Last month, I explored my conundrum (and I make no excuses for the sorry pun) of what form to present my tale: first person, third person, omniscient, limited, objective, etc. None of it worked for me, largely because of the shifting point of view in a short piece. I concluded that I needed a character outside of the story to look back on the story to delve into the story’s questions. Hence, the use of the word “conundrum.”

I wrote one of my fantasy novels, Jonathan Clearly (still to be released), mostly in third-person objective, interspersed with Jonathan’s diary entries (first person, unreliable narrator). It occurred to me to do something similar for this short story, which is also not unlike the structure I use for my end-of-month blog, Fairy Tale of the Month.

Falling back on my “pantsering” creative process—in other words, using ideas that come out of the clear blue sky—I conceived of telling the story in third-person objective within the frame of a first-person narrative and actually making the story a physical object, a story vase.

I describe the story vase as a piece of pottery created by a storyteller who recites the tale over and over again as he creates it. The story is infused into the clay, as well as being depicted around the sides of the vase in panels, much like stained-glass windows running along the walls of a cathedral.

My protagonist, a mage of some sort, speaking in first person, is given the obligation of magically reassembling a shattered story vase, with the help of a cat-síth, Johannes, a character from Fairy Tale of the Month (I couldn’t help myself).

As they “heal” the vase, they hear the story. However, with the vase being shattered, they don’t know where to begin. They put it back together, starting at the middle of the story, working their way to the beginning before coming to the end. I took a clue from Picasso’s Guernica about disassembling the image and reconstructing it in a different form. I will use Johannes, the cat-síth, as a non-human to ask my protagonist questions about this complex, human story.

Next month, I will talk about my submission of this tale to my critique group, an important part of my writing process.