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 “This is an Alert,” by Thomas Pierce (published in The New Yorker March 2015), we meet a family on their way to a weekend pool party in the middle of a high-tech war taking place over their heads. They are both always and rarely aware of the battle: Robotic Alerts are sent out periodically when things are particularly dangerous, and the pieces of tech that wage the battles are occasionally visible, but other than that things seem markedly as they always were. The family we follow is forced to wait out two Alerts on their way to their family outing, and then another while eating lunch, until finally the narrator’s husband decides to ignore the Alerts. The rest of the family, except for his mother, follow suit, and they do the same as more Alerts rain down. Neal’s twin brother Cecil brings out his Glock and ups the ante by pointing it into the sky and shooting, ostensibly at the drones overhead. Later, as the party wraps up, something drops from the sky, a robotic object none of them can identify for sure. The family all steps outside to observe it, aware as they do so they could be in mortal danger, and Cecil picks up the cylinder to drop it in the pool where it fizzles and releases a chemical agent of some sort. Back inside the house, the family huddles together, and as they attempt to bring back some level of calm, two distinctly unsettling details emerge: First, there was no Alert before the thing landed on their property; and second, the family dog is spasming wildly, either from exposure to the toxic agent that may already be infecting the family, or alternately from a dream. The family will find out soon enough, but we readers will have to make our own determination.
The Basics
This story is written in a first-person, past tense, from the perspective of an unnamed wife and mother. The piece is played straight, a woman going though her day while war takes place around her, ready to erupt at all moments. There are only two set pieces: Our first scene takes place in and around the car on their drive to lunch; everything else is at our narrator’s mother-in-law’s house. The setting is a general America, presumably Southern based on the mother-in-law’s cooking and process of elimination from the “other” areas of America mentioned. Our inciting incident is given somewhere around halfway through the story, when Neal decides to challenge the status quo of donning gas masks, and from there our conflict arises out of Neal and the rest of the family attempting to exist as if the war doesn’t exist while the war continues to invade their space.
On a technical level, there are only a few distinct specifics to mention: the voices of the automated alert system’s AlertBots (speaking This is an alert and thus giving the story its name) are presented in italics. A small interesting wrinkle is the use of “you” directed at the audience, which we get in the occasionally more ruminative paragraphs that pepper the story: Mostly we are watching the somewhat normal interactions of a family lunch, but our narrator allows herself to step outside her expected role to speak to the actual story she’s telling; however we as readers may scan that story (gonzo journalism, diary entry, historical record, something else), we are part of her story, part of how she presents herself and the reality in which she sees herself.
Genre: Literary/Sci-Fi
As a reader, I love filing stories into genres in my mind. Trying to fit any truly good story into a single genre is a fool’s errand, and I don’t really care where they end up in a bookstore or on bestseller lists, but I’m constantly thinking through the tropes used and how they influence a story, where they’re mixing with the expected uses in other genres, and how that all comes out in the wash to produce new, intriguing takes on familiar settings and ideas.
Taking from science fiction, the story’s built around a futuristic war, where the populace must don gas masks at the drop of a hat to avoid various repercussions from the battles above their heads. We have robotic alerts that chime for safety, and the humans of the story have no knowledge of their own as to whether their technological overlords are right, wrong, indifferent, or using the alerts to control the human populace. Moreover, the technology introduced has metaphorical but dangerous/cool names, like “Snakes” and “Jailbirds” and “Sweepers,” and all of these are introduced with a quick loglines to make sure we understand at least relatively their roles. The climax of the story is introduced by the sudden appearance of one of the tools of war on their roof, and the story ends with the possibility that the family may have been overcome by the sputtering remnants of said war and its requisite technology.
