Author skills
Become a Master of Story With These Six Secrets
Tips from the great short story writer Raymond Carver
A few years ago, a small independent bookshop opened in my home town. While I was in there browsing, a guy came in — someone I didn’t know well at the time, but who is now a great friend, and happens to be a successful poet. A tall Scotsman with a big gentle dog.
He picked up a book, and said, “Jon, you’d like this.” It was a book of short stories by Raymond Carver. When I hesitated, he insisted. “You have to buy this book.”
And so began my journey into the work of Raymond Carver. I knew next to nothing about the author before, and was pretty surprised to find out that the man had focused almost exclusively on short stories. I mean, many novelists have a book of stories in their catalogue. Even two. Early work.
This was pretty much Carver’s entire career.
On reflection, though, this focus really reflects his approach to storytelling. As Carver puts it: “Get in, get out. Don’t linger.”¹
Some facts about Raymond Carver:
- He grew up in Washington state, and worked in a sawmill after leaving high school.
- He turned to fiction, and is considered to have revitalised interest in the American short story in the 1980s.
- He was married to poet Tess Gallagher.
- He was mentored by the novelist John Gardner.
- He was an alcoholic, and died age 50.
As well as the stories themselves, Carver’s canon includes certain short non-fiction pieces on writing. Reflections. The advice, when it comes, is often terse, cryptic, and even a little crotchety. Precise and to the point — just like his writing. But it made a great impression on me.
Here are some of the key insights:
Every writer has a unique perspective, and it’s a mistake to mimic someone else’s.
Carver lists numerous examples of this, from John Irving to Flannery O’Connor to Ursula Le Guin. It’s not the same thing as style, he explains. It’s bigger than that — it includes a writer’s view of the world, and their experiences.
It’s like a writing fingerprint.
“Someone else’s way of looking at things… should not be chased after by other writers.”
Good writing is all about clear, precise language.
This is central to Carver’s philosophy, and it’s obvious in his prose that he has spent time editing out unnecessary words. He cites Ezra Pound in saying that “accuracy of statement” is the only thing that should matter.
It’s clear that Carver is suspicious of flowery prose, experimentation, or fancy gimmicks (‘tricks’, as he calls them). He wants writing to be precise, and says that it is no less impactful for being simple:
“Too often, ‘experimentation’ is a license to be careless, silly, or imitative.”
Edit, and then edit some more.
Another key insight from Carver is that creative writing is not just about being a free spirit. It’s not personality or genius— it’s work. Writing takes time, and you need to put in the hours as you would with any craft, from sculpture to coding.
Often in his own stories, it takes just a sentence or two for Carver to set the scene.
He reflects on being shocked to hear other authors say that their work could have been better if they hadn’t been pushed by a deadline. If you aren’t going to do your very best to get it right, he asks, then why do it at all? Maybe pick a different trade.
“That’s all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones, and with the punctuation in the right places so they can best say what they were meant to say.”
You don’t need to know the story when you start out.
Carver calls it an “uncomfortable secret” that he didn’t typically know the ending when he began writing a story. He usually just had a promising starting point.
Find a real-life event that is recognisable but unusual, he suggests. After that, the leap of a good story can take you by surprise. It can emerge. Even as an author, you don’t always see it coming.
He describes writing one of his stories as follows:
“I sat down in the morning and wrote the first sentence, and other sentences promptly began to attach themselves. I made the story just as I’d make a poem; one line and then the next, and the next. Pretty soon I could see a story, and I knew it was my story, the one I’d been wanting to write.”
There has to be tension.
Stories have an emotional heart, and Carver adds to the previous point by saying that he likes there to be a sense of threat or menace when the story begins.
Rather like a thriller novel, a good short story keeps you engaged. It might be more concentrated than a novel — more of a neat whisky than a pint of lager — but it should keep the reader riveted all the same.
It can’t be bland.
While he recognises that the tension is created by the way we describe actions and characters, he adds:
“…it’s also the things that are left out, that are implied, the landscape just under the smooth (but sometimes broken and unsettled) surface of things.”
A short story is a glimpse of life.
Carver quotes V. S. Pritchett in saying that a short story is “glimpsed from the corner of the eye”.
A lot of Carver’s stories focus on character, but often from an outside perspective. They feel chanced upon, and then described in matter-of-fact ways. But yet, as a reader it’s enough to make you put the book down and say, “Damn… that hit home.”
There’s something so real about his tales, with each told in such a simple way, you really feel like you are experiencing, not reading.
And while other authors might write about very different topics, I think Carver would advise them to do it in a way that is honest, focused, and unflinching.
“First the glimpse. Then the glimpse given life, turned into something that illuminates the moment and may, if we are lucky, have even further-ranging consequences and meaning.”
These are my selection of the greatest insights from Carver’s non-fiction. They come especially from his essay, ‘On Writing’, which you can find here.
As an author, I try to learn from Carver was trying to teach. And although most of what I write is fantasy rather than literary fiction, I think that these principles still firmly apply. I find myself :
- Drawn to simple phrasing
- Seeking out the tension
- Focusing in deeply on characters
- Editing and rephrasing until I am satisfied (this becomes a habit, after a while).
Perhaps most importantly, I feel confident to tell my stories, with no pressure to imitate popular styles. I learned that from Carver.
Be you. Be honest.
The advice about letting short stories build — to some extent discovering them after coming up with an interesting premise — is part of my style, too (and can be seen in my story prompts). Of course, a novel may be a different matter from a short story — most novelists will benefit from at least a basic outline!
Before I finish, a shout-out and thank you to the ‘story nerds’ of Medium, who commented on this previous article that I wrote about Carver, and encouraged me to go deeper: Bernie Pullen, C.A. Jaymes, Eko BP, Mike Butler, Angie Mangino, Mary Louisa Cappelli, MFA, JD, PhD, Denise Darby, Scot Butwell, Maria Rattray, The Sober Vegan Yogi, Klara Jane Holloway.
The bookshop where I first picked up a Carver collection is sadly gone now, perhaps due to the Kindle era, though maybe also in part because it preferred to stock books of literary short stories and poetry rather than the things most people want to buy…
Still. Carver’s work stayed with me. And from that initial book, I began to work my way through all of the short stories he had written, as well as the work of those authors he frequently recommended.
Thanks for reading! Before you go, you can find more of my articles about writing here. I also write fiction on Medium; check out some examples in this list! Or simplify things by just getting all my posts direct to your inbox. Do that here! 🧠 Thank you so much! 🌟
¹The source of all of the quotes in this article can be found here.
