I’ve never conceived myself as a fiction writer.  Though I’ve loved getting lost in a great story for as long as I can remember (my fondest memories are huddling with the American Girl series under floral covers), I never imagined I could write them myself.  Writing stories was for other people, people more imaginative and inventive than myself.

As an English major at Berkeley, I learned to anatomize sentences like frogs in biology.  After years of rigorous intellectual training, I could analyze Satan’s use of the subjective case in Milton’s Paradise Lost or explore the role of modernity in an Edith Wharton novel.  If my higher education taught me anything, it was how to dissect the work of other people.

But I didn’t want to be an art aficionado: I didn’t want to just appreciate Cezanne’s apples and Van Gogh’s sunflowers— I wanted to create something of my own.

Flash forward more than a decade and I’m in a creative writing seminar, attempting to accomplish the very thing I once deemed impossible.  How— I wondered— did writers do it: fabricate a fictional world?

Annie Proulx once said, “Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.”  So I headed to my dust-covered bookshelf.  Maybe if I could read, I could write.  Like a tradesman attempting to master his craft, I diligently dissected my mentor texts: how did they introduce their characters?  define the scope of their narrative?  show the passing of time?  

I decided to first study Jhumpa Lahiri’s “A Temporary Matter,” one of several stunning stories from her 2000 Pulitzer-prize winning collection Interpreter of Maladies.  Why Lahiri?  To me, she is an expert storyteller, as consummate as Raymond Carver or Ernest Hemingway.  

So what lessons can we take from her gracefully-crafted short story?

craft a compelling opening

Lahiri’s heartbreaking narrative begins with 3 simple sentences:

“The notice informed them that it was a temporary matter: for five days their electricity would be cut off for one hour, beginning at eight P.M.  A line had gone down in the last snowstorm, and the repairmen were going to take advantage of the milder evenings to set it right.  The work would affect only the houses on the quiet tree-lined street, within walking distance of a row of bric-faced stores and a trolley stop, where Shoba and Shukumar had lived for three years.”

The masterful first clause introduces a pronoun without an antecedent, “it”.  But what— exactly— is a temporary matter?  This unanswered question immediately draws us in.  Lahiri’s first clause creates a mystery only to unravel it in the second part of the sentence.  Soon after we’re confronted with the ambiguous pronoun “it,” we learn what the temporary matter is: an upcoming power outage.  Though our riddle seems to be solved, we’re still left wondering: what’s the power outage’s significance?   Considering that it’s described as a “temporary matter”— the story’s title— we know it’s important.  Does the phrase only refer to the power outage or does it have more thematic significance?  Lahiri’s intriguing, if understated, opening teases us with these questions.

It’s only in the third sentence that Lahiri introduces our central characters, Shoba and Shukumar.  The only thing we learn about the couple is that they’ve lived in this quaint New England neighborhood for “three years.”  Rather than bore us with tiresome background or unnecessary exposition, Lahiri inserts us right into the action:

“It’s good of them to warn us,” Shoba conceded after reading the notice aloud, more for her own benefit than Shukumar’s.  She let the strap of her leather satchel, plump with files, slip from her shoulders, and left it in the hallway as she walked into the kitchen.  She wore a navy poplin raincoat over gray sweatpants and white sneakers, looking, at thirty-three, like the type of woman she’d once claimed she would never resemble.

She’d come from the gym.  Her cranberry lipstick was visible only on the outer reaches of her mouth, and her eyeliner had left charcoal patches beneath her lower lashes.  She used to look this way sometimes, Shukumar thought, on mornings after a party or a night at a bar, when she’d been too lazy to wash her face, too eager to collapse in his arms.  She dropped a sheaf of mail on the table without a glance.  Her eyes were still fixed on the notice in her hand.  “But they should do this sort of thing during the day.”

Which leads us to our second writing lesson:

say less & show, don’t tell 

“A Temporary Matter” is a masterclass in showing vs. telling.  Rather than simply tell us that Shoba is busy at some sort of office job, Lahiri shows us the “strap of her leather satchel, plump with files.”  The fact that she lets the satchel “slip” from her shoulders and leaves it in the hallway conveys a certain carelessness of character: she doesn’t seem to care about tidying up after herself or putting her things where they belong (later Lahiri will reveal she treats her home more like a hotel).  Her sloppy attire (“white sneakers”/”gray sweatpants”) and disheveled makeup (“charcoal patches” left from her eyeliner/smudged “cranberry lipstick”) reinforce this image.  The confession that she looked “at thirty-three, like the type of woman she’d once claimed she would never resemble” subtly revels something has shifted.  As readers, we begin to wonder: what’s changed?  

In the next line, we finally hear from Shukumar, Shoba’s husband: 

“When I’m here, you mean.”

