When we think of teachable stories, we often reach deep into the rucksack of the literary past, pulling out classroom-tested stories that have worked their way into the canon. While there is obviously a ton to learn from these pieces, contemporary short story writers are also completing strong work built upon teachable literary foundations, while also finding fascinating ways to advance the form. In this space, we’ll highlight some of these more modern stories and explore a bit of what they have to teach us as we continue to do our part to push literature forward.
Introduction
In “A Brief Lesson in Native American Astrology” by Rebecca Roanhorse (linked here in Apex Magazine, originally published in The Mythic Dream), we meet Dez Hunter, a movie star who’s just seen the love of his life, Cherie, pass away. While he’s retreated deeply into himself in his grief, his agent and the studios won’t let him out of the spotlight; in an effort to get him working again, they offer him a chance to get a piece of Cherie back, a digital copy preserved through hand-waved technology: Suffice to say, it’s a replicant of the self built through memories, meant to be interacted with in the same way one would a human. He’s already been imprinting small memories of her into his mind, taken from strands of her hair and other minor aspects of Cherie he can find, so he jumps at the chance, implanting what remains of her consciousness directly into himself rather than putting the engram into VR or AI or something else of that type. In essence, what is left of her becomes part of him, downloaded directly into his brain. The price is twofold: First, that he get back on the celebrity grind, including taking a trip to the edge of the atmosphere to have his digital likeness projected into the stars; and secondly, the digital artifact of Cherie is imperfect and almost immediately begins to degrade, turning his reunion into a horror show from which he cannot escape.
The Basics
This story is written in a first-person, present tense. Dez, the narrator who leads us through the story, is a Native actor, somewhere close to the height of his fame but also aware of the constraints thereof: He is typecast, and all that money and power and recognition of the masses is built upon his existing within a very specific stereotype at all times. The language is casual, with a nod to the reader or at least someone being addressed (from the second paragraph: “but fuck him, you know?”), whether we want to think of that as a diary or a natural chronicling of events or something slightly more epistolary. Dez’s speech peppered with the casual superiority of the mostly-made-it celebrity but undergirded by a weary expectation of unfairness and a grievance with the world and his place (as well as Cherie’s lack thereof) in it. The world is futuristic but modern: We have semi-casual almost-spaceflight and this memory-capture technology, but Dez lives in Malibu because that’s where stars are supposed to live, and Hollywood still rolls forward as the awful behemoth it’s always been; what cultural markers we’re given are the same as the reader’s world too, which is very important for Dez and for the thematic intention of the story.
The Quick Establishment of World
The opening paragraph of any story holds significant responsibility. It strikes the tone, creates our first understanding of stakes, has to dig hooks into the reader, and in genre fiction it has to introduce the reader to the world: What’s the same as the reader’s reality, what’s been changed, what is normal here, and exactly what type of world are we stopping into?
This story doubles down on the work needed in its first paragraph, as that opening salvo also stands alone as an entire section. That allows the section to stand outside of the plot, which is introduced in the second section, and to immediately focus on theme: “We were gonna be stars,” we’re told in the opening sentence, and the story places that concept both figuratively and literally, comparing Dez and Cherie to “Jack and Rose or Mr. and Mrs. Carter” as well as setting up Dez for the trip to the stars he’ll take once the plot does get rolling. Additionally, we learn about our setting, the science fiction trappings of the “tech that keeps people alive for 150 years now if you can afford it.” Putting those two pieces together, the cultural touchstones of the real world in our references and in the social inequality beside the futuristic lifespans and technology, immediately sets the readers in place, while at the same we’re learning about how our main character fits in that world (a star, rich enough to afford the tech), and his principal concern (“How could I lose my perfect girl?”). That’s one heck of an effective intro.
Retelling, and Re-Telling
It’s not often in these essays that we step out of the story proper to discuss inspirations and the like (and honestly, I’m not convinced it matters all that often; there’s only one story that comes to mind where I always bring up the legend on which the story is based, and even then it’s more because of the response it creates in readers when they do versus don’t know the legend, and how fascinatingly gendered that awareness is. That story, by the way, is Carmen Maria Machado’s “The Husband Stitch,” and if you somehow have gotten through life without reading that story or its inspiration, “The Green Ribbon,” well, you’re welcome for introducing you to it), but since the writer herself has talked it through in the story’s afterword in some editions, it feels like a bit fairer game than normal. So then: This piece is a sci-fi shell upon a Tewa folk story, and as a result it naturally follows a great majority of the same beats, with a man wishing for his wife to return and her doing so in a way that is less perfect than he imagined.
