Best of Every Day Fiction

My story, “Home to Perfect,” has been included in the Best of Every Day Fiction Two anthology. The book is now available for order in both hardcover and paperback.

Every Day Fiction posts one flash piece a day and has developed a great community that comments intelligently on the day’s stories. It’s definitely worth dropping into the feed reader. If reading online’s not your thing, here’s your chance to check out what they do.

I’m very proud of “Home to Perfect,” and I’m glad to see its life extended this way. I thought this might be a nice occasion to talk a bit about what goes on when I write a piece of flash fiction.

I’ve seen a lot of discussion online recently about how long it takes to write various types of fiction. Most of what I read about flash fiction suggests that these are quick, easy pieces that you can dash off in a morning. That’s not my experience at all. The only reason I can afford to write flash is that I have a day job.

“Home to Perfect” took me a solid 15 hours to write. I’ll try to break down how those hours were spent. You should read the story (linked at the top of the post) before reading my explanation–I’m not going to worry about spoilers.

I got the idea when I was poking around the Internet one day and found a video on YouTube of a kid pulling off 100 percent FC on expert of “Through the Fire and Flames” on Guitar Hero. At the end of the video, the kid is visibly trembling, cursing in disbelief, totally overwhelmed (I’d link it now, but I can’t find it anymore–if you search for this on YouTube, you get totally overwhelmed by bots and parody videos). I found myself thinking over the next several days about the kid’s awe and how he shared it with an audience on YouTube. I wondered if his parents had any idea what that moment meant to him.

I spent about 3 hours over the next several days developing the idea. I asked myself who Vic (my main character) was, why he cared about 100 percent FC, and what else was going on in his life. I wrote extensive notes on him, his mom, his dad, and his brother Kurt. This was the point at which I realized that I was writing about domestic violence. I could tell you a lot of details about all of these characters that never made it into the story. I believe a story should be an iceberg–what’s visible should be only a small amount of the material that’s in the author’s possession.

At that point, I wrote my first draft, spending about 2 hours on it. (My first draft rate for longer pieces is much faster, but my speed of writing seems to be inversely related to the length of the piece).

I put my first draft down for about a week. When I picked it up again, something was wrong with it, and I couldn’t figure out what. After much rereading and consideration (which I’m not counting towards the total time spent on the work), I figured out that “Through the Fire and Flames” was the problem. I had no emotional connection to the song, and I hadn’t spent much time playing Guitar Hero. I had, on the other hand, pulled many all-nighters playing Rock Band. There’s a song on Rock Band called “Green Grass and High Tides” that I love deeply and find wickedly difficult (I can beat it on hard, but that’s the best I can do). I changed the story so that Vic is playing Rock Band, and spent about 5 hours writing a new draft. While I wrote this draft, I played “Green Grass and High Tides” on repeat and periodically took breaks to watch videos of people playing this song on Rock Band.

[As an aside, when the story was first posted on Every Day Fiction, fellow writer Deven Atkinson pointed out that the lyrics of “Green Grass and High Tides” are actually very inspiring and appropriate to Vic’s situation. Though I normally pay a lot of attention to song lyrics, I hadn’t in this case. However, the story just didn’t work for me until I saturated it and myself with the mood of this song. I think it’s quite possible that I was subconsciously aware of what the song is saying to Vic.]

At that point, I thought I’d finished the story, so I let my husband read it. As always happens, he made me realize that I was far from finished with the story, pointing out several problems with how it was structured. I spent about 3 hours restructuring and fixing those problems. Then, I spent 2 hours doing a final polish and preparing the story for submission. For me, this consists of reading the whole thing out loud several times, fixing anything that trips me up and fiddling with things until I’m sure I really want to send this out into the world. I run spellcheck. I obsessively study the guidelines for the market to which I’m sending the story.

And that’s a wrap. I’ve wished that I could write faster, but I’m much happier with the version that’s on the Every Day Fiction site than what I would have come up with if I’d stopped after the first or second draft.

