MemeMachineGo!

A friend and I were discussing whether one had room in a short story (under 7500 words) to fit the classic 7 point plot structure, complete with repeated attempts to solve the problem that result in failure as the stakes rise. As delineated in Algis Budrys' Writing to the Point:

1. a character
2. in a context
3. has a problem
4. s/he tries to solve the problem
5. and fails — tries and fails twice more, stakes escalating
6. victory or death
7. validation (denouement)

I can hear the knees jerking out there about how this is a trite formula for predictable action stories, yadda yadda yadda. But if you look at it, it's impossible to avoid most of these — the presence of any sort of conflict alone instantly implies the first 4. It's formulaic to the extent that it calls for a given number of attempts and failures, calls for clear success and failure at the climax, and calls for a well-defined beginning, middle and end. And no one claims that all stories should or must have all of these elements in an overt fashion.

Anyway, my friend didn't think there was room in a short story to really fit all this in, at least not without being so skeletal as to not be interesting. So I took it as a challenge to see if I could find one that did. Analyzing successful stories is one of the standard bits of advice for writers I've always meant to get to, but never have — here was a good excuse.

Now here's the surprise — thus far, 3 out of 3 stories analyzed did map to this without strain. Two of the stories were based on physical rather than emotional movement, but the neatest correspondence was in Jim Kelly's "Itsy Bitsy Spider", a story based on emotional movement almost to the exclusion of physical.

I went into this assuming that actually finding things that mapped so easily outside of the most straightforward genre problem-solving fiction would be relatively rare. With my inconclusive sample size thus far, I may have to revise that opinion.