Have you ever read a craft essay that invokes matrices? Does the very idea give you flashbacks to high school algebra? Should that give us pause? Or should we say what the hell, and just dive into J. Howard Siegal’s craft essay on beginnings?
While reading a book on my way home from a writing festival, I had an epiphany: Damn, this is how you start a short story. I put the book down in my lap and tried to figure out just why that beginning worked so well. I came up with nothing, so I finished the excellent story (“Domokun in Freemont” by Juan Martinez, from his collection Best Worst American), paid the cab driver and got on with my life, until the next morning, when I woke up with an awful idea.
The idea is this: Let’s take something lucid and arresting and fluid, and chop it into lifeless cubes, which we can then restack in every possible combination while we stroke our chins and ruminate on craft.
This isn’t to say that we should be like Jack Kerouac and take Benzedrine and sit down at the typewriter and pound away until a novel has emerged. Besides, Kerouac might have been careening, but he wasn’t guessing.
My thought, rather, was to apply a kind of Gematria to what I identified at play in the opening to Martinez’s story, namely four elements I’m calling (how suspect is it when you start using this phrase?) “Thematic Content”, “Situating Content”, Flashback Content”, and “Action Content”. TSFA, for short. If you say it fast, it sounds like scoffing.
In “Domokun in Freemont”, this is the order of these various elements as they appear. First we have some thematic content, piquing our interest and setting the tone, then we situate our characters (and readers) in the scene, followed by a brief flashback that lets us know how exactly we got into this mess, which then leads back into the action of the story.
It’s brilliant.
Let’s all do it all the time, with every story, forever, until we’ve exhausted every terrible way to go about it. No, wait, let’s get greedy and see if there’s an even better way to do it. This is how every sci-fi horror film starts, I know.
As with occult numerology and alphabetical incantation, reckless exposure to this kind of linguistic alchemy can be deadening, enlightening, ruinous. You’ve been warned. Go back to writing by feel and intuition. Keep praying to the muses. Once we carve these slabs of content, they’ll lose all their magic. Why am I doing this? I don’t know, I’m like the archaeologist who discovers a folio of spells—I can’t help myself.
Okay, here it is, our sacred matrix, made of various content types, Thematic, Situating, Flashback, and Action.
TSFA — STFA — FSTA — ASFT
TSAF — STAF — FSAT — ASTF
TAFS — SATF — FTSA — ATSF
TASF — SAFT — FTAS — ATFS
TFAS — SFTA — FAST — AFTS
TFSA — SFAT — FATS — AFST
In order to perform this wretched sorcery, we’ll need an example in miniature. Here’s a paragraph with one sentence for each content type. It’s a nice little introduction to a man who’s lost his shoes, just as his wife predicted.
David had always liked his shoes oversized and roomy. Now he sat on the beach running sand between his toes. Maria had told him at the ice-cream shop to keep his shoes tied, but he loved the loose loops of them. A man approached down the beach, yoked under a rack of leather sandals.
Theme, situating, flashback, action. It works. So why not leave well enough alone? Because this is an insufferable essay about writing craft, that’s why.
We’re going to get really tired of David and his bit with the shoes, and Maria, and the ice cream shop. If you want to read through every single permutation, I’ll include them all below, but to spare you the entirety of the recombinatory slop, we’ll focus instead on the best and worst iterations.
Okay, let’s get started!
The best:
TSFA:
David had always liked his shoes oversized and roomy. Now he sat on the beach running sand between his toes. Maria had told him at the ice-cream shop to keep his shoes tied, but he loved the loose loops of them. A man approached down the beach, yoked under a rack of leather sandals.
Comment: This is the original pattern I noticed. I think it works beautifully, even in miniature.
TFSA:
David had always liked his shoes oversized and roomy. Maria had told him at the ice-cream shop to keep his shoes tied, but he loved the loose loops of them. Now he sat on the beach running sand between his toes. A man approached down the beach, yoked under a rack of leather sandals.
Comment: This works pretty well. Letting the Thematic content and the Action bookend the intro (as in the original example) seems pretty strong. This formulation also introduces more of a cause-and-effect between the Flashback and the Situating.
FTSA:
Maria had told David at the ice-cream shop to keep his shoes tied, but he loved the loose loops of them. David had always liked his shoes oversized and roomy. Now he sat on the beach running sand between his toes. A man approached, yoked under a rack of leather sandals.
Comment: This almost makes it, but the Thematic content seems more like an aside. Maybe in a longer formulation, it could work better.
