Writing: Short Story Advice

 I remain uncertain about my talents at writing short stories. Shambling and rambling fits me better, and that is a novel, not a short story. Still, I am trying to improve. 

YouTube videos are my main source of help nowadays. 

This I wished moved a bit slower, but his points seem good. I am on transitional moments right now, and this has me wondering if there is my great failure.

Something to encourage, a more general thinking about the craft of short story:

 It may well be that I am right and my stories just suck.

That would be my characters, since I think the stories are about my characters.

I hear some overlap between the following video and the first (and not just because they come from the same source):

When I listen to these videos, I keep flashing to my own stories. Did I do this with Theresa Pressley? Did I make her clearly having a conflict? Yes, I think so.

Now that the problems with my dad's trust have been resolved, I need to get back to something else proving my mediocrity. So, more writing.

sch 6/18

Getting caught up on my email, I found Less Matters More: Joanna Walsh on the Expansive Possibilities of the Short Story in a slightly less than fresh  Literary Hub newsletter. Here are some thought of hers I found significant.

Now we furnish with IKEA: flatpack, convenient, able to be set up anywhere, able to furnish a room in the way of Swift’s short conversations. When everything is flatpack, everything is surface, surfaces that can be put together to create an illusion of volume. In a small space, the short story writer needs to be able to use surfaces. These are the surfaces of language. Inverting the object-oriented society that Swift describes, short story writers trade in illusion.

Writers of short stories furnish small spaces—not ten-room apartments—with immateriality that, fragmented, creates the illusion of volume. The fragment has been a thing ever since around the time Swift was writing, when rich Northern Europeans started touring the Mediterranean in search of encounters with leftover fragments of the classical world, the “Grand Tour,” an experience that Gulliver’s Travels pastiches.

My "Dead and Dying" stories were not about illusion, but about the real world consequences of economics. I had in mind a sociological study - I went very far with this concept in one story. No editor has liked them. Illusion comes easy in many ways, I liked sleight-of-hand as a kid, but there is stiffness in my mind when it came to my short stories,

The space issue has always troubled me - there is always more circling around the events of a story. I cannot shut out that "more stuff" when I am writing a story.

Who are the short story writers, these traders in fragments: the grand tourists, or the inhabitants of fragmented landscapes building pillars into single-room apartments to be furnished with flatpack furniture? Or either, likely either. Or both, which is either’s opposite. In any case their fragmented material conveys hope and memory. Because the memory of these fragments is always created, as a matter of reconstruction. And creation is always hope.

Fragments - even those I see as part of something larger. I am not helping myself, am I?

 Having been a tenant all my life, this did get through my thick skull:

Short stories are for tenants, those who are aware that they are in a holding space. The short story writer doesn’t have to build and doesn’t have to respect the architect’s intentions. That’s because language isn’t really an exchange of objects, only their surfaces.

Maybe this last remodeling of "Theresa Pressley" does lean towards this territory - but it is closer to novella length!

This paragraph gobsmacked me, I am not sure what to do with it, but I feel that it points me in a direction I need to go.

As writing becomes more portable, we have become less so. Now we work from home on our flatpack furniture. Wherever we are, we work “remotely,” always ready to move but never moving. The short story used to be fable, then anecdote. Now it’s something else. The short story is a reconfigurable, expansive surface of the immaterial material, of hope and memory, that is always bigger than the small room that only appears to contain it. It is a way of questioning spaces and the things in it, which is a way of questioning the distribution of space and those things, which is a way of questioning the distribution of language: what matter who’s speaking? It is a question.

Gone by Stetson Ray won first place in  On the Premises's writing contest. Vanity tells me my prose is as good, then it gets humbled by the story's invention and the dread rising with every sentence, then every paragraph. Then there is the imagining of the quotidian concerns when people just start disappearing. Then tension dialing down until the story hits the brick wall of its ending. Bravo!

sch 6/18 

 Wanting to see a writer lay out their writing process? Then read Alternative Facts (Necessary Fiction)

sch 6/22