Posted on
by

A ten-minute ramble on making sense on form… and function? Maybe? As a treat?

So begins the Heart Sutra: “form is emptiness, emptiness is form.” It’s from these two arguments that much of Buddhism’s materialist philosophy springs:

  • ‘Form is emptiness’ – No object exists independent of the Universe. Take colour. The purple you see on your screen cannot exist without an observer – you:

https://brologue.net/2023/11/07/tinker-tailor-painters-eye/

One object comes to be by many, many causes and their effects. A clay vase comes to be not just by the sculptor who designed it, but the deposits where that clay came from; the water that kept it wet; the glaze that coated the clay; we can go on. Remove one link in that chain of causes, and that vase, as we know it, cannot exist.

  • ‘Emptiness is form:’ In the book of Genesis, the Universe is void, nothingness, until God says, ‘let there be light.’ He creates the Universe ex nihilo1. This is, for the most part, the exact opposite of what ’emptiness’ means in Buddhist philosophy. If there is a space in which matter can exist – such as the place you’re reading this post in, right now – it holds the potential for forms to rise, change, and change each other. That is ’emptiness.’
    • Drinking vessels, by this definition, are empty not because they are devoid of some liquid – water, milk, cordial, tea – but because space and time are what let them be filled.

This was how I understood, and went about deciphering, the sources I had to read for my second-to-last seminar of my Creative Writing MLitt: “Finding Form.” If my findings below are of any use, form, as an element of story, is influences and influenced by other elements of story – characters, location, plot, pacing etc.. As I learned from Eudora Welty’s essay, “Place in Fiction” – no place nor character exists independent of an observer.

The most straightforward way to show this, I think, is to run a thought experiment. Say you’re going to write a short story. You’ve whittled down your potential locations to two: the Mongolian steppe; and the Amazon rainforest:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grF3eboqDGQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxyDNrTlViw

From these videos alone, it’s pretty clear to see that humans would move around each environment differently. Your characters’ field of vision would be vastly different, too – you can see much further out on the steppe than you can in the rainforest. Thus, your story’s setting – what your characters choose to pay attention to – will also be different.

Let’s add in a monster, something supernatural. Again, the form of the location affects how we write about how the monster appears, and gets closer. On the steppe, we might clock it from across the plain, slowly catching up to us; in the rainforest, it might pursue us in quick, fleeting glances, between the trees. And those sightings, in turn, affect how we imagine the environment in our heads2.

Watching a crowd of people bustling by, one narrator might become caught up in picking out the objects in that crowd that divide its people into groups. How ironic it’d be, then, for that narrator to follow one crowd-member in particular, trying to learn all they can, only to learn very little.

This is a very short summary of Edgar Allen Poe’s short story, “The Man of the Crowd”:

https://nevermore.rip/docs/short-stories/the-man-of-the-crowd

Now, in class, what most of my cohorts came to agree on was that Man of the Crowd demonstrates one of the short story format’s ground truths: there are many, many stories that cannot be told. My drinking vessel can be filled with all kinds of liquids – and yet if you never drink from it, it’ll overflow. The potential to be filled, and to be emptied – ’emptiness is form.’

Their interpretation of form also put me in mind of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. When Kublai Khan tries to create his own cities by adding elements together, Marco Polo disagrees:

I have only to subtract exceptions from my model, and in whatever direction I proceed, I will arrive at one of the cities which, always as an exception, exist.

Every road that Poe’s narrator chooses not to go down is a story untold. Or, to put it as Mary Robinette Kowal does: if a novel set in London is like an unedited live broadcast of the Olympics, then short stories – like Poe’s – are the highlight reel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blehVIDyuXk&t=78s

In a literal, objective sense, a short story is… well, short. Between 5k to 10k words. That’s the form of the text. And what I find myself constantly coping and seething at is the fact that the word economy of a short story forbids you from exploring much of the world you’re building. There’s more gaps the reader has to fill:

https://brologue.net/2025/03/06/secret-strings-revenge/

5k words is maybe enough to flesh out ONE, and ONLY ONE character, ONE theme, ONE viewpoint. And before the reader can immerse themselves in this world, the story’s over:

https://bsky.app/profile/brologue.net/post/3ln75vvhwdk2h

Poe couldn’t cram the entirety of London into “Man of the Crowd” even if he tried. It’s not a Dickensian novel. His goal was not to immerse you in the day-to-day street life of London. The form of the word limit shapes what you can show, and thus, what your characters pay attention to, and for how long they can hold on before the short story lapses into novel form.

Case in point: the plot progresses because the narrator wants to stalk the old man from a distance, but London’s streets shape both his progress – how he moves, on foot – and his perception. He’s never allowed to fully immerse himself with the task – all we get are glances that reaffirm the old man’s location. If the narrator looks away for even a second, to inveigle himself in anything else, then his target might slip down a side street, never to be seen again.

