People often ask me what I am working on. And so I tell them the truth: I’m working on a story collection. The reaction is often the same: a pained expression, a sigh, or once—someone rubbed my arm with sympathy. And then there are the people that lean in and whisper: Is it at least linked? The truth is: many people lack faith in story collections. The consensus seems to be that they just don't sell.

Is there any hope for short fiction?

Thankfully, lately, it seems there is. Despite literature’s gloomy forecast, something remarkable seems to be happening: short story authors are getting attention. This is good news for me and my many colleagues—we’re all writing our hearts out, writing what we want to write, hoping our work will one day find a home, a readership. There’s all this: Oprah recently picked her first ever short story collection Say You're One of Them by Uwem Akpan for her book club; Jill McCorkle's short story collection, Going Away Shoes, was reviewed in People; Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Wonders was nominated for a National Book Award. There are many more collections out there, too, that are picking up steam and making there way into the hands of excited readers.

Just last week, the Wall Street Journal posted an article, When Brevity Is a Virtue.  It seems that “the short story is poised to get its due.” The article speaks of how changing technology has provided a boost for short fiction and more readers are accessing and enjoying it. There also has been attention brought to this form through prize winning collections—Alice Munro won the Booker Prize and Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge not only won the Pulitzer Prize, but also did something most collections rarely do: it sold over 400,000 copies.

To capitalize on changing technology, new literary magazines like Electric Literature are serving up short fiction any way you please, whether it’s on your kindle, IPhone, or if you’d prefer to keep it traditional—on paper. The goal is to simply get short stories to readers. In a New York Times article Scott Lindenbaum, EL's fiction editor said, “The short form could work increasingly well in a hectic age.” This month, Rick Moody is even tweeting a short story over the course of three days. Another reason to join Twitter....

Tonight is the 60^th annual National Book Awards ceremony and dinner where they’ll announce this year’s winner. Perhaps Daniyal Mueenuddin’s collection will win tonight creating even more buzz for this form.  Here’s to hoping…

I'd love to know what your favorite short story authors/ collections are. Drop them in the comments box and I'll post a great big recommendation list soon. 

"I want the reader to feel something is astonishing. Not the 'what happens,' but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me. "
Alice Munro

Wednesday, November 18, 2009 5:19:01 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [3] 

5 writing exercises/ prompts from Escaping into the Open: The art of Writing True by Elizabeth Berg to help keep you writing through the weekend:

1.      A very old woman, in her nineties, is taken to lunch by her teenage grandchildren. She tells them something surprising. What is it, and how does it change their relationship?

2.      You are on an airplane that suddenly loses altitude. Oxygen masks drop; you are told to brace yourself for an emergency landing. Your seatmate begins laughing loudly. When you look over at him, what does he say?

3.      Write a beginning of a short story that is at least half a page long. In three days, without looking at the first version, write the same beginning. Now compare the two versions. Are they much different? Is one better than the other?

4.      If you’re a man, write how a woman would describe an ideal man. If you’re a woman, tell how a man describes his ideal woman. Make this a conversation between two people, and set it in a bar.

5.      Find a poem you like. Make a story out of it—one paragraph or many pages.

“…what I want to say to anyone who wants to write: You feel the call. That’s the most important thing. Now answer it as fully as you can. Take the risk to let all that is in you, out. Escape into the open.”

-Elizabeth Berg

Friday, November 13, 2009 3:14:37 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

Lately, I’ve had to trick myself into writing. Here are 6 (Okay, I snuck in an extra this week) tricks/methods (suggested by great writers, mentors, professors, & colleagues) that I’ve been using to get started:

1.      The longhand trick. Write in a notebook, with a good old pen. Pablo Neruda said, “The typewriter separated me from a deeper intimacy with poetry, and my hand brought me closer to that intimacy again.” 

2.   Allow yourself to write terribly. Just get it down on the page. Tell yourself I’m just having fun, I’m just free-writing. It doesn’t matter if what I write is any good. I’m just stretching my writing muscles, practicing.  “You must be unintimidated by your own thoughts,” said Nikki Giovanni, “because if you write with someone looking over your shoulder, you’ll never write.” 

