Finder

by Will Ferguson

Entertaining spellbinder by 2012 Giller Prize winner

File this book under the category of a romp/literary thriller, not exactly a who-done-it, but a how-does-this-crazy-thing-end.

I confess up front, this kind of book isn’t really my thing. The short chapters, almost always ending on a button, as screenwriters say, or a cliffhanger, grow wearisome over three hundred plus pages. Ferguson’s wordsmithing, delectably noirish and hardboiled, is, often to a fault, itching to please. Aren’t all writers trying, at bottom, merely to entertain, even us snotty literary types? We hide the vaudeville under our vaunted observational prose, whereas the thriller writer is unabashed, inviting the reader to sit back and revel as the gears turn.

Ferguson is a winner of a Giller Prize, no less, and his stylish, inventive prose powerfully delves into the humanity of his characters, into the particulars of the book’s many exotic locations. It’s just all at the service of so much nonsense.

What nonsense, you say? An international mastermind, a finder of lost, and therefore immensely valuable, things, who will stop at nothing and who at times may not even exist, ensnares a raft of characters in his diabolical schemes.

Still, all the international settings, the insights into the worlds of travel writing and conflict reporting, all the buttons and cliffhangers did their duty, kept me flipping the pages until the end, however hastily. In the middle of a one-hundred-year pandemic with a seemingly interminable amount of time on our hands, a good romp may be just what we all need.

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Warlight

by Michael Ondaatje

Ondaatje's latest puzzler informs, but fails to ignite

My only other experience reading Ondaatje was more duty than pleasure. “In the Skin of a Lion” is a novel that keeps you at a distance. Major characters disappear to return as minor ones in other guises. When the story settles on a single narrator, it continues to ramble. You just have to go with it and give up expecting a conventional narrative arc.

A lot of the same can be said of “Warlight.” While it is told, for the most part, from a single POV, the narrator doesn’t know what’s happening any more than the reader does. An old technique that can be engaging. And it is, up to a point.

In the first half of the book, at the end of WWII the protagonist and his sister are abandoned by their parents and left in the protection of two mysterious characters—criminals possibly—known by their nicknames: The Moth, The Darter. The siblings’ childhood home, once a sedate refuge, now becomes a revolving door for these men’s equally mysterious and entertaining friends.

All stories are puzzles and piecing together the fragments is the secret subject of every book, only here overtly so. The second half bounces around in time and place (this is an Ondaatje novel, after all), as the protagonist seeks answers surrounding his mother’s disappearance, reappearance, her war crimes and mysterious death. (The father never resurfaces.)

Along the way, we get the briefest glimpses into the mechanics of espionage and illegal dog racing, the canal system around London, the Blitz, the tradition of roof climbing in Oxford, nitroglycerin production, more espionage, the Allies’ unholy alliance with Tito’s partisans and the atrocities committed on all sides for geopolitical advantage during and after the war.

What we don’t get much of, if any, is human kindness, all the characters remaining, for us, and for the protagonist, barely more than ciphers.

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Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours: A Novel

by Luke B. Goebel

Experimental novel enthralls, confuses

I'm working through the stack of books I accumulated at AWP17. First up, this from Luke B. Goebel by way of the publisher FC2, a collective that specializes in non-traditional and experimental narratives.

Here, the stories are not so much linked as they are interconnected through repetition of sometimes nonsensical detail from a single narrative voice. This voice is in the tradition of the Beat novelists—drug-addled, non-linear, stream-of-consciousness. Out of the verbal chaos emerges a story of a lost love, the death of a beloved brother and the failure of literary ambition. In the spirit of the Beats, through it all weaves a song of America, from its rusty trailers and Native American peyote lodges to Manhattan galleries and bars.

A difficult read, but worth the effort.

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The Pier Falls: And Other Stories

by Mark Haddon

Genre trappings add flavour to literary collection

The stories in Mark Haddon's most recent collection are big: frequently long, centering on the subjects of death, mercy killing, violence, suicide and redemption. However much they yearn for connection, his protagonists, isolated emotionally ("Breathe", "The Weir") and physically ("The Island", "The Woodpecker and the Wolf", "The Boys Who Left Home to Learn Fear"), must concentrate on survival.

