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 “Thoughts and Prayers” by Ken Liu, (published in Slate), we meet the Forts, a family (wife Abigail, husband Gregg, daughter Emily, and Gregg’s sister Sara) in disarray after their eldest daughter Hayley was killed in a mass shooting. Abigail is approached in her grief by a group of activists who want to use Hayley’s story to further their cause; Abigail agrees, and as soon as Hayley’s image is used as part of the campaign, the internet does what it does and makes an absolute mockery of her in all matter of abhorrent ways. Sara, who works for a tech company, immediately jumps in to send over some “armor,” which is a technology that allows Abigail to filter out the online abuse based on her own personal filters, but trolls quickly find ways to break through it. As Abigail grows more and more obsessed with avoiding the vitriol, she unwittingly extricates herself from her marriage, and worse, armors herself so entirely from the grossness of the world that she can no longer even view her own daughter.
The Basics
This story is written in rotating first person retrospective POV. The story exists heavily in narrative summary; because of the reflective nature of these narrators, who are looking back on the past and telling us about what they remember, there are fairly few scenes. Each character takes their turn explaining the situation to us: Abigail takes the lead in describing the actions moving the story forward; Gregg handles the more idea-based concerns that lead us to much of our internal conflict; Emily spends much of her space watching the family disintegrate and also pointing out how grief has made her virtually invisible to her family; and Sara is focused on battling the trolls. Technology leads us to our situation, but this is an intentionally grounded piece, interested in the human dynamics that are overrun by these technological breakthroughs.
The Argument, and the Other One, and That One Too
The easy read on this story is that it’s about the awfulness of trolling, about how the internet has democratized evil, and that’s absolutely a fair scan. But my students tell m—and I tend to agree, after talking it through with them for a class period—that a lot of that stuff feels obvious, to the point where Abigail not realizing how the internet would react to her posting clips of her daughter online comes off as cringe, as yet another example of why ye elders shouldn’t be allowed to have technology. That doesn’t mean the argument’s not there—it’s clearly a large theme of the piece—but if that’s all this story was doing, I don’t know that it’d be a master-level story.
But in a story with so many characters, there are plenty more elements at play. One thing that came up a lot in discussion was the failure of experts; Sara is doing her best, but she’s badly beaten by the mobilized denizens of the net. The same is true of the activists; if we assume they’re acting in good faith, well, they get railroaded by the populace you think they’d have done some focus group researching on at some point. No expert comes out of this story looking like an expert.
Another theme brought up in discussion was the shifting, surprisingly slippery concept of victimization and responsibility. Abigail, by agreeing to share the likeness of her daughter, is by a certain read taking her daughter’s death and forcing that to be all she’s remembered for; she’s also forcing her entire family to relive this forever; and of course her decision is what leads the trolls to come out. None of these things make her a villain, but there are certainly people hurt by her actions. Alternately, the activists who choose to approach her do so at her weakest moment: there’s a pretty clear read where they are preying upon her for the benefit of their cause, not caring what happens to Hayley as long as they can keep their cause moving forward. And of course, Sara has an interesting question of responsibility; in her constant efforts to stop the trolls, how much is she pushing her own company’s technology and/or her own research? The ultimate bad of the story, when Abigail loses the ability to see her daughter at all because the armor associates all mentions of her daughter with the evil things that have been done to her, only comes about because of Sara’s choice to send the armor.
The Conceit
A small but interesting twist to this story is that it’s written as a documentary. The family is being interviewed, relating their experiences, which means that either we as readers are being invited to treat their pain as spectacle (if this is simply content being filmed), or alternately that they’ve agreed to join yet another high-profile stunt. We don’t explore this conceit at all, but there are some interesting questions that arise from that: Why would they agree to join, but also haven’t they learned their lesson, what do they hope to accomplish, and, based on the end of the story, are they really just Sob Story of the Week material to this narrator? I wish this thread had been played with a bit more narratively, but it is there and needs to be acknowledged.
On a structural level, this choice helps massively as a reason for all our POV characters to speak, and it lets us move through the somewhat unnatural narrative summary without a problem. The characters are relating this information, are reflecting back upon it, because they’re being asked to—it’s an incredibly elegant solution to a problem that plagues a lot of first-person reflective narrations, that being the question of why the characters would bother saying any of this anyway.
All These POV Characters
Rotating first can be tricky, because the use of first person by its very nature suggests that the speaker has a clear reason to tell their story. They have to have a motivation, a purpose, stakes. Complicating that with multiple first-person POVs means doubling, or in this case quintupling, the narrative responsibilities. And this is not a tremendously long story. That’s a big ask, right from the start. Of course it helps that the characters are all being interviewed about Hayley for a documentary, which gives us a ready-made reason both for the telling of the story and also for the switching, but the story doesn’t take the easy way out and make the characters entirely subservient to the unseen narrator’s story. Rather, Hayley is the backdrop against which each of them struggle to come to terms with how they exist.
In other words, each character is given a thematic conflict. There are elements of Hayley’s story that each tackle, based on what they’re concerned with personally as their lives move on. Each of these point of view characters are more than talking heads; they have their own motivations that lead to what they say and remember, their own ways of looking at Hayley’s death through their own lenses. Writers, take note: If we’re going to be in first person, our characters are going to be leading us down their own arcs.
