I’m going to stick my neck out here and try and define a characteristic of fiction that is, at least to me, new. I’ve written a few short stories as well as three novels, but when I finished a short story of about 4600 words a few weeks back, and read through it several times, I was struck by the story’s lack of a characteristic I’m going to call “import.”
What’s import, you ask? It’s going to be hard to define, and I’m not sure I can do a very good job. Perhaps the best way to define it is to look at stories that lack the concept. A story without import is bland, unimaginative, listless. That’s not to say that a story without import can’t be well written, or well conceived, or well executed. But when I finished reading through my story I asked myself, “What the hell was that?” It wasn’t that the story wasn’t satisfying, and it wasn’t that I didn’t get anything out of it, but it fell flat on its face, and I was left with the feeling of, “So what?”
To be effective, a story has to mean something. It not only has to have a real beginning, middle and end, the final impression left in the reader has to be real. My story didn’t do that. I thought it was reasonably well written, it has a real beginning, middle and end all right, and when I was through, I felt it gave the reader a lot of interesting information. I even had to do some research to get my facts correct. Yet, it was flat. Dullsville. Again, I said to myself, so what?
This was the first time this had happened. All my stories I feel give the reader something significant to take away. But this one didn’t, and I can’t really define why not. A story has to leave an impression on the reader. That can be either a positive or negative impression. Leaving a negative impression is at least an impression. If a reader says, “I hated that story,” that’s better than, “I got nothing out of it,” or “I didn’t understand it,” or “So what.”
I’m not sure how I can fix the story to make it more significant. It actually tells the story I wanted to tell, and does it effectively, with even a little humor, yet it lacks something important. The story falls into a category called magical realism, a relatively new genre which is sort of a subdivision of science fiction, and a genre I’m just getting into. I suspect no reputable journal or magazine would ever accept it, though; it’s too bland. I could spice it up, yet that would be to pollute it with details that have little to do with the plot. That probably wouldn’t fix the problem anyway.
Ah, the vagaries of the writing life.