As such, these stories combine the deep observation of literary fiction with the action focus one typically associates with genre. Indeed, in his mission to spin a good yarn Haddon often utilizes genre-based forms—Victorian adventure/explorer accounts, Greek mythology, space narratives—that veer into the fantastical.

The genre trappings of some of the stories may be tired, but they lend the stories a sense of familiarity in which difficult truths may be plumbed. I'm reminded of the dictum that in stories stereotypes are never the problem. The problem is to get the stereotypes right.

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A successful failure

DRAWING A PICTURE OF AN ALASKA COMMUNITY
by Lucian Childs and Martha Amore.

When contemplating telling a story as large as that of Alaska’s LGBTQ community, we editors understood the anthology we set out to create would be a failure of a kind. No one book can fully describe the variety and depth of this community, nor indeed, of any community. However, as Alice Munro says, “The story fails but your faith in the importance of doing the story doesn’t fail.”

Over the course of the three-year project to create Building Fires in the Snow, we sustained our faith in the uniqueness of Alaska and the importance of telling its story through the LGBTQ experience. After sifting and editing the work, we can now see both a little more clearly. That “… despite my distance/and the tendency of light/over ice toward mirage,/some shape comes through/that both of us/can recognize.” So Elizabeth Bradfield describes the successful failure in one of the collected poems.

And what shapes there are to recognize! Through M.C. Mohagani Magnetek’s tragic-comic stories we get to stand in the life of a transgendered woman and witness how saucily she handles the daily abuse that comes her way. Through the stories of Alyse Knorr and Morgan Grey we experience the failure of love on both sides of the equation of a closeted relationship. Reading Lucian Childs’ tale of a mature married couple, we get to view gay unions beyond the prevailing script of promiscuity and bar life.  

Other tracks in which we place our own feet: Gabrielle Barnett’s fading southern queen, clinging to the homesteader’s dream; Rosemary McGuire’s innocent young fishermen, caught up in a tragic first love; Indra Arriaga’s passionate traveler, torn between past loves and landscapes, confusing “the sweet odor of night with the blue smell of snow about to fall in Alaska.” We follow these tracks into a queer literary space.

And yet, our queer voices describe thoughts and feelings everyone shares. Some would go so far as to say now that queer people have the freedom to simply be ourselves, like a butterfly who has abandoned its caterpillar skin, we’ve no need any longer for Queer Literature.

Perhaps, but the power of literature resides in specificity. Our queer lives, though they be similar to those of our straight neighbors, have particular stories to tell. Queer people yearn to see these representations on the printed page. Yet they remain a rarity.

That this is so speaks to the publishing bias against gay stories. In the current business environment, authors worry being branded a “gay writer” can stunt or even end a budding career. Some develop protective strategies that write around the issue of sexuality. They relegate gay characters to an ancillary or supportive status. Some poets choose gender-neutral second person address to a beloved. Or writers simply give in to publishing pressure and write straight material.

Anthologies such as Building Fires in the Snow are of vital importance if the stories of minority communities are to be told. Anthologies are uniquely positioned to span the breadth of these communities by having a wide range of voices, ethnicities, sexualities and genders. With the support of academic presses, they are freed from the “bottom line” exigencies of commercial publishing to open a window onto rarely-seen aspects of culture.

The result can be powerfully liberating. Anthologies such as ours foster communities of shared struggle and can catalyze political and social action. Or they can simply be a book one holds in one’s hands and finds, with deep pleasure, that one is not alone.

With the publishing of Building Fires in the Snow, our faith in Alaska and its LGBTQ community has been realized. That the collection is the first of its kind creates an expectation for it to represent all the varieties of queer experience in the state. Though this was our mission, we quickly understood the limitations under which we labored: the relatively small pool of queer material from LGBTQ and ally Alaskans, the number of people too busy with their own projects or not sufficiently ‘out’ to be published in a gay book.

In the end, just a quarter of our writers identify as people of color/bi-racial, none Alaska Native, and, like the bulk of our state’s residents, most of the works are set in urban areas. Within these limitations, we have carved out what success we can by taking a pointillist approach. As complex as the picture we’ve drawn, the shape you see of Alaska and its LGBTQ community is incomplete. We leave it to others to fill in all the dots.

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Reading my way to a gay life

“Today is the culmination of almost three years of work on the part of myself and my co-editor, Martha Amore. Building Fires in the Snow: A Collection of Alaska LGBTQ Short Fiction and Poetry has just been published by the University of Alaska Press.

