Chapter 7:

Summary

Call the Townspeople Together: When a narrative contains many characters and subplots, it can be difficult to keep track of all of the different moving pieces of the story. When this happens, the easiest thing for the writer to do is create a scene that brings them all together for a similar purpose that takes the individuals threads and ties them together. This creates new situations for characters to react to and can bring out new elements. "The Lottery," for example, has many townspeople and the central event of the story brings them all together for a specific purpose--murder.

Stones to Pebbles: Words should be chosen carefully for specific purposes. Shirley Jackson purposefully uses the word "stone" in "The Lottery," never deviating to synonyms like "rock." By using "stone" she emphasizes a connection to the act of stoning someone, which is how murder is ultimately committed in this small town. The only deviation that Jackson allows is "pebbles" in the hand of the son of the woman who is being stoned. Pebbles cannot kill, but they can train someone to throw stones in the future.

A Dark and Sunny Night: Often, the weather in a story is intended to mimic the actions of the story but the reality is that the weather does not care about the actions of people. When writing, try and mix things up, don't have the predictable "It was a dark and stormy night..." introduction to a creepy story. "The Lottery" is a story about a whole town committing murder, and yet, as Clark points out, the weather is "clear and sunny." Variate from the norms.

Blessing Becomes a Curse: Inverting a reader's expectations can make a story much more interesting. In normal circumstances, winning the lottery means receiving a lot of money, yet in Jackson's "The Lottery," it means death for the winner. Blessings can become curses and curses can become blessings. By taking the reader's expectations (the person who wins the lottery receives wealth) and inverting them (the person who wins dies), a writer creates a much more intriguing story and drives a reader to want to read on.

Writing Lessons

1. Gather the townspeople. Most characters in stories interact one-on-one or in small groups. Look for opportunities to bring them together, especially in the middle of narratives, where we can take stock of them. Many of the opportunities for such gatherings are ritualistic, such as weddings and funerals, which lend their own energy to the larger narrative.
2. Differentiate between synonyms. Remember that Jackson repeated stones and did not allow any variation for rock. There is value in not accidentally repearing a key word. When you do repeate one, do so purposefully, squeezing every ounce of meaning out of it. When you repeat and repeat, and then vary, as when Jackson mentions the pebbles in the hand of the young boy, it will magnify the effect.
3. Nature need not cooperate and often should not. To create an appropriate setting and landscape for a story, the weather has to do something, but it need not align itself with the will of human beings. Happy times can occur in blizzards. The sun smiles down on bloody killers. The more realistic your work, the more unpredictable the connections between the elements outside and the internal landscape of character and motive.
4. Tie the ending to the beginning. We are seeing a recurrence of this pattern, in which a story seems to return to the place where it began. The narrator of Gatsby sees that green light on Daisy's dock at the beginning and at the end. Grandma in "Good Man" reads about the Misfit at the beginning of the story and meets him at the end. The stones piled up by children at the beginning of "The Lottery" kill Mrs. Hutchinson at the end. The key is this: even though a pattern is repeated or a character returns, nothing is as it was the first time.
5. Reveal how a blessing becomes a curse. Blessings and curses rotate ina kind of yin-yang wheel until it is hard to recognize the distinction. This pattern exists, of course, in real life, made emblematic in the phrase "Be careful what you wish for." It occurs in every dimension of narrative and myht, from creation stories to beast fables to nursey rhymes. When a character or a circumstance appears too good, warns editor Mike Wilson, look for "the bruise on the apple."
6. Kill someone at the end. Go ahead: pull the trigger, light the fuse, reveal the dagger hidden in the desk drawer. One of the two dominant modes of dramatic narrative--tragedy--requires suffering and, ultimately, death. But death can work in comedy as well, as a prologue to the birth of a new generation.

Critique

"The Lottery" is a short story that can be taught at a high school level, despite its disturbing nature. The themes that Clark presents are also broad enough to encounter in other stories as well, if a teacher chooses not to teach "The Lottery." The Hunger Games is a perfect example of blessings becoming curses and there are a plethora of texts that bring many characters together all at once. The strategies that Clark brings up are broad and therefore easy to create writing assignments around for students.

Two habits of mind, creativity and persistence, from the "Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing" are present in this chapter. Creating an environment counter to the events of the story and inverting blessings into curses takes a creative mind. Maintaining a specific word and not allowing yourself variations requires persistence to make sure that you do not allow yourself to deviate. Gathering characters and plot lines also takes persistence as it requires the writer to keep track of everything that they have going on in their writing and connect it all together in a coherent way.

This chapter focuses primarily on narrative writing and therefore does not lend itself very much to writing in nonfiction forms. The closest that this can come to is tying the ending of a text to the beginning with concluding essays by bringing back what was discussed in the beginning, but this is still a stretch.