Intrigue, Surprise and Delight – Is this the Winning Combination for a Short Story
Intrigue, Surprise and Delight – Is this the Winning Combination for a Short Story
But the real question is how?
Let me take these three pillars on which a good short story stands, its test, one by one.
Intrigue teasingly
If intrigue is the soul of a good short story, blunt hard hitting revelations interspersed is what keeps it ticking. Merely intrigue – like an abstract art, I am afraid – will amount to leaving a person short of a climax, that he neared successfully and with much anticipation, but somehow could not reach. The effect, now that we know the cause, will be repugnance at the cost of author’s capability to impact. So for me, a good story should have liberal dose of intrigue, but in flashes. In other words, I can also say that one should attempt to intrigue the readers teasingly – Tantalizing their imagination, and then, just as the reader reaches a degree of understanding, taking it further with another of those intriguing twists.
Surprise innocently
The world is full of surprises – this is no surprise for any one of us. But the fact that a surprise awaits us at every corner, it still doesn’t stop surprising us all the time. According to me, and to typify, an innocent surprise is what people like to experience and admire, and feel happy about. Surprise of any other type gives rise to repulsion, because the reader is not expecting it. By innocence, I am in no way implying that the surprise be of a particular variety, because by saying that I will be limiting my statement to a particular genre of short stories. All I am saying is that the element of surprise should emerge from the text out of innocence, and at the least expected moment. The innocence should be visible and felt.
And Delight Relatively
Delight is what all souls seek, in pursuit of their everyday lives, whether they eat, sleep, play, party or read. I am sure all of us agree on this one. The essence of the entire life form is to seek delight in our being, us. For this we ape other’s luxuries, feel ourselves through other’s appreciations or just tend to achieve calm through the misery of others. It is human, after all, to seek happiness through a medium that has everything in it other than you. In short, happiness, or delight, is essentially relative. So it is always a very good idea to let people have access to shades of happiness they can relate to, in a manner that it could have happened to them as well.
This is off course in a nut shell, but something I can advise aspiring writers who are just beginning to venture out. Can this thinking be applied to writing books as well? To a very large extent, I would say yes. But in writing a novel, one should also consider the fact that it has to sustain the expanse of the format which is not only ambitious in its sheer enormity but also needs a sustainable twine that will go into keeping the whole ambition of the story bound together. And for that one needs an understating of a few other aspects too. More soon….
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