To commemorate this day, I’d like to take a sentimental journey through some of the works of gay literature that have helped to shape me.

Being a gay boy in Texas in the 1960s was pretty bleak. I survived by reading. I poured through books in my room: Dickens for fun, the classics for prep school. There were no gay role models in those books. Still, entering the private lives of their characters, I felt less alone.

I came out in Austin, Texas at the age of twenty-six. It was 1975 and people had only just begun to use the gay bar’s front door instead of secreting in the back and disco hadn’t yet been invented. Neither I, or anybody else it seemed, had a clue how to be gay. We tried on new roles, using old ideas of masculinity: lumberjacks and cowboys. I wore a lot of flannel shirts in those days, but I also fell back on my old habit—reading. At last, I saw myself reflected in the gay books I read.

I was drawn to the sentimental romances popular at the time. After surviving the wasteland of my childhood, I yearned for the love described in melodramas such as The Frontrunner and the glitzy novels of Gordon Merrick.

Romantic yearning lead me to Mary Renault’s historical novels, The Charioteer and The Persian Boy. I inhaled them both, practically at a single sitting, imaging a dreamy Alexander the Great to be my lover.

I won’t be disingenuous. Though I was pining for love in Central Texas, I was also hounded by its doppelganger: sex. I greedily read John Rechy’s City of Night and Numbers, tales of hustlers and sexual athletes, not only for their prurient interest, but as a window into a world outside the comfortable one I’d always known in Texas.

In 1981, I made the journey to that world, one that many gay men had made before me. I filled a U-Haul and drove to San Francisco. The City was at the height of the party, when men reveled in the freedom so long denied them. It was not a time conducive to clarity. That yearning for true love was often waylaid by baser instincts and the literature we read reflected that.

Larry Kramer’s Faggots was a searing satire of the shallowness of the new gay culture with its worship of beauty, social status and money. The writers that followed marked a Golden Age of gay literature: Andrew Holleran, Edmund White, David Leavitt, Alan Hollinghurst and others.

Holleran’s The Dancer from the Dance devastated me with its poetic language and vivid celebration of New York and Fire Island gay life. This was the life I was, with some difficulty, attempting to navigate and to see it so artfully rendered was at once to ramp up the alienation I felt from it and to give me hope.

The prose in Edmund White’s earlier books thrilled me, but his 1982 release, A Boy’s Own Story, read as if it were my own biography: that of an alienated young man taking refuge in literature. It was a painful, but necessary read with its powerful depiction of shame and yearning, the primary feelings of my boyhood.

Other classics followed at a quick pace. The Lost Language of Cranes by David Leavitt. The Beautiful Room is Empty by Edmund White. The Swimming Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst. These coming-of-age stories paralleled my life in San Francisco with its challenge to create an authentic life while subject to the tidal forces of sex and the social mores of the new gay culture. My life was a string of words on each page: the varieties of sex one had at one’s disposal, the entanglements they brought, the joy and the confusion.

As my time in San Francisco came to an end, this deluge of classic gay fiction seem to ebb. At least for me. Holleran, White, Leavitt, and Hollinghurst continued to chronicle gay life in New York, Paris and London. But in 1992, as I packed my Honda and prepared to drive up the ALCAN to a new beginning with my partner in Alaska, that life had lost its relevance.

My reading of fiction slowed to a trickle with infrequent dips into work by Michael Cunningham, Colm Tóibín and others. It wasn’t until 2005 that I began to read in earnest again. That year, The New Yorker published a story that changed my life. It didn’t describe fabulous nightlife, beautiful men, drugs, or the pursuit of gay sex and bold experience. It was a cramped tale, of longing and denial. Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain woke in me the need to read deeply again, and to write.

Now, eleven years later, I and my co-editor, Martha Amore, have brought all this reading to bear in crafting the anthology, Building Fires in the Snow. It collects for the first time the stories and poems of twenty-six contributors to open a window onto the lives LGBTQ Alaskans.

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Writing and nostalgia

“He says, narrative is the aftermath of violent events. It is a means of reconciling yourself with the past. He says, the violence in the Odyssey is a story told afterwards, in a cave.—Rachel Cusk, "Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation"

I find it difficult to write about the present day. Specifically, it’s been hard for me to write about my life in Alaska, a place I’ve lived in for over twenty-five years. My childhood in Dallas, sure. My young adult years in North Carolina, Austin and San Francisco, no problem. But of my time in Alaska, barely a word.

