To start my series of writing workshops, I wanted to use some of my favorite short stories as guides for different techniques and skills to use within our own writing. Ann Beattie is one of those revered writers and here is one of my favorite short stories she wrote, published in The New Yorker in 1984, In The White Night. In the story, a couple returns home from a friends’ dinner party late at night in an icy snowstorm, where the reader learns of their consuming grief from their daughter death, and how they continue to navigate the sadness while continuing on in the mundanity of their suburban world.
I’ve read the story here, in case you don’t have time to read it online.
Here are some of the techniques she uses in the story:
Opens with dialogue in the middle of the scene. Beattie from the opening breaks all the rules—introduces a lot of characters we don’t know, starts the story mid-conversation, and leaves the reader clueless about what the story will be about in the first couple of paragraphs. And yet, we’re still hooked. There’s a vitality to the moment and immediately a sense of danger with the falling, icy snow they must traverse.
Present Moment Momentum: The story is about incomprehensible grief, the loss of their daughter to leukemia, and yet the emotional crux of the story happened years ago. It’s such a difficult thing to tackle the subject of grief without miring it down in emotional language and stagnant scenes. Yet Beattie manages to deftly bring the reader into this couples’ immense sadness by showing their dance as partners in grief, at the end of an evening out. Beattie keeps us in the present tense as the driver for the storytelling, while dipping briefly in the backstory through interior memories from Carol’s POV.
Adept shift in impending doom: Beattie quickly establishes for the reader what we think is the inherent danger in the scene—the couple driving home safely late at night in a snow storm. Then in one sentence, the reader is upended with the new knowledge that the real danger, the loss of their daughter, has already occurred years earlier. In fact, this information is buried in the sentence about half-way through the story, shocking the reader, and at least for me, sending me back to the beginning of the sentence to reread it to make sure it was real. While news of their daughter’s death upends the reader, the way the information is revealed also illustrates how ingrained this fact is in the lives of the characters. Sharon’s death is very much established.
Uses POV to show interiority: While the story is told in third person omniscient, it’s a close POV with Carol, Sharon’s mother. And yet Carol is often removed from the scenes in which she describes; she’s always at a distance. She’s by the hospital door when her daughter dies, she removes herself to the powder room when she’s upset, she observes her husband’s hushed exchanges next to his friend on the couch, much as she observed the same with her daughter and her friend years before. In contrast, her husband, Vernon, is tactile, literally hands-on with his emotions, trying to physically comfort Carol when she’s upset, sitting right next to Sharon in the hospital bed when she passes, and close to his friend Matt when they’re talking or whispering. Using this technique of distance, the author subtly reveals characterization; Carol appears cold and withdrawn in her grief, while Vernon is vulnerable and needing physical closeness.
Sparse dialogue: While it is a short story, what amazes me is there are only four lines of dialogue within the entire piece. The first two lines come in the beginning of the story, with Matt saying “Don’t think about a cow…don’t think about an apple!” The last two lines is the only dialogue in quotes between the Vernon and Carol, our main characters, towards the end of the story, even though this is a story about a dinner party and then the car ride home in stressful conditions. Why might this be? Why would Beattie only reference in passing a few exchanges in the car about the evening, and only put “Are you crying,” Vernon said. “No,” she said. “The wind out there is fierce.” She uses the dialogue to establish the dance between the couple; these reprotroire is a part of their daily conversation—Vernon asking if Carol is upset, and Carol saying no to hide her emotions, before dipping away to cry in private. Again, this sparse use of dialogue gives the reader a powerful punch, making the words much louder, than if they had been mired down within a lot of other dialogue.
Tone: Beattie use of the snow storm and the literal “hush” that creates over the landscape and the story is powerful. One of my writing teachers said, if you have an emotional scene, use cold language to describe it. Beattie does this with such finesse, one can almost hear the quiet dampening of the world outside the car and home while reading, which serves as a double entendre for the dampening of their emotional world as well. She shows us as writers how to adroitly use elements of the natural landscape to convey emotional interiority and complexity within the characters.
Strong metaphors and use of natural elements: From snow, to lacy filagree of valentines, from apples to surrealist paintings, Beattie weaves gorgeous metaphors throughout the short story to evoke strong images and emotional reactions.
Strong Final Beat for the conclusion: Where to end a short story is one of the hardest moments to navigate. Technically, the story ends when the wife curls up on the living room floor, her husband’s coat her blanket as he sleeps on the sofa next to her. But then we’d miss the gravitas of the story—the lasting heartbreaking image that stays with us long after the story concludes. By bringing us back into Carol’s interiority, we see how she has accepted this new way of life, and even imagines her daughter’s spirit, still flitting by to observe their ways of coping since she left. It’s a haunting and arresting scene:
“What would anyone think?
She knew the answer to that question, of course. A person who didn’t know them would mistake this for a drunken collapse, but anyone who was a friend would understand exactly. In time, both of them had learned to stop passing judgement on how they coped with the inevitable sadness that set in, always unexpectedly but so real that it was met with the instant acceptance one gave to a snowfall. In the white night world outside, their daughter might be drifting past like an angel, and she would see this tableau, for the second that she covered, as a necessary small adjustment.”
Join us tomorrow, Thursday at 1 pm, to discuss the story, do a writing prompt together, and share work. I’m hoping I can figure out how to host a live session by then;) And please add any comments below too about your thoughts on this short story.
xoxo,
k