'Patriotism,' by Yukio Mishima

Warning: If you click through and read this whole story, it is gruesome.  But amazing.  I read this short story last night, and it is somewhat overwrought but amazing in its detail. It starts with this introduction, but then jumps back and goes through the seppuku feeling by intimate feeling.  BTW, the author Yukio Mishima committed a sensational seppuku in protest against what he saw as the degradation of samarai ways.

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Patriotism

by Yukio Mishima

1

On the twenty-eighth of February, 1936 (on the third day, that is, of the February 26 Incident), Lieutenant Shinji Takeyama of the Konoe Transport Battalion—profoundly disturbed by the knowledge that his closest colleagues had been with the mutineers from the beginning, and indignant at the imminent prospect of Imperial troops attacking Imperial troops- took his officer’s sword and ceremonially disemboweled himself in the eight-mat room of his private residence in the sixth block of Aoba-cho, in Yotsuya Ward. His wife, Reiko, followed him, stabbing herself to death. The lieutenant’s farewell note consisted of one sentence: “Long live the Imperial Forces.” His wife’s, after apologies for her unfilial conduct in thus preceding her parents to the grave, concluded: “The day which, for a soldier’s wife, had to come, has come. . . .” The last moments of this heroic and dedicated couple were such as to make the gods themselves weep. The lieutenant’s age, it should be noted, was thirty-one, his wife’s twenty-three; and it was not half a year since the celebration of their marriage.

2

Those who saw the bride and bridegroom in the commemorative photograph—perhaps no less than those actually present at the lieutenant’s wedding—had exclaimed in wonder at the bearing of this handsome couple. The lieutenant, majestic in military uniform, stood protectively beside his bride, his right hand resting upon his sword, his officer’s cap held at his left side. His expression was severe, and his dark brows and wide gazing eyes well conveyed the clear integrity of youth. For the beauty of the bride in her white over-robe no comparisons were adequate. In the eyes, round beneath soft brows, in the slender, finely shaped nose, and in the full lips, there was both sensuousness and refinement. One hand, emerging shyly from a sleeve of the over-robe, held a fan, and the tips of the fingers, clustering delicately, were like the bud of a moonflower.

After the suicide, people would take out this photograph and examine it, and sadly reflect that too often there was a curse on these seemingly flawless unions. Perhaps it was no more than imagination, but looking at the picture after the tragedy it almost seemed as if the two young people before the gold-lacquered screen were gazing, each with equal clarity, at the deaths which lay before them.

'To Build a Fire,' by Jack London

Oh my gosh.  I read "To Build a Fire" the other night, and it has haunted me ever since.  I hadn't read it before.  Makes me want to throw everything aside and read Jack London morning, noon, and night.  There is something so haunting and vital about his writing.  So, here I am hooking you too.  Mwa ha!





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Day had broken cold and gray, exceedingly cold and gray, when the man turned aside from the main Yukon trail and climbed the high earth-bank, where a dim and little-travelled trail led eastward through the fat spruce timberland. It was a steep bank, and he paused for breath at the top, excusing the act to himself by looking at his watch. It was nine o'clock. There was no sun nor hint of sun, though there was not a cloud in the sky. It was a clear day, and yet there seemed an intangible pall over the face of things, a subtle gloom that made the day dark, and that was due to the absence of sun. This fact did not worry the man. He was used to the lack of sun. It had been days since he had seen the sun, and he knew that a few more days must pass before that cheerful orb, due south, would just peep above the sky-line and dip immediately from view.

The man flung a look back along the way he had come. The Yukon lay a mile wide and hidden under three feet of ice. On top of this ice were as many feet of snow. It was all pure white, rolling in gentle undulations where the ice-jams of the freeze-up had formed. North and south, as far as his eye could see, it was unbroken white, save for a dark hair-line that curved and twisted from around the spruce-covered island to the south, and that curved and twisted away into the north, where it disappeared behind another spruce-covered island. This dark hair-line was the trail—the main trail—that led south five hundred miles to the Chilcoot Pass, Dyea, and salt water; and that led north seventy miles to Dawson, and still on to the north a thousand miles to Nulato, and finally to St. Michael on Bering Sea, a thousand miles and half a thousand more.

But all this—the mysterious, far-reaching hair-line trail, the absence of sun from the sky, the tremendous cold, and the strangeness and weirdness of it all—made no impression on the man. It was not because he was long used to it. He was a newcomer in the land, a chechaquo, and this was his first winter. The trouble with him was that he was without imagination. He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances. Fifty degrees below zero meant eighty-odd degrees of frost. Such fact impressed him as being cold and uncomfortable, and that was all. It did not lead him to meditate upon his frailty as a creature of temperature, and upon man's frailty in general, able only to live within certain narrow limits of heat and cold; and from there on it did not lead him to the conjectural field of immortality and man's place in the universe. Fifty degrees below zero stood for a bite of frost that hurt and that must be guarded against by the use of mittens, ear-flaps, warm moccasins, and thick socks. Fifty degrees below zero was to him just precisely fifty degrees below zero. That there should be anything more to it than that was a thought that never entered his head.

As he turned to go on, he spat speculatively. There was a sharp, explosive crackle that startled him. He spat again. And again, in the air, before it could fall to the snow, the spittle crackled. He knew that at fifty below spittle crackled on the snow, but this spittle had crackled in the air. Undoubtedly it was colder than fifty below—how much colder he did not know. But the temperature did not matter. He was bound for the old claim on the left fork of Henderson Creek, where the boys were already. They had come over across the divide from the Indian Creek country, while he had come the roundabout way to take a look at the possibilities of getting out logs in the spring from the islands in the Yukon. He would be in to camp by six o'clock; a bit after dark, it was true, but the boys would be there, a fire would be going, and a hot supper would be ready. As for lunch, he pressed his hand against the protruding bundle under his jacket. It was also under his shirt, wrapped up in a handkerchief and lying against the naked skin. It was the only way to keep the biscuits from freezing. He smiled agreeably to himself as he thought of those biscuits, each cut open and sopped in bacon grease, and each enclosing a generous slice of fried bacon.

He plunged in among the big spruce trees. The trail was faint. A foot of snow had fallen since the last sled had passed over, and he was glad he was without a sled, travelling light. In fact, he carried nothing but the lunch wrapped in the handkerchief. He was surprised, however, at the cold. It certainly was cold, he concluded, as he rubbed his numb nose and cheek-bones with his mittened hand. He was a warm-whiskered man, but the hair on his face did not protect the high cheek-bones and the eager nose that thrust itself aggressively into the frosty air.

