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 “The Wolf” by Carter Sickels, (published in Joyland), we meet our unnamed narrator, a man who is coming to terms with the fact that he is a wolf. The piece functions as a clear metaphor, using the character’s wolf nature as a means of self-discovery, of coming to terms with what he is, of coming out. We watch him decide to accept, or perhaps no longer be able to battle, what he is. And in so doing, he leaves behind family and job to embrace the part of himself he’d never previously been able to.
The Basics
This story is written in third person limited, past tense. Third limited, common a choice as it might be, is the perfect choice for a story of this type: We follow our main character with an explanatory narrator who can access and our protagonist’s thought process more effectively than the character himself might have been able to. This narrator is therefore able to talk us through, in a clear-eyed manner, the struggle the character is feeling. The conflict of the piece is primarily internal: His parents don’t want him to live as the person he is (“His mother was furious and disappointed. ‘I can’t ever see you like that,’ she warned. ‘Neither can your father, it would kill him.’”), and he has to decide how he is going to live in the world. “Eventually he’d have to make a decision: to live forever in hiding or to live openly as a wolf.” This internal conflict is heightened by the inciting incident of the piece: When the manager at the bank threatens to put him on leave from his job at the bank because his canine nature is coming to the fore. At happy hour with a coworker later, it’s confirmed: People know, or suspect, his true nature. There’s not exactly an external conflict to the piece: Nothing stops our narrator in a physical sense, but that’s by design, as this story is deeply and clearly focused on the internal effects both of bottling up oneself and then of letting oneself free.
Setting
I argue in this space consistently for bringing in setting to our pieces, which I define in a myriad of ways: the space a story inhabits (the room; the car; the building), the place and time in which the story resides (Salem, Massachusetts; the moon), and the rules the world follows (the air is orange; or, as in the case of this story, werewolves are an oppressed other).
This piece doesn’t do a ton of space-setting or of place-setting, but it nonetheless does great work to build the reality of its world. We look back on the ’80s and ’90s and define the way of the world at that time, giving us a smart quick contrast to the world as the story currently sees it. Frappuccinos get a mention. We name-drop celebrities and tie our main character’s concerns to a political ideology. Religion is invoked, as is paramilitary fervor. Conversion therapy, the parents thinking his existence is a curse, all the classic ways we see folks in our reality dismissing and othering what they don’t understand. We even get a quote from the sitting President to bring the threat home. Our narrator has a job, a home life, former relationships, an occasional friendship. In all of those ways, we are allowed to see this as a fully-functioning world, as a place where people live their lives; this isn’t simply a vehicle for a story, not just a conceit with a few papered-over details, but instead fully-fledged human beings we’re dealing with. And yes, it’s setting that creates that for us.
Conflict
I mentioned that this story doesn’t have a ton of external conflict. What’s there is handled quickly: Steve threatens his job, then is looking for any excuse to fire him until he finally can. Other than that, the main physical action of the story is the constant barrage of our narrator’s parents ignoring him (and ignoring the issue with which he’s struggling). But those actions, small as they are, take place over months. Even Monica, a coworker attempting to give him some level of comfort and stability, talks to him twice over a period of months. The physical changes he undergoes, and even to a large extent the mental changes that lead to him leaving the house, are mostly handled in summary as we pass through all these months.
I point this out not as a flaw of the story, but instead as something we should be thinking about as writers. There’s only so much page space for any story, and every choice we make takes time and space away from other things we could have written. There is certainly a viable choice that Carter Sickels could have made to show us one night, or to get deep into scene for all of the most important choices. But there’s a very clear reason that this story stays at 5,000-foot-level: the choices of this story aren’t exactly choices at all. For all that he’s struggling with the decision, this person isn’t really trying to decide whether he’ll become a wolf or not. He will. He cannot, and is not even trying all that hard, stop his nature. This story has no interest in asking whether one should be what one is; there is a clear acceptance of one’s nature baked into the piece.
The questions of this story are instead about how our narrator comes to terms with himself, and for that we cannot watch one moment. This is something akin to a character study, or a study of the character the narrator is and eventually will be, and we can’t learn everything we need about a person from one happy hour conversation or one battle with the parents. And so we get to see all of those moments, and plenty more besides, and in so doing get to
What I’m saying: scene is great, show-don’t-tell is important, sure, sure. But there are limitations to existing in a single moment, and the more expansive timeline here gives us a valuable model for how we as writers can build to powerful plot-filled epiphanies in emotional state, or in mental awareness, or in physical action.
