Kurt Vonnegut on the Short Story

A Story Short

For the past week and heading into the next month or so, my updates have not been and will continue not to be as regular as you've come to expect.  There are several illnesses in my family and something's got to give.  But as often happens amid turmoil, creativity has burbled to the surface as I take refuge in my typewriter.

I believe that I've mentioned before how my dad loved Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories and how he wanted me to love them too.  But I just couldn’t. There was too much of a gap there, too far of a leap required of a kid born in the 70's.  A kid who had already sold his allegiance to the Ray Bradbury and Tolkien crowd.  I was conquering Martian frontiers with John Carter and exploring Middle Earth with Frodo.  I didn't have time for stories set in rural Michigan circa 1910, I was living in THE WORLD OF TOMORROW!

Though in fairness, dad gave me my first battered copy of John Carter of Mars and it was at his behest that I

spent some time exploring Victorian Africa with Allan Quartermaine.

I often wondered what it would have been like if I had liked Nick Adams and what it would have taken to make that happen for a kid of the Star Wars era.  What if those stories had been written by someone who spoke in a voice I recognized, a voice less burdened by Hemingway’s affection for the primal male rituals and closer to the swords and sorcery of Tolkien or the jetpacks and laser guns more familiar in my late twentieth century childhood?

Short stories are not my usual forte.  I tend to take large bites of the stories I concoct and I want a large canvas to make them as detailed and beautiful as their architecture can bear without the constraints of the short story getting in my way.  I love short stories, but I don't write them very often.

But the coming-of-age in the space age idea kept prodding and poking me.  Mine was a childhood spent wondering why the promised WORLD OF TOMORROW kept being put off until tomorrow and then the next day and the next.  And a character began to coelesce.

The other day I sat down at the computer and was surprised to find a story of a young man of my generation looking for the future he had been promised by those same Science Fiction visionaries and moth-eaten books from the 1950's and 60's that haunted the basement of the local library.  A kid who thrilled to the same ideas as I had and wanted to know what happened to that jetpack he was supposed to get when the world's odometer clicked over to the year 2000.  A kid who was far more clever and self confident than I insomuch as he was willing and able to do something about it.

It never ceases to surprise me when I find stories hiding in my head that aren't 100,000 words long.  And the self-discovery that like Hemingway I could tell fantastically exagerrated tales spun from my own childhood imaginings.  No more or less surprised than I was to find those half-imagined adventures were still lurking in there, buried under the more literate and adult adventures that overlay them.

What I ended up with was not even close to an attempt to rewrite the Nick Adams stories, far from it. For one thing, I'm definitely not Earnest Hemingway and have no desire to be.  Nonetheless, the stories I've been telling myself for the past couple of weeks are informed by Nick Adams even if it was just that I was reacting against that archetype.  Nick was in the back of my mind as I filtered my thirty year old self back into the ten year old body of a boy that was (in the words of Douglas Adams) similar to but not entirely unlike me.   Certainly I made him smarter, more self-assured and at once more naive than I have ever been.  Because in the end, even if a character contains a sizeable portion of Scott, it's never Scott.  His sister is never my sister and his parents never my parents, though in this case I would say his soul is my soul.

These new stories owe as full a debt to the things I was reading the summer of my tenth year on the planet.  John Carter of Mars, The Mad Scientist’s Club, The Hardy Boys, Encyclopedia Brown and God knows the pages of those musty picture books from the 1950’s that teased and tempted my young mind with the impossible future of gleaming domed cities, jetpacks and monorails.

Eventually, of course, that ten-year-old became a thirty-year-old and we made the leap together and I treasure those stories less for what they are than for what they meant to him.  But before the end, my dislike of Hemingway became a bonding thing for us. Which is why I return to it time and again.

Regardless of Hemingway’s influence on these stories, his influence on my dad meant that Dad and I talked about books from the very beginning and the Nick Adams stories in particular. I learned to love them because he did, just as I learned to love books because he made it look like the right way to live.

---
John  Carter cover public domain - care of Wikimedia Commons

What Is the Scientific Nature of the Whammy?

My friend and fellow blogger Rachael is on maternity leave this month and she asked me (among many others) to write a post for her blog which bears the unlikely moniker "The Scientific Nature of the Whammy" (I don't know what it means either, but I like the sound of it).  Because of the impending arrival of her little one, she asked all of us to ponder the subject of birthdays. 

Yesterday was the day my post was featured, called "Ephemeral Gifts".

