Where's the blood?

I don't want to give you the impression that the "blood way" is the only way to write a literary short story... However, I do want to convince you that it is one potentially successful formula, or recipe if you like, for making a literary short story.

But what do we mean by blood? Is it literally hemoglobin of a Type O variety spattered or smeared on the page, or is it (cue the power chords) metaphorical?

Sometimes blood is literally that: blood. In the course of the short story a wounding will take place. The POV character will shed blood or in some significant way be witness to bloodshed. (Note the word "significant." More about that shortly.) Always "blood" functions metaphorically and we understand it to represent the "thing of magnitude" that triggers for the POV character his/her moment of changed reality. What has been merely a swirling chaos in the story events, or what has been loping toward crisis, is all at once rocketed to a summit, driven to a peak, in the blood-letting. After that, the chaos or crisis is leveled, made still and calm. In this, then, the blood serves as a unifying device. It pulls together what might otherwise seem a bewildering randomness in the narrative, and it focuses it.

Let us consider for a moment the history of blood. Identified with the life-force, it has held a place of honor in religious rites and healing rituals. Pagan sacrifices featured it prominently. Jewish customs hinged on it as protectorant (consider the lamb's blood of the Passover.) Christian religions privileged it in their services. Of the cardinal humors (body fluids) in medieval physiology, it was associated with a warm, passionate, cheerful temperament and the healthy, ruddy complexion of one in whom blood is the predominant humor. Elaborate methods of regulating and adjusting it resulted: the use of leeches and other types of blood-letting. At one point it was believed that the soul was borne on this crimson tide. Superstitions could develop from blood, too. Witness the suspicion about or fear of a woman's monthly cycle (the woundless bleeding), the menstrual huts and other forms of cleansing that occurred. It's notable that the word "menses" hails from the Latin plural for "month", or "moon," bypassing any blood reference at all. Yet blood is everywhere, and the relation of monthly blood to earth's mysterious satellite moon somehow widens its own mystery. For the human species, therefore, blood is not merely blood, but more. It is archetypal. When it appears within a short story, it taps the power of that archetype.

If blood fills a metaphorical function within the story and furthermore triggers for the POV character the moment of changed reality, then it is a thing of magnitude, gravity and profound importance. In other words, it comes to represent what's at stake within the story. I used the word "significant" earlier. Because the blood-letting or witnessing of blood becomes simultaneously a crisis point for the POV character and a purgative, it occupies an elevated place within the story. It both precipitates the climax and signals it. In this, then, it becomes a powerful element of technique or craft for the student of fiction writing.

When blood (if it represents or symbolizes "what's at stake") takes center stage in a short story it begins to exert a force all its own. Certainly it brings along a human history's worth of freighted baggage. But it alters the story dynamics, too, makes demands of its own. For reader, author and (potentially) the POV character it ushers in that moment of changed reality. For the author, however, its function is particularly noteworthy.

First of all, it can serve as the "discovery point" in the short story. Textbooks abound with the description of writing as a process of discoveryãfor author, reader and character. Much of the joy of writing (and the frustration) is bound up with discovering something about the story material that heretofore had been veiled. In that the appearance of blood introduces something unexpected, not to mention critical, it brings along with it the possibility of revelation (discovery).

Second of all, in that blood brings its own baggage, exerts its own force and alters story dynamics, it can distract the author's mind from preoccupations purely of technique (the precise word, the cutting edge image, the push-the-envelope thing the character might say). It takes the author out of him/herself and forces a change of plans.

In this--and thirdly--it creates a complication that now must be addressed. The complication, then, becomes the story's problem. When the problem is resolved, the story may end.

One of my short stories presents us with the case of a character whose feelings of love, awe and terror in response to new fatherhood all but overwhelm him. His wife, who carried the baby, has an earthy bodily connection to his son that he, the father, does not believe he can duplicate but craves nonetheless. Instantly, then, the story has worked the POV character around to the precipice of Mystery. How to get him to totter off the edge--? He leaves his house one late afternoon, frustrated, and in randomly walking about the Milwaukee business district finds himself in the shop of a stained glass artisan. At first he thinks he'll order a suncatcher for his new baby's window. The artisan, something of a beguiling crone-type, shows him glass samples, discusses design. Our POV character transfers (and externalizes) some of his feelings of being overwhelmed onto her. He sorts through the glass, rummages around a box of various colors. All at once he nicks himself. Blood trickles down. The artisan handles this matter of factly, takes him to the backroom where she cleans the wound and bandages it. She shows him the scars on her hands, talks about the paradox of glassãits threat, its danger. He leaves the shop and walks back home in the twilight along Lake Michigan, the experience of his wounding having "initiated" him into the bodily earthy qualities of fatherhood that he's found inaccessible previously. End of story. "Man on a Turquoise-Colored Cloud" appeared in '96 in the VIRGINIA QUARTERLY REVIEW. (Parks Library has a copy of this.) When I wrote it, I formulated, intuitively, my theory of blood. If you read it, you can determine whether it succeeds or not. I felt so strongly about its potency, blood, as an approach, a formula, that I repeated it in another story. "You'll Return Somewhere You've Been" appeared in GLIMMER TRAIN in '02 .

Is this the only way to write a story? Certainly not. It's one way, however, to focus a bewildering randomness into a unified whole.

Sometimes writers bemoan the unsatisfying qualities of what's recognized as Workshop Fiction, or the Workshop Story. If I may summarize those stories (and I realize the liberties I'm taking in this generalization), I'd say that they lack soul. Here's a Flannery O'Connor quote in support of this: "Anyone can learn to write a competent short story, but the short story is dying of competence." Neither theologians nor physicians nor philosophers have ever been able to map the place of the soul within the human bodyãand yet we know it exists. Because it has no materiality in and of itself, we must resort to representing it some other way. In his essay "Why Write?" Jean Paul Sartre says that a symbol stands in place of something that, for whatever reason, cannot be present. In the way we've discussed it here, blood equals soul in the literary short story. Formulaically speaking, its place of significance and stature in the writing of a student of fiction is a sure way to lift a story from that technique-heavy, bloodless realm of what's denigrated as the Workshop Story. I guarantee it.