At the man's heels trotted a dog, a big native husky, the proper wolf-dog, gray-coated and without any visible or temperamental difference from its brother, the wild wolf. The animal was depressed by the tremendous cold. It knew that it was no time for travelling. Its instinct told it a truer tale than was told to the man by the man's judgment. In reality, it was not merely colder than fifty below zero; it was colder than sixty below, than seventy below. It was seventy-five below zero. Since the freezing-point is thirty-two above zero, it meant that one hundred and seven degrees of frost obtained. The dog did not know anything about thermometers. Possibly in its brain there was no sharp consciousness of a condition of very cold such as was in the man's brain. But the brute had its instinct. It experienced a vague but menacing apprehension that subdued it and made it slink along at the man's heels, and that made it question eagerly every unwonted movement of the man as if expecting him to go into camp or to seek shelter somewhere and build a fire. The dog had learned fire, and it wanted fire, or else to burrow under the snow and cuddle its warmth away from the air.

The frozen moisture of its breathing had settled on its fur in a fine powder of frost, and especially were its jowls, muzzle, and eyelashes whitened by its crystalled breath. The man's red beard and mustache were likewise frosted, but more solidly, the deposit taking the form of ice and increasing with every warm, moist breath he exhaled. Also, the man was chewing tobacco, and the muzzle of ice held his lips so rigidly that he was unable to clear his chin when he expelled the juice. The result was that a crystal beard of the color and solidity of amber was increasing its length on his chin. If he fell down it would shatter itself, like glass, into brittle fragments. But he did not mind the appendage. It was the penalty all tobacco-chewers paid in that country, and he had been out before in two cold snaps. They had not been so cold as this, he knew, but by the spirit thermometer at Sixty Mile he knew they had been registered at fifty below and at fifty-five.

 

'The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,' by Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula Le Guin is such a great writer in so many ways.  I love how she is able to plumb the depths of our humanity and inhumanity.  Here's an excerpt from the story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas." To know where the picture fits in, you'll have to read the story, which you can do here.

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The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

by Ursula K. Le Guin

Joyous! How is one to tell about joy? How describe the citizens of Omelas?

They were not simple folk, you see, though they were happy. But we do not say the words of cheer much any more. All smiles have become archaic. Given a description such as this one tends to make certain assumptions. Given a description such as this one tends to look next for the King, mounted on a splendid stallion and surrounded by his noble knights, or perhaps in a golden litter borne by great-muscled slaves. But there was no king. They did not use swords, or keep slaves. They were not barbarians. I do not know the rules and laws of their society, but I suspect that they were singularly few. As they did without monarchy and slavery, so they also got on without the stock exchange, the advertisement, the secret police, and the bomb. Yet I repeat that these were not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. They were not less complex than us. The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can't lick 'em, join 'em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy. How can I tell you about the people of Omelas? They were not naive and happy children--though their children were, in fact, happy. They were mature, intelligent, passionate adults whose lives were not wretched. O miracle! but I wish I could describe it better. I wish I could convince you. Omelas sounds in my words like a city in a fairy tale, long ago and far away, once upon a time. Perhaps it would be best if you imagined it as your own fancy bids, assuming it will rise to the occasion, for certainly I cannot suit you all. For instance, how about technology? I think that there would be no cars or helicopters in and above the streets; this follows from the fact that the people of Omelas are happy people. Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive. In the middle category, however--that of the unnecessary but undestructive, that of comfort, luxury, exuberance, etc.--they could perfectly well have central heating, subway trains, washing machines, and all kinds of marvelous devices not yet invented here, floating light-sources, fuelless power, a cure for the common cold. Or they could have none of that; it doesn't matter. As you like it. I incline to think that people from towns up and down the coast have been coming in to Omelas during the last days before the Festival on very fast little trains and double-decked trams, and that the train station of Omelas is actually the handsomest building in town, though plainer than the magnificent Farmers' Market. But even granted trains, I fear that Omelas so far strikes some of you as goody-goody. Smiles, bells, parades, horses, bleh. If so, please add an orgy. If an orgy would help, don't hesitate. Let us not, however, have temples from which issue beautiful nude priests and priestesses already half in ecstasy and ready to copulate with any man or woman, lover or stranger, who desires union with the deep godhead of the blood, although that was my first idea. But really it would be better not to have any temples in Omelas--at least, not manned temples. Religion yes, clergy no. Surely the beautiful nudes can just wander about, offering themselves like divine soufflés to the hunger of the needy and the rapture of the flesh. Let them join the processions. Let tambourines be struck above the copulations, and the glory of desire be proclaimed upon the gongs, and (a not unimportant point) let the offspring of these delightful rituals be beloved and looked after by all. One thing I know there is none of in Omelas is guilt. But what else should there be? I thought at first there were not drugs, but that is puritanical. For those who like it, the faint insistent sweetness of drooz may perfume the ways of the city, drooz which first brings a great lightness and brilliance to the mind and limbs, and then after some hours a dreamy languor, and wonderful visions at last of the very arcana and inmost secrets of the Universe, as well as exciting the pleasure of sex beyond belief; and it is not habit-forming. For more modest tastes I think there ought to be beer. What else, what else belongs in the joyous city? The sense of victory, surely, the celebration of courage. But as we did without clergy, let us do without soldiers. The joy built upon successful slaughter is not the right kind of joy; it will not do; it is fearful and it is trivial. A boundless and generous contentment, a magnanimous triumph felt not against some outer enemy but in communion with the finest and fairest in the souls of all men everywhere and the splendor of the world's summer: this is what swells the hearts of the people of Omelas, and the victory they celebrate is that of life. I really don't think many of them need to take drooz.

'Girl,' by Jamaica Kincaid

I love how Jamaica Kincaid uses an innovative structure and the rhythms of language in this piece.  I reread it last night and was once again blown away.