What Makes Me Think I Can

Many times, I’ve seen interviews or posts in which a writer says she decided to make a serious go at writing and publishing after reading some godawful novel, throwing it down in disgust, and saying, “Surely, I can do better than that!” This has always turned my stomach, and the feeing of superiority has never been helpful to me.

I once had a lover who could barely stand to go into a bookstore because he compared himself with every writer on the shelves, thinking of all of the books as books he hadn’t written. Was he better than those writers? Was he worse? Was he younger than Writer X when Writer X published a debut novel? Older?

I think that kind of paralysis is exactly what this tendency to comparison creates. I was useless at taking my writing anywhere beyond the drawer as long as I worried about what Writer X was doing. If I look down on Writer X, and then I get a rejection slip, what does that say about me? I think this attitude leads to bitterness and contempt for the industry.

The last couple years, a different feeling has been growing on me. I’m finding myself inspired by seeing writers who are making progress, winning awards, and getting published. It started with writers I’ve learned to recognize online. Watching Matt Bell go from winning the Million Writers Award to publishing chapbooks to being about to release a story collection has been inspiring. Watching Jordan Lapp, who is one of the editors of Every Day Fiction, win a Writers of the Future award and go to Clarion West has been inspiring.

Lately, I’ve had the privilege of meeting some writers in person. Ken Liu and I have talked over various aspects of the writing and publishing process, and it helps to see how serious he is about this, and to meet someone who’s spent years studying markets like I have. (Ken has also won a Writers of the Future award, and has published some excellent stories, including this one). At the featherproof books event, I got to meet and talk briefly with Amelia Gray, who’s an extremely nice person whose book AM/PM I just finished devouring, and who won the FC2 prize.

Seeing that human beings can be persistent, develop their craft, and be recognized for it is what makes me think I can do this. When I was a child, writers were some sort of extradimensional being to me. I’d rather keep myself on this path by recognizing people’s humanity, not by feeling contempt for what people have done.

That doesn’t mean I love every piece of fiction out there. It just means that I don’t find it useful to focus on the ones I don’t like, and they certainly don’t help me stay motivated. I know it can be intimidating to look at Flannery O’Connor or George Eliot or Neil Gaiman or Maureen McHugh or whomever and wonder how they write like they do. I think any serious writer has to get over the fear and figure out which writers to admire, look up to, and learn from, not which writers to scorn.

Creating An Ominous Mood

Every Day Fiction has a great story up today. Robert Swartwood’s “Incomplete” is particularly interesting to me because of the ominous mood it creates. Written in a series of eight very short chapters, it wastes no time creating suspense:

1.

The men without faces came for his father just after dinnertime. There were two of them. They broke down the apartment door and stormed inside. His mother screamed, dropped her glass. It shattered on the floor. His father tried to fight the men but the men were very strong. They grabbed his father’s arms and legs and carried him away. His father kept shouting that he didn’t have their money. Then his father was gone, the door was slammed shut, and his mother was collapsed on the kitchen floor. She stared up at him, tears in her eyes, the shards of broken glass surrounding her, sparkling like diamonds.

What I like most about the story is that the opening sets me off balance and the story keeps me that way. The first line leaves me uncertain whether the men who come for the narrator’s father are monstrous or simply masked men being perceived as faceless. The possibility of the supernatural hovers at the edges of the story. I think that, ultimately, there is no supernatural element, but that possibility affects the mood and highlights the powerlessness of the narrator and his family. I love that the story is surreal yet stays very grounded in solid detail. I have no trouble following what’s happening, or interpreting the images that the narrator sees. I do, however, feel with the narrator the sense of confusion and uncertainty about the nature of the forces in the world.

I can also say that the story rings true to me. When I was very young, my father was arrested–though not with the degree of violence described in this story, thank God. To me, the story’s sense of the overwhelming supernatural accurately reflects the way that real experience felt. That says to me that the author has carefully considered the probable reactions that his narrator, a child, would have to the situation.

