The Loooong Development of a Short, Short-Fiction Character: a Craft Essay by Brendan Todt

For nearly two years now, I’ve been working on a series of short short stories which I usually refer to only as “the Sarahs.” Anyone who knows me knows that Sarah is not me. Sure, she’s a writer and a teacher like me, but she is also a single woman with no children. In this regard, we are hardly alike. And Sarah is not real. She is not based on a real person. In fact, in the earliest stories—which I was then considering prose poems—I tried very hard to make her as deliberately unreal as possible. 

But let me back up. The most recent iterations of the Sarah stories began again in January of 2023, but they first appeared when I was an undergraduate, nearly twenty years ago. At that time, I was writing many short, unambitious poems which, for the most part, went nowhere. Although I may have recognized (but never expressed) this, my advisor did. He challenged me to write at least three poems that were exactly 100 words each, which back then constituted an Anna Karenina-length effort for me. The result: three prose poems that addressed, lyrically, a character named Sarah. The prose poem represented no stylistic departure for me, but the lyric mode did. These poems—though perhaps even those weren’t poems—unlocked something by way of their voice. I pursued the project further and over the next couple of years wrote forty or fifty more. Most of them are terrible. A handful were published in now-defunct magazines. There are even fewer I would still stand by. It’s no great tragedy that the majority are lost to time. I must have sensed that even then, because I abandoned them.

Seventeen years later, while I was leading a creative writing class through Cathy Ulrich’s flash collection Ghosts of You, Sarah returned to me. Ulrich’s stories, with titles like “Being the Murdered Professor” and “Being the Murdered Spelling Bee Champion,” demonstrated the kind of variety that could be attained through variations on a single theme. So, during an in-class writing exercise—I always write when I ask the students to write—Sarah returned. Though I’ve let go of that early draft and many others, I liked how that first one felt. I pursued more. There weren’t any murdered wives or actresses, but I did challenge myself to start most new Sarahs with Sarah herself. Essentially: “Sarah does something…” and then we’ll see what happens. In the Abraxas story: “Sarah sits on her deck and reads.”

What happened early on happened in language and the syntax; it didn’t happen in the real world. Once again, Sarah had unlocked a voice, a new manner of speaking which was also a new manner of thinking, moving, and arriving at meaning. This is what I mean when I say that I tried to make Sarah as deliberately unreal as possible. She was not a character, in a typical fictional sense, when she revived herself. I had no sense of her body, only some sense of her voice. I have always struggled with the line in a poem, but I began to understand the sentence as the essential unit of meaning in the Sarah stories. So I played around with sentences. The sentences were not vehicles for Sarah to say or do what she wanted. Instead, they dictated what she said and did—and how. 

For the first several months, this was liberating. Since those early Sarahs were driven by language and the sentence, I decided that Sarah should never become so real—so corporeal—that she would have a kitchen counter. No kitchen counter, no knives, no doorknobs. This was an actual thought that passed through my head. However, although the abstract, lyric space may be an infinite one, I eventually felt like I was running out of territory. At some point, Sarah went for a walk through her neighborhood, which meant, of course, she had to live somewhere. She had to have a home. In that home was a kitchen counter and a few kitchen knives and plenty of doorknobs. Now there’s also a space for a vegetable garden as well as a space for tulips. Now there’s also a deck and bats and painters and shutters. 

Though Sarah is not real, is not me, there are plenty of parts of me in her stories. In the Abraxas story, Sarah sees bats flying overhead as she reads toward dusk. I’ve seen this, too, exactly twice, as I’ve read on my own deck. Our house was also painted. Our house also had bats living under the shutters. It wasn’t the father who swept away the droppings; I did it. 

It's funny: as I reread the Abraxas story now, I see and interpret it much differently. Sarah is cozied up close to the house as the sun goes down using the light from inside to help her read. This is not at all how I intended the story to be read, but as I return to it, that image suggests to me, in this moment, that Sarah has got to get outside. This is true in both a literal and figurative sense. She can’t merely be a voice anymore. She has to engage in the outside world. If Sarah’s house is anything like mine, there’s a light on the deck she could turn on, but she doesn’t. Neither does she go back inside. Once again, she’s straddling another set of boundaries: night and day, in and out, poetry and prose, lyric and narrative, old and new.