All of that is built into the O shape of a story: A gripping first scene. Assurance of where the plot must go. And a context and teller for the story. With Haunted, I’ve taken my first shot at a story shape I’ll call the Quilt shape. A friend of mine, Whitney Otto, wrote a book called How to Make an American Quilt, and since then she complains about how readers want to discuss quilt making with her. Whitney doesn’t seem to give a shit about quilts. She just needed a good device for uniting a series of different stories. She found a book about quilting, and the metaphor was born. Her stories became the “squares” she could sew together, to make a larger quilt. That’s what I call a “Quilt” shape: A novel that provides a context for telling many short stories. The first novel that I recognized as quilted short stories was Generation X. In chapter after chapter, the characters sit around telling each other stories. Beside swimming pools. At desert picnics. In this same way, every musical play provides the matrix for song-and-dance numbers to occur. It’s a kind-of variety show or vaudeville that consists of different types of acts, all combined to serve a larger narrative line. In simplest terms, Haunted is a rip-off of the Broadway musical A Chorus Line. The context is a group of folks trapped in a theater, on stage, and performing different types of stories that they hope will save them. Some stories occur as moments of stand-up monologue. Some as songs. Some as dance. And some narratives stretch across the entire length of the narrative, revealed bit-by-bit, between the shorter, self-contained stories. This mimics the different textures of acts that made up a vaudeville show, varying from low comedy to high drama, tragedy to comedy. A talent show is the same thing: an “envelope” drama that holds together several short performances. The central question is: Who will win? In A Chorus Line, who will get the jobs? This central question lets you collage together a collection of very different acts. The different plot points of your envelope allow you to transition between the shorter stories. To cull characters. Tell medium-length stories.
72