"The Ledge" | Lawrence Sargent Hall

Several years ago, Yannick Murphy (The Sea of Trees, 1997; Signed, Mata Hari, 2007) recommended Lawrence Sargent Hall’s (1915-1993) short story, “The Ledge,” when I was her student in the Master of Professional Writing program at the University of Southern California.  She did me an important favor for which I remain grateful.

This story continues to resonate over time and after successive readings. Published in 1959, “The Ledge” won first place in the O. Henry Prize Collection of 1960 and has appeared in dozens of anthologies since that time. Hall’s lean, vivid prose establishes a reliable sense of place and time. His fallible characters are compelling. And “The Ledge” has a narrowness of time and event that focuses the mind and holds that focus. It also has a strong point of view, clarity of theme and premise, and the poetry of natural detail. I mention it here in case you haven’t already read it and are looking for inspiration.

LAWRENCE SARGENT HALL was educated at Yale and worked as an English professor at Bowdoin College for more than forty years. Based on actual events and initially rejected by Esquire and The New Yorker, “The Ledge” was selected by John Updike as one of the best short stories of the century. Hall also published the novel The Stowaway in 1960. He died in 1993.

AUDIO: Lawrence Sargent Hall reads “The Ledge” in this 1959 recording at Bowdoin College. 

Updated: 10 Jan 2021

The Last :05 Seconds

If I can’t write the final beat of a story, brief, or article, or the last five seconds of a commercial or video, I know that the premise is not yet fully realized. Those concluding seconds, or those cascading syllables leading to a final conclusive sustaining note should resonate.  The end should resolve, summarize and underscore the point.  If those qualities are absent or not sufficiently present, then the foundational work – the premise in most instances – is not done; the ad, video, short story, screenplay or novel is not complete. The piece might move, twitch, even walk, but it won’t fly.

Dramatic Structure | Aristotle

Just reviewing my notes about structure written when I was halfway through my third novel (as yet unpublished). Aristotle… good material.

Classical Unities

1. Single Place

Aristotle called this Unity of Place:  he recommended that no play should cover more than one physical space; and definitely should not get into gimmicks like compressing geography or representing more than one space on the stage.

2. Single Action, Objective, Challenge

Aristotle called this Unity of Action: he recommended that the story (play) have one main action, with few or no subplots.  Can you imagine a primetime hourlong with only one plot?  Samuel Beckett’s play, Waiting for Godot, comes to mind – two men, Vladimir and Estragon, waiting for Godot by a tree along a deserted country road.  A few sitcoms have attempted it (i.e., Mad About You in which Paul and Jamie wait by the bedroom door for the baby to fall asleep).

3. Brief Time (a.k.a. ‘time lock’)

Finally, Aristotle suggested – you guessed it, in his Unity of Time – that no play should cover events representing more than 24 hours of time. Hmmm… so a season of 24 actually represents the Aristotelian ideal, right?  Each episode follows Jack through exactly one hour of his challenging existence.  That’s a time lock.  Yet, at the risk of nitpicking, while he follows one overarching action, he is all over the world trying to achieve it.  My guess is that Aristotle wouldn’t judge 24 too harshly.  The structure works.

Hemingway’s For Whom The Bell Tolls is another example of the essential power of Aristotle’s Classical Unities:

1. Strategically important BRIDGE in war-torn Spain
2. Jordan must DESTROY the bridge
3. He has 3 days in which to achieve his objective… 72 hours

Apply that to just about any story and you see the pattern. There IS method!  How many times must we rediscover what we know?

One Chance

Pamela Dorman, vice president and publisher, Pamela Dorman Books/Viking, a division of Penguin Group, moderated a publishing seminar recently entitled, "Between Milk and Yogurt": Book Publishing Today. One of the takeaways for me was this:

a writer gets one chance.

Even if the editor engages and provides encouraging notes to the author about his/her manuscript, perhaps even suggesting that it could work if certain changes were made.

The fact is that no editor has time to read material twice - even if the manuscript is completely rewritten. Don't resubmit 1, 2 or 3 years later. No one has time. You get one chance.

That reads more harshly than it came across. Ms. Dorman and her panelists were unfailingly positive about their professions, yet recognized that publishing is, after all, a business.

Ms. Dorman, the publisher who successfully persuaded author Helen Fielding to entrust her with her novel, Bridget Jones's Diary, in the American market, recounts how she did it.