3.      Goals. Set them and stick to them, my professor says.  A page a day equals a novel a year.  Goals force us to rise up; they make us fight for something. And when we accomplish them, our self esteem is boosted and our artistic faith is renewed. This week my goal was 1,000 words a day.  Did I accomplish that goal? Yes. Was every word worth keeping? No way. I may have ended up scrapping half the week’s work, but I believe I wrote more than I would have if I hadn’t set the goal.

4.      Read good stuff. I once overheard a writer say, I’m not really a big reader. This blew my mind! Reading and writing go hand in hand. Whenever I read good fiction it completely inspires me. I used to feel intimated and think: Well, I’m never going to be that good, why even bother? I’ve learned this feeling is unproductive. My friend’s brother is a songwriter and when she was struggling with her own writing, he said to her: I look at it as even the worst songwriter is still a songwriter. We can’t be writers if we don’t write. And we don’t always need to be the best to do what we love.

5.      Imitate the good stuff. I often use this method to warm up. Again, back to the notebook where I write a short piece imitating the style of an author I admire. Others recommend literally copying a paragraph you love, word for word, onto the page. This gets the hand moving and it wakes the mind up. It’s about paying attention: you closely witness another writer’s choices as you transcribe the passage. And you learn something you may choose to apply to your own writing.

6.      Writing in a café/ bar. Think of Hemingway at Le Deux Maggots or at the Ritz Carlton in Paris. There’s life and noise happening in cafes that feeds our writing. Writing somewhere new also shakes things up and makes things fun. And you feel mysterious and cool when you do this. And people come up to you and say, “What are you working on there?” My novel, you can say. Or, a collection. Then they get really impressed and it makes you feel like you’re doing something important (which you are).  It also puts the pressure on: I better not be all talk, I better get down to business and write this thing.

      Today I will be using two tricks. I will allow myself to write terribly and I will read good stuff. Currently reading two beautiful story collections: Lydia Peelle’s Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing. And Barb Johnson’s More of This World and Maybe Another.

“It is important to try and write when you are in the wrong mood or the weather is wrong.  Even if you don’t succeed you’ll be developing a muscle that may do it later on.”

-John Ashbery

Friday, November 06, 2009 4:17:35 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [1] 

I’m working on a non-fiction essay today for a workshop I'm taking this Saturday. I’ll tell you more about the workshop later, but now I just wanted to say how different it is for me to work on something non-fiction. I'm so used to making things up! It’s been an interesting challenge. I’m also writing about the time I broke my back, which was a pretty traumatic experience. As I write about it, I feel surprisingly emotional, but then when I reread what I've written it just isn’t any good! It doesn't seem to flow or have the power and energy I want it to have.  It’s so weird… I'm just having such a hard time organizing  the story in a thoughtful way that will resonate with readers. I’ll let you know how it goes. Perhaps I won’t just have just one shitty first draft, but many.

Speaking of “shitty first drafts,” I just found this Anne Lammot quote (she’s the one that coined that phrase) and thought I’d share it with all of you. It’s a reminder, especially for those more difficult days, why it is we do what we do and why it’s so important to never give up. I’m getting tired of hearing that literature is dead, that publishing is dead. We must continue to read others’ stories and to tell our own. The quote below is just one reason why.

“Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life; they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It's like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can't stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.”

-Anne Lammot

*photo credit: flickr, sr.gabriel

 

 

Thursday, November 05, 2009 6:09:36 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [0] 

In her book, Making a Literary Life, Carolyn See offers advice for aspiring writers looking to connect with the greater literary world. She has an entire chapter dedicated to this advice called Charming Notes.  Her advice is this: In addition to writing 1,000 words a day (or two hours of revision) five days a week for the rest of your life, she recommends writing one charming note (“or a phone call that makes your hands sweat”), five days a week for the rest of your life. This note should be written to someone you admire, whether it’s a novelist, an editor, a painter, a journalist, even an agent.  She says this about the notes:

These notes are like paper airplanes sailing around the world, and they accomplish a number of things at once. They salute the writer (or editor or agent) in question. They say to him or her: Your work is good and admirable! You’re not laboring in a vacuum.  There are people out in the world who know what you do and respect it.

The notes also say: I exist, too. In the same world as you. Isn’t that amazing? They can also say: Want to play?

These notes are just notes. You don’t want to burden some poor wretch with the entire story of your life. You absolutely don’t want to ask them for a favor… Be gracious. You’re entering into an emotional and spiritual courtship with the literary world that will last the rest of your life.”

