The Woodpile: An Analysis
Free-to-Read Fiction Workshop
Welcome, friends, one and all!
Before we begin, a quick word about what’s going on, here…
Occasionally, I will get a bee in my bonnet to write and share one-off free articles specifically for the community of Substack writers. (These can all be found at my Start Here! page.) I don’t send these out as emails/posts to my entire list, because I don’t want to overburden my readers with content that only really pertains to writers here on the platform.
That said, one of my recent articles, called How To Write Good, brewed up some discussion, and a handful of folks expressed that they would like to know more about my writing process when it comes to putting together my short fiction, especially my thoughts on Motivation and Theme in storytelling.
And so! I’ve decided to use my most recent piece of flash fiction—The Woodpile—as a guinea pig for taking a deeper dive into how I do what I do. I chose this story because it’s relatively short and wears its themes on its sleeves, which I think makes it a good candidate for this kind of discussion.
Highly recommended that you read The Woodpile first before continuing on!
Obligatory Disclaimer
This article is intended to explain and dissect my own method of writing fiction. This method has been honed over many, many years of personal trial and error, and I am in NO WAY saying that it’s right for everyone! If you are a writer, you’re probably going to have to practice, practice, practice for a while before you find a way that works for you. It may look like mine, or it may look completely different, and that’s okay!
(And if you’re a curious reader, I just hope this little glimpse behind the curtain is interesting for you!)
Righto…let’s get to dissecting!
The IDEA
“It was a raccoon, well-fed and well-furred, standing in the middle of the lane, one front foot raised mid-stride like someone had captured the thing in bronze. Its eyes flashed from its dark mask in the flashlight beam, but otherwise, it did not move.”
Let’s start with a quick word about ideas in fiction.
All of my short fiction starts as an idea, just a little spark. Something that interests me, or makes me laugh, or gets stuck in my craw. I imagine that’s how most stories are born. I rarely start with a character; I usually start with an idea.
In On Writing (a fantastic resource for any writer, by the way), Stephen King talks about having an “idea net” that you drag around throughout the day, catching whatever interests you. This takes honing your observational skills, taking time to notice what you might not otherwise (putting down our phones helps), and not dismissing ideas for being too silly, right off the bat. Write them down, keep them in a Notes app on your phone, whatever you need to do. But don’t dismiss them. Keep them, just in case. You never know.
In the case of The Woodpile, I was keeping an eye on a neighbor’s house for them while they were gone, and was being constantly surveilled by the curious raccoons in her woodpile (whom, yes, my neighbor generously feeds). So that made me think, “Raccoon security system?” and I chuckled and wrote it down. It sounds stupid on its own, but it’s an idea, and it deserves to be kept for a rainy day.
The combination of silly ideas, planted in my own setting of Ferris Island, usually breeds interesting results.
But ideas alone are not good stories, just like a spark is not a warming campfire. You need a bit of fuel. And that leads us into…
The PROTAGONIST
“Ricky had worked at the Damascus Auto Repair for the last five years, and it still never ceased to amaze him when Ginny Schumacher pulled in every November. But the more he got to know Ginny—sweet old thing, not a tremor of suspicion in her sweet old head—the more he realized just how easy it would be to make the immaculate Chevy disappear.”
A word about protagonists...
The English language is a strange beast, and we like to let words all jumble together and lose meaning over time. This is the only reason I can think of why the terms protagonist, hero, and main character have all come to mean the same thing in common speech.
There’s a bit more nuance to it, but the most important thing I want every writer to understand is that “protagonist” DOES NOT MEAN “hero”.
Your protagonist is the character whose decisions progress the story forward. PROtagonist = PROgress. That’s it.
There is no moral imperative tied to the label of “protagonist”. They don’t have to be a good person. But they do have to be a person who has clear goals and choices to make, and those decisions are what create plot.
In The Woodpile, Ricky is our protagonist. That doesn’t mean we have to like him; we just have to understand him well enough to follow him through nearly 2,000 words of story. If he’s too insufferable, readers put the story down. Interest and sympathy need to be balanced.
