New Short Stories

I have written short stories using many methods. I have  storyboarded, I have read McKee and followed his strategy, taken workshops, given workshops, returned to school, created an e-zine. I have winged it, writing my way into a strange world until it became familiar,  toyed with various endings, strategies, characters, possibilities until one struggles to the top or peers out at me from the edge, tugs at my hem. Pick me, pick me! I’m the real deal, an original, I will make you laugh, I promise, I will thrill you. This is what the story promises me and we writers live for those moments when the beast has been wrestled to the ground because no matter how I do it,  it is always hard to manage. Characters taunt me and try to withhold what they know. So often I stop, restless irritable, discontent with my own work, skills, imagination.

In the end I think all we can do is write and although that sounds like a dodge, it really isn’t, in fact it is the only thing that is not a dodge. Sometimes I have to write like a banshee just to get one lame idea, day after day I write myself into a familiar corner but then, inevitably the work moves in its cocoon and somewhere a fully formed limb begins to emerge, wet and shaky. If I follow the limb I get to the body, the thick of the story then move from top to bottom somehow.

This time around the story I began has turned into two stories so I am getting a bonus.  What a thrill  – and I bank this against the times when all I can do is drag my sorry shaken ass back to the dreaded screen and stare helplessly after getting distracted by ebay, other blogs, email. So what I can offer by way of advice is to set a mental timer and tell yourself –  just one hour – you just have to write until 11:15 (or whenever) and then you can stop – but you have to write no matter what drivel you serve up.

Sooner or later the magic will hit and the subconscious will deliver – but for me, the slog is essential most of the time. If this were easy everyone would do it.

I like to read books in groups and finish them at the same time, more or less. Here’s what I’m reading now.

Dave Goodis – The Blonde on the Street Corner – classic bleak, simple noir without murder – written in 1954.

Martin Amis – House of Meetings – Fine bleak (but very accessible) literary fiction with deadly cynical observations and insights into dark corners of the human psyche. I love his grim merciless humor. Set in and around the Soviet gulag.

Megan Abbott – Die a Little – a new fabulous find – stylish and seamy – gorgeous observations – literary noir about vulnerable women in the 1950’s – unsentimental.