“We used to get high together instead of getting high alone. Can’t remember the last time I saw you, can’t remember the last time we talked. You left home for a fresh start, working as a waitress down in Bradenton. With my name tattooed into your skin. Because of the shame associated with vulnerability, I am numbing myself completely. Can you hear me right now? I watched your mother bury you today, with tears in her eyes. It wasn’t her words that shook me, but the resemblance you shared. Don’t it seem so detached and unreal? Don’t it seem so far away? Like the past never happened, like nothing’s ever changed. With your casket open in front of me, your eyes closed, your lips silent. My name tattooed into your skin. I didn’t listen to the preacher, couldn’t look your husband in the eye. I’m not sure what I meant to you then, so I’m not sure what I owe you now. But if something I said hurt you, I swear it was not my intention. With your name tattooed into my skin.”

Because Of The Shame by Against Me!

183 words

In 183 words, Against Me! manage to tell an entire three act tragedy of friendship, past love, death and loss. They give you back-story, character growth, protagonists and antagonists. They give you set up, conflict, tension and resolution. They paint a picture of characters so vivid that you can fill in the rest of the story without them needing to spell anything out. What is left unsaid, between the words, makes the characters real, and turns 183 words into a story.

Take the first sentence: “We used to get high together instead of getting high alone”. Even those few words give the listener (or reader) so much description, hidden between the lines of what is actually said. You can picture young teenagers bored in their small town, not a lot of other friends, misfits perhaps, finding something in each other that is lacking in their life.

“Can’t remember the last time I saw you, can’t remember the last time we talked”: So a friendship lost. Two characters who grew apart from each other. A childhood connection lost to the reality of adulthood.

The songwriter might very well be telling an autobiographical story, but almost everyone can relate to the feeling of losing a childhood friend, can remember someone that used to be a big part of their life, that no longer is. The listener can fill in the spaces with their own experience, creating an almost instant emotional connection in two sentences.

Very early in the narrative, we discover the death of the main character, and like any good story, we are left with countless questions: Who are these characters? How did they meet? How did one of them die? Were they lovers at one point? Why did they drift apart? What did they mean to each other?

You could spend hours dissecting this story, trying to answer all that is left unsaid. You could write a thousand words, or even a thousand pages, expanding on the character’s history, the story surrounding the death, the interesting relationship with the narrator and religion, or the narrator and the character’s family. But despite these burning questions, and our natural intrigue at the hint of an interesting story, we are not left feeling cheated by the end of the song. We are not left confused by plot holes or missing story threads.

The subtle change of the last line: “ your name tattooed into my skin” tells us more than a thousand words of dialogue. It gives us some resolution, in finding out more about the nature of the character’s relationship. And in an emotional song about loss and death, it gives us a little hope, that at least when the characters were together, they meant something to one another.

By default, with the time and word count restrictions of a 4 1/2 minute song, the writer is forced to leave most of the story unsaid, remove anything non essential, and only tell you just enough that you can fill in the rest. We are told only what matters. We are given only the bare minimum to describe an entire life, an entire relationship, and the rest is up to us.

I’m not just writing this because Against Me! write great music. They do, but that’s beside the point. There is a lesson here, hidden behind evocative word choice and beautiful melody.

And it’s a lesson about narrative fiction and the art of storytelling.

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I recently wrote a short story. After a few days of rewrites and edits, I had something useable, but nothing groundbreaking. Par for the course for me. This story was meant for an assignment, so after completing a first draft, I reread said assignment, and noticed a pesky word count hiding at the bottom of the page. A 300 word maximum! Oh dear! I had written over 2000+ words, which I had painfully edited down to a healthy 1800. Oh dear, indeed.

Not wanting to scrap my piece entirely and start again from scratch, I attempted the daunting task of trying to reduce my work down to less than 1/4 of its size.

But as I worked, something magic happened.

The more words I cut, the better the story became. The more I edited, the more I left unsaid, the more cohesive my writing sounded. My characters were more interesting, my world more enticing. Themes appeared where before there were none. It was as if removing the fluff and padding gave the story life, allowed it to breathe, allowed it to become what it wanted to be. In the end, I created one of my favourite pieces of work I’ve written this year, not from writing more, or writing better, but from cutting that which didn’t need to be said.

This got me thinking.

About short stories. About word count. And about the power of what is left unsaid.

You don’t need thousands of words to write an emotional tale of friendship and loss. You don’t need an explicit backstory and complex dialogue to make your characters engaging or make your world feel real. Sometimes all you need is 183 words to break your reader’s heart. Sometimes, less is more, and cutting the excess, cutting all that is not essential, can leave you with the raw heart of a story you didn’t even know you were writing.

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So, I have a writing exercise for you, if you’re up for the challenge:

Next time you are feeling creative: write a story, any story, letting the words flow out onto as many pages as is needed to tell the story you want to tell.

And then… cut it to bits.

I’m not talking about the usual rule of “take 10% off the first draft”. I’m talking about imposing an arbitrarily small word count no matter how much you start with.

First, try to cut out 50% of the words. Then halve it again. Then again. See how short you can make it before it loses what made it a story in the first place. Cut entire scenes, combine characters, cut themes, remove descriptions. Try to get to the bare bones of the story and nothing else.

Keeping a copy of your original work can make it easier to ruthlessly edit; it’s less scary to delete entire scenes when you know they still exist somewhere. Embrace the old adage: “kill your babies”. It doesn’t matter how perfect that sentence is, or how cute that character, if it’s not integral to the story, it’s gone.

It can be terrifying and liberating to cut your beautifully crafted narrative to ribbons, but if you keep at it, you might find an even better story hidden beneath the one you thought you were telling. A story with more heart, more substance, more magic. And it’s a story you’ve already written- you just need to cut it loose.

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A note on influences

I used to think I didn’t know how to write short stories, because I don’t read a lot of short stories. How can you write what you don’t know? But the other day it occurred to me: Most of us listen to short stories all the time, even know the words by heart. We just don’t consider them stories. We think of them as songs.

Music has influenced my life in many ways: it was my school, my career, an artistic outlet and a social scene. But I never thought about music as an influence on my writing.

Rise Against, Alkaline Trio, Bayside, Against Me!, these are bands I have loved for years, not only for their great music, but specifically for their ability to tell engaging, heart breaking stories in the space of 4 minutes. These artists write songs that make you connect with their characters, make you see yourself in their worlds. They sing of lives you’ve never lived, and remind you of memories you’ve forgotten. They take you on emotional journeys, rip out your heart and show you what’s inside.

And that’s exactly what great writers do.

Yes, melody helps create an emotional connection, and the repetition of a good chorus and a catchy guitar riff makes a song memorable, but strip away the music, strip away the harmony and production, and you’re left with a story.

The tradition of oral storytelling goes back further than history, so the idea of music as more than simply entertainment shouldn’t be a revelation, but somehow, I never connected writing lyrics and writing fiction. I always saw music as an interest, as part of who I was, but never as creative inspiration for my writing. I never dissected a song as a storytelling device. Never saw lyrics as a story arc, chorus as character creation, verse structure as set up, conflict, and resolution.

It’s interesting now, to go back through the songs I love, the songs that shaped my life, and look at them through the lens of narrative fiction. To see what these artists were capable of in less than 200 words. To understand on another level, why I felt so drawn to these songs in the first place.

Neil Gaiman said it best, as he does with most things:

“Remember that your influences are all sorts of things. And some of them are going to take you by surprise. But the most important thing, is that you open yourself up to everything”

Neil Gaiman