Recently, there seems to be hope. I’m finishing an Alaska story now and have two coming out next month in the anthology I’ve edited with Martha Amore, Building Fires in the Snow. (More on that later.)

 Still, why has it been so hard to describe what has been in front of my face for so long?

Because, I’ve come to believe, writing for me is a nostalgic act. Nostalgia, from the Greek álgos, meaning pain and nóstos, the word Homer used to describe Odysseus’s yearning for and difficult journey home.

For the past eight years, I’ve had two homes, going back and forth between Anchorage and Toronto. It’s been thrilling to have two apartments, two sets of friends, two great cities to work and play in.

There’s a hitch, though. When I’m in one place, it’s not long before I begin to miss the other. I feel in-between. It’s a tough place. Like the old comedy line says, “How can you be in two places at once, when you’re not anywhere at all?”

Psychologists call this “liminality” from limen, Latin for “threshold.” It’s thrilling, yes, but also terrifying. On the doorsill of a paradigm shift, we are in the place of pure potentiality, where the rituals and realities that once buoyed us are no longer meaningful and where anything goes.

Turns out, as unsettling as this intermediate place can be, it is also the perfect place for the artist. From the vantage point of the threshold, we writers have a kind of double vision, contemplating our present (and the presents yet to come) using the only reference we have, our past.

“To tell a story,” Elena Ferrante, the pseudonymous Italian novelist writes in The Days of Abandonment, “you need first of all a measuring stick, a calendar, you have to calculate how much time has passed between you and the facts...”

Calculating this temporal distance in order to plumb its depths brings on another kind of double vision, the simultaneous experience of joy and sorrow. Like Marcel Proust taking the first bite of the madeleine in In Search of Lost Time, there is a palpable joy in a remembered life, along with a sorrow for being irrevocably displaced from it.

Brazilians have a word for this that defies proper translation: saudade. The Portuguese mariners who discovered that country must have felt it when they set sail from Lisbon, knowing they would almost surely never return. And homesick and stranded on the shore of their new world, they longed to feel the past’s visceral presence.

As that obsessive chronicler of his past, Karl Ove Knaugaard, says in A Time for Everything, “in reality there is only one time…. One single second, one single landscape, in which what happens activates and deactivates what has already happened in endless chain reactions…” Proust eats a little cake dipped in tea and, as if it were a magical potion, the long-forgotten city of his childhood rises up like a stage set where In Search of Lost Time will be performed.

We writers use every magic potion at our disposal; chiefly, we string words together in order to return to the places in our past. “That is what writing is about,” Knaugaard says in his epic work, My Struggle. “Not what happens there, not what actions are played out there, but the there itself. There, that is writing’s location and aim.”

In order to return “there,” I’ve been cannibalizing my past to create fiction. My personal stories are cobbled together and refracted in these fictions I tell of Dallas, Austin and San Francisco. Why? It’s what I know, of course. But also there is a joy in creating an impression of return. Not to the past itself; that’s unattainable. For as Proust reminds us, “Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.” Yet painful as this remembrance might be, like the Portuguese mariner who yearns for the home he’ll never see again, I long to go back. I write stories.

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After the soufflé falls

Some thoughts on revision with quotes from “Mrs. Dalloway” by Virginia Wolf

“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”

Call me Clarissa. I like to give a good dinner party. I like a smart table full of good food, conversation and laughs.

What are the elements of a successful dinner party? Setting, a beautifully appointed table. Characters, having the right mix of personalities. Dialog, people skilled at repartee and anecdote. Action over time. Timing when each dish should be served. Sound familiar? These are also the elements of a good story.

Like Virginia Wolf’s Clarissa Dalloway, I plan dinner parties obsessively. My partner and I pour through recipes and audition them in what we jokingly call our “test kitchen.” We make a list of ingredients and, like her, scurry around town acquiring them. This kind of fastidiousness is great for meal planning, but it’s a terrible way to begin a story. In writing, E. L. Doctorow reminds us, “You start from nothing.”