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Girl

by Jamaica Kincaid

Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap; wash the color clothes on Tuesday and put them on the clothesline to dry; don’t walk barehead in the hot sun; cook pumpkin fritters in very hot sweet oil; soak your little cloths right after you take them off; when buying cotton to make yourself a nice blouse, be sure that it doesn’t have gum on it, because that way it won’t hold up well after a wash; soak salt fish overnight before you cook it; is it true that you sing benna in Sunday school?; always eat your food in such a way that it won’t turn someone else’s stomach; on Sundays try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming; don’t sing benna in Sunday school; you mustn’t speak to wharf-rat boys, not even to give directions; don’t eat fruits on the street – flies will follow you; but I don’t sing benna on Sundays at all and never in Sunday school; this is how to sew on a button; this is how to make a button-hole for the button you have just sewed on; this is how to hem a dress when you see the hem coming down and so to prevent yourself from looking like the slut I know you are so bent on becoming; this is how you iron your father’s khaki shirt so that it doesn’t have a crease; this is how you iron your father’s khaki pants so that they don’t have a crease; this is how you grow okra – far from the house, because okra tree harbors red ants; when you are growing dasheen, make sure it gets plenty of water or else it makes your throat itch when you are eating it; this is how you sweep a corner; this is how you sweep a whole house; this is how you sweep a yard; this is how you smile to someone you don’t like too much; this is how you smile to someone you don’t like at all; this is how you smile to someone you like completely; this is how you set a table for tea; this is how you set a table for dinner; this is how you set a table for dinner with an important guest; this is how you set a table for lunch; this is how you set a table for breakfast; this is how to behave in the presence of men who don’t know you very well, and this way they won’t recognize immediately the slut I have warned you against becoming; be sure to wash every day, even if it is with your own spit; don’t squat down to play marbles – you are not a boy, you know; don’t pick people’s flowers – you might catch something; don’t throw stones at blackbirds, because it might not be a blackbird at all; this is how to make a bread pudding; this is how to make doukona; this is how to make pepper pot; this is how to make a good medicine for a cold; this is how to make a good medicine to throw away a child before it even becomes a child; this is how to catch a fish; this is how to throw back a fish you don’t like, and that way something bad won’t fall on you; this is how to bully a man; this is how a man bullies you; this is how to love a man; and if this doesn’t work there are other ways, and if they don’t work don’t feel too bad about giving up; this is how to spit up in the air if you feel like it, and this is how to move quick so that it doesn’t fall on you; this is how to make ends meet; always squeeze bread to make sure it’s fresh; but what if the baker won’t let me feel the bread?; you mean to say that after all you are really going to be the kind of woman who the baker won’t let near the bread?  

"Tiny, Smiling Daddy," by Mary Gaitskill

Reread Mary Gaitskill's short story "Tiny, Smiling Daddy" last night. Rips your heart out, just like at the end of Amy Hempel's "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried." An excerpt from the end.

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He thought of his father. That was too bad too, and nobody was writing articles about that. There had been a distance between them, so great and so absolute that the word "distance" seemed inadequate to describe it. But that was probably because he had known his father only when he was a very young child; if his father had lived longer, perhaps they would've become closer. He could recall his father's face clearly only at the breakfast table, where it appeared silent and still except for lip and jaw motions, comforting in its constancy. His father ate his oatmeal with one hand working the spoon, one elbow on the table, eyes down, sometimes his other hand holding a cold rag to his head, which always hurt with what seemed to be a noble pain, willingly taken on with his duties as a husband and father. He had loved to stare at the big face with its deep lines and long earlobes, its thin lips and loose, loopily chewing jaws. Its almost godlike stillness and expressionlessness filled him with admiration and reassurance, until one day his father slowly looked up from his cereal, met his eyes, and said, "Stop staring at me, you little shit."

In the other memories, his father was a large, heavy body with a vague oblong face. He saw him sleeping in the armchair in the living room, his large, hairy-knuckled hands grazing the floor. He saw him walking up the front walk with the quick, clipped steps that he always used coming home from work, the straight-backed choppy gait that gave the big body an awesome mechanicalness. His shirt was wet under the arms, his head was down, the eyes were abstracted but alert, as though keeping careful watch on the outside world in case something nasty came at him while he attended to the more important business inside.

"The good parent in yourself."

What did the well-meaning idiots who thought of these phrases mean by them? When a father dies, he is gone; there is no tiny, smiling daddy who appears, waving happily, in a secret pocket in your chest. Some kinds of loss are absolute. And no amount of self-realization or self-expression will change that.

No One’s a Mystery, by Elizabeth Tallent

This is one of my all-time favorite short-shorts, and I just adore Elizabeth Tallent's writing!

A woman and a pickup truck on a country road near Lincoln, by Joel Sartore

No One’s a Mystery

by Elizabeth Tallent

For my eighteenth birthday Jack gave me a five-year diary with a latch and a little key, light as a dime. I was sitting beside him scratching at the lock, which didn’t seem to want to work, when he thought he saw his wife’s Cadillac in the distance, coming toward us. He pushed me down onto the dirty floor of the pickup and kept one hand on my head while I inhaled the musk of his cigarettes in the dashboard ashtray and sang along with Rosanne Cash on the tape deck. We’d been drinking tequila and the bottle was between his legs, resting up against his crotch, where the seam of his Levi’s was bleached linen-white, though the Levi’s were nearly new. I don’t know why his Levi’s always bleached like that, along the seams and at the knees. In a curve of cloth his zipper glinted, gold.

“It’s her,” he said. “She keeps the lights on in the daytime. I can’t think of a single habit in a woman that irritates me more than that.” When he saw that I was going to stay still he took his hand from my head and ran it through his own dark hair.

“Why does she?” I said.

“She thinks it’s safer. Why does she need to be safer? She’s driving exactly fifty-five miles an hour. She believes in those signs: `Speed Monitored by Aircraft.’ It doesn’t matter that you can look up and see that the sky is empty.”

“She’ll see your lips move, Jack. She’ll know you’re talking to someone.”

“She’ll think I’m singing along with the radio.”

He didn’t lift his hand, just raised the fingers in salute while the pressure of his palm steadied the wheel, and I heard the Cadillac honk twice, musically; he was driving easily eighty miles an hour. I studied his boots. The elk heads stitched into the leather were bearded with frayed thread, the toes were scuffed, and there was a compact wedge of muddy manure between the heel and the sole—the same boots he’d been wearing for the two years I’d known him. On the tape deck Rosanne Cash sang, “Nobody’s into me, no one’s a mystery.”

“Do you think she’s getting famous because of who her daddy is or for herself?” Jack said.

“There are about a hundred pop tops on the floor, did you know that? Some little kid could cut a bare foot on one of these, Jack.”

“No little kids get into this truck except for you.”

“How come you let it get so dirty?”

“ `How come,’ he mocked. “You even sound like a kid. You can get back into the seat now, if you want. She’s not going to look over her shoulder and see you.”

“How do you know?”

“I just know,” he said. “Like I know I’m going to get meat loaf for supper. It’s in the air. Like I know what you’ll be writing in that diary.”

“What will I be writing?” I knelt on my side of the seat and craned around to look at the butterfly of dust printed on my jeans. Outside the window Wyoming was dazzling in the heat. The wheat was fawn and yellow and parted smoothly by the thin dirt road. I could smell the water in the irrigation ditches hidden in the wheat.

“Tonight you’ll write, ‘ I love Jack. This is my birthday present from him. I can’t imagine anybody loving anybody more than I love Jack.”

“I can’t.”