When Rachael asked me, I said "Yes" without really thinking much about what I was saying.  Rachael's blog is all about family and faith and motherhood and for the life of me, I couldn't think of anything to say on the subject of birthdays that would fit within those parameters.
---


I've received many gifts for my birthday. Teddy bears gave way to GI Joes gave way to electronics and a 16th birthday car which eventually led to kitchen implements and gardening equipment. And I still have a lot of them. They are either the cherished possessions of childhood or the favorite items in an overflowing house. But as is so often the case the birthday present I cherish most is one I no longer possess.

Two years ago, my telephone rang one evening while I was not at home and my answering machine picked up the call. It was my mom and dad, calling to wish me a happy 35th birthday. Together, the two of them sang that great old son into the recorder for me to find and listen to later.

I'd never heard my dad sing before. Not that he hadn't, but it was always either in church or otherwise among the voices of others so that it was lost in the tumult. He sounded strong, vibrant, and a little embarrassed. It was weird and wonderful all at the same time.

For a few months, that song remained on my answering machine and I would periodically hear the strains of Happy Birthday as either Kristin or I played the messages. I meant to take it and record it into a more permanent venue but I never found a tape recorder or other method of getting that song off of there.

One day the inevitable happened. I don't recall whether it was a power outage, or if the thing got knocked off the kitchen counter or what happened, but the message was lost. I tried everything, including contacting the company to find out if there was any way to retrieve it, but there was not. It was gone.

The simple solution would be to ask him to sing to me once more, but that's not possible. My dad died just before Christmas that year. His voice forever silenced except in my memories and in the few snippets of video tape where he appears (usually saying "What do you think you're doing?" or "Is that really necessary?")

In the end, though, the memory of the song is the more precious for its absence. If it still remained it would live on a hard drive or an audio cassette and I might listen to it once in awhile, but it wouldn't be the same. I think it's the clearer for being a memory.

And never can I hear that song without in my mental recording studio, layering dad's voice track into the chorus. Strong and vibrant, and just a little bit embarrassed.

Who the heck is Scott?

(I haven't done one of these in awhile)

Scott is...

• ... a device for turning coffee into words.
• ... an unabashed splitter of infinitives.
• ... not known for taking small bites.
• ... fiction's fool

Thought for the day

I spend so much time with my characters I begin to think of them as friends.  Except with my real friends I don't spend quite so much time getting them into trouble just to see how they get out of it.

Children's Book Week & My Next Project

This story is both about and not at all about Children's Book Week.  It is simply the happiest of coincidences that this week and CBW happen at the same time.  Sometimes if you shake the puzzle box juuuuust right, the pieces fall together on their own.

Last week I began a new project and acquired a new co-author.  I will be writing a midgrade/young adult novel with the able assistance of my 12 year-old nephew Jared.

Yes.  You read that right.

We talked a bit and I ran an idea by him that he likes and we have a bit of a rough idea what we're doing and how we're going to do it.  It will be a contemporary fantasy with young protagonists, written to - at least in part - bridge the chasm of our respective generations but also the expanse of United States that lies between us.

I'm not sure how I'm going to approach blogging about this.  I love the genre and feel in many ways that the most exciting things currently happening in literature are happening in the areas marketed to these younger age groups.  And the constraints of the intended audience are that much greater and yet also that much less at the same time.

I love the idea we came up with, the first go at characters we're going to use to tell our tale and the fact that it gives us something to talk about when we don't see one another for such great lengths of time.  Jared is such an avid reader and really seems to love writing.  And I was about his age when I first got the bug myself so... family tradition?


This is going to be wonderful fun.


Anyway, happy Children's Book Week, everyone!  I was going to jokingly lament that Hallmark doesn't make a card for this, but it occurs to me that there are cards for this holiday.  They generally have more than two pages and they stock them in the kid's section of your friendly neighborhood bookseller.

Cheers!

Writing With the King: His, Mine & Ours

NOTE: This is the long-awaited wrapup for my unintentionally-lengthy look at Stephen King's writing book-cum-memoir "On Writing: A memoir of the Craft".   At the end of which you will find a free short story written at the prompting and in the style of Stephen King.

His, Mine and Ours 

I've spent this entire series alternating between arguing with King and praising his writing.  And honestly, I'm not sure I entirely agree with him on what writing is, where it comes from or whether or not it's something anyone can do.  I'm also split on my feelings as to whether or not there's a ceiling to our potential as writers beyond which it's impossible to improve.  King obviously feels that there is, but I'm not so sure.  I think it is possible to learn to do this and what "natural" writers are born with is an innate love for it.  Whether or not that love is the catalyst needed to go from adequate to great is a philosophical question beyond the purview of this blog or this book.

Which begs the question: "Why are you so enthusiastic about a writing book that you don't entirely agree with, written by a writer whose books you're not especially a fan of?"