But preparing a meal without knowing what we’re cooking makes us crazy, so we plan our recipes anyway. But what if that recipe isn’t a map, but just one set of possibilities? What if, when we get into the kitchen, we decide to use curry in the dish instead of pesto, as we’d planned, or instead of our protagonist mutely plodding to work, we turn him into a cockroach? We don’t have to throw out our recipes entirely; we’ve worked too hard on them for that. But the way we navigate through them should be governed by serendipity.

“The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames.”

Know this, all you Clarissas out there. Your soufflé will fall. To pull off a soufflé requires delicacy and skill. Locating the heart of your story requires the same. You will fail at both. Repeatedly.

What do you do when your story deflates into a mush in the oven? Go back to your list of ingredients you bought for the meal. The shorter the list, the better. Constraints limit your opportunity to paint yourself into a corner.

Because clearly the soufflé isn’t working for you, ask yourself what elements already present in your story can you use to create an entirely new dish? Here are some suggestions:

·      Fiction is told through action. Our characters have to interact with externals (a thing, a person.) What externals are already present in your story? Can you use them in a different manner to propel the action?

·      Ask yourself again, what does your protagonist really want and why can’t she get it? Go ahead, amp up the obstacles, but let her character reveal itself in a way you didn’t expect.

·      Which story elements in the original are essential and require your sustained commitment? If you’ve added four tablespoons of chili to the sauce back in Chapter One, there’s really no turning back. Everything else you do must support that decision.

“Cleverness was silly. One must say simply what one felt.”

Here’s something Mrs. Dalloway knows: sometimes a basic salad is best. Throw away your trickery. I know you want to write a story with a complex time signature. I know you’ve plotted your characters’ personal histories back six generations. But really, some baby kale, and a little vinegar and oil are all you need.

Don’t pile on the spices either. Experiment with new combinations of ingredients already in your story. What happens if the young protagonist doesn’t reconcile with her father? What happens if a character barely mentioned in an early draft becomes a central flavor?

Simplify the timing of the courses. Information served too heavily or too quickly overwhelms the reader’s ability to directly experience the story, the chief joy of fiction. Look at your rate of reveal. Ask yourself, what does the reader need to know and when does she need to know it?

“Life stands still here.”

So, you’ve got a bunch of people in the other room waiting to be fed. You’ve got these ingredients in your story that aren’t quite congealing. How to move forward without a recipe?

• Slow down. Let the elements in your story speak to you. Trust your subconscious. Subconscious: what a word! It scrubs the magic out of what happens when we abandon our plans and rely on our intuition.

• Refine your sentences. Layer them with specificity. Let them drive you into the heart of the matter. As Annie Proulx says, “Carefully constructed sentences cast a tint of indefinable substance over a story.”

• Reduce the sauce. Let go of your pre-writing and backstory work. Thicken your understanding of your character and her predicament by letting go of what you think you know about her.

“Mrs. Dalloway is always giving parties to cover the silence.”

The end of a dinner party is always tricky. When will that silence come, after which the guests begin to shyly signal their partners it’s time to head home? Finding the end of a story is even trickier. It’s a moment of extreme delicacy that should surprise both you and the reader. I don’t believe you can find it through planning. If you get out of the way, though, you can bring your ingredients to a deep conclusion and, like the first guest who takes his napkin from his lap and pushes his chair from the table, everybody will know it’s time to go.

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Vetting and Submitting

Okay, so you’ve used your prompts and followed your sentences; you’ve harnessed the power of objects. Now you have a story you think is good, but you aren’t sure. What’s next?

CRITICISM

Inevitably, most of us turn to other writers when we need feedback about our work, either seeking them out individually or by joining writing or critique groups.

What is the proper attitude to receiving criticism in an endeavor that chases excellence in the absence of right and wrong? Trust your subconscious, a mentor once told me, but that hardly seems enough. There is gut and there is craft.

I used to study Zen and one day in the meditation hall the teacher yelled, “Don’t seek from others!” I think he meant that, though we are inevitably affected by others, we shouldn’t be swayed. As writers, we should listen, but shouldn’t tamp out every flicker of criticism we’re given. In doing so, we can easily lose our way.

We need to have healthy egos, to believe in our talent and our work. How else could we begin to string words together or find our stories? How do we cultivate that ego, but not fall into defensiveness? Of which I am guilty as charged. Just ask anybody in my writers groups.

