Good Story Seasoning

I don't know how to write a story.  What I mean is--yes, plot, characters, tension, catharsis...but with a short-short story, the way that these elements come together is so closely tied to the rhythm of the story, to individual word choices, to the overall poetry of the prose...

I know that sounds pretentious.  It's hard to craft a good short-short story, is what I was trying to say. You have to focus on minutiae.  But you can't do it in a way that appears fussy, over-written, over-careful.

It's like seasoning a stew.  You've brought all the right ingredients together, but that's nothing.  You have to know when to add a bit more rosemary, another laurel leaf...a half-teaspoon of bouillon. How do you know?  No one knows.

But sometimes, you can feel the perfect stew happening--just as you can feel a damn good story coming together.  All the sentences start sounding good, solid, true.  (That sounded Hemingway-esque, but so be it.)  Or you've managed to introduce a note of tension by changing just one phrase; instead of "The minister smiled" you write, "The minister attempted a smile."

But you have to know where to stop...once it's all come together, leave it alone.

Maybe the hardest thing in any pursuit is to know when to leave it alone, when to say, "finished."  I'm getting better at that, though, in my old age.  Cut and run--get it done.