David Atkinson on Not Quite So Stories and Just So Stories

In the second in a series of posts on 2016 books entered for The Story Prize, David S. Atkinson, author of Not Quite So Stories (Literary Wanderlust), explains how Rudyard Kipling's book did and didn't influence his own.

My story collection Not Quite So Stories has at its heart a certain conversation with Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories. Although, the book didn't actually start out that way. At first, I found myself writing a few stories that were primarily realistic but had at their core something utterly absurd. I had no idea what I was going to do with them, but they were too fun not to write. When I found the work of authors like Etgar Keret and Amelia Gray, I realized that these kind of stories really could work. Not only did I see even more possibilities, it looked like someone might actually care enough about stories like that to read them. Things were taking off.

Rudyard Kipling: Paternalistic?

However, it was only when I thought back to Just So Stories that Not Quite So Stories really started to take shape. I thought about these slightly odd stories I was doing in the context of myth, how it's often seen as an attempt to explain the world. Just So Stories is kind of like that, but highly simplified, pretty much for children. Many of Kipling's stories in that book can be seen as colonialist, or at least paternalistic. The camel? Cursed for refusing to work for man, but what reason did the camel have to work for man? It felt like trying to reduce life to too little, sucking the magic out of the world. I mean, I don't want to explain life. I think it's impossible anyway, but would rather revel in the wonder of it all regardless.

And that's the approach I started taking with my stories. Life is absurd. We aren't going to make sense out of it. Who we are is how we deal with all that, and everything else. In a way, I was somewhat thumbing my nose at Kipling, though I still have a fondness from childhood for his stories. Whether I'm right or not, or whether it's even the sort of thing one can be right about, it was an interesting avenue to contemplate and write stories along.

The result was Not Quite So Stories, and beyond admitting to the existence of the Kipling conversation, my book will have to speak for itself.

Where David S. Atkinson Gets His Ideas

In the third in a series of posts on 2013 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, David S. Atkinson, author of Bones Buried in the Dirt (River Otter Press), discusses the irregular flow of story ideas.

How often does an idea for a story occur to you, and what triggers those ideas? 
This very question once itself triggered a story of mine called "Ideas: Where to Get Them and What to Do When They Won’t Leave." In that story, a personified (bad) idea follows the narrator home from a conference and only leaves when the narrator pretends to be getting to work on "[s]omething along the epic line. Maybe three thousand pages of consciousness stream unformed dream logic babble with a hint of poetic inversion." It is one of my more bizarre stories, which I feel is the most fitting answer to this particular question.

After all, there is no regularity to when ideas for stories occur to me, or anything specific that typically triggers them. The timing seems to be utterly random and the causes perhaps even more so. All of a sudden, one is there. Some are just ideas, and nothing more comes of them. However, sometimes they arrive with an overpowering voltage and an element of marvel. Those are the ones I know I have no choice but to carry through.

Gravity defying?

One story bubbled around in my head for over twenty years, brought on by a brochure for a tourist attraction I'd seen on a long road trip in the Southwest as a kid. The attraction was some kind of optical illusion house where objects appeared to roll uphill. The concept fascinated me, and simultaneously disappointed me because I knew it wasn't real. I always wondered what it would have been like if it wasn't illusion, something marvelous and at the same time completely pointless. Then a few years back, for reasons that I cannot explain, my obsession over that brochure suddenly sprouted into my story "Cents of Wonder Rhymes With Orange."

Another story of mine, "Counter Spring," which was inspired by a conversation about Sharia Law's treatment of rape, came quicker. I imagined a world where avarice was virtue and merchants could only be believed if seconded by a customer (because, after all, the customer is always right) even before the conversation was over. Though, truth be told, it took me two years to finally get the story exactly right despite the fact that the idea was born almost instantly.

Still another, "The Pipe," was something of a mix between a period of years and an instant. For years, I'd been fascinated by an exposed pipe that extended over a creek in my hometown. My parents drove by that creek once in a while, but I'd never actually walked anywhere nearby. At each end, the pipe had these fan-like half circles of steel mesh. I suppose they were to keep kids from messing around on top. Regardless, I saw that pipe over and over again for years, and kept thinking about sneaking around the fans and walking around just because I obviously wasn't supposed to. Then, when a friend read a particularly bad story of mine (one I delusionally thought was Lovecraftian) and told me in no uncertain terms how horrible it was, I insisted I'd show her what I could really do. Suddenly the pipe, as well as the story that involved it, popped into my head.

My ideas come when they come. They are triggered by whatever triggers them. I just sit down to write and hope for the best. That's all I can do.