Andrea Caswell
A Craft Chat With Monique D. Clark

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

Andrea: Congratulations on “The Love,” (Issue 44) which feels like a perfect short story. It’s got it all: deep love, disenchantment, humor, food, family secrets, and a profound moment of truth, encapsulated within 1500 words. What’s your “recipe” for creating a powerful short story? 

Monique: Thank you so much! It was an honor to have “The Love” published in Cleaver Magazine. This is a great question, and in theory feels like an easy one to answer. However, it truly isn’t. My best answer is: Know at least one thing for certain, whether it’s setting, a theme, or in this case, word count.

For this piece, the primary goal was for the story to be a maximum of 1500 words, with very little room for compromise. I had spent the past two years in my MFA program at Drexel University working on a short story collection. Each of those stories was between 5000 and 7500 words, and I wanted to compose some shorter bodies of work.

The second most important ingredient in this piece was the POV. Because I had such a small space to work within, it was imperative to create an intimate connection with my protagonist immediately, and to maintain that bond throughout. First person POV allowed me the capacity to bear my protagonist’s soul in such a tenderhearted way that even if the reader couldn’t absolve her, they could deeply empathize with her. It also limited how much the narrator could intervene.

Andrea: Where did this story begin for you? With these two characters, or a general situation, or the setting so ripe for a difficult conversation? Thanks for sharing those early tentative ideas, for a story that feels so fully realized that we can hardly imagine it any other way.

Monique: The bare skeleton of this story began with a timed prompt several years back. We were to write about someone with a secret. I’m not great working with prompts. As a matter of fact, I had completed only about two meager paragraphs, then put it away.

This past June, I attended a writing retreat in Collioure, a beautiful vacation town in southern France. Every morning about 7:30, I had coffee at a restaurant on the beach. All seating faced the Mediterranean Sea, so even if you were with someone, you naturally gazed upon the water instead of at each other.

I sat toward the back, which was still relatively close to the beach. However, it allowed me to take in not only the vibrant colors of the structures, the plush green of the mountains, the varying shades of blue of the clear water, but also the people. One morning, a couple up in age passed by and sat a few rows in front of me. They moved slowly and deliberately, not in a way that suggested age was defying them, but more in a manner of just being. The French have such a laissez-faire way about them. I watched them get settled in, place an order, and then just rest in the peace of the atmosphere.

Now, I’d never met them, nor had I talked to them. For all that I know, they could have been widowed and found love together later. They could have been just friends. But I imagined them as a couple who had lived and loved through decades of life together, and I wondered what they survived to get to this day when they could sit restfully on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea, watching the ebb and flow of the water in the beautiful seaside village of Collioure.

Then I remembered the prompt about the secret. After the workshop, I went back to the same spot and the story flowed.

Andrea: What challenges did you encounter in writing this piece? How did you address them?  

Monique: The biggest challenge was keeping the story confined to 1500 words, while fleshing out the characters in a full manner. Longer pieces give the writer opportunities to explore the characters in a deeper capacity. To address those issues, I revealed the secret to the reader, but not to Robin. The idea was to use the secret to push the story forward. I also chose the first person POV to develop intimacy between the reader and the protagonist, and I depended on dialogue to do a great deal of the heavy lifting, such as fleshing out the characters.

Andrea: The title of the story works at every level: as part of the setting, as the electric current running through the narrative, and as a thematic compass rose leading us to the ending. Any tips on coming up with terrific titles?

Monique: This is truly an instance where the title hid in plain sight. The initial title of the story was Barren. It’s such a heavy word that lies on the heart. However, outside of being unable to physically conceive, the mother’s life was extremely fruitful. Even meeting at The Love restaurant was in commemoration of it being Cliff’s favorite one, and the relationship between Robin and her mother is so full and compassionate. In the overall arc of the story, Barren didn’t fit, which I realized somewhere around the second draft. I changed it to ‘unknown’ and let it rest.While reading the final draft before submission out loud, when I read the name of the restaurant, The Love, I literally froze. This story is about love in one of its most complicated forms. The moment I heard the words “The Love,” they felt perfect. My suggestions for choosing good titles are: (1) don’t force the title; (2) expect to change it, even if you don’t; (3) be open to the title finding itself within the story; and (4) read your work out loud—you never know what you’ll hear or how you will hear it.

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