A writer of short stories must be a master of the telling detail.
Especially when you have only three or four pages to write a story, no details can be wasted. Every detail must count for more than itself.
A ball of string must suggest a house.
A wall in a house must suggest a neighborhood.
And a character must be established in a sentence.
Saki is a master of such one-sentence characterizations.
In his outlandish short story, “Tobermory,” we meet Miss Scrawen. She “wrote fiercely sensuous poetry and led a blameless life.”
We also meet Lady Blemley. She “kept up a flow of what she hoped was conversation, but her attention was fixed on the doorway.”
In “The Jesting of Arlington Stringham,” Saki creates a living character by quoting only a few words of dialogue.
“Arlington made a joke in the House last night,” said Eleanor Stringham to her mother; “in all the years we’ve been married neither of us has made jokes, and I don’t like it now.”
Then there’s the memorable Lester Slaggby from “The Easter Egg” who “never crossed the Channel without mentally comparing the numerical proportion of life belts to passengers.”
And there’s the delightful Lady Carlotta from “The Schartz-Metterklume Method” whose “friends and relations were thoroughly well used to the fact of her luggage arriving without her.”
Such one-sentence evocations of complete personalities are both marvelous and, maybe, admonishments on behalf of humility.
We like to imagine that our personalities are multi-faceted constructions from mysterious depths . . . and maybe our personalities truly have this complexity.
And yet, others may feel that they can know us on the strength of but one telling line.
* Orlando Bartro is the author of Toward Two Words, a comical & surreal novel about a man who finds yet another woman he never knew, available at Amazon.