Wild In The Street Writing Novels - Shaggy Dogs and IMs and Obsessions

 Kevin Chong wants you to write about what you're obsessed with

What advice would you give an aspiring writer who is thinking about entering this year's CBC Short Story Prize?

First off, just get something on the page. You're not going to be Alice Munro in your first draft. You're not going to be Alice Munro ever, but it's going to get better once you get something on the page and you write it and think through it.

And secondly, write about what obsesses you. Write about what scares you. Write in a way that's audacious.

I do not know whether I write in an audacious way; it seems just being able to write nowadays is audacity enough. 

Lincoln Michel provokes me to think about my writing, so I read him and I learn. His The Novel as Shaggy Dog Joke: On Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine and novels whose pleasures are in denying our expectations makes me wish I had time to read The Mezzanine. From what I read the novel sounds audacious both in construction and in the effort to be humorous.

Many writers have compared short story writing to joke telling before. Short stories often, in a certain light, function like jokes. We except both to end in an “inevitable yet surprising” way, whether punchline or epiphany. In my own reread of The Mezzanine I couldn’t help but thinking how much I admire novels that essentially function like a very particular type of joke: the shaggy dog joke.

If you’re not familiar with a shaggy dog joke, the gist is they take the form of a joke yet deny the expected punchline for as long as possible by stretching out the set-up. There’s typically still a punchline, often of a groaner variety. Although sometimes the punchline is that there is no punchline. Either way, the pleasure is not in the punchline—the joke part of the joke—but rather in the telling. It’s the journey, not the destination, maaaaan.

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Some readers will find these novels “pretentious” or “gimmicky,” claiming the authors are just showing off what they can do. Well, so what? Why shouldn’t authors show off what they can do and try to push their artform as much as possible?

It reminds me of some life advice I got once—and which I’ve been mulling over for many years since—when I was feeling forlorn after a hard day at work and the usual depressing state of the world, and I decided to drink my worries away at a local dive bar down the street, where I happened to strike up a conversation with an old man who was grumbling over a glass of whiskey and holding a leash attached to the absolute shaggiest dog I had ever seen…. 

I do not do Reddit or Slack; I did Yahoo Chat back in the day to my detriment. This leaves me a bit (or more) clueless about using IMs in an epistolary way. The Cleveland Review of Books introduced me to this idea in Michael Colbert's review essay, Looking for Gauraa in “Notes”. Mr. Colbert and I share the same entry point for epistolary novels: Dracula. He also describes how it has been applied to this new way of corresponding with one another, and how Guattaa extended its use:

As the modes of modern communication have evolved, so too has the epistolary novel. In Calvin Kasulke’s Several People Are Typing, an employee at a New York public relations firm is one day uploaded into the company’s Slack channel. Samantha Allen’s Patricia Wants to Cuddle intersperses the rotating third-person perspective with letters, blog posts, and the equivalent of subreddits to reconstitute the story of a female Sasquatch disrupting filming of The Catch, a Bachelor send-up, on a remote island off the coast of Washington. Where these contemporary novels use IMs and message boards to dramatize characters working together to figure out what is going on in real time, the form of Notes feels both haunted and understated. These notes were never intended for an outsider’s consumption. The reader picks up the narrator’s iPhone and snoops through the thoughts that the narrator is carrying, processing, and using to make sense of the world for herself. As a result, the voice is abundant. Narrating her life to only herself, she shares so much more. 

December 23, 2018 10:40 PM

held myself back from texting “i miss you” am i finally guarded now

The text often reads in this free-flowing manner of auto-narration, and the stylization—the time stamps and lowercase letters and flexible punctuation—confer an additional intimacy. This is the unedited version of the character’s musings on her life, and we are so privileged as to view it. In this way, Notes remixes the diaried epistolary with the off-the-cuff style of Slack and Reddit posts. The book becomes an act of construction. For the narrator, the act of writing these notes provides her with a way of processing life in New York within this small writing community. Her sense of the world is condensed. 

And extends further into what did:

Novels narrated through IMs or letters can manipulate the space between messages, relying on the reader to intuit the gap between what someone might be feeling and what they might be saying. But the self-recording notes in real time—as opposed to sharing a final account in a diary entry the next day—offers something more: spontaneous insight into how one feels and how their understanding of the event can transform over the course of a night or a conversation. Were the novel composed in diary entries, this spontaneity of thought would likely be dialed down. Recollecting the occurrences of her life post hoc, the narrator might have already processed the events of the evening prior to writing, the minute details that capture her attention might not be worthy of transcribing the following day, and what is written is a more final account—the complete diary entry—as opposed to a note on a cell phone, which can be appended or struck through, as she does throughout the book. It’s process instead of product. We witness the action, its contemplation beforehand, and the interpretation after.

I can see its uses only Reddit is too far from my experience to know how to implement it.

I may be old and so is this song, but is it any less true, any less a call to arms?

I think we are only limited by our imaginations. Go wild.

sch 2/3