“In a year you’ll write, `I wonder what I ever really saw in Jack. I wonder why I spent so many days just riding around in his pickup. It’s true he taught me something about sex. It’s true there wasn’t ever much else to do in Cheyenne.’ “

“I won’t write that.”

“In two years you’ll write, `I wonder what that old guy’s name was, the one with the curly hair and the filthy dirty pickup truck and time on his hands.’ “

“I won’t write that.”

“No?”

“Tonight I’ll write, `I love Jack. This is my birthday present from him. I can’t imagine anybody loving anybody more than I love Jack.’ “

“No, you can’t,” he said. “You can’t imagine it.”

“In a year I’ll write, `Jack should be home any minute now. The table’s set—my grandmother’s linen and her old silver and the yellow candles left over from the wedding—but I don’t know if I can wait until after the trout a la Navarra to make love to him.’ “

“It must have been a fast divorce.”

“In two years I’ll write, `Jack should be home by now. Little Jack is hungry for his supper. He said his first word today besides “Mama” and “Papa.” He said “kaka.” ‘ “

Jack laughed. “He was probably trying to finger-paint with kaka on the bathroom wall when you heard him say it.”

“In three years I’ll write, `My nipples are a little sore from nursing Eliza Rosamund.’

 “Rosamund. Every little girl should have a middle name she hates.”

“ `Her breath smells like vanilla and her eyes are just Jack’s color of blue.’

“That’s nice.” Jack said.

“So, which one do you like?”

“I like yours,” he said. “But I believe mine.”

“It doesn’t matter. I believe mine.”

“Not in your heart of hearts, you don’t.”

“You’re wrong.”

“I’m not wrong,” he said. “And her breath would smell like your milk, and it’s kind of a bittersweet smell, if you want to know the truth.”

SSFD ~ The Wrap Up

What I’m Reading Today: Dipped back into a little of John Dufresne’s The Lie that Tells the Truth while we were camping. He has such great things to say.

Well, I thought long and hard about it, and I’m going to throw in the towel on the Summer of Shitty First Drafts. I hate to do it, as I have an inordinate need for closure, and I hate giving up. But I have a novel or two that is more important, and being split like that and feeling guilty about everything is something I hate worse. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed and not to get anything done.

So, some observations about the SSFD challenge.

1. It was a very worthwhile experiment, though having to report when I failed the challenge was not fun. I learned a lot about myself, and I got a bunch of first drafts / first pages of short stories.

2. It is true that if you don’t fail sometimes, you’re really not putting yourself out there. Even if I hate to fail, even at a self-imposed challenge. But, really, you have to be prepared to fail of you risk anything at all. (Or maybe I’m just justifying things to myself. Blech.)

3. It reaffirmed that I have no problem coming up with ideas. Ideas are everywhere.

4. It sounds so easy. A story a week. Who couldn’t knock out a story a week? I feel like it’s something I should be able to accomplish. And I think I could over a short term with a firm (outside) deadline if I had to. However, it’s really hard, for a number of reasons. One, my time is so split in so many directions, and I do best when I have an idea, have some focused time to think about it, and then throw myself into it for a day or two. But an hour a day, sometimes having to skip, is A LOT harder for me. Second, writing stories takes a lot of focused emotional energy. See first reason.

5. It made me think a lot about whether I had the chops to be a full-time fiction writer. I still believe that I do ~ because I think I’ve got the focus and the drive, and if I was full-time I would arrange my schedule so that it would work. There’d also be a lot more emphasis on it in my mind, and I could be, as Jessamyn West said, “slightly savage” about it. It’s a matter of scheduling and priorities, to a certain extent.

6. I need a lot more pure rumination time on a story than I had realized before this. Whether I’m figuring the story out before I start or I’m staring at a blank page to begin, I need the same amount of pure cogitation time. It needs to mature in the subconscious. No amount of trying to force it will make it mature faster, though active thought will help it along a lot.

7. Nothing will get you out of sitting down in front of the blank page and getting words on the page. :-)

8. There seems to be a natural ebb and flow to my creativity, and well as my productivity. I’m generally not a page-a-day gal. I can be tremendously productive, and then I can be tremendously avoiding. I should accept this about myself but do all I can to keep the creative energy high.

9. The creative way is a lifetime of continual recommitment to yourself and your art. And I mean that: There is something that is unique to each of us ~ and I mean that in the true sense of the word: something that ONLY YOU can bring forth into the world. We should treasure that and not take it for granted nor devalue it. What you have to say/create is priceless because only you can create it. The world would be a poorer place without it.

Questions of the Day: What do you think about the SSFD challenge? Have you ever done something like this? How do you take failure?

SSFD ~ Week 10

What I’m Reading Today: Lots of internet history specific to and leading up to 1885.

Well, it’s the tenth week of the Summer of Shitty First Drafts. Three weeks to go.

Did I accomplish my goal this week? Well, I did, but in spirit only. I wrote 11 pages of brand-spanking new material. However, it was on revising the first novel I wrote (I signed with my agent on my second novel manuscript), not on a brand new story. However, it was a new beginning to the novel, so it’s sort of like starting a new story. The first line is “Sara stood at her father’s shoulder as he went over the weekly household accounts.” Judges, may we have ruling?

It’s amazing the change in my grasp of craft. As well it should be, as this was the first part of the first novel I wrote, as well as very early in my of writing short stories. 1999 vs. now. It’s hard to judge your own work sometimes, but even I can tell I’m light years ahead of where I was. Annie Proulx once told me, “You should be able to judge your own work.” Well, maybe, just now, I’m beginning to be able to (though tomorrow will be different, I’m sure).

It’s gratifying to see how much I’ve learned. It’s also terrifying ~ because that means the rewrite of this novel is basically from scratch. It’ll be easier than scratch because I do have stuff there, the plot, but I need to amplify it so much. Add a lot more depth, nuance, and character. The first fourth of it in particular I’ve rearranged and there will need to be some brand new scenes. Heck, probably through the rest of the novel as well, but I’m in denial.

It’s fun because the voice in this novel is so different from the one in the finished novel. The finished novel with Rachel is called Deep Down Things (DDT) and is women’s fiction set in the present, with four first-person POVs and in spare Hemingway-esque language. The first novel written but the one I’m revising is called Earth’s Imagined Corners (EIC) and is historical women’s fiction with close third person POV and much more lush language. When writing DDT, it was easier because I could be contemporary and have that spare western style that comes naturally to me but it was hard because I had to make sure to make the voices different enough. With EIC, I get to play and bring out my historical, sort of academic voice and just let the clauses go on and on, while still trying to make it as clear as possible. I get to bring out my Latinate phrasing. It’s been weird but switching back and forth between them.

