On Keeping It Short

I’m keeping things short again tonight, because I’ve been spending my off hours for the last three days polishing up a short story for a contest deadline tonight. The thought of keeping my post short made me think of very short stories. Here’s a link to a few on Wired, all six words or less. I return to these periodically, because it is a fun exercise. I think my favorite is:

I’m your future, child. Don’t cry.
- Stephen Baxter

I like to look at how these stories hint at plot. It’s an extreme example of what happens in flash fiction: The writer gives the reader a scaffolding, around which she builds a world, invents back story, and projects forward. Baxter’s line really gets me going this way.

Here’s another that I like, though it’s so meta I’m not so sure it counts as a story:

There were only six words left.
- Gregory Maguire

Good night, all.

A Souvenir

Today, I finished Elizabeth McCracken’s Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry, an excellent short story collection published back in 1993.

I picked this up over 4th of July weekend at Tim’s Used Books in Provincetown. Click on the link to the store, and you’ll see why I had to follow the path to the store’s front door — it had too much sense of mystery to pass up. The store is small. The fiction section is a single floor to ceiling shelf, not much wider than I am. I like that in a bookstore, though. It’s nice to be able to read all the titles in the fiction section and then start pondering. I like getting a balanced alphabet in my selections.

I like to buy souvenirs when I travel, but this is the sort of thing I get. To be honest, I’d be unlikely to read histories of Provincetown, and I’ve got little use for picture-filled coffee table books. On the other hand, I always remember the bookstores I visit. I still remember that 10 years ago, during my first visit to the St. John’s College Bookstore in Annapolis, where I later ended up working off and on for four years, I bought a copy of Allen Ginsberg’s Kaddish and Other Poems. Or that, a year and a half ago at San Francisco’s famous City Lights Books, I bought Georges Bataille’s deeply disturbing Story of the Eye, a book that I’m not sure I will ever have the courage to read again. The experience of reading these books will forever color my memories of these places.

And sometimes, the souvenir is even more serendipitous. When I bought McCracken’s book, the bookseller informed me that she used to be a customer at that store. The stories in her book are set deeply in Massachusetts, and are populated with odd characters. I ended up thinking of Provincetown as I read these stories, imagining that she was surely influenced by that place — a beach town that must go deeply gloomy in the winter, full of hordes of tourists and drag queens in the summer.

I knew I had to buy the book when I read the first paragraph of the first story, “It’s Bad Luck to Die.”

Maybe you wonder how a Jewish girl from Des Moines got Jesus Christ tattooed on her three times: ascending on one thigh, crucified on the other, and conducting a miniature apocalypse beneath the right shoulder. It wasn’t religion that put them there; it was Tiny, my husband. I have a Buddha round back, too. He was going to give me Moses parting the Red Sea, but I was running out of space. Besides, I told him, I was beginning to feel like a Great Figures in Religion comic book.

While I love short stories, I’m sometimes suspicious of literary fiction, which I suspected McCracken’s book of being. I find that sometimes, in literary fiction, it seems like nothing happens. There are pretty descriptions, but no plot. This wasn’t the case here. People murder people, fall in love with people, run away from their families, lie to each other. And most of the characters are delightfully strange, even while many of the stories have a dark streak. Here are quick comments on my favorites:

The title story is the one that’s really going to stay with me. “Aunt Helen Beck” concocts family relationships that she uses to mooch of strangers for as long as she can get away with it. McCracken uses this full name every time she mentions her, and this is an important piece of characterization in itself. Here’s an excerpt:

Aunt Helen Beck worked hard at all the things that convinced people to let her stay. She got up early to bake bread, examined the books that were on the shelves and referred to them in conversation. She did dishes immediately; cooked for herself; went to bed early and pretended to sleep soundly.

She charmed Mercury, at least. He adored her, and started playing in the yard less and in the house more. She instructed Mercury to behave, she threatened him with poems about goblins that stole nasty children, and he seemed eager to be taken, and asked her if she were the head goblin.

Every quirky detail in those paragraphs is made to count once Aunt Helen Beck’s ruse is discovered. In fact, I just now noticed that stealing nasty children turns out to be a theme. What seems to be a throwaway line on a first read is actually a carefully chosen piece of foreshadowing.

