Manuel Gonzales' Strange, Meandering Thought Process

In the 27th in a series of posts on 2013 books entered for The Story Prize, Manuel Gonzales, author of The Miniature Wife (Riverhead Books), discusses the many offbeat story ideas he abandons and those he doesn't.

During a discussion of his work at the International Short Story Festival in Cork, Ireland, Alistair MacLeod, the well-respected Canadian author, said that he’d never abandoned a story once he’d begun it. He’d been publishing since 1976, had published two story collections and a novel and, recently, a collected works, and through all of this, every story he’d begun, he’d wrestled with it until he finished it.

Which does not describe me at all.

Just today, I deleted ten stories from a folder titled, New Collection, because they were sketches or because what I’d started no longer spoke to me or the idea, even if it spoke to me, seemed silly, which, considering I’ve written stories featuring unicorns and swamp monsters and robots, says something about how silly these story ideas were.

I could have deleted more of them, really. Unlike MacLeod, who carefully picks and chooses what he’ll write about before he even sets pen to paper, I grab story ideas at every chance I get, throw sentences onto the page willy-nilly, and then wait and hope that something comes of them. 

Today alone, three story ideas popped into my head, one about an old woman who shows up at a young couples’ house and refuses to leave, another about a couple who uses a specially trained cat to act as birth-control (by inserting itself into the bed between them), and a third that I won’t mention because I think it might actually become a story at some point. These came to me while loading the groceries into my car, while washing the dishes, and while reading a book to my son at bedtime. It’s possible none of them will become stories, but for each of them, I’ve already composed various opening lines. 

For instance:

He told his wife the old woman looked like the kind of old woman, gnarled and haggish, who will, when you refuse them a bed for the night or a cup of soup, reveal themselves to be beautiful, vengeful fairy queens before laying a curse on you for being arrogant and handsome and princely, turning you into a hideous monster, and that that was why he let her inside. To which his wife responded that he was an idiot, and to this he didn’t quite disagree.

Knock, knock

People have asked where my stories come from so I’ve tried to backtrack my thoughts to figure out what strange, meandering path my thoughts followed before actual words reached the page hoping to find some dark, mysterious magic to it all, but generally my story ideas grow out of misunderstandings, or poor extrapolations, or hyperbolizations. The story about the man who wrote a speech commemorating the sinking of the African continent into the sea, for example, came about when, looking over someone’s shoulder, I misunderstood the headline, “Farewell, Africa,” in The New York Times Week in Review section. The story about a man trapped on a plane that circles Dallas for twenty years I wrote after spending a lot of time on airplanes.

Most recently, the story of the old woman and the couple arrived while I washed dishes. Looking out of the window above our sink and into our backyard, littered at the moment with boxes and tubs and children’s toys and dead leaves and a shed that we don’t close, even when it rains because it is full of holes big enough for rats to climb through, rats who do not feel safe enough to nest there when the door is open, I thought about the poor state of our house and wished our landlady, who is ninety-one, would invest money into fixing it or would agree to sell it to my wife and me so we could fix it, which made me think about her own house—a split-level two-story, four-bedroom house in a hilly neighborhood and with an enormous front and backyard—which she lives in by herself, and which causes us undue stress (because she’s 91), and then I thought: What if she arrived on our doorstep one day having sold her overlarge house so she could move back into this house where she grew up, where she raised her kids and lived most her life? And then, because we’re unable to say no to a 91-year-old lady, what if we let her in and never tell her to leave?

Which, come to think of it, wouldn’t be the worst story I’d written.

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.