I have to watch it, though, because I can easily get swallowed up in the research. I have a full box of research from my first go around, which I’m reading through, and now I have to do further research on the internet for little things. What were the types and colors of horses in 1885? What is the history of the town of Anamosa, Iowa? What battles did the Confederacy win in the Civil War? What was the Civil War called in its own time? It’s so easy to get pulled away into this fascinating history. I limit myself and keep pulling myself back to the writing of it. I try to keep the immediate goal in mind and have faith that even if I’m not researching it to death, I can always go back and check it. And even if I didn’t do research I’ve often found that going with what feels right is often very close to the truth of it when I later go back to double check it.

I find I write slower nowadays than I used to. By that, I mean I make less forward progress during the course of a day. I used to charge on through, telling myself, this is just a draft, don’t get caught up in the small stuff, you’ll start grinding your wheels. Now I do much much more sentence- and paragraph-level editing as I go. I find le mot juste, the right word, the surprising image. I push beyond the cliché to find something surprising. I write specifics, rather than generalities. I rework and rework a sentence. Something will remind me of something, and I’ll go up above and rework it up there, adding something. So on one hand it bothers me that I’m not doing more pages, but the pages I do have are much more well-written.

Virginia Woolf said that writing is like digging out caves behind our characters. Sometimes it feels like each word is that way. Each word opens up new possibilities, and you try all the alternatives and switch the sentence around and see how it sounds and substitute a new word and then switch it around again. That word scoops its own little cave, associations, a life behind it that adds up to create, eventually, the life in the text.

And, I might as well say it now, I don’t know how successful I’ll be with the rest of SSFD. Now that I’m on this project, I think I’d like to continue to focus on it. Sigh. But I’m so excited! I’m past the first hump of getting started and things are flowing and I’m living in that world.

Questions of the Day: How do you balance all your different writing commitments? Your work writing vs. your creative writing? Or, if you write creatively full time, how do you balance short story vs. novel vs. memoir?

PS My friend Mary M. Davies has a fabulous story "Feeding the Ballet Girls" in the next issue of Fiction.  I got to read this story in a draft stage - very exciting.  It isn't posted quite yet, but make sure to check it out!

SSFD ~ Week 9

What I’m Reading Today:  More fabulous Scribner’s Anthology.

Boy, when I said 13 weeks, I wasn’t thinking how long 13 weeks really was. I’m already so fragmented in my life, it’s hard having one more thing fragmenting me. But, you know, I’m learning a lot about myself through this process, which I think I’ll recap when it’s all over.

So, I didn’t quite rise to the challenge of the Summer of Shitty First Drafts, though I did get a story started. Not quite three pages. This week, I had no idea where I was going before I started. Usually I have the general scenario, the characters, and the first line worked out in my mind before I sit down to the page. This week, I typed the first thing that came to mind.

The first thing that popped into my head was: “Imagining my parents as swingers is easier to do than you might imagine. It was the 70s, after all, when I first knew them.” I think this came from a combination of thinking of two things: the movie The Ice Storm, which is based on a book by Rick Moody that I would love to read but have not yet, and a great 70s photo of my writer friend Merrik Bush-Pirkle and her family when she was a kid.

So, I liked those first lines but had no idea who said it or what was going to happen. I thought, well, it’s a kid watching his parents. They must have parties. What do they do with their kid when they have these parties? Well, he goes to the basement to play, and let’s give him a brother: “I thought it was normal to be banished to the basement while large groups of loud adults overran the first floor and spilled out onto the patio.”

Why a “him”? I don’t know. Maybe the protagonist became a boy when I wrote the line: “Damon, my little brother, and I would’ve been happy to stay in the basement if it weren’t for the swells of women’s thighs pressed into checkered miniskirts and the trainwreck tone in the voices drifting down the stairs.” A sensitive boy would notice these things.

I circled back and described the parents a bit: “Mom bobbed her brown hair and wore dresses splashed with color. Dad grew muttonchops and herbs.”

Then, continuing: “As the romance of sunset dimmed and night took over everyone’s hearts, the polite laughter and the clatter of dinnerware was replaced by deep guttural guffaws and the stomping of loafers.”

You get the idea. I continued on. I have no idea where this story is going, and I don’t have a name for it yet. Maybe someone at the party will do something to the boy. Or maybe he’ll realize something about himself. It’ll be about sex, but more than sex. Maybe about the fallibility of adults.

See, I’m all excited to find out!

Questions of the Day: What do you start with when you start a story? Can you just dive in knowing nothing? Or do you have to have some of it figured out?

SSFD ~ Week 8

What I’m Reading Today: I started Mark Spragg’s Bone Fire. He’s so amazing. Like Kent Haruf, the pace of his novels are so wonderfully slow and inexorable. He captures my Wyoming so beautifully. If you get a chance, read his memoir Where Rivers Change Direction ~ amazing. He grew up not far from where I did and under similar circumstance.

Okay, a very disappointing week for the Summer of Shitty First Drafts. I didn’t even get a line down. In my defense, I had a very busy week last week. (Excuses!) I signed with an agent, revamped my website, created a new blog, and researched platforming, in addition to, you know, taking care of twins and my husband and working my regular job. But, still, excuses!

The story I was going to write was called “Cindy.” It was taking the fairy tale “Cinderella” and converting it to a modern structure with scenes and interiority and an ambiguous ending. I thought it would be a hoot to write.

Boy, sometimes I wish I weren’t so pathologically honest!

Questions of the Day: Have you ever tried anything like my experiment with SSFD? How’d it go?

SSFD ~ Week 7

It’s the seventh week of my challenge, the Summer of Shitty First Drafts. I accomplished the goal this week, but I have to admit that I cheated a bit. All’s fair in love and war and writing, right? Kidding!

Instead of starting from scratch this week, I took previous material and added to it. In addition to (struggling to) accomplish the SSFD challenge, I’m working on revising my first novel ~ not the one out to agents right now but the first one I wrote. So, instead of starting from scratch for SSFD, I took a particularly exciting chapter from the novel ~ one that I thought I might cut out completely but I loved too much to let go but have since changed my mind and it’s still in. I’ve been revising it for a short story. I haven’t got it final yet, but I’ve been revising and adding to.

The story is called “The Kaw,” and its first sentence is “It rained and rained.” It’s set in 1885 and is the story of an itinerate carpenter named Ed who is helping his sister and brother-in-law build a house in Kansas City. The walls are up, but because of a cold and wet winter and spring, a huge flood builds upriver and crashes down the Missouri River and the Kansas River, or the Kaw, and comes together right there in Kansas City where the two rivers converge.

It’s pulled from the novel Earth’s Imagined Corners, which is women’s fiction set in 1885. The novel is about twenty-two-year-old Sara, who is a naïve but dutiful daughter and a competent hostess, but when her father tries to force her to marry his younger partner, she must choose between the partner, a man who treats her like property, and James, a kind man she hardly knows who has a troubled past. She and James elope to Kansas City and try to make a life.