My other favorites are “Mercedes Kane,” about a woman who gets to meet, as an adult, the child prodigy she worshiped as a girl, and “Secretary of State,” which is a story about the sort of family that keeps all its members trapped in its web of opinion, but turns out to be a bittersweet story about love.

I’m glad I picked up this book and got the chance to discover McCracken. It looks like her next book is a memoir. I’m sorry that it seems she’s moved away from short stories, but perhaps I’ll read more of her in the future.

Fun With Zombies

Today did not have enough fun in it. As a result, I am linking to Isabel Kunkle’s story in Spacesuits and Sixguns, “Higher Education,” which does have fun in it, especially if you think zombies are fun, and if you like the idea of making holy water out of Sprite. Here’s a sample:

Green Sweater opened the door, stepping to one side. I pointed the bottle, tried to aim at the Thing rushing toward me while not actually looking at it, and wrenched off the top. The Sprite hit It in the eye, the main eye, the one as large as my head, and it smoked and turned cataract-white. The Thing didn’t die, though, like the bat had; it just reared back and thrashed around until Drew stepped past me and hit it between a couple of its other eyes with the fire axe.

I have pretty eclectic tastes in most art forms, and will read a pulp story with just as much (if not more) relish than a literary story. This is solidly a pulp story. I can’t philosophize about its deeper meaning — I’m honestly not sure it has one. But I am very convinced that the author had fun writing it, and I know I had fun reading it. Sometimes, especially considering my nonfiction day job, that’s what I need to come home to in the evening.

Moment of Attraction

There are many things about E.B. Johnson’s “Killer Heart” that I could talk about. This story, which won Glimmer Train’s recent short-story award for new writers and is published in the Summer 2008 issue, is dark and gripping and really great. I’m going to write about a very small piece of this story that I’m still wondering about a month after having read it:

Dooley and Tina met when his band was playing at Don Quixote’s, a college bar. Tina stood with the other college girls who pressed themselves against the stage; she did that shimmy thing that girls do, her arms going up slowly over her head, her hands crisscrossing, swimming like little bejeweled fishes in the spotlight that lit the crowd at the edge of the stage. Dooley watched as the hem of Tina’s blouse rose up, revealing a tan line just above her low-rise jeans, and a silver loop winked at him from her pierced navel. Tina looked Dooley right in the eye, nodded when she danced, like she knew exactly what she was doing. Tina was hot.

She was sure of herself. She knew what she had in her plus column, and she didn’t believe in hiding what was on the minus side, a fact that made Dooley fall in love with her right from the get go. “Listen,” she said on their second date, “I’m an only child, so I’ve got a lot of princess in me.” She pulled Dooley’s arm around her as they walked along the river, and then she leaned her head against his chest. “I’m not saying I plan to be that way till I die,” she went on, slipping her hand inside his shirt and cupping his ribs, then pulling him to her, “I’m just letting you know what you’re in for here.” Once he got to know Tina, the other girls Dooley had dated seemed just like that: girls. Tina was woman.

This description interests me because the moment of attraction between two people is always hard for me to describe. I want to express something beyond the physical, but it’s easy to turn a description of liking someone’s conversation into a terrible cliche. It’s risky for Johnson to say that Tina is woman and every other date is a girl. It could easily come off sounding trite. But I think it works here. The ideas that could be tired (Tina is confident, knows herself, is hot) become something more in combination. We see that she can make a confession of her shortcomings turn out sexy.

This moment is from the middle of the story, and a lot rides on it. At the start, we’re introduced to Tina and Dooley’s (very) troubled relationship. The primary impression at first is of Dooley’s acute pain over the trouble. When I got to this memory, I needed to get a good glimpse into what happened between the two of them when things were good. Though it included a lot of physical qualities, I learned things about the characters that I needed to know from how they interact with each other here.

As I said, this is far from the most stunning scene in the story. The solidity of this scene, however, enables many of the more heart-stopping scenes to be as gripping as they are. I highly recommend this story.