On the literary side, this is a basically a slice-of-life story: a family goes for a Sunday lunch and pool party. While there are family tensions exposed, we are mostly watching how these people function around the sudden new realities of war and desperation. No lives are lost (with the possible exception of the dog at the end), no scandalous secrets exposed, no one decides to dramatically run away from home. The inciting incident is a choice to simply exist, and we explore the consequences of that decision mostly in dialogue and in the way characters feel (the narrator: exuberant for a time, then concerned: Sarah, rapturous; Edina the mother-in-law terrified for her family at all times) rather than in actions that take place as a result of the decision. The drone that eventually drops on their house has nothing to do with Neal’s choice to stop wearing gas masks, which speaks to the fact that the story is interested in a literary level on the ideas around self and normalcy rather than around the effects of the war or the poison they may have ingested.
In putting these two genres side-by-side, we strengthen the possibilities for each. The sci-fi trappings work because we’re not squinting too hard trying to establish how the tech works or why the fight is being waged but simply exist in that space, and the realistic interplay is interesting because the family Sunday routine is made entirely new again by the extremity of the setting.
Frustrated Normalcy
The Alerts happen multiple times a day, and have been for at least a year; enemies are rarely if ever seen. These two simple facts conspire to make it almost impossible not to fall back into something like normalcy, and then be frustrated when normalcy is upended by the danger that has become banal. The story begins with a normalcy that has been rebuilt through the emergency—going to see family for Sunday lunch, with the odd precaution added, such as “headsocks” or gas masks stowed away in the car’s emergency gear. That normalcy is frustrated rather than destroyed by the Alert that flashes as they drive, and the subsequent duck-and-cover drill they perform takes on the rhythm of routine rather than of fear. This repetition has become so humdrum that even in the very first scene we see Sarah, daughter of our narrator, more concerned about what the gas masks will do to her makeup than any possible physical danger.
Showing up from the start, the story naturally explores this theme heavily. Neal, our narrator’s husband, is shown in the very first scene as pushing back against the strategic protections in place: While he hands out the gas masks to his family, he quickly stands up while everyone else is hiding, looking at the sky and claiming the precautions (or the warnings, or the entire idea, perhaps) absurd. Each time the family is reminded of the alerts, Neal is pushed further into his antagonistic stance. By the third Alert of the day, he’s announcing, “Next time I’m not even bothering with it,” and when the fourth Alert shows up just a few minutes later (while they’re talking about the war, no less, so that for both reader and characters there is no break from the omnipresence of the drones and the battle), Neal refuses to take any precaution whatsoever: He stays upright while the rest of the family cowers. Suddenly, the new routine is broken in favor of the old, and now the story begins in earnest.
For us as young writers, it’s interesting to see how this moment is positioned: This is the inciting incident of the story, the place where baseline normalcy is overturned so that conflict can begin. I use that phrasing intentionally: The story’s opening norm is upset by the act of attempting to reclaim Neal’s previous normalcy. That’s a mouthful, but it’s an incredibly elegant introduction of plot to the story. I say this a lot, but: Find a way to do that in your writing, and you’ve got yourself a hell of a story.
The Secondary Conflicts are Derived From and In Relation to the Main Conflict
The Alerts obviously take up a massive amount of attention in the piece, both because they’re happening so frequently and also because, well, how could they not? Even when we’re not talking about them, or hiding from them, or hearing our robotic overlords warning yet again, This is an Alert, what we get of interpersonal conflict often presents as a result or even a part of that larger conflict. This is a lesson we talk about constantly in these essays: The best conflicts are informed by each other, so that every problem established in a story interlocks with all the others. Here, we have that exemplified perfectly: There is no way to escape the ever-present war in the sky, and as a result everything that shows up in the story is infused by that awareness. This is front-and-center in the main plotline, built around Neal’s decision and the danger that isn’t or isn’t created therefrom, but the techno-war additionally looms thematically over all of the other subplots as well, so that they are deepened, complicated, and indeed exist in relation to that element of the story to which Neal’s main conflict is responding.