I’m deep in revising the novel right now. I was all set: I had decided what I was going to do. I would cut a bunch of it, including Ed’s point of view completely. Get rid of the mom dying and the twin brothers and drastically cut and revise the first quarter of it. I got Ed and mom all cut out and started rearranging the beginning and then I had a crisis. Wait! What in the heck am I doing?

I had to stand back and think about what the story is really about. Is it merely about the relationship between the two main characters, Sara and James? Or is about more than that. It’s definitely about more than that. Then my friend Nina gave me the advice, trust your instincts, and my instincts were screaming, don’t cut it! So, though I’m still not totally sure, I’m going with it and keeping a lot of it.

So, juggling!

What I’m Reading Today: Manuscripts.

SSFD ~ Week 6

Gosh, I can’t believe it’s Week 6 already. Where is the summer going?! Wait! Aack! I did accomplish my Summer of Shitty First Drafts goal this last week, though I didn’t get a complete first draft written ~ just a little over three pages.

I went to my wonderful dentist this last week, which got me thinking. Years ago, I’d told him I was going to write a story about a dentist, one in which the dentist was not a bad guy. So my visit last week prompted me to start it.

It’s called “Dennis the Dentist” and it’s about a dentist who is suddenly struck by the beauty of the world and takes to sculpting, a natural progression from what dentists do every day. The idea was to follow his arc ~ from sculpting small toothlike objects to experimenting with different media to larger vaguely human-shaped sculptures and then, when he starts working on the teeth of a meth addict, to human decay. Its first sentence is “Dennis was working on an ugly woman.”

I am struck, as I go through this process of SSFD, that I need to rededicate myself to my craft. Sure, I get things accomplished. In fits and starts. But I need to reaffirm my commitment and to assert myself against the world. It’s so easy to do what other people want you to do, to give in, to be an enabler and to act in the service of others. That’s the line of least resistance. But as a writer I need to wrest time away from the world and to police myself, to get the job done EVERY DAY. Every morning, I need to ask myself, when am I going to write today. Even for just 15 minutes. And not just write ~ because I do write every day for my job and for this blog and other things ~ but do the heavy lifting of fiction.

I must be brave, I must work hard, I must prevail!

What I’m Reading Today: My friend Pembroke’s wonderful draft of a zombie novella, Finding Eden. It’s five interconnected short stories told from three peoples’ points of view (unless the last story is from a fourth) telling the story of their journey after the apocalypse to escape the undead and find this mythical place called Eden.

SSFD ~ Week 4

It’s the fourth week of the Summer of Shitty First Drafts (SSFD), and this week I failed the challenge. All I can say is that I had 1) an old sinus infection, 2) a new killer cold, and 3) food poisoning, all in the same week. I’m just now feeling human again. But, dang it! I wish I didn’t have to make excuses.

I did begin a new story. It’s called “Pearl and Ty” and it’s about a young rural Wyoming couple with four daughters. She’s a stay-at-home mom and he’s a carpenter. I wanted to explore someone who’s identity is very much tied to being a mother but also someone who is young and still a little selfish. Maybe Pearl will think she’s pregnant again but then it turns out to be cancer. Or maybe she’ll lose a child. Or maybe she’ll go through some things and nothing will change. The first line is “Pearl and Ty Banks lived with their four daughters—Penny, Paige, Piper, and Peri, called Flower—in a rented two-bedroom trailer house twelve miles out of town off of Highway 27A.”

But I wanted to talk a little about what I’m learning about myself and my writing through this experiment. First of all, I think it’s a valuable thing. Any way that you can challenge yourself, stretch your boundaries, is good. I don’t like failing, but failure is also a good thing. We learn so much more from failure than success, usually. It makes us try harder (or give up) and makes what we produce that much better. Second, it makes me re-commit myself to the project. Dang it! I can do this.

On one hand, I think: What kind of idiot cannot write three measly pages in a week? On the other hand, it reminds me of all the commitments I do have and that the creative process is not all in the writing. There’s a lot of rumination time. I write best when I can throw myself into something. Often, for a short story, I’ll write and ponder a little for a day or two, and then I’ll steal a half day or a day away from the world to focus almost exclusively on the story. But I can’t steal a day a week for that. I try to write an hour a day every day, but I have a hard time doing that. The world gets in the way. And, I suppose I let the world get in the way. I need to think more about all this.

In the meantime, nose the grindstone, I recommit myself to the challenge. Maybe a fun story this week. A fairy tale or a kids’ story.

What I’m Reading Today: I haven’t been reading anything, mostly sleeping, but I have been browsing a little more Calvin and Hobbes.

SSFD ~ Week 3

So it’s the third week of the Summer of Shitty First Drafts (SSFD). Once again, I didn’t complete a full first draft, though I suppose I have a bit of an excuse as I drove eight hours on Wednesday, had a family reunion in Omaha on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, and then drove eight hours back on Sunday. Well, my husband drove, and I entertained the twins. Excuses, excuses.

All this lack of closure is driving me crazy!

I wrote my story longhand this week because I knew I would be on the road and not taking my computer and I hoped to be able to work on it. I wasn’t, but I still was able to crank out seven and a half pages of longhand first draft the two days before I left.

This week’s story doesn’t yet have a title, which is unusual for me. Usually I start out with something for a title, even if I change it. It’s a series of emails between a ten-year-old boy Eric and his father. Eric’s mother died when he was just a baby, and his father is a hydropower engineer who is working in Chile. Eric lives in Los Angeles and is taken care of by a Hispanic woman named Rosie. It’s a story about Eric trying to get his father to come home and his father avoiding the subject and him. The first line is “Dear Dad, Rosie said I have to go to bed on time, but I said no because Batman goes to 9:30 and you said I get to stay up till Batman is done.”

What prompted that story was that horrible incident I talked about in last week’s SSFD post.

Did you know that Kenneth Grahame, who wrote The Wind in the Willows, and his wife Elspeth basically abandoned their son Alistair or “Mouse,” who had health problems, to the servants? In letters, Alistair would beg his father to come home, and his father would avoid it by writing him the story of The Wind in the Willows. Ironic that the book has become such a beloved children’s story. Mr. Toad is actually supposed to be a representation of Alistair. Alistair ended up committing suicide while an undergraduate at Oxford by laying on a train track and being decapitated.

I couldn’t get it out of my mind. That poor little boy writing letters to his father and begging him to come home, and then the father avoiding by writing this children’s story. The loneliness and abandonment of it all. And then the horrible death.

