|
a writer's journal
Thursday, December 29, 2005
"Nothing Like an Ocean" is trimmed to 4970 words.
Reviews on Zoetrope have been strong, but I'm still wondering about it.
I'll get feedback from House Writers in another week. Then I'll do a quick
rewrite and include it in the story collection I'll be sending to a
contest the following week.
The editor of
Limestone e-mailed yesterday, wanting "Stainless" for their theme
issue. Apparently my letter withdrawing it (when
River City took it) never caught up with the submission. The
editor seemed genuinely disappointed to have missed out on the story.
I'm reading Jane Smiley's new book, Thirteen Ways
of Looking at the Novel. I'm planning to pick up the novel I
started last spring, to use some of Smiley's insights to help me get a
perspective on it, help me shape it. I may write a few short stories in
2006. But the novel will be my main goal.
Thursday, December 8, 2005
The story begun around Halloween is finished (finally!)
to the point where its worth getting feedback. I've posted the story,
"Nothing Like an Ocean," on the Zoetrope website for critiques. Right now
it's a few hundred words longer than I'd like, something like 5200 words.
Once revised based on Zoetrope comments, I'll try it on my face-to-face
group, that probably in early January. When it's ready to go out into the
world, I think it will merit a place in the collection of short fiction
I'm submitting. Not sure which story it'll replace. That decision will
take some thought.
Tuesday, November 29, 2005
River City, the literary journal of the University of Memphis,
has taken "Stainless" for their spring 2006 issue. These past few months
I've been placing stories faster than I've been writing them. It looks
great, having publication credits for so many stories in the collection
that I'm trying to get published. But it also means my story cupboard is
starting to look quite bare.
Friday. November 18, 2005
In the last entry I talked about writing blind into a
short story. Yesterday I finished it. Or I should say I finished the first
draft. It's not long, under 5000 words, which was a goal, but it is still
quite misshapen. I think it's got potential, though, with some hard
editing and reshaping. Working title is "Tickets," which is as
unimaginative as a title can be. Anyway, I'll start something else, come
back to this in a week or two, see what I can make of it then.
Starting something else...that sounds easy. What's the
best way to begin? Looking back at how my better stories got started. I
find that most came from a 'prompt' of some sort. "First Husband, First
Wife" evolved from a newspaper story, a judge's ruling in a drug
case...that and a great first line. "Marathon Man" came from a writing
class exercise, write a story from associations with a particular song by
Iris Dement. "Lake Charles" came from that song and from a first line that
set voice and character. "Stainless" was written toward a final image
(this suggested by Jill McCorkle's comments about writing 'Intervention.')
"The Accomplished Son" flowed out of its first line and built on the
memory of a road rage killing in New England years ago. Most stories that
eventually work seemed to have someplace to go from the beginning, that
and a launching sentence or two to begin.
So I'll see if I can start my 'something else' that
way.
Monday, October 31, 2005
My wife gave me an XM satellite radio, an early
Christmas present. It's great for dialing up music to write by, avoiding
the chatter between songs that even most FM stations have. Instrumentals
seem to work best--jazz sometimes, new age other times, or bluegrass.
Lyrics can interfere with my writing, that is unless the songs are oldies,
the lyrics known and needing no mental minding.
At the moment I'm writing blind into a short story. Two
characters, brother and sister, a small mystery to open the story,
something just to get things started. It may lead nowhere, but I'm writing
it to find out.
Friday, October 21, 2005
Somewhere on Zoetrope Virtual Studio fiction workshop
there was a discussion of the difference in subject matter between novels
and short stories. The usual points were made: novels tackle bigger
subjects, cover longer time span, embrace more characters, as a general
rule, than short stories. All true. Still… Then someone suggested that
short fiction doesn't deal directly with big events, as novels do.
Instead, the short story takes place in the aftermaths of events, and
their subject is less the event itself than its consequences, the things
that ripple out. Maybe that's why some write better in one form than the
other.