The opposite of Poe’s story, yet nonetheless another fantastic showcase of form, would be one of Harlan Ellison’s lesser-known short stories: “Prince Myshkin, and Hold the Relish:”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dr5NsTOXAyE

It’s not only that the location of Pink’s proves an animate snapshot of LA’s night scene; it’s not only that, where Poe’s narrator pursues a man through London’s streets, Ellison’s narrator is seemingly singled out by a stranger across the street; it is that the late-night diner, as a third place, is an eccentric mix of an indoor and outdoor space. It is a town square where loud, surly monologues can take place for all to hear, all to participate in – and it’s also one where the narrator and his sally supplier can discuss the intimate minutiae of Dostoevsky’s treatment of women.

This story couldn’t be told until LA’s streets were lit by lamps and neon signs, policed by cops, and the intersection between Melrose and La Brea paved3. The conditions for the stranger to walk in, expound his life story, refuse to elaborate and leave, arises from the diner itself. Try rewriting this story in a pub, or cafe, or quiet sitting room, and the circumstances leading to the stranger being able to speak his mind won’t come about the same way.

I’m not saying you can’t have a character delivering a bombastic, Dostoevskian diatribe in these locations. I am, however, saying that the conversation might follow a different trajectory. Put Ellison’s stranger in a British pub and there’s every chance he’d be heckled out after four or five syllables.

Having said that, I think I might be veering into Plot’s territory. It’s pretty obvious that a single hotdog diner in LA cannot capture the entirety of LA at night. But Ellison, in his attempt, has trimmed down all of LA’s excess fat, not unlike how Marco Polo subtracts from Venice to create cities for the Khan.

…

Shit. Where did I put that drinking vessel…? It’s probably in the dishwasher, now. Anyways: the liquid that can fill a drinking vessel is empty, too. A story’s a series of empty pages, until you fill them with lucid, liquid actions, commonly referred to as ‘plot.’ These actions are also empty, until you define how long they’ll go on for – to what extent do they fill up the plot?

And that, in turn, leads to what many would call ‘pacing.’ Taking a page out of Anna Keesey’s essay in The Writers Notebook, Vol. 14, “Making a Scene,” pacing’s the ratio between plot events happening in story time, and discourse time. If something is unfolding from a character’s perspective, temporally 1:1 with the real world – like a conversation – that’s story time.

‘Discourse time’ is the opposite, where the event described is shortened or lengthened by the writer – a few sentences to describe a volcano eruption, or several pages’ dedicated to a byzantine, blink-for-blink breakdown of two neurotics staring at each other.

When short story writers compress the Big Bang into a few pithy sentences, that’s discourse:

https://brologue.net/2025/03/06/secret-strings-revenge/

When the poet of Borges’ “Parable of the Palace” captures the place in one word, he’s done a discourse:

https://www.ronnowpoetry.com/contents/borges/Parable.html

When the snake tells Eve to take forbidden fruit from the tree in Chapter 3 of Genesis, that’s… actually, that’s all story. He’s persuading her to take a future action without any narrative flourishes, and she just does it. Simple as.

Now, as a dyspraxic writer, I tend to overshoot both how much detail I should put into a given scene in a short story, as well as how many scenes I can have5. When it comes time to edit, I have to cut down on description, reduce the dimensionality of certain characters, and it’s… well, I wouldn’t call it ‘soul-destroying,’ but it can really fucking suck.

Keesey would write that I prefer discourse time over story time. I prefer infolding, the tendency to stretch out scenes through narrative – a familiar sort of infolding that Virginia Woolf was known for. In her novel, To the Lighthouse twelve pages are dedicated to describing how each of her characters come to make a decision:

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/To_the_Lighthouse

Anna Keesey cuts down a section of To the Lighthouse to make the ‘unfolded’ version, which clocks in at about a quarter of a page. She cuts straight to the chase; and in stories where things keep unfolding, where the sentences and dialogue tend to be on the shorter, pithier side, we find the pacing to be much faster.

So, as a summary: form, plot, and pacing provide feedback to each other, and are thus interdependent; where you set your story can help by setting constraints on how we think events will unfold.

  1. We don’t know how to experience that ‘nothing’ in which Old Testament God supposedly created the Universe, and never will. But the Lord loves a trier ↩︎
  2. Alien: Isolation wouldn’t be half as scary if you could see the Xenomorph running in a grassy plain from half a mile away. Or maybe it would: get to a sniper tower and shoot the fucker. ↩︎
  3. And there’s a corollary to this idea: once something does exist, you will find yourself spending less and less words to describe what it is, how it works, etc.. You can more safely assume your audience is on the same page. (When’s the last time you picked up a sci-fi novel from 40, 50 years ago, and said to yourself, “that’s a laptop, that’s a smartphone, that’s the Internet, that’s email?”) ↩︎
  4. https://tinhouse.com/book/the-writers-notebook/ ↩︎
  5. At least, dyspraxia’s the most immediate reason available to explain why I struggle to keep things within a word limit. ↩︎

TTLY… (permalink)

CC

Some Ramblings on Form in Writing is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. So long as you clearly credit me, this blog, and provide a clear URL for people to follow, you may use this work as you like.