Caitlin Horrocks' "Very Edifying Form of Procrastination"

In the fifth in a series of posts on 2011 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Caitlin Horrocks, author of This Is Not Your City (Sarabande Books), talks about the challenges of writing a story with a very unconventional structure and other aspects of her work.

What's the longest narrative time period you've ever contained in a short story? 

Which story in your collection required the most drafts or posed the most technical problems?
The answer to both of these is the story “Zolaria,” and its long time period was one of the reasons for the many, many drafts.

The “present moment” of the story is the summer the narrator is ten years old, the last summer she spends with her childhood best friend. Other points in time—middle school, her marriage, her own motherhood, happen in the future tense. There are a few moments of past tense. The story covers over 20 years, told out of chronological order. I was committed to that structure early on, and I felt confident that the story could work that way, but I also knew that I was asking a lot of the reader, to hang on and keep up with the leaps in time. I’m not afraid to challenge a reader, but I try to be very conscious of being a good guide; if I’m asking extra work of someone, it should come with equal rewards. In earlier drafts, there were even more time jumps than in the published version, and there was an entire character, the narrator’s grandmother, who didn’t make the final cut. Some of those cuts were literal: At one point I was crawling around on the floor with scissors, tape, and a sheaf of disembodied paragraphs, trying to figure out what the progression of the story should be. Writing something that wasn’t chronological was a great excuse to think about other ways to order a story, about where else its rhythm or movement might come from.

What kind of research, if any, do you do? 
I’m constantly researching. I’m one of those people who will use any excuse to toggle away from a manuscript to search for a certain type of flower, or the recipe for a specific mixed drink. I’ve contacted people for translation help. I’ve done archival research and read biographies and history books, although for projects other than This Is Not Your City. Much of the research in TINYC was of the Googling variety, which is admittedly shallow but sometimes just what I needed. It’s easy (for me, anyway) to become paralyzed by too much information. Or just paralyzed by how interesting I can find almost anything. I like research too much. It becomes a very edifying form of procrastination, and hours later I’ve learned a lot about Ludger Sylbaris and written zero words.

Have you ever written a short story in one sitting and not revised it later? 
I wish. I’ve heard other writers refer to certain stories as “gifts,” and others as slogs. I understand that—some stories have certainly come more easily for me than others—but nothing has ever come so easily that I felt satisfied with it on the first pass through. Or perhaps that says more about a lack of self-assurance than the work itself. I’ve certainly tinkered with a piece and then reverted to an earlier version. But revision is always a part of my writing process, even if just by confirming that I had something right the first time.

If you dabble in any other non-literary forms of expression, what do you do and how does it inform your work? 
I’ve dabbled in music (piano and choirs) and crafts (quilting), but I think I’ve done them as acts of interpretation rather than self-expression. That’s probably a false distinction, but I never composed music, I just played the notes in front of me. When I make a quilt, I follow a pattern that someone else created. I love those other forms of expression partly for the ways in which they are, for me, unlike writing stories, where I have to invent new worlds and people every 20 pages. Writing is probably the one mode of expression that I actually use to express something wholly my own, that makes other modes a little more restful.

Edith Pearlman Plays with Time

In the second in a series of posts on 2011 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Edith Pearlman, recent winner of the PEN/Malamud Award and author of Binocular Vision (Lookout Press), discusses stories she has written that range in time from twenty minutes to a lifetime and some unconventional time structures she has used.

What is the shortest narrative time period you have ever contained in a short story? The longest?
The action in “Eighteen Questions” (Alaska Quarterly Review; not yet collected) takes about twenty minutes. The setting is equally restricted: a queen-sized bed. A married couple is engaging in post-coital game of twenty questions. The questions and answers, narrowing in focus and mounting in intensity, reveal a recent tragedy in their lives.
         
“South Market” (Pakn Treger, not yet collected) follows its hero from grade school to nursing home. He suffers from unrequited love throughout his life. Meanwhile he rises socially and financially and becomes an active citizen in the small city that is the story’s setting. The reader learns the man’s history, and also the history of the city’s sociology and architecture and ethnic groups.
         
In “Eighteen Questions” the strict rules of the parlor game – like the demands of an acrostic poem or a sonnet’s rhyme scheme – set up constraints that the story then seeps heartbreakingly out of. The tale could not have borne a longer narrative time period or another page.  “South Market,” padded and stretched and deepened, could probably have been turned into a novel.  However (see below), I don’t write novels; my imaginary, irritable reader wouldn’t stand for such a thing.
         
In two stories collected in Binocular Vision, I’ve used narrative time in a less straightforward way:

“The Ministry of Restraint” relates a series of events in the lives of a man and a woman. They meet as strangers on a train, and together endure its wreck. Then follow silent and accidental encounters, each separated by ten years or so. They yearn for each other, but they do not speak or touch. Some details of their individual lives separate the description of the encounters. In the final meeting one sentence is spoken.  But the story is not yet finished; in its last paragraphs time reverts to the day the two met, all those decades earlier, and tells what happened immediately after the wreck. The reader, plunged again into the beginning of their history, solves the puzzle of the two lovers’ lifetime restraint.

“Lineage,” a few pages long, takes place now, during a half hour in a hospital room. Three doctors stand beside a bed in which lies a very old woman. The woman relates an occurrence that was told to her forty years earlier, an occurrence that itself took place fifty years earlier than that. The old woman urgently describes the ninety year old incident. Then the story returns to the hospital and the present. Circular time here runs counter to circular time in “Ministry”.

The challenge in each work was to convey the urgency of the tale inscribed in its circle – the restlessness of the old woman’s confession, the strength of the lovers’ mysteriously unfulfilled desire. I think that this sense of urgency must exist somewhere in every successful tale what ever its time schema; the sense that this story is begging to be told. As an author I become a small and nearly invisible girl pulling at the coat sleeve of a large and busy man; a man who has no time for novels; a man, say, on his way to the airport. “There is something I must tell you, Sir; please give me your attention for a just little while.” And because I have promised to be brief, I must exercise all my powers of compression and economy while allowing emotion intensely to flow. If I go on too long – if I become slack, if I am profligate with words -- my overcoated listener will shake me off, and you will find me weeping on the curbstone.

The narrative time of the story may encompass twenty minutes or half a century. The writing of it may have lasted a month. The reading of it (or listening to it) may take a quarter-hour. But let that quarter-hour be headlong and unstoppable -- for my busy man has a plane to catch.