Arguing with King in absentia is part of the charm of his book.  If I entirely agreed with King I probably would not have given his memoir a second reading.  I have piles of books about writing in my home library that may or may not ever get a second look, most of them written by writers I whole-heartedly love and agree with.

The three books I most often loan-out are the three with which I maintain an active dialogue.  Telling Lies for Fun & Profit and Bird By Bird spend more time being loaned out than they do on my shelf and I can wholeheartedly endorse both of them for writers seeking guidance... but that doesn't mean I rubberstamp the opinions of Mr. Block of Ms. Lamott any more than I can with Mr. King.  Though I admit to arguing much more with King, but it's a friendly sort of one-sided tussle for my part.

On Writing challenged a lot of the closely-held assumptions I'd made about writing, among them the idea that I didn't need and didn't have time for writing prompts.

When King first published this book of writing advice and memories, it included a challenge to his readers.  He posed a writing problem and asked us to send him our results.

Now, when a major author asks to see something you've written, if you have any literary aspirations at all you don't hesitate.  You send them your writing sample.  Most writers refuse - on advice of counsel - to read unpublished and unagented works as an act of self-protection against future lawsuits of the "You stole my idea..." variety.  Lawsuits still happen, as JK Rowling can tell you, but I'm sure they're much less frequent because of this policy.

Because he'd never accepted writing samples from un-agented writers before, I think this was a bit of an eye-opener for Mr. King.  According to a post on his website shortly after the book came out, the request resulted in an avalanche of stories from the writers and fans eager to garner that kind of attention.  I'm as sure that many of them had dreams of landing a book deal as I am that none of them did... at least not from Mr, King's recomendation based on these writing samples.

In subsequent printings of the book, this request was removed and a notice on his website notes that submissions are closed.

All the same, it's a good 'story problem'  and one of the few I've seen that actually inspired me to sit down and put hands on keys.  I'm notoriously averse to someone giving me something to write about beyond the most general guidelines.  "Write about math" is a good prompt for me.  "Write a story about characters in this specific situation, hitting the following specific points..." is significantly less likely to get a response from my creative faculty.

Have I mentioned yet how much I hated writing for school?

Suffice to say that I like to write my own ideas and if I didn't I probably would still be a journalist.  I have enough ideas and writing prompts of my own to last me a lifetime and any time spent writing someone else's ideas feels like fingernails on the chalkboard.  No matter who the idea came from, I feel caged by these things and the urge to wander off their map is overwhelming.

For some reason King's story didn't do that to me.  For one thing, I don't usually write horror, so I was stepping into unknown territory and knowing that Stephen King had drawn the map in my quavering mitts was oddly comforting.  For another, it wasn't a ghost story it was a story of love gone awry and the chain of events leading to confrontation.

Of course I wandered off the path anyway, but I did so knowing what direction the path lay when I wanted to get back to it.  Dick & Jane are in a bad marriage.  Spousal abuse compounded by all the bad add-ons a horror writer of King's caliber can dream up.  But the roles are reversed and Jane is the abuser and Dick the abused.  Events lead to separation and, eventually, Jane's arrest.  One day, Dick drops their child off at a friend's and comes home to find Jane waiting for him...  chaos ensues.

And for whatever reasons, my fingers flew across the keyboard.  On some level I was playing out my arguments with King's assumptions about storytelling and "The Craft".  But the story became a meditation on the benevolence of the Creator, on fatherhood, vengeance and the proprietary feelings we all feel toward our loved ones and what happens when that's taken to an unhealthy level.

It was a strange feeling to have my storytelling so guided by someone else.

My story was longer than the word count he later imposed (out of a sense of wise self-preservation, I'm sure) so I never sent it to him or tried to get it published (it wasn't my idea, after all) and throughout the writing of this series, I've been vacillating on whether or not to just post it here and be done with it.  I've decided to do so as a way to encourage you to do the same, if not here then in your own webspace.

Without further ado I invite you to read: "Mine" A macabre little story about Dick & Jane (Opens as a .PDF "GoogleDoc")


Read the previous posts in this series:
Writing With the King: An introduction and summary about why I care and why you should too.

Part I - Designated Dreamers: The truth of memory and the place of writers as society's shepards of the subconscious.

Part II - Bedside Tables: The importance of the mundane as a foil for the fantastic (or the horrifying).

What I'm Listening To: WNYC's Radiolab Vanishing Words

This is a fantastic study relating Agatha Christie, alzheimer's and the science of memory scene through the foci of the growth and eventual recession of vocabulary. All of it held against the backdrop of a study of aging in a convent. I love Radiolab. WNYC - Radiolab » Vanishing Words

Cafe Grumpy offers a more expensive Joe