To assist with this, the story is careful in its structure, meticulous in doling out sections: Abigail and Gregg receive four sections each, Emily three, Sara two, and then one is left for a troll to speak. Gregg and Abigail sections are often in conversation with each other, and receive much of the beginning and ending; the only time their sections are not immediately after one another is at the end, when they are split by the troll. That’s some ingenious structuring. Sara’s two sections are bookends for one of Emily’s, and Sara’s POVs are only in the middle of the piece, as we consider the technology that functions to advance the plot, then stepping aside as the actual conflict takes center stage. Emily gets the beginning, that middle section between Sara, then she gets the beginning of the end of the story as well, just in case her role in the story wasn’t clear, fading out in each of the moments as everything is always about Hayley.
The Troll
We get exactly one speaker who is not a member of the Fort family. He receives exactly one section, and it’s the penultimate section in the story, right before we discover how far the Forts have fallen. It’s somewhat exhausting and incredibly aggravating to read, as was clearly intention, but it’s also almost frustratingly trite. Dude is so high on his own bullshit. He makes something close to no sense, but manages to always almost make sense, so that he can’t be entirely discounted instantly, as the best of snake oil salesmen seem to do so infuriatingly well.
The interesting thing about his section, especially when remembering the conceit, is that the troll admits from the start there’s no way to verify who he is, or that he was involved, or even that he is a troll. How exactly was he found, and was any effort made to verify any of his story? Who even is the narrator, and why do they deserve our trust? How did they get the Forts to agree, and what does it mean that they were willing to do so? Why should we believe—wait, no, that’s playing right into the troll’s hands.
All of this combines to make the troll’s section an interesting litmus test for this piece; on one hand, it’s simply attempting to give voice to the villain, but its placement in the story seems to hint at more than that. And the troll is speaking directly to the audience, and attempting to implicate us. He is attempting to turn at least some of the blame onto the clear victims of the story. In the most successful version of this piece, we readers would find our take on the piece complicated, would find ourselves wondering even if only for a second whether there was a point to be made there. I’m not sold that we get there, and maybe this is just an attempt at rewriting history because of how badly by the troll because of how badly the Forts were hit by his actions, but I can’t help but believe that there’s a version of this story where those arguments land.
This feels important to talk through, as writers: Even if I don’t think the story necessarily sticks that insanely difficult landing, the leap that it takes here is audacious, and the story is infinitely better for the attempt.
Technology in Service to Story
This piece is set in a near-future world. We get the internet, of course, but the technology that rules the story is this concept of armor, basically a techno-shield that hides you from having to see the parts of the internet, and possibly the larger world, with which you don’t want to interact. It’s basically AdBlock for, well, whatever you design it to block. This is soft sci-fi, so even though we have a character in Sara who could go into great detail on the armor, we stay pretty hands-off; it’s there, deal with it, that’s how the world works.
Now, the technology is in many ways the fulcrum of the story: Sara sends it to Abigail, and then when the first attempt doesn’t work, she keeps iterating, keeps trying new software updates and the next model and the higher subscription, on and on and on. The plot is driven heavily by the armor, and the ways that the trolls manage to break past it. And the other major plot point of the story is also technology-based: when Abigail is approached about using Hayley’s likeness, the selling point is that new virtual reality technology will allow Hayley’s memory to exist like never before. Every aspect of this story is put in motion by the sci-fi trappings.
And yet, for all that it is the clear driving force of the story, Liu is very careful to make sure that the story is not actually about the sci-fi stuff. He’s deeply aware that this story is a reflection of the complications in our current world, and so keeps the piece grounded in grief, and in the family struggling with the decisions that Abigail has made.
For us as writers, this is a constantly necessary lesson: The tools of the story, as kickass as they may be, as much fun as they are to devise, are not the essentiality of the story. Even in a piece like this, that literally could not exist without the two technology advancements in the story, the heart comes back constantly to the human: to characters making decisions, and the way that those decisions ultimately bring down the family. Plot and character; it sounds silly-simple, I know, and my students tell me I sound like I’m teaching third graders when I hit this every single class, but all the literary pyrotechnics we talk about in this column every other month all exist to get our characters in conflict. It’s never not that simple. Interesting people doing interesting things for interesting reasons. Character + Plot. Guys, I just figured it out, I solved story. Oh, you already knew that? Okay then.
In Conclusion: Well, Damn
I should probably mention that I taught this in a classroom of 300 students that had only two exits, at the top and bottom of a massive row of stairs no one could possibly have taken quickly. We were sitting ducks and heavily aware of that fact.
And this story saps all the joy out of a room even without that foolish backdrop. There is no happy ending, everything is awful, the bad guys win and appear likely to do so for the foreseeable future. The good that Abigail tried to do was immediately tossed in a blender and pureed into one more meme to be forgotten, the family is destroyed, the experts are clueless, and even the memories of Hayley have been corrupted to a point that Abigail has lost her daughter entirely. Technology runs amok, forcing people further and further into individualized conclaves to avoid the worst impulses of the world around them. And of course, the continued normalization of mass shootings, of dead bodies being jokes, of “thoughts and prayers” having failed and so we’re all out of ideas.
I was hoping I’d come to an “And yet” somewhere in that paragraph, but it didn’t happen. My God, this story tore me apart. I’m not going to say that was a pleasant feeling, a joyful reading experience, but the level of emotive power, combined with the clear technical skill we’ve discussed here, is worth the heartbreak.
by Brandon Williams