I’ve been sick all week, which never happens to me. Frankly, I don’t have the time for this. Long hours in bed. Naps, from which I awake more drowsy rather than less so. And everyone in my immediate family came down with some version of this, and we do-se-do’d around with it, swapping and trading, lying all four of us in bed together sometimes, worked.
I had to give up my 2000 words/ day that I’d been doing for 17 days at that point—34,000 words. A week has passed. I did get to read Jennifer Egan’s Look at Me, which is an amazing book. At first, the sheer power of its writing discouraged me—I wasn’t writing and hadn’t written this and wouldn’t I rather read than write anyway? Then, slowly, it flipped, and the power of it came back to me as courage. First because she does interiority so, so well, and interiority is what I do most naturally, what I tend to go back and edit out.
I remembered that I’d promised myself not to let the power of editing stop how I drafted, but that I’d tried anyway to come in and edit while I wrote—useless. Worse than useless. Self-editing as you go stops you. Writing has to come, in the early stages, from a foolhardy courage and love of language and character, imagery and action, place and emotion, and then more language that you access through words, poetry, rhythm.
I’ve been reading short short stories, too, preparing for the May 31 “Write a Whole Story in 5 Hours” class. I’ve taught a version of this before, but my classes always evolve, because my students evolve and I evolve. I reread “The School,” by Barthleme, which is brilliant, and “The Monkey Garden,” by Sandra Cisneros, and “Satisfaction” by Janus and “Ex Poser” by Paul Jennings and “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin and “Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid and some others. What are your favorite short shorts? Stories of under 1000 words that work?
What I found in these is my own little formula for the coming workshop, and I hope that even if you can’t join us (and I hope you can), this will en-courage you, too:
- Courage
- World
- Situation/ Problem
- Escalation
- Turn
- Double Turn/ Ending Note
The stories themselves all possess courage, in their jumps and juxtapositions, in their use of language and imagery, in the bold marks they make upon their canvases. They each make powerful use of world—this is the medium with which they draw theme and emotion. They do not dally long, though, these tight pictures, before something happens, trouble is brewed, situations arise. And again, things quickly escalate before something surprising happens—the turn. We are suddenly heading in an altogether different direction that we’d thought, and now we are racing this way . . . BUT before the end, another surprise will heave us in yet a new direction, and it is this double turn that leaves us sitting there, pages still spread before us, mulling over the story we’ve just, so quickly and yet alteringly, read.
On Saturday, we’ll bound joyously through these movements, inspired and sharing. It’s amazing what happens when we get together, isn’t it?
Sign up to join us on Saturday: https://bookwritingworld.com/work-with-me/
What are your favorite short short stories and what do you love about them? What gives you courage to write the way you write?