ASTF:
A man approached down the beach, yoked under a rack of leather sandals. David sat running sand between his toes. He had always liked his shoes oversized and roomy. Maria had told him at the ice-cream shop to keep his shoes tied, but he loved the loose loops of them.
Comment: In this case, the Action seems to do double duty as Thematic content.
And the worst:
SFAT:
David sat on the beach running sand between his toes. Maria had told him at the ice-cream shop to keep his shoes tied, but he loved the loose loops of them. A man approached down the beach, yoked under a rack of leather sandals. David had always liked his shoes oversized and roomy.
Comment: What the hell. That last line reads like a punchline to a nonexistent joke. Terrible.
STAF:
David sat on the beach running sand between his toes. He had always liked his shoes oversized and roomy. A man approached down the beach, yoked under a rack of leather sandals. Maria had told him at the ice-cream shop to keep his shoes tied, but he loved the loose loops of them.
Comment: David has severe attention issues.
FSAT:
Maria had told David at the ice-cream shop to keep his shoes tied, but he loved the loose loops of them. Now he sat on the beach running sand between his toes. A man approached, yoked under a rack of leather sandals. David had always liked his shoes oversized and roomy.
Comment: This is almost working, until David turns to the camera and starts talking about his shoes.
FAST:
Maria had told David at the ice-cream shop to keep his shoes tied, but he loved the loose loops of them. A man approached down the beach, yoked under a rack of leather sandals. David sat running sand between his toes. He had always liked his shoes oversized and roomy.
Comment: David just doesn’t give a shit about anything.
So, what have we learned, besides that we can suck the life out of something while rearing monstrosities of its children?
It seems that starting stories with situational content is really boring. On the other hand, starting them with action is also difficult, though workable, if the action relates to the theme and the situating. Thematic content seems to work well at the outset, but really badly at the end of a story’s beginning, where it seems to say: now pause with me, dear reader, as we together ponder what the hell this story is actually about.
Flashbacks seem hard to do at the outset, unless connected closely to the theme and the situating. Action works well at the end of a story’s beginning, to pull us further along. Situational content is really necessary to orient the reader, but can gum up the works if you’re not careful.
Maybe the muses are aghast at all of this, and maybe we’ve infused the writing craft with the formaldehyde stench of the dissecting table. But I hope not.
I hope that, like scales consumed by jazz improvisers and drills conducted by athletes, playing with these blocks gives us some more tools in our bag, and that we can array them around us like talismans when we kneel before the blank page.
J. Siegal writes fiction, nonfiction, music, and code. He plays barrelhouse piano and produces the musical group Red Spot Rhythm Section. His writing has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review and Skeptic Magazine, among others. Currently, he is at work on his first novel. He lives with his wife and two children near Chicago, IL.
And for those of you who haven’t had enough despoiling of a decent paragraph that never did anything to anyone or asked for any of this in the first place, here’s the full list of variations:
TSFA:
David had always liked his shoes oversized and roomy. Now he sat on the beach running sand between his toes. Maria had told him at the ice-cream shop to keep his shoes tied, but he loved the loose loops of them. A man approached down the beach, yoked under a rack of leather sandals.
TSAF:
David had always liked his shoes oversized and roomy. Now he sat on the beach running sand between his toes. A man approached down the beach, yoked under a rack of leather sandals. Maria had told him at the ice-cream shop to keep his shoes tied, but he loved the loose loops of them.
TAFS:
David had always liked his shoes oversized and roomy. A man approached down the beach, yoked under a rack of leather sandals. Maria had told him at the ice-cream shop to keep his shoes tied, but he loved the loose loops of them. David sat on the beach running sand between his toes.
TASF:
David had always liked his shoes oversized and roomy. A man approached down the beach, yoked under a rack of leather sandals. David sat on the beach running sand between his toes. Maria had told him at the ice-cream shop to keep his shoes tied, but he loved the loose loops of them.
TFAS:
David had always liked his shoes oversized and roomy. Maria had told him at the ice-cream shop to keep his shoes tied, but he loved the loose loops of them. A man approached down the beach, yoked under a rack of leather sandals. David sat on the beach running sand between his toes.
TFSA:
David had always liked his shoes oversized and roomy. Maria had told him at the ice-cream shop to keep his shoes tied, but he loved the loose loops of them. Now he sat on the beach running sand between his toes. A man approached down the beach, yoked under a rack of leather sandals.