My last critique, I came to one of my writers groups expecting my usual flogging, which I got, but this time I didn’t say a word. (Okay, one time I did make a telling hand gesture. I’m not perfect.) What happened was interesting: A lively discussion. The writers in this group are smart. They’ve wrestled with aspects of writing that I haven’t even heard of. By just listening, I came to feel this deep discussion about the elements of fiction was not so much a mark of the wrongness of the piece, but of its potential. What of their criticisms will I use? I’m still wrestling with that.

Maybe my Zen teacher was right. I’d like to find out. I’ve decided to apply for a one-month residency next summer. I want to write for once without my hat in hand. Until then, it’s like the joke Woody Allen tells at the end of “Annie Hall.”

This guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, “Doc, uh, my brother’s crazy. He thinks he’s a chicken.” And, uh, the doctor says, “Well, why don’t you turn him in?” And the guy says, “I would, but I need the eggs.” 

SUBMITTING

Now your story is polished like a diamond. You’re ready to see it in print. Paper or digital, you don’t care. You just want that byline.

It’s time to switch hats. We writers don’t like being business persons, marketing our wares door to door. Like it or not, get ready to have them slammed in your face.

As a short story writer, I submit often. That means many rejections with arcane language like “this piece is not for us,” or “we regret that it does not meet our present needs,” or “unfortunately it was not a right fit.” I enter the rejection in my spreadsheet, patiently waiting for the next. 

Which brings us to the mechanics of submitting. I’m talking about submitting short stories, but much of it, I suspect, could be applied to other types of writing.

1. THE RULE OF 100 – You have to submit your story to 100 publications before it gets picked up. It’s best to tier your submissions in groups of 25 to 30, sending them to the better journals first.

2. IDENTIFYING PUBLICATIONS 

— Make lists: Look at the contributors’ bios in publications you think might be a good match. You’ll see publications that come up repeatedly. These are good bets.

— Use the Internet: Most people I know use Duotrope. It’s free. You can search for genre, word count, subject and find information on the resulting journals such as publication frequency, reading period and response time. You’ll also find links to submission guidelines.

Poets and Writers and New Pages also have lists of publications although their search capabilities aren’t very robust.

If you can spend some coin, try the Writers Market. Their web site, a companion to the print publication, features a searchable database.

— Use a submission service: For some serious coinage, try a service like Writer’s Relief. I’ve found them personable and helpful. They can proofread your piece, select publications and print cover letters and labels. You need to do the legwork, but if you have the budget, this can be a great way to build a publication database and history. As you become knowledgeable about the process, take ownership of your submissions—give them options where and where not to submit your work. Success is your responsibility, but they can assist you.

3. WAIT – Response times vary from three to eight months. Sometimes up to a year. Add this to the up to eight months before it’s published and the eight months it took to write the piece. That can be two years from when you began to when you see the piece in print. By then, it’s almost an archeological artifact. You’re a completely different writer.

4. POP THE CORK – Toast yourself, do a little dance, then get back to the piece you’re currently wrestling with. It’s the only one that matters.

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Write what you don’t know

Among the things writers are told, there are two seemingly universal laws. Show, Don’t Tell. Write What You Know. It’s hard to imagine a piece of fiction where the first doesn’t apply, but I’ve never seen much point in the second.

Personal experience is always lurking in the stories I tell, but as vocabulary, not as the main event. The point of writing narrative fiction isn’t to answer unresolved personal questions or discover deeply buried personal truths. John Updike again: “I believe that narratives should not be primarily packages for psychological insight, though they can contain them, like raisins in a bun. But the substance is the dough which feeds the storytelling appetite, the appetite for motion, for suspense, for resolution.”

In other words, just tell us a story please where one thing happens and then the next, that leads us somewhere.

Writing stories from personal experience is easier, I’ll grant you that. We understand the connective tissue between events, our characters’ tics. How do we achieve this organic quality in a story we don’t already know?

The answer isn’t in your life, in research, in story prep, although all that can help. The answer is on the page. Nancy Zafris, my teacher for the last two summers at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, says, “Follow your sentences to an end you don’t know.” This isn’t a magical formula, although there is magic when you end your story and say, “How’d I do that?”

The main practice again: What’s the next sentence? This is harder than you think. You have to set your agendas aside. Each sentence must grow out of the preceding one. Character, dialog and action are revealed to you along the way. You have to trust your subconscious. It’s like daydreaming on the page.

How to jumpstart this process? Here are some techniques Nancy taught us.