Thursday, October 13, 2005
My friend Dory is a writer, primarily poetry and
nonfiction. She says that when she really likes something she's just
written, she has trouble getting started on the next thing. I'm in that
place right now, noodling with several scraps of ideas but not feeling
committed to any of them. I'd really like to get one more 'Spivey' story
written before the next version of my short story collection goes out,
November 15 deadline.
After hearing of the story for years, I finally read
Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." And I read her remarks
about the story in 1963. This quote struck me:
"I often ask myself what makes a story work, and what makes it hold up
as a story, and I have decided that it is probably some action, some
gesture of a character that is unlike any other in the story, one which
indicates where the real heart of the story lies. This would have to be an
action or gesture which was both totally right and totally unexpected; it
would have to be one that is both in character and beyond character; it
would have to suggest both the world and eternity. … It would be a gesture
that transcended any neat allegory that might have been intended or any
pat moral categories a reader could make. It would be a gesture which
somehow made contact with mystery."
Rereading stories of Carver and Bausch with this
O'Connor quote in mind, I find those moments now, those gestures. They're
not always as pure as O'Connor's vision, her ideal, but they stretch
toward it.
Wednesday, October 5, 2005
Yesterday
Five
Points accepted "First Husband, First Wife." It will probably be
in their summer 2006 issue. It's been a long journey for this favorite
story, one that has ended up in a great place!
The story I've been writing for the
Limestone theme issue is finished for now, revised based on
Zoetrope and face-to-face writing group feedback. I'm submitting it to
several other journals, too. I used some of the learning from Sewanee
workshops on this one, and it seems like one of my better stories. Of
course, I'm much too close to it still to really know.
Sunday, October 2, 2005
Endings are hard, harder for me than beginnings or
middles. Those final two or three paragraphs in short fiction can be
torture to write and get right. My easy way out is too often to end with a
blast, a pie in the face, a dinner table upended. Sometimes it works. But
sometimes it stretches credibility, violates the characters or the
promises made by the story.
Most writers obsess over beginnings, getting the reader
into the story. Endings are fully as important. I've been living with this
issue the past few days, trying to 'fix' the ending of "First Husband,
First Wife," to make it subtle. To that end, I've spent time looking at
the ends of dozens of stories by Raymond Carver and Richard Bausch, the
final hundred words or so. How is character growth/realization shown or
implied? How is it woven with the last bits of story action? How do
masters of the craft create the satisfying endings that stay for days
afterward with the reader? It ain't easy. I've got pages of notes now,
dozens of examples of how it's done. And I've revised the ending of "FH,FW,"
trying to implement what I've picked up in the process.
Tuesday, September 20, 2005
Cliff Garstang highlighted in his blog,
Perpetual
Folly, an essay by Richard Bausch. It's titled
"A Letter to a Young Writer." Bausch calls it a sort of Ten
Commandments for Writers. It's not so much a "how to" list as one of "how
to be" list for a writer, habits and ways of approach to life in the craft
that seem to improve your shot at surviving in the profession, of getting
the most from the talent/potential you have, whatever that might be.
A lit journal has expressed interest in "First Husband,
First Wife." I've been involve in a rewrite of the ending as a result. It
feels strange, revisiting a story I wrote maybe eighteen months ago,
trying to see it take a different shape in that final scene, trying to
find the narrative and character voices again so the rewrite seams won't
show.
And the novel is set aside again for a couple weeks
while I work on a story to fit a theme issue at Limestone, the Lexington,
KY literary magazine. What I've got feels like a good start. The theme:
Noise, Ruckus, Breaking a Silence...or something like that.
Friday, September 9, 2005
"Start as close to the end as possible." I've
often read this advice,, most recently in a list of eight writing
pointers, these purportedly from Kurt Vonnegut.
Well, hearing and learning are different things. A
short-short I wrote in August and workshopped online was accepted by
SmokeLong Quarterly,
a first-rate purveyor of flash fiction. (Flash seems to be almost a genre
of its own, and I'm quite uninitiated in its ways.) The SmokeLong editor
suggested two changes. The small one we worked out easily. The bigger edit
was to delete the first two paragraphs. And she was dead right. There was
nothing there that couldn't be gleaned from what followed. The reader
didn't need the set-up, the character coming through the door. "Start
as close to the end as possible."