This is shown early in the story. We are told the narrator and Neal’s marriage is beset by recent arguments; as the narrator says in our very first scene, “I’d like to believe that the low-wattage stress of all the Alerts was responsible for these flareups.” A few Alerts later, as Neal makes his decision to ignore the Alerts, one of the reasons that the narrator eventually joins him comes from a natural family tension that was presented in the piece: In attempting to convince him to don his gas mask, she realizes she’s on the same side of the argument as the mother-in-law that she was previously antagonizing, and “I’ll admit that it did make me reconsider my position.” Even the conflicts that are ostensibly not about the war plotline, like the ever-present battle between a wife and mother-in-law, still have no choice but to interact with it.
Additional subplots are played in a similar manner. Perhaps the best example is Sarah, the narrator’s daughter, becoming religious, possibly because of a boy and possibly because of the craziness of the world around her. The Alerts are pushing her further in that religious direction: “It’s literally a voice in the sky!” And once Cecil introduces the gun and our narrator starts to think things have gone too far, we see the depths of Sarah’s fervor: ” I was the mother of a child hungry for the end times.” Again, her personal arc is built around the larger arc of the piece.
Dialogue
This is perhaps a smaller thing, but still very important for us to look at as writers. Within these heightened tensions, the dialogue plays a huge role, both in revealing the frustrations between characters but also in giving us information about the war and the drones. Much of the dialogue, naturally, is about the Alerts, and the nature of belief, and how much the Alerts should be trusted and how much normalcy has been lost as a result of said Alerts.
But crucially, not all of the dialogue is explicitly about that topic. Here perhaps more than anywhere else in the story do we get to see our characters live and breathe a bit: Sarah talks about Marcus, Neal and his twin brother talk about firearms, Neal’s mother and the narrator have multiple tension-laden discussions. These conversations carry the weight of the main conflict, but bring it forth in ways that both are and are not directly related. That’s huge for the realism of a story, and for the reader’s suspension of disbelief—it allows the story to exist on a timeline that is larger than simply the moment we’re watching, because other things are happening, the characters have lives beyond this one moment.
Another important dialogue note for young writers from a craft theory perspective: In first-person POV such as this, dialogue is the only moment where we are entirely sure that we are stepping out of the narrator’s control. Anything in quotes is being presented to us verbatim. While the rest of the piece is subject to a narrator potentially editing what we’re seeing—or, to put that more kindly, every other part of a story is being show to us in the way that the narrator is interpreting the information—dialogue steps outside of the narrator’s mind into objective fact (in most fiction). That doesn’t come into play in this story, but it’s a useful awareness to throw into the toolbox for the occasional unreliable narrator piece.
Time Period
I suppose it is important to acknowledge, as with any mask-based story at this point in our currently reality, that this piece was written pre-COVID. There are places where that awareness looms large: As much as the story is about characters refusing to follow the mandate, it’s presented as a singular choice, and the only other anti-maskers were hear about in the piece come from an unsubstantiated rumor about a commune of folks who refuse to wear them. Probably the thing that hits most realistically from the future we readers inhabit is Cecil’s conspiracy theory: He is convinced that the robots have broken free of any human overseer and are now out solely for themselves. That one fits right in with our current post-truth society.
I point this out to say, you never know what might end up dating your story and what will land perfectly for future readers. That’s not a weakness—every story is written from the perspective of a specific place and time, and we weaken our writing, and our arguments, by trying too hard to force them to be in anything like an always-time. We may be able to look back at the way this story considered mask mandates and see it as a produce of a before-COVID worldview, but nothing in that truth delegitimizes the ideas presented herein.
In Conclusion
This is a story I teach often, and certainly a large reason for that is the memorable world, well-drawn characters, effective plot-building, and strong prose. But sitting in a classroom, I often find this is one of those stories that functions above and beyond its baseline components, that its power as a teachable story outshines even its strengths as a good read. Whether we’re discussing the convolution of sci-fi and realistic fiction or the byplay of large-scale and family-level conflicts, the lesson for us as writers is simple, clear, and worth repeating as often as possible: A story is strongest when all the necessary elements of a piece bounce off of each other, so that every piece of story we’re given is complicated by the other pieces that interact with it. It’s hard to pull the trick off as precisely as Pierce has here, but that’s always the goal.
by Brandon Williams