On Second Person

Second person is a strange tense, but I like it. It has a forbidden air. The strictest teachers seem to feel that anything but third person has a tinge of the naughty. In an essay in the June 2008 issue of The Believer, Zadie Smith wrote about trying to settle on a tense:

Because I am an English novelist enslaved to an ancient tradition, with each novel I have ended up exactly where I began: third person, past tense. But I spend months switching back and forth.

Still, the tradition Smith describes has loosened up a great deal, and most people accept first person just fine. It’s only tenses like second person and first person plural that shake people up. I’ve been thinking about what makes a story right for second person, and have noticed a sort of second person subgenre. I’ve already referred briefly to one story in this group: Laura Madeline Wiseman’s “How to Measure Your Breast Size.” Tonight, I discovered another in The Pedestal Magazine: Paul Graham’s “Porn: A Memoir.”

Both of these stories use the second person with an instructional tone, as if the author is explaining to you how to do something. For example, from Wiseman’s story:

2) Bandsize. Okay. Now that you have the first number, if the number is 33 or less, add 5. If it is above 33, add 3. This logic may not make sense to you, but take heart that you didn’t invent it. It’s a rule and like many rules (taxes due April fifteenth, liquor can’t be bought after two am, green lights mean go) they are arbitrary, but should be followed. Write this new number on the mirror. This is your bandsize (e.g., 32, 34, 36, etc.). Maybe you knew this number before, maybe you didn’t. Think about how many bras you’ve owned that have not been that number, especially all the sassy ones purchased for cuteness rather than fit. Feel a little guilty for punishing your breasts. Wallow in breast pity. Then move on. Clothes aren’t meant to be lessons, right. Except the training bra. Whatever was that bra training your breasts to do?

But as the reader gets more deeply into these stories, it becomes clear that the “you” isn’t really instructional. It’s more of the “you” that substitutes for an “I” in certain types of conversations. It’s used for statements like: “You know how sometimes you’re just angry at people who don’t deserve it.” But what I really mean is, “Sometimes, I’m mad at you when you don’t deserve it, and I’m sorry, but too afraid to say so.” It is a “you” that signifies a frightened “I,” and so contains a plea for identification, an upfront assumption that you and I participate in exactly the same sins. From Graham’s story:

Years of recreational behavior to the contrary, you nonetheless understand: the girls in the magazines, the pictures you continue to download onto your computer, you see in the movies you can now buy, are not real women. They are not even the idea of women. They are the idea of sex, of commerce. College teaches you this. College teaches you that your habits are tailing off in the direction of the abnormal. College makes you uneasy with yourself. You recognize that you are of two minds, two lives. The girls you know describe you to their friends and parents as a nice guy, a little shy, respectful. They aren’t wrong, quite.

It strikes me when I put these stories beside each other that each deals with an intimate subject. I am so relieved when I read these stories, since they tell me I’m not the only one who wanders confused through the strange landscape of sexuality. I think “you” is the right tense for that landscape. Writing on these subjects is not an “I.” Because of the sensitivity of it, it becomes a “you,” since I am so aware of the “you” that will read whatever I write (or, at least, the narrator of the story would be this way).

This type of “you” story is an “I” story in which the narrator pleads for connection to the reader, as well as understanding from her. The instructional tone is another aspect that emphasizes the universal qualities of whatever the narrator describes. I think it’s an interesting thing about English that “you” can become a special way of saying “I.”

A Sense of Myth

For several years, I’ve admired Rebecca’s work over at Hitherby Dragons. Since September 2003, she’s been posting short fiction on her site. Reading through the archives, a definite mythology builds up. There are recurring characters, and stories that have the ring of myth. It’s been a while since I followed the site daily, and I thought I’d check it out tonight. Sure enough, “Fire on the Tongue” had that same sense of myth and mystery. It’s a riff on the story of Prometheus, except that the three would-be saviors of humanity are Dinosaur, Frog, and Chameleon.

The fire gutters. It goes out.

Frog’s feeble struggles grow feebler yet. Her eyes bulge out. Her skin is moist.

Humanity … clusters around the remaining warmth and the afterimage that was fire. It wails softly as that fades away.