STFA:
David sat on the beach running sand between his toes. He had always liked his shoes oversized and roomy. Maria had told him at the ice-cream shop to keep his shoes tied, but he loved the loose loops of them. A man approached down the beach, yoked under a rack of leather sandals.
STAF:
David sat on the beach running sand between his toes. He had always liked his shoes oversized and roomy. A man approached down the beach, yoked under a rack of leather sandals. Maria had told him at the ice-cream shop to keep his shoes tied, but he loved the loose loops of them.
SATF:
David sat on the beach running sand between his toes. A man approached down the beach, yoked under a rack of leather sandals. David had always liked his shoes oversized and roomy. Maria had told him at the ice-cream shop to keep his shoes tied, but he loved the loose loops of them.
SAFT:
David sat on the beach running sand between his toes. A man approached down the beach, yoked under a rack of leather sandals. Maria had told David at the ice-cream shop to keep his shoes tied, but he loved the loose loops of them. He had always liked his shoes oversized and roomy.
SFTA:
David sat on the beach running sand between his toes. Maria had told him at the ice-cream shop to keep his shoes tied, but he loved the loose loops of them. David had always liked his shoes oversized and roomy. A man approached down the beach, yoked under a rack of leather sandals.
SFAT:
David sat on the beach running sand between his toes. Maria had told him at the ice-cream shop to keep his shoes tied, but he loved the loose loops of them. A man approached down the beach, yoked under a rack of leather sandals. David had always liked his shoes oversized and roomy.
FSTA:
Maria had told David at the ice-cream shop to keep his shoes tied, but he loved the loose loops of them. Now he sat on the beach running sand between his toes. He had always liked his shoes oversized and roomy. A man approached down the beach, yoked under a rack of leather sandals.
FSAT:
Maria had told David at the ice-cream shop to keep his shoes tied, but he loved the loose loops of them. Now he sat on the beach running sand between his toes. A man approached down the beach, yoked under a rack of leather sandals. David had always liked his shoes oversized and roomy.
FTSA:
Maria had told David at the ice-cream shop to keep his shoes tied, but he loved the loose loops of them. David had always liked his shoes oversized and roomy. Now he sat on the beach running sand between his toes. A man approached down the beach, yoked under a rack of leather sandals.
FTAS:
Maria had told David at the ice-cream shop to keep his shoes tied, but he loved the loose loops of them. David had always liked his shoes oversized and roomy. A man approached down the beach, yoked under a rack of leather sandals. David sat on the beach running sand between his toes.
FAST:
Maria had told David at the ice-cream shop to keep his shoes tied, but he loved the loose loops of them. A man approached down the beach, yoked under a rack of leather sandals. David sat on the beach running sand between his toes. He had always liked his shoes oversized and roomy.
FATS:
Maria had told David at the ice-cream shop to keep his shoes tied, but he loved the loose loops of them. A man approached down the beach, yoked under a rack of leather sandals. David had always liked his shoes oversized and roomy. He sat on the beach running sand between his toes.
ASFT:
A man approached down the beach, yoked under a rack of leather sandals. David sat running sand between his toes. Maria had told him at the ice-cream shop to keep his shoes tied, but he loved the loose loops of them. David had always liked his shoes oversized and roomy.
ASTF:
A man approached down the beach, yoked under a rack of leather sandals. David sat running sand between his toes. He had always liked his shoes oversized and roomy. Maria had told him at the ice-cream shop to keep his shoes tied, but he loved the loose loops of them.
ATSF:
A man approached down the beach, yoked under a rack of leather sandals. David had always liked his shoes oversized and roomy. He sat on the beach running sand between his toes. Maria had told him at the ice-cream shop to keep his shoes tied, but he loved the loose loops of them.
ATFS:
A man approached down the beach, yoked under a rack of leather sandals. David had always liked his shoes oversized and roomy. Maria had told him at the ice-cream shop to keep his shoes tied, but he loved the loose loops of them. He sat on the beach running sand between his toes.
AFTS:
A man approached down the beach, yoked under a rack of leather sandals. Maria had told David at the ice-cream shop to keep his shoes tied, but he loved the loose loops of them. He had always liked his shoes oversized and roomy. He sat on the beach running sand between his toes.
AFST:
A man approached down the beach, yoked under a rack of leather sandals. Maria had told David at the ice-cream shop to keep his shoes tied, but he loved the loose loops of them. He sat on the beach running sand between his toes. He had always liked his shoes oversized and roomy.