I’ll admit that when I first read this advice I felt terrified.  Many of us put writers up on pedestals. Authors are certainly my celebrities. You may have read my post about the time I saw Mary Gaitskill in a café and interrupted her dinner to babble on about what an inspiration she was. We all get nervous: a classmate of mine was riding an elevator with Wally Lamb once and she couldn’t stop talking. He must have thought I was crazy, she said. When I took a picture with Nicole Krauss this fall, I practically sat on the poor woman’s lap.  My friend Jessica just stared at her, until Krauss said: Um, Miss, do you have a pen for me to sign that book? Authors are our crushes. And don’t we risk something when we let out crush know how we really feel?

The truth is: it’s good to push ourselves to do the things we are afraid of. And so I forced myself to write those charming notes. I craved that connection and more importantly—I wanted those authors, who probably don’t hear it every day, to know just how good I thought they were. Carolyn See says, “Life is a matter of courtship and wooing, flirting and chatting. If you don’t know a soul in the literary world, you can choose to stay home and sulk until the cows come home.” And so I sent those paper airplanes into the world.

And what do you know? People wrote back. Big time authors wrote back. Sure, some simply wrote two words: Thank you. Others wrote more. One even wrote: Could you please write me everyday and tell me how much you like my work? No one wrote: You’re a complete freak, why are you writing me? One author even graciously agreed to read one of my stories.

It is surprising, even when you don’t ask for it, how many writers are willing to offer advice. The charming notes are, after all, meant for them. But they too crave connection just as much as we do and many are more than happy to offer help to fledgling writers. Some are just grateful for the correspondence. Much thanks for your good words, A. M. Homes wrote me, good luck in work and in life. I must say, that response was enough for me.  There are times, Carolyn See says, “Everybody’s life was changed for the better.”

“These are paper airplanes of affection.  They are the glue of human sweetness in literary society. What our mothers told us (if we were well brought up) is true: Manners and civility count for everything.”

-Carolyn See

Tuesday, November 03, 2009 7:00:48 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [1] 

Flannery O’Connor was the first great writer to be educated in an MFA program.  I learned this Wednesday night in my literature seminar (I passed in that 10 page paper, by the way. It ended up being 12). She studied at Iowa under the instruction of Paul Engle. In the introduction to The Complete Stories, it is noted that Engle, at their first meeting, was unable to understand a word of Flannery’s “native Georgian tongue.” He said, “Embarrassed, I asked her to write down what she had just said on a pad.” Flannery felt that journalism school was not right for her; she wanted to be in the writing program. Engle recalled, “… [Flannery’s]stories were quietly filled with insight, shrewd about human weakness, hard and compassionate…”  

A student once asked Flannery why she wrote. “Because I am good at it,” she responded.

Here are 5 Flannery O'Connor quotes on writing:

1.      The first and most obvious characteristic of fiction is that it deals with reality through what can be seen, heard, smelt, tasted, and touched.

2.      The peculiar problem of the short-story writer is how to make the action he describes reveal as much of the mystery of existence as possible. He has only a short space to do it in and he can’t do it by statement. He has to do it by showing, not by saying, and by showing the concrete….”

3.      Fiction writers who are not concerned with these concrete details are guilty of what Henry James called “weak specification.” The eyes will glide over their words while the attention goes to sleep. Ford Madox Ford taught that you can’t have a man appear long enough to sell a newspaper in a story unless you put him there with enough detail to make the reader see him.

4.      It’s always wrong of course to say that you can’t do this or you can’t do that in fiction. You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much.

5.      If a writer is any good, what he makes will have its source in a realm much larger than that which his conscious mind can encompass and will always be a greater surprise to him than it can ever be to his reader.

      All excerpts are taken from Mystery and Manners.

Have a good weekend, everyone!

“The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.”

-Flannery O’Connor

Friday, October 30, 2009 5:06:47 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [1] 

Rita Dove, an American poet and author said, “Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.”  I think, as fiction writers (or writers of any sort for that matter) it is important to ingest as much of this form as possible.  There's all this: the beauty of the language, the imagery, words meticulously chosen to create a moment, to create magic. Some of my favorite poets include: e.e. cummings, Pablo Neruda, and William Carlos Williams (and wow, get this: WCW wrote a poem for my husband’s grandparents called “For Eleanor and Bill Monahan.” He was also my husband’s father’s doctor. And his son, WCW Jr., was my husband’s doctor).