Frog, broken, maddened, crawls off to the swamps. She leaves a trail of slime behind.

Then there is silence where she had been and humanity departs.

Now there is darkness on the world but in the darkness no one dances. Now humanity mourns for there is none to be its god.

I don’t always follow the meaning of these stories, particularly when I’ve been out of the loop for a bit. In this story, I enjoyed thinking about the mythological resonance of the three creatures, and wondering about what their actions and fates mean. Dinosaur, for example, quickly fails to bring fire to Earth, attacked and killed by the “Three Lords.” I wondered why it is easy to defeat the dinosaur, and why brutality seems to be so effective against it.

Reading a bunch of Rebecca’s stories in succession is fun, since that mythological understanding builds up in layers, operating at its own subterranean level of consciousness.

When Memory Has an Agenda

Y.Z. Chin’s “January 27,” published in the Summer issue of Flashquake, is a story of the limits of words. In spite of the power of incantations, words cannot reform the world to match our own desires.

Calling what has changed by its old name will not bring it back, Mike. It only distorts it, damaging not only what it is now but also reaching back to smear what it once was.

I have, at times, been prey to painful nostalgia, and have gone to great lengths to resurrect the past, returning to places, and people, that were best left alone. Always, I talked myself into this with words, and tried to catch other people in their spell, trying to get myself and those around me to believe, for example, that I never went away, and had been right beside them all along.

Words are dangerous when used this way, for exactly the reason Chin describes. Once it’s clear that words can’t retrieve everything I wish for from the past, the memories I once treasured turn out to have been sullied by my attempts. I can’t remember the perfect mood to my high-school romance in the same way, after having tried and failed so many times to resurrect it. The memory gets left in a Frankenstein’s-monster state, scarred by botched galvanization.

Considering the dangers of nostalgia, how does a writer handle looking into the past? How can the words be prevented from turning traitorous? To me, it’s a matter of being exact. I know the difference between remembering the way I want to remember and remembering with full detail.

For example: I want, sometimes, to go back to the time just before I returned to college, when I studied ancient Greek all the time, took road trips to Savannah, constantly worked on my novel, and copied quotes from old French serialized novels into a little flowered notebook.

But, to be exact, I often sat then on the porch, smoking out of loneliness. I was so nervous, I stayed up until all hours. I didn’t manage to make it through The Man in the Iron Mask, and I was spending all my savings.

As the two paragraphs show, it was both a lovely time and a miserable time. Truth is difficult. It’s so hard to avoid landing on one side or the other, especially if I use memory with an agenda. For this reason, I must take care with words.

A Challenge

I’m buried in deadlines for the day job, so I’m just going to quickly point you to a challenge I’m considering taking up late next month. The 3-day novel contest is exactly what it sounds like. It takes place from August 30-September 1, and writers can participate from anywhere in the world. Registration has to be postmarked by August 29, and it costs $50.

I’ve taken part in National Novel Writing Month and Script Frenzy the last two years, and have found both to be deeply rewarding and incredibly fun. I figure, why stop there? If anyone reading this plans to participate, let me know. Maybe we can commiserate after the event, when we’ve both got carpal tunnel syndrome.

In any case, I’m thinking of working on an idea I’ve been turning around in my head for about 10 years. It seems to me that to pull off something that crazy, a strong vision helps.

On Writing What You Know

I almost missed a good story tonight, because I was turned off that it was about golf. But Robert J. Santa’s “Up and Down in Tycho,” published in the most recent issue of The Martian Wave, is so intimate with golf that it won me over. The main character is playing golf on the moon, basically alone, in a faulty space suit. Here’s a sample:

Parker stopped the cart at the end of the path and walked up to his ball. It was about one foot from the edge of the green and at least fifty to the cup; he had landed on the right most side of the green furthest away from the pin. As he squatted down to check his lie he felt the fabric of his suit stretch across his legs and his back and most importantly across his right arm. He stood immediately and inspected the patch. It was still firm. He double-checked the lie, but this time he stayed standing, backing up from the ball a few meters. There was nothing exceptionally challenging about the putt. He could certainly get it close to the hole and two-putt out for a bogey. The minus one point wouldn’t hurt him that much. He stood before the ball; dialed up his shades one more notch, practiced a few strokes, then stepped forward. Parker’s putter eased back and moved forward very gently making solid contact in the center of the club. The ball slid forward at a perfect pace to be within three feet of the hole, sliding softly left less than a foot, and when it fell into the hole Parker gave a short exhalation of disbelief. He had not actually intended to make the putt and was only keeping the reality of par in the back of his head. The helmet speakers were still vibrating with the sound of the ball rattling in the bottom of the cup as he walked forward to verify the evidence of his eyes. There it was, sitting down there, waiting for him to pick it up and carry it to the eighteenth tee. It was par the hard way: drive into hazard and drop for one with a terrible up and on and a long one-putt. Nevertheless, it was par.

I’m not thrilled by golf. I’ve played it a few times — enough that I’ve got some context for what Parker’s going through. But good detail and a strong voice, I think, can defeat lack of interest every time. I’m reminded of William Zinsser’s excellent book, On Writing Well, which I bought when I was in the depths of misery with my master’s thesis. I remember being incredibly refreshed by what Zinsser had to say about audience:

Soon after you confront the matter of preserving your identity, another question will occur to you: “Who am I writing for?”

It’s a fundamental question, and it has a fundamental answer. You are writing for yourself. Don’t try to visualize the great mass audience. There is no such audience — every reader is a different person. Don’t try to guess what sort of thing editors want to publish or what you think the country is in a mood to read. Editors and readers don’t know what they want to read until they read it. Besides, they’re always looking for something new.

Zinsser goes on to give the example of E.B. White’s “The Hen (An Appreciation).” He says:

There’s a man writing about a subject I have absolutely no interest in. Yet I enjoy this piece thoroughly. … [M]ainly what I like is that this is a man telling me unabashedly about a love affair with poultry that goes back to 1907. It’s written with humanity and warmth, and after three paragraphs I know quite a lot about what sort of man this hen-lover is.

Every aspiring writer has been told at some point, “Write what you know.” As someone who was always attracted to writing fantasy, science fiction, and other speculative stories, I never understood what that meant. But as I read Santa’s story, I thought to myself, “This man is doing nothing if not writing what he knows.” By the end of the story, I was deeply invested in the character and his struggles.

Sitting down and really listening to anyone talk about whatever they happen to know deeply and do well is always interesting and well worth it. It’s the same to read something written in this way. Though Zinsser is discussing nonfiction, Santa’s story is just one example of why all this applies just as much to fiction.

A Satisfying Mixture of Light and Darkness

I’m slow to point this out, but Ramsey Shehadeh had a story in Strange Horizons at the end of June, called “Jimmy’s Roadside Cafe.” I’m crazy about Shehadeh’s work, based on this story and his debut story in Weird Tales, “Creature.” What gets me is that Shehadeh has this signature quirkiness that allows him to be very dark and very loving within the same story. An example from the Strange Horizons story:

His second customer appeared out of the north as well, pulling a large red wagon with two children inside, a boy and a girl, both laid neatly out and dressed formally, as if for a wedding, the boy in a black suit and a little red bow tie, the girl in a frilly blue dress with lacework at the sleeves.

Hello there! said Jimmy, scurrying up the bank to the road. This new visitor was large, bald, and broad-shouldered, and wore a charcoal Giants jersey and a pair of blue sweats, torn at the knees. He slowed, but did not stop, and fixed Jimmy with a hard glare.

…

The man snorted, and picked up his pace. He was leaving. Jimmy felt a thrill of panic. He said: You have lovely children.

The man stopped, dropped the wagon’s handle, and, in one fluid motion, spun around and slammed his fist into the center of Jimmy’s face. Jimmy heard his nose crack, and the world went dark. When he came back to it, he was on the street, and the man was straddling his chest, hitting him and hitting him. Every blow was seismic, the pain monstrous, and then incomprehensible. A gentle thrill of peace passed through Jimmy’s body. He felt sure that he would die soon.

I am absolutely convinced that the characters in a Shehadeh story are good people. They are wrapped, however, in a strangeness that is at once terrifying and delightful. Go read him.