Mastering the Art of Short-Story Telling: Lessons from ‘The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories’
We spend our entire lives trying to tell stories about ourselves–they’re the essence of memory. It is how we make living in this unfeeling accidental universe tolerable.
It is not often that a story seemingly devoid of any of the usual literary devices associated with popular Science Fiction, walks away with all the three major awards in the genre. And yet, this is the unique distinction that the titular story in the anthology, ‘The Paper Menagerie’, possesses — it won the Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. Although, I must admit, being a newbie (despite my Daily Science Fiction email subscription), I’d never even heard of these awards prior to devouring this book. I say ‘devouring’, because after months of it languishing in the to-be-read Kindle pile, I started reading one night when life seemed particularly bleak and was rapidly swept away, so much so that I finished five or six of the stories in a matter of hours, restoring my crumbling confidence in my reading habit.
What is perhaps my most favourite thing about each story in this book is that they all retain distinct elements of humanness despite being set across vastly diverse realms of imagination, fantasy and advancements in the frontiers of science. Even in the worlds with souls that come in cigarette packets, and in universes that are millions of light years away, the internal conflicts of the characters resonate so vividly that not for once did I drift away, lost in technicalities. Each detail serves to help the reader picture the plane of existence, and at the same time puts them one step ahead in the story.
This anthology is beyond the understanding of what science fiction is to an average reader — this is a mix of a utopian-dystopian set of universes where man has advanced in every form except in controlling his fears and insecurities. Indeed, it might not be far-fetched to imagine some of the innovations— like the Simulacrum, which simulates memories in an advanced holographic form, or the use of quantum entangled particles to revisit history— materializing in real life. But the ultimate learning, much beyond the realms of scientific knowledge, is for the human race to own up to our fallibility, to admit that there is much that we shall never understand.
A dimension that might seem objectionable to some(although not particularly to me) at times, is the level of pre-existing knowledge that a reader requires to approach some of the stories. Liu throws around the concepts of relativity and singularity almost as easily as he does love and longing. And while the jury may be out on which of these is more complicated, a few of the stories might perhaps deter the less persistent reader because one needs to keep reading, reviewing and looking up terms and contexts. (Although as Arihant Verma points out in his essay on critical reading and writing, this is perhaps one of the factors that makes this anthology so relevant. Indeed, Liu provides material for further reading at the end of some of the stories, which would be a source of much delight for the reader who wants to understand and know everything.)
Fiction is about prizing the logic of metaphors — which is the logic of narratives in general — over reality, which is irreducibly random and senseless.
What I learnt about language and short-story writing
Genre isn’t everything
Often enough, authors might tend to think that certain themes automatically lend themselves to exclusion from certain genres. Typically, a science fiction plays to certain tropes, as does a love story. However, in what is a masterstroke, Liu dismantles these boundaries and seamlessly melds the seemingly unrelated subtexts of displacement, dissonance in identity, and a feeling of being caught between the times into a narrative of artificial intelligence, robots, and spaceships, without diluting the essence of the genre at all.
Note the simplicity of the following lines about evacuation plans in the event of an asteroid collision. They would hardly be out of place if placed in the current discourse on climate change:
The other nations of the world had squabbled over who should contribute how much to a joint evacuation effort when the Hammer was first discovered on its collision course with Earth. And then, when that plan had collapsed, most decided that it was better to gamble that the Hammer would miss and spend the money and lives on fighting with one another instead. — Mono No Aware, Ken Liu
Build a story around your story
Apart from mere literary biology, it is very important for your characters to have a history, a geography, a unique cultural identity.
There are a thousand ways of phrasing everything…each appropriate to an occasion.
The description of the meal being cooked by the Chinese laborers lends a unique flavor (pun intended) that seasons a seemingly neutral narrative. The use of traditional poetry provides a glimpse into the tenderness that hides in the folds of an otherwise-stern father-son relationship, when the father consoling his son recites —
“The fading sunlight holds infinite beauty
Though it is so close to the day’s end.”
to which the boy, visibly moved, replies,
“It is like a gentle kitten is licking the inside of my heart.”
Three lines suffice to explain the bond in a way that three pages might have failed at.
Use multiple/parallel perspectives to keep it interesting
Most stories have two or more voices, even if the primary narrator remains the same. Having the story tell itself from only a single point of view might lead to a stagnation that is skilfully avoided here. Each secondary character is constructed with care, so, for example, in State Change, you find yourself growing as concerned for the fate of the girl whose soul is in her cigarettes, as much as you are for our ice-cubed narrator.
In All the Flavors, where one could easily have lost sight of the smaller characters amidst the spunky Lily and the mysterious Logan, one finds out exactly where Lily inherits her independent thinking from when her father chooses to call himself Jack instead of his given name, Thaddeus. (“I’ve always wanted to be a ‘Jack’”, he told her, as if names were like shirts that you could just put on and take off.) The art of storytelling blossoms because none of these details hinder the narrative- they breathe soul into what could have been a mere mass of flesh and blood.
The Man Who Ended History is a particularly shining example of a documentary style narrative, in which various characters report their perspectives on the same incident based on experiences. (The author states in an endnote that he got inspired to write after reading Ted Chiang’s Liking What You See: A Documentary which deals with the concept of beauty. Read here.
Who can say if the thoughts you have in your mind as you read these words are the same thoughts I had in my mind as I typed them? We are different, you and I, and the qualia of our consciousnesses are as divergent as two stars at the ends of the universe.
And yet, whatever has been lost in translation in the long journey of my thoughts through the maze of civilization to your mind, I think you do understand me, and you think you do understand me. Our minds managed to touch, if but briefly and imperfectly.
Does that thought not make the universe seem just a bit kinder, a bit brighter, a bit warmer and more human?
We live for such miracles.
In conclusion, as Liu writes about his characters, and as is sound advice for writers everywhere, “He always gave her time to come to her own conclusions about something new without his editorial comment.” The mark of a good short story is one where you leave your reader room to breathe and think, to chart out their awareness in conjunction with your own. It is the best hope you have of not being lost in translation.
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