1. Collect sentences. Use a set of notecards bound on a metal ring. Wear it on a lanyard around your neck. Fill it with sentences you hear during your day. (The technologically minded can use their smart phones.) When you get stuck, when your characters aren’t speaking to each other in unexpected ways, go to your found sentences. Find something that surprises you. Throw your characters a curve ball.
   

2. Write a story to a first, middle or last sentence. Go to your found sentences or collect others from the news, from an instructional manual. Anything. Find sentences that speak to character, that require a response. Writing within a box grounds you in an amorphous process that can be unsettling. You don’t have to make everything up. Let these sentences do some of the work.
   

3. Speaking of boxes, get one. Fill it with stuff, with sentences from your bank. Ask friends to contribute. This summer, my box contained a blue plastic swim cap, the sentences, “He treated everyone with arrogance and condescension,” “Save room for Jesus,” and “Silly boy, Jeeps are for girls.” The last item: a box of three spent bullet cartridges and one live one. Those bullets wrote the whole story for me, with the help of the rest.
   

4. Write to a prop. Use the power of objects to reveal the progress of your protagonist’s innermost story. My first year at Kenyon, Nancy tossed me a beach ball with Shrek and the Donkey printed on it. That was a fun one!
   

5. Analyze a story structure and copy it. Last year we were assigned a triangle story: three characters, seven sections. In the first section, Character A tells a story set in the past when he meets Character C. I started: It’s hard to believe I was so crazy then. By following this sentence and schema, voice and character revealed themselves. In the end, I had a complete story, one that has changed very little from the first draft. Was my personal experience part of it? Sure, but, filtered through the prism of character, structure and setting, it split into a rainbow—a story not my own.
   

6. Tell a story with a secret. Any will do. If you need help, there’s an excellent book we used in the workshop, “A Lifetime of Secrets: A Postsecret Book” by Frank Warren. This year I chose, I buy antique pictures because it makes me feel like I have a family. I started with one of my found sentences which brought a character to mind. I kept writing the next sentence. Whenever I got stuck, I went to my sentence bank and found something revelatory or unexpected. I wrote it down. The result: A story plucked from thin air that I’ll submit next month.

You can find other useful techniques for kickstarting your stories by searching online for writing prompt sites. There’s even an iPhone app. Writing to prompts, while letting your sentences guide you, is a powerful tool that can help you write the stories you don’t know.

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The Power of Objects

I think we can take as a given that the story we appear to be telling is just the vehicle for the “real” story we tell. Many people have said the same. This secret is the story’s engine: Your character’s hidden flaw, an ideal that drives her, some event which she must acknowledge, resolve or deny.

Stories ration out this secret or “bottom” story, repeatedly salting the plot with clues. For me, this balancing act is one of the most difficult things about writing fiction. Nancy Zafris echoes this, saying, “It’s a kind of dance—how much to reveal, when you are saying too much.” One thing is for sure, by the end of the story, it’s all about the secret. The what-happens-next more or less falls away.

Lead is turned to gold. The alchemists understood the transformative power of objects; we writers should as well. This may be an old-fashioned way to look at crafting stories, but objects are both the catalyst for and markers of this change. 

It could be a physical object. A wooden leg, say. A father’s ghost. A white whale. A child’s sled.

It could be a process. I once wrote a story about a woman who sees her life as a mathematical equation that needs solving.

It could be a place we are returning to. Our childhood home. The Cracks of Doom.

A journey. Riding horseback into Mexico after your parents die. Making a pilgrimage to Canterbury. Rafting the Mississippi.

An event. Witnessing a rape and falsely identifying the assailant.

Whatever it is, the telling object bridges the plot, the seeming story, with the secret story our character must resolve or refuse. They do that because they exist both in the material plane where we situate our stories and the emotional world where our characters live. We humans attach to objects because they elicit feelings in us.

Objects in fiction are more than simple metaphorical equations. There are a host of emotions triggered by them. Proust bites into a plump little cake and seven volumes of reminiscences ensue.

T. S. Eliot put it like this, “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding ... a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events ... such that when the external facts ... are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.” It is the way we’re hardwired. 

Because of this, there’s a marvelous economy telling a story through objects. They can say things words only hint at. Through it the bottom story leaps off the page and strikes the reader or, in the case of movies, the viewer, resolving everything, explaining nothing. 