In just five words, we get a poignant portrait of Shoba and Shukumar’s disintegrating marriage.  From their very first interaction, we sense tension boiling beneath the surface.  Though their exchange seems civil— Shukumar, after all, doesn’t scream, doesn’t shout, doesn’t call his wife a self-centered bitch— his words simmer with irritation and resentment.  Shoba’s assertion that “they should do this sort of thing during the day” clearly upsets Shukumar who takes her suggestion as a personal affront.  A grad student who works from home, he interprets his wife’s offhand comment to mean his work isn’t important.  By saying she’d prefer the power to be out when she’s in the comfort of her downtown office and Shukumar’s at home writing his dissertation, Shoba seems to imply that she’d rather inconvenience her husband.

But why is there so much animosity about something as insignificant as a power outage?  It reminds me of the age-old fight about dirty dishes.  As anyone who’s been entangled in a romantic relationship knows, the topic of an argument is almost never the actual source of conflict.  A fight about dirty dishes is never just about dirty dishes: it’s about not prioritizing your partner’s needs, it’s about one person not listening to the other’s preferences.  If a wife asks her husband to wash his cheese-crusted pans (because, if he doesn’t, she’ll have to labor later to scrub them) and he never heeds her requests, he sends an undeniable message: I could care less.

In the same way, Shoba and Shukumar’s little domestic squabble isn’t just about who should be inconvenienced by a power outage— it’s about who matters and who doesn’t.  In a compact 16 word interaction, we glean important insight into the dance of Shoba and Shukumar’s relationship dynamics: Shoba cares about herself and behaves more as an individual than as one half of a family unit, while Shukumar feels his wife doesn’t consider his needs and neglects him.

Lahiri is an expert of the iceberg theory, or theory of omission.  According to Ernest Hemingway, who first pioneered the theory, stories are like icebergs.  They have two layers: the surface you can see (character, plot, setting, sensory detail, words, body language) and subtext (thoughts, feelings, symbols, themes).  The best stories don’t tell everything: they only tell part of the story.

Take “A Temporary Matter.”  Lahiri doesn’t tell us Shoba and Shukumar are in a loveless marriage— she shows us through their dialogue and actions.  Lahiri implies rather than states.  She leaves things unsaid rather than attempt to include everything.  Much like her predecessor Papa Hemingway, she prefers simple words and declarative sentences that leave a lot to the imagination.  What she says is just the tip of the iceberg— the rest of the story operates beneath the waves.

 Take this paragraph:

“He ran his tongue over the tops of his teeth; he’d forgotten to brush them that morning.  It wasn’t the first time.  He hadn’t left the house all day, or the day before.  The more Shoba stayed out, the more she began putting in extra hours at work and taking on additional projects, the more he wanted to stay in, not even leaving to get the mail, or to buy fruit or wine at the stores by the trolley shop.”

Lahiri’s use of detail plunges us into the debilitating depths of Shukumar’s depression.  Not only has he “forgotten to brush his teeth”; he rarely leaves the house, not even to “buy fruit or wine” at the grocery.  What’s interesting is how husband and wife are immediately placed in opposition: while Shukumar is incapable of leaving the confines of his bed, Shoba is relentlessly active: she puts in “extra hours at work” and is always “taking on additional projects.”  From the first two pages, we get the sense that the two are islands separated by a vast ocean rather than one single continent.   Yet Lahiri never directly says Shukumar is dejected, nor does she elaborate on why the couple seems to be growing distant— she says less.

It’s only in the next paragraph that we learn the couple suffered a miscarriage.  With characteristic restraint, Lahiri underscores the different ways Shoba and Shukumar cope in the aftermath:

“These days Shoba was always gone by the time Shukumar woke up.  He would open his eyes and see the long black hairs she shed on her pillow and think of her, dressed, sipping her third cup of coffee already, in her office downtown, where she searched for typographical errors in textbooks and marked them, in a code she had once explained to him, with an assortment of colored pencils.  She would do the same for his dissertation, she promised, when it was ready.  He envied her the specificity of her task, so unlike the elusive nature of his.  He was a mediocre student who had a facility for absorbing details without curiosity.  Until September he had been diligent if not dedicated, summarizing chapters, outlining arguments on pads of yellow lined paper.  But now he would lie in their bed until he grew bored, gazing at his side of the closet which Shoba always left partly open, at the row of the tweed jackets and corduroy trousers he would not have to choose from to teach his classes that semester.”

Shoba and Shukumar grapple with their grief completely differently.  While Shukumar sinks into a pit of despair, squandering his days lying in “bed until he [grows] bored,” Shoba distracts herself by working as much as possible.  She operates by means of avoidance: always occupied, she never stops long enough to have to think about their lost child.  Shukumar has the opposite reaction: he surrenders to his grief so completely that he can’t function, abandoning his “tweed jackets” and “corduroy trousers” and taking a temporary leave of absence from university.  By the time he wakes up, he imagines his wife is already in her office “sipping her third cup of coffee.”  The couple don’t kiss each other goodbye or even exchange empty pleasantries before Shoba heads off to work in the morning.  Shukumar doesn’t wake up to his wife but to strands of her “long black hair,” a poignant, phantom-like image of just how estranged they’ve become.  