Equally, the raccoons (and whatever else is in that woodpile) are the story’s antagonists. That doesn’t mean they are “villains” in the traditional sense of the word; they are simply Ricky’s obstacles to obtaining his goal. They are here to make things harder for Ricky, and more interesting for the reader.
For a story to work well, the protagonist and the antagonist should be equally weighted and equally interesting in what they want by the time the story is over.
And that leads us to…
The MOTIVATION
“But Ricky was not able to decipher the oracle’s message. Instead, he simply felt the raccoon’s stare like a bolt to his conscience, and felt the need to explain. To say it out loud.
‘She doesn’t need it,’ he said. ‘But I do. That’s all.’”
Every character of consequence in a story needs to have something that they desperately want, more than anything. A goal. A deep desire. This is vital for storytelling to be effective. Without strong, understandable motivations, characters become flat and the plot goes slack.
Sidenote: This is why so many villains in literature and film have a reputation for being more interesting to read about than their heroic counterparts. Villains are often given MUCH more interesting motivations than heroes. Pitted against every young blank-slate, wide-eyed farm boy whisked away on an adventure, there is usually a brooding, interesting, complex presence standing in their way. Not equally matched.
Protagonists (hero or not) need interesting, understandable, personal motivations. You want your reader to be invested in the right people for the story to work.
In The Woodpile, Ricky wants to steal a vintage car from elderly widow Ginny Schumacher. It’s a very simple motivation, and it’s what drives the plot of this short story forward. This simple motivation works well for a piece of flash fiction, but wouldn’t be as effective in a longer novel unless other goals and motives were introduced.
Yet this level of simplicity/complexity is where we, as writers, get to play with reader sympathy.
Let’s use a hypothetical: The Woodpile would be a very different story if I wanted the reader to “side” with Ricky. I would have given Ginny Schumacher a bit more edge, perhaps. Not the flawless, lovely old lady everyone thinks she is, maybe. But mostly, I would have given Ricky a REALLY compelling reason for wanting that money. For example: if Ricky had a daughter who needed a life-saving surgery, and the stolen car would go to fund that surgery, that would put my readers into an emotional bind. Do we care enough about Ricky to look the other way when he steals something from a defenseless old woman? Who do we side with?
This is emotionally interesting, and would take the story in a very different direction. Not better or worse, just different.
In this case, I kept things simple, because I knew how I wanted the story to end.
But that ties into…
The THEME
“Later, in her slippers and her thickest robe, she slipped out the back door and filled and refilled the bowls on the back porch with cat food in the frost-covered morning, cooing to the masked faces—and whatever else—watching her curiously and gratefully from the woodpile.
The old woman was good to them, and they were good to her.”
Theme is where a lot of writers get stuck. And I’ve argued at great length with plenty of fellow writers about this topic over the years, so here’s my disclaimer: this is how I understand and utilize theme in my work. If you don’t see it this way, that’s completely fine! Do what works for you.
So, here goes.
At its most basic, theme is the narrative argument of your story. Your thesis, basically.
Three Things To Remember About Theme:
Themes are not just single words or concepts. “Love” is not a theme. “Kindness” is not a theme. Themes are statements. “Love conquers all” is a theme. “Kindness can heal the most wounded heart” is a theme. Themes are defensible and require defense. Your story—every hair and feather of it—is your defense, the case you have built to defend your theme.
Themes are born out of your own worldviews. The things you value will typically rear their heads in your story’s theme. Most stories have more than one theme, and some themes are present in your story whether you put them there on purpose or not.
Every single story—no matter how short, simple, or fluffy it looks on the surface—has a theme. The best stories are aware of their themes and put them to good advantage. The least effective stories play fast and loose with their themes, creating a jumble of messages. When you finish a book or a movie and you feel strangely unsatisfied, nine times out of ten it’s because there was an issue or mismatch with the story’s theming.
The theme is the thing that your protagonist is going to learn by the end of the story, either for their ultimate good or their ultimate doom.
