down. She straightened the bowtie on the duck. Then Annie unfolded the handwritten question pinned to its coat. It says: "Have you forgotten me."

You too need to tap into a personal dilemma. That's what you bring to the table this night of writing. You also need a structure that allows you, not only to dramatize this, but resolve it. At least for you.

Why do we have to have a structure? There are two reasons; 1) it allows us to suggest things that can't be put into words, and 2) this format is something others can read and respond to with their own comparable experiences. When that second part happens, it forces us, as writers, to do better, to be more exact...this time or the next. And mining the depths of something that matters to us is what good writing is all about.

I'll give you some tools and provide examples of how I have used them.

The short story has gone in and out of fashion, but the form itself offers you a unique opportunity to learn your trade--whether that is writing novels, plays, memoir and even creative nonfiction of any length. Many of our greatest writers, Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald and Henry James first became masters of the short story (as did contemporary writers, such as Joyce Carol Oats, John Updike, Lorrie Moore and Charles Baxter). There may not be the money in a collection of short stories that there is in a novel or autobiography, but it is a form readily publishable in over 4,000 small magazines that can provide leverage for eventually getting a longer work published.

There's another advantage to the short story. A novel or piece of book length nonfiction is a world complete in itself. A short story is more like a spotlight that shines on a crowd of people. We see what is there but also know there are things to the left and the right of the spotlight that we can't see directly. These are the events of the short story that happen before it began or that will happen after it is over. As writers we have to plant clues for the reader and we depend upon that reader to create what isn't expressed. It's this partnering with an audience in the creative process that is invaluable for other types of writing. They depend upon it, but nowhere (except perhaps with poetry) is it more essential than with the short story. The secret of good writing is to get your reader actively involved doing the work for you. Writing short stories shows us how to do that. The words are important, but the story takes place beyond the words, in the imagination of the person who reads it.

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