Good stories often connect me to a personal experience of my own–not that the details have to be the same at all. I think it’s simply that a good story points to a certain area of human experience (i.e. the powerlessness of childhood), and, if it’s doing its job, kicks up an analogous response in the reader. Well done.

Long Time, No Blog

It’s been a really long time since I’ve posted, but I wanted to quickly mention that my story, “Home to Perfect,” is up on Every Day Fiction. To everyone coming in from that site, thanks so much for visiting.

Another Side of the Story

Jason Stout’s piece, “My Corona,” is up on Every Day Fiction today, and he asked me to take a look. I figured I might as well do that as a post, though I should note that Jason was the first person to start reading and commenting on this blog, so that may make me a bit biased.

Since “My Corona” is a companion piece to “Larry Legend,” the first thing I did was go back and read that. The two stories overlap because of a high-school almost-romance between the main character of “Larry” and the main character of “Corona.” From “Larry Legend”:

And if they’re from French Lick, they’ll go out to Grapevine Holler and remember how they used to smoke grapevine and chew blackjack gum and drink stolen Boone’s Farms. Or they’ll go down to the Jubil bar and hope to run into Jamie Fisher who was hot and easy way back when, but never for you. Because the easy girls don’t hook up with the ones who want out. Or you’ll have breakfast at the Villager and start smoking again because, why the hell not, you’ll get a pack’s worth of second-hand smoke there anyway, so you may as well enjoy it.

From “My Corona”:

Jamie spun gravel on Sand Hill Road leaving their trailer later that night. She wouldn’t go far, she knew. But she was tired of being called a retard by Sam. She drove to the Honey-Do-Stop and bought a Diet Coke and a Snickers before driving the strip. Past Ballard Mansion. The old 7-Up bottling plant. She was about to go home when she saw the crowd gathered at the Jubil. A good crowd for a Thursday.

And, of course, Jamie runs into the main character from “Larry” when she gets to the Jubil.

I like interconnected short stories — they’re not interconnected the way novels are. The stories exist in the same world, but they can be about totally different things. “Larry Legend” seems to me to be about the fine line between being nostalgic and being trapped. There’s a bit of romance thrown in, but, most of all, it’s about the main character having gotten stuck in a small town after all, when he thought he’d gotten away.

Jamie is trapped more completely, in a marriage and in a trailer. To her, getting out in a physical sense is unthinkable. She escapes by hanging on to pieces of knowledge that seem to belong to her alone:

She knew that sunlight traveled at around 186,000 miles per second, but how she knew it or where she heard it, she couldn’t remember. When she wanted to feel smart, or to appear that way, she would tell people that it takes eight minutes and eighteen seconds for the light of the sun to reach the Earth’s surface. Someone could turn off the sun, she would say, and we wouldn’t know about it for over eight minutes.

This story is about the might-have-been romance that was an aside in “Larry Legend.” The feeling of nostalgia works. There’s a simple line toward the end that does exactly what it’s supposed to do:

Jamie leaned forward and for a moment the two recaptured seventeen.

I think that line may be the core of the story; about two characters wanting to be seventeen, before life’s path becomes solid and determined, and about them knowing in their hearts that there’s no going back. It’s great for it to be there, plain and simple, at just the right moment in the story.

I have a few more things to add about the story’s construction. The image of the sun is good. It’s a random fact, which is what Jamie wants, that does seem to shed metaphoric light on the rest of the story. The image of the corona — this cold place between two heats — is an interesting one to have in a story about reawakened desire. Kudos to Jason for choosing a random fact that adds value and meaning to the story.

As readers have noted in the comments on Every Day Fiction, the dialogue stumbles a bit towards the middle. Jason tries to give back story through dialogue, which is tricky, because it’s all too easy to fall into the trap of: “As you know, Bob, we’ve been married for 14 years, and have been mostly happy except for the affair you had that I’ve never been able to forgive you for.”