In The Woodpile, I knew that Ricky was ultimately going to meet a sad fate at the hands (paws?) of the raccoons in Ginny Schumacher’s backyard. But for this to be satisfying to the reader, a few things needed to happen.
The first was that I needed to establish that Ricky was given a chance to turn back, and he didn’t. That first encounter with the raccoon in the driveway was a shot across the bow. And even if he didn’t know what he was walking into, he still felt the need to explain himself, telling the raccoon that he needed the car, and Ginny didn’t. He made the decision to keep going, and he brought the consequences upon himself.
You’ll notice that, in most of my stories where things end unhappily for the protagonist (Something In The Water is another example), the character has a choice to step into their doom or turn back. That’s because one of my worldviews is a belief that redemption is pretty much always possible, if a person chooses to grasp it. It’s built into a lot of my stories. It is one of my ever-present themes.
But getting specific, The Woodpile’s over-arching theme—its defensible statement— is: don’t bite the hand that feeds you.
From the jump, a parallel is drawn between Ricky and the raccoons (the name “Ricky” was on purpose). In the first encounter with the raccoon in the road, Ricky makes that parallel plain: he sees himself as disenfranchised, and raccoons are often seen as pests, little thieves, worthless. Ricky assumes that the raccoon will understand him. They’re both opportunists, taking what they need to survive.
But the raccoons and Ricky have another parallel, tied to the theme: they have both benefited from the generosity of Ginny Schumacher. Later in the story it’s explained that Ginny Schumacher treats everyone in town like her own children, including Ricky. And obviously, she feeds the raccoons out of a desire to take care of them, too.
What Ricky fails to understand is that he is taking the old woman’s generosity and throwing it back in her face, and the raccoons—the antagonists, the obstacles of his story—have done the opposite. Bucking the perception of their nature, they are happy to look out for the defenseless person who sees them as important enough to care for.
Is this transcendence on the part of the raccoons inspired by whatever supernatural entity is in the woodpile? Who knows. That’s just fun creepy stuff. But the meat is what’s important.
Ultimately, Ricky’s goal is thwarted by the very thing he assumes is his asset: Ginny’s innocence and kindness. What inspires his theft also inspires his demise.
Final Notes
I recognize that there are lots of other elements of storytelling I have not touched on, here, but this article is already getting pretty long!
In future, I would love to talk more about:
Pacing and Tension
Descriptions and Narrative Specificity
Spirituality in Storytelling
…and more!
So if you want to hear more about any of those things, please let me know!
I hope that this analysis was helpful, or at the very least gave you some insight into my storytelling process!
I’ll be keeping an eye on the comment section for this article in particular, so please throw ANY questions you might have down there, or just give me a thumbs-up if it was helpful and you would be interested in more articles like this in the future!
Ok this os great. First question that comes to mind: how much of theme was deliberate BEFORE you started writing, and how much was emergent WHILE you were writing?
For example--the raccoons and ricky both sharing benefits but reacting differently vis a vis Ginny, that was cool and i didnt pick up on it immediately. Was that part of your intentions while you were writing, or was it a happy accident you stumbled upon?
I suppose the underlying question here is: of the three elements you mentioned in this article, how complete were they before you started writing?
Ive been thinking a lot about your discussion of theme, even before this article, and I have an intuitive sense that my...well intuition about theme is different, but i have less control of it as a consequence.
Thank you for writing this!
I love how succinctly you describe theme!! I have always had a hard time explaining theme to people, but you articulated what I’ve understood about it perfectly! This was a fabulous reminder, thank you for sharing. I have been in a burnout for a while and feeling disconnected from the prolific writer I used to be. This simple and succinct statement about theme instantly reconnected me with my pre-burnout writing self because it’s how I always understood and intuitively approached theme. Unfortunately I’m still not quite out of burnout entirely, but you helped me to reconnect with my past identity. Perhaps I’m closer to writing the sequel to my spy adventure novel than I thought. Thank you!