What do you think a good short story collection should deliver?
A good story
collection isn’t anything as tidy as a box of chocolates; it’s more like a
variety pack of fireworks. Sure, you recognize them all as fireworks, made at
the same factory with similar techniques, and they essentially just shoot into
the sky as you would expect. Even though you know they are made to explode, the
explosions still thrill and shock you a little. Yet they leave their most
powerful impression not at that moment of bursting but in the aftermath, as the
burning shards fall toward you and then disappear. When you close your eyes,
you can see their silhouettes.
But in
addition to that variety there should be some common ground, a larger overall
impression that the stories work collectively to create. A good story
collection may have greater and lesser stories, but each story will be
essential to the overall impression. Common threads, however slender, should
run from one story to another. One story might extend, reinterpret or
contradict the circumstances or thematic implications of another, so that the
unity of impression each story creates becomes challenged, supplemented,
complicated by the impressions of the stories surrounding it. Ideally, if you
read a story in the context of its collection, it will leave a different
impression than if you read it on its own. Otherwise, what’s the point of
putting the stories together at all? This can’t be just an exercise of vanity
or convenience.
Which story in your collection posed the
most technical problems?
The title
story, which is structured in two columns of scenes that run simultaneously and
unbroken by section breaks, posed the most technical challenges of any story
I’ve written so far. It’s set in a small home on a single night when a family
of three tries to cope with an industrial accident that has left the father
maimed, volatile, and very isolated. The father’s perspective fills one column
while the son’s fills the other. When they hear the same noises or come
together in scene, those lines have to synch up in time side by side on the
page. This meant that if I added or subtracted a line from one column, I had to
adjust the other accordingly – and these adjustments went on through every revision
and every typesetting.
This may
seem a silly way to go about writing a story, but to me the form was essential
to the story and ideas I wanted to convey. We all know that two characters will
experience and narrate the same events in very different ways; it doesn’t take
a two-columned story to show that. What I wanted to do was lay bare the
isolation inherent in the fact that we may never view even small aspects of the
world in precisely the same way as anyone else. And even when we do share true moments of common
perspective, other factors often conspire to keep us from realizing it.
It seems to
me that language, art, culture, and intimacy have been our typical means of piercing
that isolation and connecting us with others. Yet in our time technological
devices have altered, and some might say degraded, those means of connection.
Though they’re often thrilling and useful, our TVs and computers, video games
and smartphones have splintered our experience of time and space, tempting and
distracting us with escape hatches from every face-to-face interaction. Worst
of all, they make ordinary real-time life seem awfully dull in comparison to
the dazzling worlds we find on our little screens.
Proust said
it was the writer’s job to tell the truth about time. It seemed to me that it
might take a splintered story to tell the truth about how we are living in this
time.