Lahiri’s careful selection (and omission) of certain details makes “A Temporary Matter” an engrossing story.  Because she hints rather than explicitly states, we— the reader— become active participants in the story.  Like detectives, we must piece together the clues ourselves if we are to solve the mystery of what happened (and will happen) to this young couple after they lose their baby.

Lesson?  Say less: it will keep us reading.

have a central question

In her fascinating book Wired for Story: The Writer’s Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers From the Very First Sentence, Lisa Cron argues a “story is how what happens affects someone who is trying to achieve what turns out to be a difficult goal, and how he or she changes as a result.”  In simpler terms:

“what happens” is the plot 

“someone” is the protagonist

the “goal” is the story question 

and “how he or she changes” is what the story itself is actually about 

Let’s take a minute to discuss the idea of a story question.  The story question is the underlying question that your protagonist wrestles with from page 1— and finds an answer to before the story’s end.  The story question propels the plot.  As Cron suggests, the story question and the protagonist’s goal are intimately connected (all characters must have a desire or goal…remember Kurt Vonnegut’s sage advice: “Every character should want something, even if it’s only a glass of water”).

In The Great Gatsby, the question is: will Gatsby reunite with his long-lost love and finally attain his green light?  

In 30 Rock, the question is: will lovable curmudgeon Liz Lemon “have it all”…the career, the child, the husband?

In How I Met Your Mother, the question is: will starry-eyed romantic Ted ever have his fairytale ending and prance into the sunset with his Platonic other half, the mother of his children?

In the beginning of “A Temporary Matter,” the question is why is Shoba and Shukumar’s marriage crumbling?  have they always been this way?  After we learn about the miscarriage, the central question of the narrative becomes can their marriage be saved?

For a flickering moment, the answer seems to be “maybe.”  The power outage (a clever plot device) allows Shoba and Shukumar to rediscover their lost intimacy.  Because the couple is forced to sit in darkness for an hour every night, they start having dinner together.  In the dim candlelight, eating lamb and sipping wine, Shoba proposes they take turns telling each other a secret, something they’ve never shared before.  Before this little game, their interactions are brief and business-like— they act more like roommates than husband and wife.  But over the course of the week, their nocturnal exchange has them communicating more candidly than ever before.

Shoba’s game gives them the opportunity to nostalgically recall the first days of their courtship (“The first time I was alone in your apartment, I looked in your address book to see if you’d written me in…I wanted to know if you’d promoted me from the margins of your newspaper,” Shoba confesses).  Sometimes their revelations are tender and sweet (Shukumar, for example, tells his wife he “forgot to tip the waiter” on their first date because he had “a funny feeling that [he] might marry [Shoba]”).  Other times, their intimacies are hurtful and vindictive: Shoba reveals she let her husband “speak to the chairmen of his department without telling him that he had a dab of pate on his chin” and “never liked the one poem he ever published” while Shukumar divulges that he hadn’t “lost the sweater-vest she bought him for their third wedding anniversary but had exchanged it for cash.”

Shukumar begins to look forward to their clandestine hour, buying candles and cooking meals in preparation.  After they lost the baby, Shukumar and Shoba seemed to be stranded on their own islands of grief— their nightly rendezvous allow them to find their way back to civilization.  In the darkness, they’re liberated from their normal roles, their normal lives.  It’s like a costume: in the same way that we can be most ourselves when disguised, the couple can be more open and vulnerable with each other under the cover of night.

Throughout the story, Lahiri lulls us into thinking there’s hope for Shoba and Shukumar’s marriage.  On the second night, they hold hands, a small but significant gesture of affection.  On the third night, they sit “together on the sofa” and Shukumar awkwardly kisses his wife’s face and forehead.  On the fourth night, they make love with desperation.  

But in the end, Shoba and Shukumar can’t salvage their relationship.  What grants “A Temporary Matter” its emotional impact is the discrepancy between what we think will happen and what actually happens.  Over the course of their nightly game, we think the couple will be reunited.  Their rekindled intimacy reassures us that this rough patch was just a speed bump on the road to a happy marriage.  Lahiri makes us believe this will be the story of a troubled couple who redeems their relationship.  But in the end, we find ourselves in a completely different narrative.  While Shukumar thinks him and his wife are finally healing from their tragic miscarriage, Shoba is planning to leave him and looking for her own apartment.  For her, their game is a tearful farewell— not a reconciliation. 

A story question is the engine that drives your narrative.  Lahiri keeps us reading by posing a question (will Shukumar and Shoba resolve their conflicts?) and devastates us by answering in the heart-wrenching negative.  Lesson?  You must tap into your reader’s hardwired desire to know what happens next if you want them to keep turning pages.