In “My Corona,” what happens is that the male lead falls into a paragraph-long description that doesn’t sound like dialogue. But I think the problem might stem from Jamie’s cluelessness. She asks, “Why didn’t we ever get together?” as if she really doesn’t know. I can say from experience that this question is typically asked coyly, as a way of introducing the topic of getting together in the present. It then sounds strange for the male lead to take her so literally. She continues asking questions about what happened, presumably because she was drunk on the night in question. This part might be more natural if she made a few jokes here, or gave little hints of what she’d been thinking before or after that night. Things even out again when the two get back to talking about the sun.

I also have mixed feelings about the end. Leading into it, the story is right on:

She thought about what she wanted to do with her long-lost friend. She thought about the sun and the ring of cold.

I think I want the story to end right there. Instead, Jamie chuckles and repeats a line from the beginning of the story, creating the circle structure that many stories have. I don’t think that’s necessary here.

I think I’ve been a bit harder on Jason than I usually am, in my effort to avoid being biased. Regardless of that, I like “My Corona.” The themes of nostalgia, lost romance, and being trapped, whether in a small town or a marriage, are important and well-explored. I also like that “Larry Legend” and “My Corona” seem to reach different conclusions on these themes. At the end of “Larry,” I have a feeling of claustrophobia. Here’s the main character, stuck in this town again. At the end of “Corona,” on the other hand, the world is opening a little for Jamie. She has another secret piece of knowledge to take back and treasure. That knowledge, and the implicit connection to the male lead that it contains, means that she can never truly be trapped.

Jason’s other work is well worth checking out. You can find it here.

At the Edge of Comprehension

Today’s offering from Every Day Fiction, Bill Ward’s “Cloudcutter,” helped to break me out of a dull mood. The world and characters Ward describes are incredibly strange, and so I found the setting and story just at the edge of what I can accept. A story this weird is a bit dangerous, I think — sometimes, if I get too lost, I get annoyed and give up on a story. This story struck just the balance I needed. It was strange enough to give me a feeling of liftoff, but it maintained some basic things to which I could relate.

On the strange side: It’s hard to tell exactly how genetics are operating. The character opens by talking about the day he got his fifth brain. I gather that each brain adds functionality, but it’s uncertain what these creatures are. The character has fur, but I’m not sure why. As with many stories, I have the sense that this is some future earth, but I can’t be sure.

The thing is that as I made that list, I realized that isn’t so bad. I understand what I need to understand. The character is young and still maturing, and the world seems terribly polluted and constrained, when that doesn’t seem to have been the case before.

On the side of liftoff: The character dreams of flying, and the impact is strong:

That night I flew above the ceiling. I was sucked up through the gash cut by the high current, and soared in a bright world of toplight blue. I did not move as I normally do, as Charlie does, but hung in the fibers of the air with broad arms and pushed forward mightily with my feet. I cannot remember a more beautiful thing.

“Your fifth brain can dream, Charlie; you are a man now.” Dandrys smiled and patted my head. I then asked why our bodies differed but Dandrys said it did not matter, and told me to come with him to work.

Ward does a good job of establishing the sense of a low ceiling of dirty clouds, and of making the idea of getting beyond them appealing and meaningful. The relationship between Charlie and Dandrys is strange, but intriguing. Their interaction as mentor and student is classic, but emphasis, as above, on the difference between their bodies left me wondering. I wasn’t sure if I should take that as a difference caused by age difference, or species difference, or some sort of sexual difference.

In any case, today I was in the mood to be confused this way, and the dream of flying gave the story a basic premise that I could connect with easily.

On a side note, my feed reader also brought Every Day Fiction’s interview with Nicholas Ozment. I was pleased to see that his story, “The Only Difference Between Men and Boys,” had gotten good traffic last month. I didn’t post about it, but it is definitely worth reading.

