This guide
is meant to assist the student of literature and the creative
writer in their understanding of how literary techniques and
narrative devices can inform a reader's interaction with text.
Each writer, from experts in the craft--like the writers of
the stories I use as examples--to the beginner who wants to
exercise control over the story they are writing, choses from
a series of techniques or strategies that permit or prevent
certain stories from being told. This study is an attempt
to examine more closely the ways that literary techniques--such
as use of narrator, the construction of character, narrative
desire, the manipulation of narrative levels and narrative
time, the evocation of cultural codes, as well as metafiction
and magic realism--assist or frustrate the reader's attempt
to understand the author's intentions.
By making
writerly readings of realist texts as well as symbolic, psychological,
and speculative thought experiments from writers as diverse
as Jorge Luis Borges, Bruno Schultz, Octavia Butler, Charlotte
Perkins Gilman, Fritz Leiber, George R. R. Martin, Gabriel
García Márquez, Thomas King, and Kim Stanley Robinson, the
implications of these choices can be more easily seen. The
reader becomes privy to certain types of information depending
on what strategy the writer has chosen, and that choice leads
the writer to ever more circumscribed possibilities until
the story has fulfilled its author's intention. Although knowledge
of these techniques is typically demanded at the undergraduate
level, and there are list-like guides which purport to define
them, seeing them in their natural habitat gives the reader
a much better sense of what the technique or strategy offers
to the author.
This analysis
of the techniques used to create engaging stories should be
useful for both students and writers who are interested in
learning about the diversity of ways in which authors have
confronted both narrative and structural questions in the
stories they wish to tell. The short story--just to name one
fictional form--seems endlessly flexible, but with an understanding
of what a particular strategy allows, both the reader and
the writer are better equipped to understand the text's messaging
as well as how the chosen technique informs or inhibits its
performance.