In February 2016, we selected “Linger Longer” by Vincent Masterson as the winner of the Fall Fiction Contest. The story follows Lori and Michael, a couple visiting a cabin in the woods for a getaway with friends—but as the trip progresses, Lori increasingly loses her grip on reality. Let’s take a closer look at the craft behind the story.
A story’s opening line can carry a lot of weight, but I’m a bigger fan of strong opening sections. Does the story start close to the action? Does it introduce some of the thematic elements that will persist throughout the narrative? Is there tension? A novel has more space for throat-clearing, but a short story has to compete against limited space—and “Linger Longer” hooked me from the first paragraph.
When you’re reading, it’s worthwhile to pay attention to the moments when you feel truly immersed—particularly if you’re a writer who’s interested in what happens under the hood. There’s a tipping point between I’m kind of paying attention and I’m fully inside this story. It’s like reading while you’re waiting for a kettle to boil. If you’re so deep in a story that you don’t hear the whistle, the work is speaking to you on a deeper level. The funny and wonderful thing is that the tipping point, or the kettle-whistle-point, is different for everyone. Some readers will feel immersed by intensive worldbuilding in the opening few pages, while others will want to see glimmers of conflict and complicated characters from the outset. I’m the latter.
Vincent Masterson’s story “Linger Longer” is worth a full read (several, really), but I wanted to focus on just the opening section to pick apart what makes those first few paragraphs really impactful. If you haven’t already, read the full story, and then come back and re-read the first section.
Good? Okay, let’s take it line-by-line.
The mechanics of the opening section
It was their first vacation together, a log-cabin weekend with Michael’s old friends from grad school, and Lori was determined not to ruin it.
We’re getting the setting and stakes from the outset. The setting: a log-cabin weekend. The stakes: Lori doesn’t want to ruin the trip. We can also infer that these aren’t her friends (“Michael’s old friends”), and she feels like an outsider.
This was more her fear than his, and she had overcompensated with eager questions—Where was this Quad? Who’s Dupin? What’s absinthe?—her eyes wide and searching and wanting more.
We’re adding more color to the idea that Lori feels like an outsider. She’s aware that she’s the one who is holding onto this fear, and she’s overcompensating. The description at the end of the sentence—“her eyes wide and searching and wanting more”—does two jobs: it accentuates the way we perceive her fear (as wide-eyed) and it also characterizes her as a woman who is “searching and wanting more.”
But somewhere between Tallahassee and the mountains of eastern Tennessee, Lori grew weary of Michael’s nostalgia.
Setting, plus characterization. They’re on a longer road trip, and “Lori grew weary of Michael’s nostalgia” tells us that she might have been willing to play along at first, but she’s not willing to support him completely.
Her temper was tripped easily—by his voice, by the loose flapping of the Wrangler’s rag top, by a stomach upset from too many filling station snacks.
From one easily overstimulated girlie to another, same. But also, note the emotional shift by this fourth sentence: The paragraph began with a sense of codependent resolve, and we’re ending with a strong sense of wanting to bail.
Didn’t he know she never wanted to go? Why couldn’t he have left her at home with her TV and magazines, refilling her favorite blue mug with dark wine?
This series of questions does a lot of work to finish the first paragraph: It’s telling us more about Lori, but it also places us more deeply in this close third perspective. “Didn’t he know she never wanted to go?” signals that Lori isn’t the most reliable character, particularly because she started the trip determined not to ruin it, but then she eventually blames Michael for not leaving her at home.
There’s an argument that these are very normal emotions anyone can experience on a big road trip, even in the most stable of relationships, but in a short story, our reading is a little heightened—I’m taking pieces of what the narrative is giving me and forming that larger world. Notice, too, that the story has introduced the following topics in this opening paragraph alone:
- Lori is an outsider.
- Lori is not completely settled in her relationship.
This isn’t to say that we need to see the entire plot in the first paragraph, but adding these complications—little wrinkles in the narrative that tell us all is not well—compel the reader to keep going and get a sense of what’s going to happen.
Masterson introduces more complications in the next paragraph:
She pressed her forehead to the cold window, thinking of the stupid questionnaire Dr. Ryerson had given her during a session earlier that week. I sometimes have strong feelings that do not seem like mine, score from 0 to 10.
Ah, there’s a questionnaire and a doctor and a session—this is a character going to therapy for a mental health concern, and she’s struggling to cope with it. The questionnaire also introduces a device that appears throughout the narrative, and it’s good that it’s introduced early on because it sets a foundation that the reader can remember every time Lori calls back to it.
The problem is that Lori doesn’t seem to be coping well. We get this sense at the end of the paragraph when she remembers her father’s advice when she was an inscrutably moody little girl: “Please, honey, just try to have fun.” Again, this is another complication, but it also adds an extra layer to our sense of Lori—she’s dealt with feeling different since her childhood, and perhaps she only recently started seeing a therapist (hence, the questionnaire). The end of this first section complements her father’s advice: Lori tells Michael that she’s fine, and they agree that she’s just nervous about meeting his friends from grad school.
The section ends with this line:
Lori could feel his easy, reassuring smile. She did her level best to return it.
So, let’s revisit our list of topics and add one more:
- Lori is an outsider.
- Lori is not completely settled in her relationship.
- Lori is struggling to cope with her mental state.
I’m hooked by this point. I’m anticipating that something is going to happen at the cabin, and that Lori’s mental health will play a factor, and Michael won’t know what to do with her. Again, we don’t need to get a sense of the entire story in the first section, but we should get some of the scaffolding for the narrative arc. We’re setting the table. We’re boiling the water for tea. (And other metaphors.)
And now for something completely different
I’m going to jump ahead because I specifically want to point out something both fascinating and spoiler-y about the questionnaire.
Taken on their own, the questions Lori thinks about and scores throughout the story paint the picture of someone struggling with their identity—if you actually Google them, they align with symptoms of depersonalization-derealization disorder, which seems to match Lori’s symptoms throughout the piece. I love this because there are so many different ways to read what’s happening with the woman in the blue dress by the end of the story. She can’t be a hallucination because Michael also sees her, but it’s possible that Lori hallucinates her again at the end of the story and has a dissociative episode. However, it’s also possible that there’s something supernatural at play here, and I love that both readings can be true.
The key about the questionnaire, though, is that the story works whether the reader recognizes the symptoms or not. The questions and how Lori thinks about them both add to the plot, but the plot doesn’t depend on the reader having an understanding of dissociative disorders. And regardless of how the reader perceives the story—dissociative episode or ghost story?—the fact remains that the themes we get in the beginning of the piece (being an outsider, struggling with one’s sense of self) are carried throughout. That level of consistency is one of the reasons this story feels so complete: The scaffolding is established in the beginning, and the entire structure is finished by the end.
The ambiguity in the ending also feels true to Lori’s potential diagnosis. She isn’t settled in her reality. We aren’t sure what has really happened by the ending. We feel unmoored, just like Lori—and we can only hold onto the story.
by Rebecca Paredes