ENGLISH 307 * Kenan
Shaping the Story * Fall 2014
The Found Form Short Story
Narrative structure can be found in many places. All human communication conforms
to some type of narrative understanding. Recipes are narratives. Histories are
narratives. Building instructions are narratives. They tell a story. Any document
created to explain, instruct, or report is inherently a narrative. But prose fiction is not
simply a narrative.
Found Form Stories both mimic the forms they are adopting, and also create human
drama. Introducing the basic elements of prose fiction – character, dialogue, place, etc.
– enables the selected form to become a short story, while using the chosen form to
instruct as the organizing principle.
Found Form Stories mimic their sources to various degrees: Some adhere strictly to the
style, shape, format of the inspiration; some use the source material as a mere
suggestion or launching point (e.g. Robert Olen Butler’s collection, Tabloid Dreams,
uses the titles and journalism of actual silly tabloid stories as the launching pad for a
number of seriously written but absurd or magic realist stories. Italo Calvino’s
fascinating novel, Invisible Cities, completely rewrites Marco Polo’s journals as utter
fabrications told to Kubla Khan.)
Some examples of found forms:
Recipes
Instructions for assembly
Histories
Business letters
Medical reports
Oral history biographies
(See: George Plimpton’s Edie and Truman Capote – nonfiction; Boone by
Brooks Hansen and Nick Davis – fiction. Plimpton popularized and
probably originated this form of oral histories by cutting and pasting and
inter-cutting shorter paragraphs from various speakers to create a larger,
chronological biography)
Scientific reports/essays
Legal briefs
Meeting minutes
Travel diaries
Screenplays
Mad libs
Encyclopedias/Dictionaries
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POV: Found forms most often ape the style of the form in question, but are often told in
second person (instruction manuals), or 1st person (diaries, journals, reports).
Screenplays, of course, would be considered as the dramatic/objective third person.
Some other famous examples:
Both Nora Ephron’s Heartburn(1983) and Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate:
A Novel in Monthly Installments with Recipes, Romances, and Home Remedies (1992)
use recipes in interesting ways to organize their books. The great Polish writer,
Stanislaw Lem, wrote two collections of stories – A Perfect Vacuum (1971) and
Imaginary Magnitude (1973)-- that were chapters, prefaces, and reviews about books
on technologies and sciences that don’t exist! Journals, diaries and letters are perhaps
the oldest use of the Found Form. One of the oldest forms of the Western novel uses
letters (epistolary): Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded (1740) and Clarissa: The History of a
Young Lady (1748) by Samuel Richardson; Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1782) by Pierre
Choderlos de Laclos. One of the more famous early uses would be Daniel Defoe’s A
Journal of The Plague Year (1722), which was originally published (horrors!) as what
we would now consider nonfiction.
Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962) is a 999 line poem with copious footnotes. Milrod
Pavic’s astonishing Dictionary of the Khazars (1982) is literally a dictionary of a mythical
people. He also published a novel, Landscape Painted with Tea (1988), organized as a
cross-word puzzle.