Ironic spoiler alert! When we arrive at that image of the sled at the end of the film “Citizen Kane,” we understand Charles Foster Kane; everything that came before makes sense in a can’t-quite-put-my-finger-on-it kind of way. The power of an effective object in storytelling lies in its unexpectedness. And its inevitability. When we understand the sled’s power over Kane, we can’t imagine his sad story going any other way.

You can’t plan a character’s object. You might get away with planning her disposition, her looks, her manner of speaking, but I’ve found the object to be slippery. It must be earned. It isn’t some hackneyed Hallmark equivalency.

As I whack my way through the what-happens-next, it isn’t very clear to me what the story is about. The protagonist (I’m mostly talking about the protagonist here, although other characters should have their telling objects too) is shifting and the object along with her. In that story I wrote about the woman who thinks of her life as math, for a long while the object wasn’t a formula, but Mission figs, then mud pies. After more than a year, I think I finally got it right, though I still have some doubts.

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Why I write shorts stories

The writers I meet in Alaska are a varied lot: people writing memoir, creative nonfiction of all types, novelists. But short story writers? There are few. I’ve had to wonder what it is about short fiction that seems right to me and why I persist in writing it.

When I started, my reasons were mostly practical. I had plucked out of thin air the notion that this was where you begin. You master the short form and move on to the real work: Writing novels. Writing short fiction was, and still is, more in sync with my too busy life. Plus, let’s face it, I’m impatient. Why slog away for years on a novel to have it wither in some box in the back of my closet?

In this I found some solace from one of my heroes, Alice Munro. She says, “I never intended to be a short story writer. I started writing them because I didn’t have time to write anything else—I had three children. And then I got used to writing stories, so I saw my material that way, and I don’t think I’ll ever write a novel.”

What is “that way”? Is telling a short story all that different from a novel or is it just a matter of degree?

I’m attracted to the 19th century French idea of the flâneur, the peripatetic observer of urban life who seeks to merge with the myriad things by wandering through them. I like to think of this walker passing by an open window and looking in on a domestic scene, trying to understand the essential truth of it from the scant evidence at hand: The way the father braces his back as he bends to light the gas fireplace, the way the mother looks anxiously toward the disaffected daughter shuffling through the opening door.

Some of my novelist friends, no doubt, would go on to describe the house’s other rooms and occupants; some the neighborhood, the city in which the family lived. My genre pals would shoot them into outer space for a little extraterrestrial mayhem. The short story writer, though, is content to describe the small actions spied in the window, to pry out the single crystallizing event, that one thing that reveals a life. Then, like the flâneur, she moves to the next open window. Not for lack of imagination, but because this single event is enough.

John Cheever, another master of the form, wrote, “So long as we are possessed by experience that is distinguished by its intensity and its episodic nature, we will have the short story.” Our life is revealed to us in sequences of discrete moments, each sequence like a short story: The time we injured our back and lost our job, the winter we discovered our daughter smoking pot, our sophomore year in high school when everything seemed drab.

I used to study Zen Buddhism. One of my teachers said, “Pick up one thing and the rest of the world comes with it.” Flannery O’Connor, arguably the patron saint of American short story writing, said much the same thing, "The longer you look at one object, the more of the world you see in it." The short story shares this ability with all forms of storytelling, but, I believe, the effect is starker for concentrating on that one thing. Much is left unsaid, unexplained. So long as we are thoroughly grounded in character and place, in implication the moment comes alive.

Dramatically too, the short story appeals to me. I’ve always liked Roman candles, a simple stick, a single glowing ball that arcs in a luminous moment then disappears. Alice Munro again: “There’s a kind of tension that if I’m getting a story right I can feel right away. I kind of want a moment that’s explosive, and I want everything gathered into that.”

Call me feebleminded, but I’ve come to prefer the singularity of effect so evident in short fiction where that one explosive moment ripples through the story out into my life. There is an immediacy to it: I’m the father lighting the fire, the anxious mother, the petulant daughter. This puts an onus on the writer of short stories. We can’t gab our way out when we’ve painted ourselves into trouble; we can’t hypnotize the reader with interesting diversions or annotate the historical context. The short story, like the Roman candle, is arching toward its ending right from the start. For a short story writer, this is the cause of much consternation, but also exhilaration. While there are so many ways to go wrong, there is also no place to hide.

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