The Metaphor
But where this story truly shines, what makes it a master work, is in its absolutely perfect awareness and utilization of the metaphor that sits alongside the main story. It’s easy to go wrong writing a story with a built-in comparative metaphor, but Sickels gives us the clear model for how to do it right. You let the metaphor sit there, unacknowledged on the page but clearly bursting at the seams for a reader to observe, and you move the story forward in such a way that the narrative doesn’t need its secondary purpose to be acknowledged in order to progress. The satisfaction comes from seeing how the alternate reading—the metaphorical reading—so obviously applies, how it gives depth and meaning and reality to the imagined world that our author has created. But the story itself still demands to be taken seriously.
A metaphor story falls apart most obviously if the metaphor is ever fully acknowledged, but there are so many other ways this story structure can be fatally flawed: if the metaphor is too vague or too lightly touched, if the reader needs the metaphor for the main story to make sense, if the metaphor is too specific to a singular awareness of class or culture or mode of being. There’s also the potential concern that comes about with comparing a person, especially a marginalized person, to animals; it takes such a deft hand for that not to be a dehumanizing choice. And the largest risk that comes with building a story that exists both as its own plotted piece and also as a metaphor for another conflict underneath: The two parallel tales need to be so deeply in concert that the reader can swap the one for the other at any time; if the comparison is tepid or strained at times, or if it only works in certain large moments of the story but not in each presented moment.
“The Wolf” steers perfectly clear of every one of those potential concerns. We jump into the potential metaphor immediately: “He didn’t just wake up one day and turn into one” is our opening sentence. The title of the story is gives us the noun that’s mission in that sentence, but that opening sentence is intentional in its phrasing: The titular wolf is not mentioned, instead using the intentionally cloudy “one.” We are allowing the waters to muddy immediately, even as the story uses clear tropes of the werewolf genre in our next few paragraphs, most specifically the full moon and the hirsute nature of our protagonist. Read that intro as turning into a werewolf, obviously, because it is exactly that, but the author’s careful use of phrasing from the start allows the piece to bring to mind other situations where a person might be transitioning into something other than their original form. From the opening paragraph, “This has been developing for years,” and from the second, “His mother didn’t like to see…” and immediately thereafter: “Yesterday she’d left out pamphlets… which he’d taken with him but thrown in the trash at work.” The story is developing, the information presented is perfectly viable for the conflict on its straightforward level, but also we as readers are aware of the real-world moments these details are taken from.
Ultimately, however, the beauty of this metaphor is how well the story functions without it: Our narrator is navigating parents who don’t want him to be the person that he is, regardless of what exact kind of person the story uses. That central struggle is here shown with our main character as a wolf, and it is the wolf nature of his existence that moves the plot forward. This is the lesson for us as writers: We never sit down to write a piece where metaphor, or moral, or symbol, is the only essential conceit of the story. If we were to read this story solely for the pleasure of recognizing the LGBTQ+ connections within the werewolf elements, then those things lose much of the impact that storytelling allows. Instead, we’re reading this to see the way the narrator becomes who he is, and the connections and metaphor deepen that becoming. The thematic elements of a story enrich the piece, give it added purpose and power and meaning, but they do not and cannot give the piece the entirety of its meaning. All those basics we discuss every month, plot and character, need to stand on their own outside of the “but if you read it this way, it also means this thing.” In writing it out, that feels obvious, but it’s a lesson I need to learn over and over again with just about every story I write: whatever fancy stuff we’re trying, the basics have to be locked in too.
In conclusion
I’ve read so few stories that get this alchemy right. There’s something about character plus plot plus metaphor that seems to me to be intrinsically more challenging than most narratives. Maybe it’s our natural desire to explain ourselves, especially when we build something clever. Maybe it’s the simple fact that in a story of this type there’s suddenly one more deeply complicated literary element to manipulate, and writing was already hard even before we added that extra convolution. I’m not sure exactly why it is, but it’s true.
So take this story and read it for the joy of watching the narrator become himself. Then read it for the metaphor, ever more necessary in our current political landscape. Then read it for the other lessons, for the incorporation of modernity and pop culture, the build of nontraditional conflict, the way we bounce through time and scene. Then read it again, for any of those reasons; personally, I’d read it for joy one more time.
by Brandon Williams