How Much Fantasy Makes A Fantasy?

This question came up a few times for me today. It started first thing, when I read today’s story on Every Day Fiction, “Touched” by Kim McDougall. The bio underneath the story contained a strong statement about the limiting power of genre, and, out of curiosity, I clicked through to McDougall’s Website to see more. McDougall calls stories that fall between genres “Between the Cracks Fiction,” and she elaborates here:

As a reader I’m all for an errant knight epic or a sexy vampire thriller, but the books that stick with me, the stories that I find myself reviewing on sleepless nights, are those that break the barriers. As a writer, I strive to avoid stereotypes by writing a great story first and worrying about classifying it later. Unfortunately, writing in the gaps has its drawbacks too. I once sent the same story to two different editors, receiving polite rejections from both, one claiming that my story was fantasy and his magazine did not publish this genre, the other that the story was not fantasy and he only published such. Same story.

This is an interesting story, and it certainly got me thinking. I think there’s a counterargument that I’ll handle in a later post, but I certainly take the point that there are very interesting stories that are hard to place as a writer and hard to find as a reader precisely because they can’t be neatly characterized. This primed the pump for me to read Liz Williams’ “The Hide” today, another of the top stories up for the Million Writers award. Though it was published in Strange Horizons, which publishes speculative fiction, it takes a long time for “The Hide” to wind into its fantasy elements, and, even then, they’re done subtly. The magical elements are certainly not explained. They invade the main character’s life briefly but deeply, and are gone again. Though there is definitely a strong aspect of the unexplained by the end of the story, most of the story did not feel like reading a fantasy. It felt like reading a dense, pastoral work of literary fiction.

The latter is far from my favorite genre, and I would never read something in that style without the promise that at some point something very strange is going to happen. This leads me to my point. I think that in many of these pieces that fall between genre, authors can do interesting things with our expectations. I’m thinking also here of Emma Bull’s and Steven Brust’s book Freedom and Necessity. I also picked this book up expecting it to be a fantasy. Mainly, it was political and philosophical and romantic. It was that same thick and creamy style of writing, set up as an epistolary novel, and what fantasy elements it included were quite subtle.

However, because I was expecting a fantasy, my reading experience was very different. I was jumping at shadows, and seeing the mysterious in everything. Most of the fantastic experiences in the book could be explained away by a determined skeptic, and yet I did not take that stance. There is a state I reach sometimes in real life where I am open that way to magic and mystery. It’s the state good fantasy induces, and it’s also the state I’m looking for when I pick up a fantasy novel or fantasy story. When a story is presented in a way that makes me expect a fantasy, I think the author gets to toy with that effect, making me see magical elements in things I might otherwise see as mundane.

To be perfectly honest, this irritates me a bit. For example, I spent much of my time reading “The Hide” and reading Freedom and Necessity waiting anxiously for things of a specifically fantastic nature to happen. On the other hand, it’s a neat effect. I do want to come back to this argument and consider it a bit more, but, having written this, I think I disagree with some of McDougall’s vehemence. The bio at the bottom of “Touched” says, “She believes that genres are crippling literature.” In the course of writing this post, I’m thinking they’re another tool in the toolkit, and are therefore useful for setting expectations for a reader and then manipulating expectations. While I enjoy stories that cross genres, I think they’re a little delicate sometimes. I’m glad I read Freedom and Necessity, but it did frustrate me, and I think that, while I recognize that “The Hide” was well written, it ultimately isn’t a story that appeals particularly to me. In both cases, I think the issue was that the story promised me fantasy and didn’t deliver.

Should I expect to get fantasy when I’ve been promised fantasy? I don’t know. Perhaps McDougall would say the answer is no. All I know is that the expectation gets to be too much to bear sometimes. There are days that I order Mexican food and would be OK with getting Italian instead, and days when I just want Mexican food. Genre seems to present a similar situation.