The story came very quickly ~ as much of it as I wrote. No hesitation whatsoever. It developed in my brain as I wrote. Instead of the father avoiding by telling a children’s story, I’m having him avoid by telling science facts and about Chile. Science is what he and his son have in common. My plan is to have the boy become more and more frightened as the story goes on because of people in the house and then incorporate Morse code (SOS) in some way with then ending, which will be an off-scene robbery. And then the father is going to email the son and get nothing back. But we’ll see how it turns out.

As a side note, in addition to writing drafts of these stories, I’m also going back and revising my first novel manuscript. Due to developments on the agent front, I think it’s time. It’s been really interesting to go back and read it. I took it as far as I could at the time, and now that I’m going back and reading it, I can see some parts really need deep work and others are pretty okay. What it needs is depth and richness and more place. I need to develop it more, unify it more. Not plot but all the meta stuff ~ metaphor, place, details, description. I’m a little intimidated at the moment, but once I get into it, it’ll be fine.

What I’m Reading Today: More wonderful Scribner’s Anthology.

SSFD ~ Week 2

Well, time to report the second week of the Summer of Shitty First Drafts (SSFD). I didn’t do nearly as well this week. I wrote four pages of SFD, so more than the minimum of three, but I wish I could’ve written the whole story. And half of the four pages may not even end up in the final story. So, first the story and then the writing of it.

The story is called “Toad Season,” and I’m really not sure how it’s going to turn out. As I said in Friday’s post, it’s about a boy who wants to catch a toad and about his mother and father’s relationship. The first line is “In the evening, with the fading light and cool breeze that smelled of rain coming in through Eric’s window, his mother sat next to him on his bed and read The Wind in the Willows.”

I’m using the metaphor of the toad in a number of ways: the mother is reading the boy the story of The Wind in the Willows, she’s a wildlife biologist studying the Wyoming toad, and the father is a dreamer like Mr. Toad in The Wind in the Willows. But I don’t know how it’s going to end because I haven’t written it. More and more I’m working this way ~ not knowing the ending before I get started ~ which has its pros and cons. Pro = it often makes for a more organic and surprising ending because it originates from the characters. Con = it’s harder to write this way.

I actually have had the idea for the story for years. One spring a number of years ago, I went through the great drivethru coffee place (Java Java) where I get lattes, and the owner/operator Kim, a wonderful gal and a friend, was telling me about her son and how he loved to go collect frogs. “It’s frog season,” she said. I loved that and thought, what a great title, though I’ve changed it to toad in honor of Mr. Toad and the Wyoming toad. I tried to start this story years ago, but it didn’t go anywhere. So I thought I’d do it now. And it still hasn’t gotten far.

As I said Friday, I had that big moment of doubt right after I started it. This is a story I didn’t know where it was going, even more than usual, so I had to search around, and the beginning writing of it was going in loops. The mother was going to be a checker at the grocery story, but then I decided to make her a wildlife biologist. I was going to set it, at least at the beginning, in a car with the mother taking the boy to school, but then when I wrote about the mother reading to the boy, I thought, why not make it all in one evening? Not that I’ve gotten that far to really know.

Did you know that Kenneth Grahame, who wrote The Wind in the Willows, and his wife Elspeth basically abandoned their son Alistair or “Mouse,” who had health problems, to the servants? In letters, Alistair would beg his father to come home, and his father would avoid it by writing him the story of The Wind in the Willows. Ironic that the book has become such a beloved children’s story. Mr. Toad is actually supposed to be a representation of Alistair. Alistair ended up committing suicide while an undergraduate at Oxford by laying on a train track and being decapitated. But I don’t think any of this background is going to make it into the story.

So, here I am, in the beginning stages of the story, and now I have to put it aside. I have the feeling that it’ll be a long story ~ closer to 20 pages. I’d also like it to end not happy, not sad, but with an ambiguous or ambivalent ending. Sort of, here we are, and life will go on the same. But we’ll see. Certainly no decapitations!

What I’m Reading Today: Drafts of great stories by my friends Pembroke Sinclair and Rashena Wilson and great poetry by my friend Peter Glovicski.

SSFD ~ Week 1

As I said in Friday’s post, I’m making this the Summer of Shitty First Drafts, SSFD. Today, I make my first report.

Well, I did it! So far, so good. A complete story (3,330 words/10 pages) last week, revised and everything. I thought first I’d talk about the story and then about the writing of it.

The story is called “Hard Men.” It’s the story of a 15-year-old boy named Johnny Good. His parents have split up. His mother took his younger brother to live in California and Johnny chose to stay with his father, a respected high school chemistry teacher. However, his father is now deep in an addiction to meth. The first line is: “Johnny Good shot and killed his cranked-out father.” The total real time encompassed by the story is maybe 15 minutes.

The story was inspired by a line in Anis Mojgani’s slam poem “Shake the Dust”: “This is for the hard men who want love but know that it won’t come.” I actually had a page of it already written. I began the story a week or two ago (and talked about it here), but since I started the challenge last Friday (not a full week) I gave myself a little leeway.

As I said in the previous post about the story, I was having a problem keeping away from cliché. The way I got around it was to make the story very interior to the main character and to not make it strictly linear. In fact, I very quickly came up with the idea of a spiral in time circling wider and wider and originating the moment of the first sentence. So the central point of the story is Johnny killing his father, but then I wanted to go a little ahead in time and then circle to a little before in time and then circle ahead a little further, until I’d circled way into the past and way into the future. I don’t think it actually comes across this way ~ I think it comes across as very slowly moving forward in time, with digressions, but thinking of it the other way helped with its composition.

I also wanted it to have a happy ending. That didn’t end up happening, but I did manage an uplifting one. But, in this case, it turns out to be an ironic ending. (Dramatic irony = when the meaning of the situation is understood by the audience but not by the characters.)

As I said, I already had one page written, and then when I returned to it, I had a really hard time going forward, possibly because it wasn’t linear. I don’t know about you, but I have an easier time moving forward if my timeline is pretty much linear. As I was writing this, I would edit through what I had, add maybe a paragraph, and then go back and edit through. I couldn’t seem to get any forward momentum.

I had been composing on the computer, so I took a break and went to my favorite restaurant for writing ~ a great Mexican place where they have great margaritas and they know me. I took a printout along. I read through it and then started writing longhand. I wrote through almost the complete rest of it in one sitting. Then I went back to the computer and typed it through, editing as I went. Then I edited through it again and again.

I actually came up with the final words of it about halfway through. This has happened in the last two stories I’ve written. About midway through writing the story, I’ve written a couple of lines and realized that they were the end of the story ~ the perfect metaphor/image/idea.

