I haven’t been posting about everything I read lately. To be honest, the constant updating was a bit tedious and the feedback lukewarm.
But, every once in a while I find something that is just too good not to pass on. The short story “What Everyone Remembers” by Rahul Kanakia is one of those stories.
This is a good example of fiction that breaks the “rules of writing” successfully. For example, the protagonist-narrator is largely passive while the other characters take action around her. Also, most of the story is dialogue. Lastly, a lot of the information you need to understand the story is established by telling, not showing.*
Yet, this is a well-written, emotionally engaging story nevertheless. The language is touching, the character interactions natural despite the strangeness of the main character. I believe these aspects of story-telling are far more important to literary quality than most of the mechanistic advice we typically read in writing blogs and books. I encourage writers and readers to take a look!
And, once you’ve read it, take a moment to think about how perfectly the title matches the precise boundaries of the story.
_
* This final point might be more a consequence of length than style; if Kanakia were to make a novel of it, he might show more.
At some point, one of our grandchildren is going to read the name “Bin Laden” and think: “weighed down by a lot of containers?”