Moreover, a significant number of the elements within the story are tropes that exist comfortably within enough genres to stretch easy classification of the piece: This is sci-fi because of the technology at play, but it equally can and should be read as a ghost story, and a horror story, and to an extent a morality tale. Note that each of those, while they can certainly be defined as genres of a sort, work at different levels of conflict and theme, thus ensuring this piece doesn’t feel overwhelmed or incongruent as a result of its disparate literary footprints, but instead as if (rightly) it’s borrowing from multiple sources and merging them all into something fascinating and complicated. The ghost story leads into the horror which allows for the morality reading, and the sci-fi sits in the background of it all providing technical reason for the story. Rather than bending genre or shoehorning disparate elements, this retelling allows for the genres to drape themselves onto the story naturally as it’s updated for modernity.
The Minute in Relation to the Large
This story utilizes character brilliantly, giving our narrator nuance through his deep awareness of the larger sociopolitical space in which he presides. This is something that many young writers struggle to accomplish, and this example is a perfect place to look as we study how to pull it off. Our narrator keenly understands that he exists to play a role which gives him all the power he possesses in this world even as he chafes against that very truth, and in his understanding he reflects upon all the ways that role exists and has always existed.
I usually talk about this on the level of internal and external conflicts, and this story certainly utilizes those techniques—our narrator is at war with himself emotionally, trying to come to terms with the death of his partner (internal conflict); he also is still moving through the world as a celebrity, with all the decisions thus entailed, and trying to make it through the roles for which he has been contracted (external conflict)—but it goes one step further to allow our narrator to both recognize the conflicts central to himself uniquely as an individual and also the ways that he, as a celebrity and as a representative of his culture and of his gender and every other manner of grouping we can devise, is pigeonholed and buttoned-down and calculated upon. This pushes the story to exist in large swaths of space and argument all at the same time, deeply and closely reflecting reality as a result. Too often, stories stay focused upon the singularity of their plot or the uniqueness of their character, the things that are happening that move a few people from one place or idea to the next, or they push for the big sociopolitical idea and theme, but perhaps the greatest lesson this story has to impart is how impactful (and straightforward) it is to bring the entire human experience to the page, from the minute character moments to the extreme waves of multigenerational political awareness. This is something we do intrinsically in our daily lives, floating from conversations about local landmarks to passing remarks about Presidents or tossing in a mention of our own cultural signifiers while reflecting fondly upon memories no other person alive would know. Put the same in your fiction, y’all.
The Mirror of Conflict and Theme
I’m almost embarrassed at how long it took me to catch this, as I’m often so focused on how well the conflicts of this piece fit the character and build awareness of culture, but on a fourth read I finally locked onto the reason this story has always felt so close to perfect for me: The way that conflict functions in this story, both internal and external, mirrors itself in multiple, almost inverted ways. I’ve said in this space, every single time I write an essay for this series, that good stories utilize both internal and external conflict, and that great stories have them intertwine, but with “A Brief Lesson,” our internal conflict becomes physical conflict (his grief is manifested by the digital remnant of Cherie, who then fails to be exactly what he remembers and so haunts him internally), and we watch him struggle with what he’s done to himself and to her memory until Dez is forced to step back into the spotlight, thinking he’s escaped the modified Cherie, only for her to reappear while he’s back on the job. That’s already great work, and the fact that the solution to her haunting him is to essentially double up on a dose of himself, leaving her behind via self-absorption, is wonderful, especially when that’s immediately twisted by the fact that she was already holy in his mind because his entire self-definition was built in lockstep with her and the dosage of self therefore brings her more deeply into him, so that it both was and wasn’t ever about the drugs, or about stardom or celebrity or arrogance or any of the other singular things we could’ve built theme on at one point or another in the piece. All of that, and we haven’t even hit on the thematic metaphor: They’re going to be stars, they’re going to the stars, all of this happens in the stars, they’re imprinted together as stars and never to be forgotten together, and there they are digitally placing themselves into the universe just as he’s done with her consciousness into his self.
Holy hell, guys, do that. If you can write a story that locks together that perfectly, do that.
by Brandon Williams