Another thing that’s happened in the last couple of stories I’ve written: I jump way head in time about three quarters of the way through the story before I come back and end in the present. I find, in general, that I’ve been playing with time a lot more, but it’s interesting that the end recently has not been the linear end of time but something that happens within the discrete and limited timeframe of the story, yet to understand it or to give it irony I’m adding the death of the main character or an important side character.

I don’t know if all this is interesting to you. I know, myself, I love to read these kinds of descriptions of the writing of a story (a la Ron Carlson’s Ron Carlson Writes a Story).

What I’m Reading Today: More The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

The Summer of Shitty First Drafts

In the book Art & Fear, David Bayles and Ted Orland tell the parable of the pots. At the beginning of the semester, a ceramics instructor divides the class. Half will be graded on one perfect pot; the other half on the output of pots. Throughout the semester, those graded on one pot argue the merits of the perfect pot, but they do not apply the clay to the wheel. Those graded on output generate pot after pot. At the end of the semester, those graded on output receive the highest marks.

In the spirit of this parable, I’m declaring this the Summer of Shitty First Drafts ~ SSFD for short. The best results are achieved by throwing yourself into something and turning out work after work, so in the interest of getting better, trying harder, that’s what I’m going to do. I’ve recently started running again (two miles at least three times a week), so I might as well throw myself into the writing too. What the heck. Sort of like the deadlines of my own little writing workshop.

So, I’m going to write a story a week all summer long. That’s 13 stories before September 1.

The Rules:

1. Every Monday, I will start a new short story. That means on midnight of the previous day, Sunday, I have to drop the previous short story and move on.

2. Shitty first drafts only.

3. (If I have time during the weak to edit and polish, great, but if not, move on. And if I finish one story, I can go back and polish another.)

4. A shitty first draft = at least three pages double spaced. That way, if I find it’s Sunday and I haven’t even started, I can throw down a really shitty first draft in an hour or two without feeling guilty and getting (even farther) behind.

5. However, the goal will be a first draft of a full story each week.

6. I will report my progress here every Monday.

That’s it. My first story is due Monday, so I’d better get cracking!

What I’m Reading Today: Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

An Incipient Story

Even though I haven’t gotten very far on the other story about the sisters, I have another story just aching to get out, so I think I’m going to switch to that one. I have a first line but haven’t had the chance to sit down with it yet.

What I’m Reading Today: “Diary of an Interesting Year,” a short story by Helen Simpson at the New Yorker. Gaaaack! (In a good way.) By the end, you’re looking back at the beginning thinking, how’d I get here?

Writing as a Series of Decisions and Re-visioning Your Work

I’m at the stage with this story where I’ve gotten it all a laid out. I’ve written through it.

It was a challenging story to write ~ though I wasn’t blocked at all ~ because I chose not to figure it out ahead of time. It’s so much easier when I know where I’m going. It flows much more quickly and I feel more confident. When I take Robert Olen Butler’s approach ~ put yourself within a situation and character, not knowing what’s going to happen ~ each itty bitty step is a decision.

(I hadn’t thought about writing as a series of decisions until I read it recently in the wonderful This Won’t Take But a Minute, Honey, short shorts and writing essays by Steve Almond. It’s true and one of the many reasons it’s hard.)

As I was saying, the story is laid out. Now I’m going back and expanding and embellishing and revising. (Though I do revise each day as I write by rereading, editing, and organically adding to what I’ve written.) I hadn’t set the story in any particular city, but I pictured its neighborhoods. Then I realized that Omaha fit it perfectly. Consequently, now I’m going back and adding more place and atmosphere. I discovered themes and motifs as I went along (mothers and afghans ~ the blankets ~ as it turns out), so now I’m going back and enriching and twisting and adding. Knitting it together ~ hehehehe ~ as I go.

That’s one of the amazing things about Kent Meyers’s Twisted Tree, which I’m reading. He must have revised and revised and revised, the way each chapter/story can stand on its own yet is part of the larger weave. (Boy, am I in a textile frame of mind today.)

One thing I need to think about is how to see a story fresh as I’m embellishing and revising. I’ve always done revision, of course, but I think I need to take it a step farther and re-vision ~ re-see ~ it, as they say. I think about extending themes and complicating plot and making it like real life and not tidy. I do do this. But I need to figure out a way to take it further, find ways of coming fresh to the material. After you’ve worked on something long enough, it feels fixed, and it’s hard to imagine outside of what is already there.

(I feel so academe-maniacal when I use the word “re-vision.”)

What I’m Reading Today: Unfortunately ~ or fortunately ~ family obligations have been taking precedence. But I’m still playing with Zombies!

Alice Munro is da bomb

It was a good writing day today. I started a story early last spring as part of an online workshop (put on by American Short Fiction and the wonderful Jill Meyers) and then got stuck on it and put it aside. It began as an exercise in which we chose a paragraph from a published short story or novel and then played with it, making it our own ~ first word by word, and then sentence by sentence. I chose a paragraph from a story by Alice Munro (of course) and dove in with no preconceived notion of where I was going. This is unusual for me ~ usually I write a lot in my head before I write a line, have a title and/or a first line, and know where I’m going to end up. (People argue the merits of this approach, but whatever works, right?)

The story became, or was going to be, a story about a young man who dodged the Vietnam draft and spent the rest of his life trying to prove his bravery. I wrote a couple of pages but couldn’t get any further on it so put it aside. I went to a couple of conferences, talked to a wonderful man about conscription (Hey, Lauren), and conceived of the idea of a book of linked short stories. This story fit in that idea for a collection but not perfectly, so I played around with the initial premise until it evolved to a young man who doesn’t know he was adopted. He avoids the draft because he realizes that his military father, who he’s idolized but has never been able to please, is not really his father. It’s about his search to find out who he is.

So today’s progress was taking the three pages I had already written in the first storyline and converting it to the second storyline. Very interesting process.

On that initial paragraph, I once again went through and changed it word by word, sentence by sentence. This paragraph was not in my usual style of writing. I have a spare style, more Hemingway than Woolf, and this paragraph had lots of commas, lots of dependent and independent clauses, lots of looping structures. Mimicking this structure, putting my head into those sentences, makes me think differently and illuminates a character I don’t often inhabit. Someone who’s stuck in his own head, bound up tight and going in circles, tentative and tortured, searching, yet very articulate and nuanced. (Wait ~ some of that sounds a little like me… hehe ) It’s an amazing thing to have the very structure of the language pull you out of yourself involuntarily and shape the character you’re writing. Especially since I usually approach things top-down, from the head, and this process started deep within and worked outward. I don’t think I could work this way all the time, but every time I try something new, it furthers my grasp of craft.

And let me just say, if you’re going to attempt to mimic a master, Alice Munro is da bomb.