Molia Dumbleton

Molia Dumbleton’s fiction has appeared in Best Small Fictions, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, Catapult, and elsewhere. Her stories have been awarded the Seán Ó Faoláin Story Prize (Ireland) and Columbia Journal Winter Fiction Award (selected by Roxane Gay), among other honors, and her collections have been honored as finalists for the Iowa Short Fiction Award, Press 53 Award for Short Fiction, The Masters Review Chapbook Open, and the Black Lawrence Press Hudson Prize. Forthcoming work will appear in Ecotone and The Sun Magazine.

Dumbleton is currently an Assistant Fiction Editor for Split Lip Magazine and a member of the Curatorial Board at Ragdale, and has served as a reader for the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction and the AWP Series Prize for the Novel. She is a freelance writer and editor and teaches creative writing as a member of the part-time faculty at DePaul University

Want a trick for getting a “stuck” story unstuck?

(Of course you do. Who doesn’t have a folder full of things that aren’t…quite…working?)

Here’s a thing I find fundamentally helpful, both in thinking about my own work and in responding to the work of others. It’s a simple distinction and it by no means belongs to me. It’s the difference between “top story” and “understory,” and it’s a great way help get a story unstuck.

In simplest terms, you can think about “top story” as the actual sequence of events taking place in your story, and “understory” as the emotional undercurrent running beneath it. A story’s understory frequently features a change, discovery, or evolution of some sort, and thus can be thought of as the reason the story is being told. (We rarely read or tell stories in which everything happens just as it did yesterday.)

Here’s an example:

Joe drives to New Mexico to scatter his father’s ashes. (Top story)
On the journey, Joe grapples with memories of his complex relationship with his estranged father and comes to terms with his father’s fallibility as well as with his own anger and grief. (Understory)

See the difference? What happened = top story. Why it “matters”/why we’re hearing about it/what makes it a story = understory.

Tease apart any story you know (this includes books, stories, movies, fairy tales, etc.) and there’s a good chance you’ll be able to identify a top story and an understory. (Try it. It’s fun.) This same process can also be helpful when you can’t figure out why one of your own stories “isn’t working.” A story that “isn’t working” is often just a story whose layers are out of balance.

Let’s go back to our example:

In your story, Joe gets word that his father has passed away. He sits on his porch and thinks about his relationship with his father, reflecting on various memories from his childhood.

This story is going to be almost entirely understory. That means it’s also probably going to feel a bit slow and static. Readers might think, Okay, but he’s just sitting there, thinking. Is anything going to actually happen?

Now let’s flip it. Joe gets the same call, packs a suitcase, and sets out on a road trip to New Mexico to scatter his father’s ashes. In your story, Joe drives, stops at various motels, gets meals, has conversations, sees the sights, scatters the ashes, and then heads home. And that’s it.

This story is almost entirely top story. That means it will click forward physically just fine, but it’s probably also not going to really feel like much. Readers might wonder, What is this actually about, though? Why am I reading this? Shouldn’t I be…feeling…something?

So. Solutions?

Yup! These are hugely oversimplified, but in basic terms, they can be very, very helpful.

Is your story understory-heavy?

Pan out. Widen your lens to let some other things in. If your character is alone, get another person in there. (A lot of understory-heavy stories feature a person alone, thinking.) So make that doorbell ring! Give your person a goal, a job they have to go to, a road trip, a hurdle, a pushy sidekick, a nosy neighbor. Get things moving. Make things more complicated at the concrete level. Push your person into the world. Complexify.

Is your story top-story-heavy?

Slow down. Zoom in. Make some space for reflection. What is your character thinking or feeling? What does your character notice or observe, and what do those observations reveal? When your person does something in the now, does it remind them of something they did in the past? What’s the connection? Between the food and the sights, can Joe look at the stars? Do they remind him of anything? What about them spurs a new understanding? What changes for Joe? Ask yourself: What is the story really about, at a deeper level, and why is it important that you tell it?

It can be both fruitful and interesting to analyze your own stories to see if you can identify clear (or even murky) top story and understory layers; to think about ways in which your story’s layers intersect and intertwine (or don’t); and to consider whether/how your story layers acknowledge or resolve one another in some way (or don’t) by the end of your story.

This last part can actually be harder than it sounds, but the time you spend thinking about it will never be time wasted, and will almost always reward you with dividends in the form of one realization or another.

Good luck and happy writing!