Happy endings margaret atwood structure10/30/2023 And here is where Atwood gives us an aside, saying, “this is the thin part of the plot, but it can be dealt with later.” Eventually we find out that John buys a handgun. Section C adds more complications, and two more people-Madge and Fred. And then section C, where John is an older man falling for Mary, who is only twenty-two. John doesn’t fall in love with Mary and Mary ends up doing things no self-respecting woman wants to see herself doing, eventually killing herself. We are told three times in the space of one paragraph that John and Mary’s life is “stimulating and challenging.” Atwood ends section A with, “This is the end of the story.”īut then there is section B, where we move into conflict. The story starts with a sentence that is about as basic as you can get in storytelling: “John and Mary meet.” Then Atwood asks us, “What happens next? If you want a happy ending, try A.” So you go to A and you get a basic happy (and boring) plot line, with many cliches and no conflict: John and Mary fall in love, get married, buy a house, have children, who “turn out well,” and eventually they retire and have rewarding hobbies. A whisper of possibility that I could hear underneath all the different versions of “isn’t that a bit much?” And back then, when I was learning about story analysis, plot structure, and Freytag’s pyramid in my literature classes, it seemed like a gift to me. But what I loved most about it was its strangeness. ![]() And nestled in that thin, 110 page collection of 27 pieces was a tiny story called “ Happy Endings.” My good faith effort turned up Murder in the Dark, Atwood’s 1983 collection of short stories, essays, and prose poems. You just had to make a good faith effort at a library or a book store. These were pre-Google days, when making good on a statement like that didn’t mean you had to sit down in font of your computer for the next 17 hours. You read that poem and you say: “I’m going to read every Margaret Atwood poem I can find.” If I couldn’t write great poetry, I could certainly be good at reading it. I couldn’t imagine anyone ever reading that poem and saying, “ that unnoticed & that necessary? Don’t you think that’s a bit much?” No. They were everything I was trying to write and failing at, but more important, they showed me just how badly I was failing at it. Once I read those lines, I never forgot them. I would like to be that unnoticed/& that necessary.” One of them was Margaret Atwood’s “Variations on the Word Sleep,” which ends with the lines “I would like to be the air/that inhabits you for a moment/only. ![]() I also remember reading poems in this class from a book called 45 Contemporary Poems. I wrote horrible lines in poems with ridiculous titles and I thought I was being mysterious and profound, until my poetry professor finally said, “ coughing up ashes again? I think that’s a bit much.” If you had asked me then, I would have told you I was a poet. When I was in college, I knew I wanted to write, but I thought I was going to be a poet. Submit your own “Flash, Back” or other flash-related essays on our Submittable page! In this edition, Jeanne Jones discusses Margaret Atwood’s “Happy Endings,” and how it gave her permission to break the rules of traditional storytelling. SmokeLong‘s “Flash, Back” series asks writers to discuss flash fiction that may be obscure or printed before the term “flash fiction” became popular, and tell us how these older or not widely-known works are meaningful.
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