by Writing Workshops Staff
3 hours ago
This craft essay comes from fiction writer Tom Andes, who teaches our Advanced Short Fiction 8-Week Zoom Workshop beginning Monday, June 22, 2026. Below, he reads a Gina Berriault story to think through plot, motive, and the container of a single night.
One of the things I love about short stories is the way they can make a single episode, an incident from a person’s life signify, filling it with meaning. This is not to say, of course, that short stories are incidental. In the best stories, the stakes are high, and there’s nothing incidental about them.
In the barest outlines of its plot, Gina Berriault’s “Bastille Day” seems incidental. A woman turning forty goes out by herself to celebrate at a dive bar in a gentrifying neighborhood in San Francisco. Teresa used to go to this same bar when she was younger and involved with radical political causes, and she finds herself looking around for faces she might recognize from that old crowd. Instead, while there, she befriends an older, “fairy tale woman,” promising to walk her home, so the older woman’s husband doesn’t think she’s been out with another man.
Finally, Teresa does run into someone she knew from her political days. Once upon a time, she might have been attracted to Mayer, who was a ship’s steward who delivered the union newspaper to Teresa’s organization. When the bar closes, he leaves with her. Together, they walk the fairy tale woman home. Having realized she’s missed her bus, Teresa goes to Mayer’s place, where she lies down—fully clothed—on his bed. At the end of the story, she is lying “as close to the wall as she can,” listening to his breathing as he falls asleep in his chair.
Even this brief synopsis ought to leave us with one glaring question, namely, why is this woman going out alone on her fortieth birthday? Why is she not celebrating with her husband, with their friends? As the story reveals in her interaction with Mayer, Teresa is acting out of a deep longing. She often does this, going out by herself, searching for something or someone. Unhappy with her husband, an academic who keeps changing fields, who she might be supporting, she is lonely, regretting her life choices, wondering at their old friends who have become “prosperous,” and disappointed with both her own life and the fact she and the people she was close to didn’t have the political impact they wished to have.
This, I think, is closer to the real plot of the story. As much as the synopsis above reveals, it doesn’t get to the question of motive. And plot is all about causation, about why we do things. For instance, does Teresa miss her bus home intentionally, or is it a lapse that reflects her ambivalence about her marriage, about her husband and their life together? The latter, I suspect—an ambivalence reflected in what she tells Mayer in the bar when he asks about Ralph, who he also once knew:
“I’m out on the town,’ Teresa told him. “I told Ralph I wasn’t coming home till late. No, I didn’t tell him. I’ll tell him when I get back.”
Then, once they have walked the older woman home, Teresa confesses that she has missed her bus:
They walked back the way they had come, unspeaking, Teresa stumbling only once, so far. She had no direction now. “I can’t make it home,” she said. “Over the bridge to Berkeley and another bus stop in the heart of darkness. Nothing’s running this time of night. Or far between. I think I’m scared.”
These are not—to my ears—the words of a woman who has planned anything, but rather of someone who finds herself in a predicament because she is acting out of desires that she hasn’t articulated to herself.
Want to read contemporary stories this closely and bring the same scrutiny to your own? Tom Andes leads an eight-week advanced workshop built around exactly these questions.
See the Advanced Short Fiction WorkshopThis idea of plot is not unrelated, I don’t think, to the idea of a container. The story takes place over the course of a single night. With great empathy but also without pity, Berriault shows us Teresa taking stock of her life. The choice Berriault makes in the first sentence of the story sets the parameters of the rest of the action, acting as a seed for what follows: “Just after one o’clock Teresa came to the San Gotardo, the last bar on her round of bars on the night of her fortieth birthday, July 14, 1970.”
That narrative specificity is wonderful. And we see it in the rest of the story as Berriault describes the bar and the neighborhood it’s in:
Only a few of the old bars were left in this Italian neighborhood that was taken over now by the manic facades of nightclubs where nude girls danced, and whenever she came in here now she wondered if anyone present had been among the customers years ago and grown unrecognizable. On the high ceiling the paint was the same antique ivory, and behind the bar the lineup of Fun Land prizes seemed the same. The Kewpie doll, the blue plush dog, the plaster Popeye. The flowerpot, wrapped in foil, held wax flowers in an era of plastic ones, and the two little girls in the photo garlanded with a paper lei were women now.
We learn early on that Teresa has been coming to this bar—presumably in North Beach, though it strikes me that the story might just as easily be set in the present day in the Tenderloin—for twenty years. It’s worth lingering over those evocative phrases, both the specific details, and also the idea that the old faces might have “grown unrecognizable,” a poignant thought on one’s fortieth birthday. But as loaded with details like this as the story is, and with a bar full of broken-down specimens gracing its first few pages—a woman ranting about William Randolph Hearst, two people who get in a barfight—Berriault controls our attention, keeping our eyes focused on what’s important: there are only three named characters in the story, Teresa, Mayer, and Teresa’s husband Ralph.
I hate using the word perfect to describe stories. As a writer, I find the idea of perfection reductive and limiting, if not to say paralyzing. And I don’t believe in it. There’s no such thing as a story that doesn’t have holes in it, little threads one might pull to tease the whole thing apart. And the holes, the absences, the unanswered questions, they’re so often what makes short fiction compelling. But I think we can learn so much from this story, and from thinking in an advanced short story workshop about these fundamental questions, the issues of plot, of a container, and what they can teach us about narrative and the questions our stories are asking.
If reading a story this closely is the kind of work that excites you, this is the work we do together in my Advanced Short Fiction Workshop. We meet Mondays from 8 to 10 PM Eastern beginning June 22, 2026, run for eight weeks over Zoom, and keep the room small, capped at eight writers, so every manuscript gets sustained attention. You will get feedback on two of your own stories and leave with a sharper sense of why your stories stop where they stop. I would love to read your work and to think alongside you about the questions your fiction is asking.
The Advanced Short Fiction Workshop with Tom Andes begins Monday, June 22, 2026. Eight weeks on Zoom, limited to eight writers, with feedback on two of your manuscripts.
Enroll in the WorkshopAbout the Instructor
Tom Andes wrote the detective novel Wait There Till You Hear from Me (Crescent City Books, 2025). His stories have appeared in Best American Mystery and Suspense Stories 2025, The Best Private Eye Stories of the Year 2025, Best American Mystery Stories 2012, and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, among many others. He lives in Albuquerque, where he is a musician and freelance editor. Southern Crescent Recording Co. re-released his acclaimed EPs on vinyl under the title The Ones That Brought You Home in 2025. You can learn more about Tom in our Meet the Teaching Artist series, and find more of our fiction offerings on the Fiction Classes page.
About WritingWorkshops.com
WritingWorkshops.com is an independent creative writing school founded in 2016 in Dallas, Texas, and the official education partner of Electric Literature. We offer online workshops, one-on-one mentorships, IndieMFA programs, and destination writing retreats in Paris, Dublin, Iceland, and Tuscany. Our faculty includes National Book Award finalists, Pulitzer nominees, and New York Times bestsellers with credits in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Tin House, and McSweeney’s. More than 30,000 writers have studied with us; alumni have signed with agents, published books, won the Halifax Prize and Mary McCarthy Prize, been selected for Read with Jenna, and earned admission to Iowa, Michener, Syracuse, Michigan, NYU, and Columbia.
WritingWorkshops.com is an independent, artist-run creative writing school and the official education partner of Electric Literature. Since 2016, we’ve helped writers strengthen their voice, develop a greater understanding of craft, and forge a path to publication.