But my favorite poet of all time is Mary Oliver, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. My friend Katie and I visited Provincetown this summer and we had hoped more than anything to bump into her during one of her early morning walks along the bay. No such luck... But just being there, walking the streets she walks, visiting the book store she frequents, made us feel closer to her and the world she inhabits.

I Want to Write Something So Simply

I want to write something

so simply

about love

or about pain

that even

as you are reading

you feel it

and as you read

you keep feeling it

and though it be my story

it will be common,

though it be singular

it will be known to you

so that by the end

you will think—

no, you will realize—

that it was all the while

yourself arranging the words,

that it was all the time

words that you yourself,

out of your heart

had been saying.

*

Thursday, October 29, 2009 10:11:06 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [1] 

Yesterday was a rough day. A rough writing day. It was one of those days when you write a sentence, erase that sentence, write another sentence, erase that sentence, and on and on and on. I would begin a story, but I couldn’t move forward. I was stuck. It was as if my body, my mind, the whole of me was revolting against the particular story I was setting out to write.

A mentor once said to me: “Never write a story you don’t want to be writing.” This seems simple enough, but sometimes we think we do want to be writing a particular story.  We’re sure it’s a great idea, a great concept. And so we pursue it. But the question is: should we pursue ideas or should we let them pursue us?

I think what I am trying to say is this: stories are only worth investing in, spending time on, and bleeding over if we can’t not write them. We need to be obsessed. You know that moment: something passes over you—an image, the singular voice of a yet unknown character—and it absolutely haunts you. You can’t get the voice out of your head, you can’t stop seeing the image, you can’t stop imagining. You lie awake at night, the story beginning to write itself… more characters appear, a setting appears… You’ve been stung by the Muse.

Now, I know as writers we can’t always wait for inspiration. Someone once said, “If you wait for inspiration, you’re not a writer, but a waiter.” We do have to write even when the Muse is shy, even when the juices aren’t flowing, even when we’re tired, sick, and feel like perhaps we just aren’t cut out for this. It’s tough to differentiate. Just because we sometimes have to write in the absence of inspiration doesn’t mean we should write a story just to write it.  We must think hard about when to let a story go or when it’s the one that’s worth slashing our way through the forest for.

Raymond Carver once said, “The story chooses us, the image comes and then the emotional frame.  You don’t have a choice about writing the story. There’s a filter at work which says this is or is not a story… I think a story ideally comes to the writer; the writer shouldn’t be casting the net out, searching for something to write about.”

At the beginning of this semester, we were assigned a paper for my literature seminar. The paper had to grow out of something we’d read in class. This paper could lean towards a more critical review or we could take the creative route. I chose to write something creative, to work on my fiction, but here’s the thing: The paper could only be 10 pages long. So there were these stipulations, these rules. And so for the last few weeks I tried to force my story into a box. I pained myself over trying to write a complete, whole story that ended perfectly on page 10. But I’d never done this before. My stories tend to be on the longer side. And so I searched and went crazy trying to find an idea for a shorter story. This was counterproductive. It caused balls of paper to pile next to me. It caused a blank screen to stare at me. I was forcing myself to write a story that my filter was working overtime to sift out.

Yesterday was the final straw. Yesterday, I looked at my files and I counted 5 half baked stories. 5 intellectually thought up stories. 5 so called “good ideas.”  Some stories were a paragraph long and some were up to seven pages. It was ridiculous. They all bored me. Meanwhile, every time I took a break from the assignment, I chose to work on another story, a story that’s been in my heart for years.  When I worked on this story, the vessel opened, the writing flowed, and the filter said THIS IS A STORY.

I just wasn’t paying attention.

As for the 10 page assignment, I still don’t know what will come of it (did I mention its due Wednesday? As in tomorrow?)  But I do know this: the next time I get stuck, really stuck, I will at least ask myself: Did you choose this story or did it choose you?

“Writing is love, a mission, and a calling, and how and where and why you write are very crucial issues.”

-Lynn Sharon Schwartz

 

 

 

Tuesday, October 27, 2009 6:50:24 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)    Comments [2]