Friday, September 2, 2005
Picked up a quote (possibly paraphrased) from David Mamet this week regarding dialogue and character interactions. Human
beings do not "communicate our wishes to each other, but we communicate to
achieve our wishes from each other. We do not speak the desire but speak
that which is most likely to bring about that desire."
Last evening I drove to the Carnegie Center in
Lexington for readings by several talented writers from the region. The
gathering was small but appreciative, the pastries excellent.
Sunday, August 28, 2005
With September fast approaching, I'm getting several
story submissions ready to send out, two of them referrals from Richard
Bausch. And I'll be entering some version of my story collection in a
competition, first prize publication.
Stories or novels (or movies) that turn out in their
final acts to be quite different than what the reader expects--these are
the ones that stand out, and I don't mean just commercially. Because of
how their essence arrives--unexpected and yet somehow inevitable--they
resonate. And they stay with the reader in a way a story told straight
might not. So I'm rethinking The Sin-Eater's Son, my
novel-in-progress, this week, seeing if I can restructure it, make it work
that way.
Monday, August 22, 2005
Laila Lalami (MoorishGirl)
and Cliff Garstang (Perpetual
Folly) are blogging from Bread Loaf Writers Conference. Both reported
a craft lecture by Charles Baxter on 'making a scene,' not in the writers'
sense of the phrase, but a parent's to an unruly child. He talked about
the natural desire of writers to control their characters, to make their
actions quite rational. We shy away from letting them 'act out' in extreme
ways. But people do sometimes behave in foolish and over-blown ways.
Characters should, too. Even more so.
As if to drive the point home, this morning's Lexington
Herald-Leader has a front page story, the headline a quote--'I've done
a lot of felonies tonight.' Below is a mugshot-style photo, height
scale in the background, of the man in question. Instead of a scowling,
dour face, though, the man, clad only in swim trunks, is beaming, his head
tilted at a sporty angle, a man on stage, the ecstatic star of the drama
he has created. After smashing his car repeated into three vehicles owned
by his ex-wife and her former husband, he trashed their residence. Then he
crashed his vehicle through the rear doors of the Adair County Courthouse.
Just the kind of guy Charles Baxter would love, a guy bent on making a
scene.
Three stories placed in print journals last week,
"Berliner" in Oasis Journal 2005, "Marathon Man" in Nougat Magazine,
and "Squirrels" in Duck & Herring Co. PFG. All three should
appear in September/October. My best week ever (okay, best month ever,
best year) placing fiction.
Click here for journal entries on the Sewanee
Writers Conference, 2005.
Back to
the top |
Journal Archives
What's new on this site?
- Blogs
Mary Akers
Sherry Chandler
Alexander
Chee
Myfanwy Collins
Katrina Denza
Xujun Eberlein
Pia Z.
Ehrhardt
Anne Elliott
Seth Fleisher
Jamie Ford
Gina Frangello
Clifford Garstang
Bunny Goodjohn
Susan
Henderson
Laila Lalami (Moorishgirl)
Jason McDonald
Kirsten
Menger-Anderson
Maud Newton
Sandra Novack
Mary E. Preece
Jordan Rosenfeld
Kay Sexton
Felicia Sullivan
Wayne Yang
- Writers Websites
Richard Bausch
Robert Olen Butler
Ron Currie, Jr.
Greg Downs
Pamela Erens
Kirby Gann
Silas House
Jill McCorkle
Andrew Porter
Roxana
Robinson
Gwyn Hyman
Rubio
George Saunders
Bob Sloan
Lee Smith
Frank X. Walker
Tim Wendel
Crystal Wilkinson
- Of Interest
Backstory
Emerging Writers Network
Five Star Literary Stories
Ginosko
Literary Journal
Lit Blog Co-Op
NYT Best Seller List
Poets & Writers
Sarabande Books
University of Iowa Press
Writers Digest |
