a writer's journal

Since I started this journal a couple years back, I've written it from top-of-the-page-down, which is natural for the form. Now, in an age of blogs--which this is not, yet it's close enough to confuse with one-- I am inverting this and future journal pages, adding new entries at the top of the page. The archive will endure in its original form.

Tuesday, December 14, 2004

I've been rethinking the short story collection, based on the positive response from the Al Smith Fellowship judges. I'd intended to start work on a new novel by the first of the year. But now I'm thinking the collection has a good chance to be picked up by a publisher, especially if two or three new connecting stories are added.

In an admittedly wonky discussion with other fiction writers recently, the kind only writers can find interesting, the subject of 'write-arounds' came up. We all do it to an extent, reword and rephrase to avoid a problem. And we all feel quite clever about how we construct them, dancing around problems like puddles in the narrative road. (The recent one involved using present tense in a first-person, past-tense narrative when things are still true today. Examples: "St. Louis was/is a city on the Mississippi River." "My brother has/had ears that stick/stuck out.") You can dodge the problem by writing "St. Louis, a city on the Mississippi River, …." and "I looked at my brother and I felt sorry about his prominent ears." This was actually proposed! But you end up with the narrator sounding unnatural, and that can be death. And there is nothing wrong with slipping into present tense in these cases. In fact, it helps establish or confirm the narrative time distance of the story, how far in the future from story action the narration is apparently occurring, a few days a few months, or decades. It makes the story feel real when this distance is implied and maintained throughout the story. I gave an example from a story from the Iowa Review, a first-person, past tense story where the narrator relates events that happened "in April," this implying a narrative distance of a few months. Then she wrote something like "We both live in Pittsburgh. He lives in the center of the city, and I live just outside Pittsburgh." Using present tense for something still true in the midst of a past-tense narrative, this reinforces the illusion of the story events happening recently. It creates the illusion of a real time dimension that's somehow related to the readers' 'now.'

Most seemed to leave the discussion with the feeling that either 'has' or 'had' would work for the brother's ears, that it was all a matter of style--by which they meant, I think, of no real consequence. In fact, it was a chance to reinforce the illusion of the story's truth. To write around it amounted to forfeiting a rather unique opportunity.

Thursday, December 9, 2004

An amazing day, today, at its center a massively improbable, oh-my-god kind of moment. A letter arrived from the Kentucky Arts Council saying -- yes really, really, honest-to-god saying--that I was being awarded a 2005 Al Smith Fellowship grant for fiction. Needless to say, I am thrilled!

Saturday, November 27, 2004

The short story collection, at least a first presentable version of it, is out in the world now, re-titled Things Kept, Things Left Behind. Silas House liked the original "Things Kept" title for the short story which became the novel-that-died-on-page-eighty, the one I was calling "Brighty Creek." I excerpted several more scenes from that, rounded them into a series of vignettes which comprise a short story of sorts. This I called "Things Left Behind," adding it into the collection in place of an early effort, a rambling and too pointless story. So the collection is again thirteen short stories with one novella. Its title is a concatenation of two story titles. Even more, though, the title seems to reflect a thread that runs through them all.

I'm at the most paralyzing point in the next writing project. No direction is set, other than that it will be a novel. But there are a million delicious choices of character and subject, of setting and theme. All things are possible. You can't open a newspaper without finding four or five new inspirations to add to the brew. Choices must be made soon, or no book will be written. Each one requires letting go of other options, though, narrowing in on the one thing this work will be. This process of choosing is difficult for me. I hate all the losing involved.

I'm reading novels again, recalibrating sensibilities from short fiction. This week I finished The House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III. The story is told in alternating points-of-view until more than half way through, when a third viewpoint is introduced. On the surface, it's the story of two people vying for ownership of a house. But as rendered by Dubus, it's the story of three very different people struggling to make their lives work again, pitted against each other in that struggle due to bureaucratic error. I admire the way the author created these characters, so different from each other, the way the reader can empathize with each in turn, the seemingly relentless complicating of their situation. It reminds me in that of Scott Smith's A Simple Plan. Or, to a lesser degree, Dennis Lehane's Mystic River.  

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