L.E. Smith Spends Time Alone with His Characters

In the eighth in a series of posts on 2011 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, L.E. Smith, author of Views Cost Extra (Fomite), discusses voice and character.

Finding VOICE is not fiction to me.

It seems to me that character comes from voice, from attitude, even more than from actions committed. Anyone can do anything in this world, and probably will. Actions are erroneously described as “in character” or “out of character.” I contend that all things are possible. Everything we do is “in character.” We surprise ourselves all the time. We only seem to deal out contradiction. It is how we react to what we do or to what others do that never varies. Or that’s how I see it. So I have tried my best to establish “voice,” point of view, in my stories, as that never changes while our actions may vary widely. One of my writer friends who blurbed this book of stories calls me a “ventriloquist.” I think that’s right. I have a basic plot in mind when I write, but then it’s the voice that leads me to where the story wants to go.

I have always had a penchant for assuming other voices. A tutorial with a frustrated English professor over the deficiencies in my essay writing in grad school pointed out my emphasis in tone over argument. I told him that my essays suggest argument. That wasn’t enough for him. The problem was that I had been asked to analyze Faulkner’s writing, which led me to assume a Faulknerian tone (entirely unavoidable when immersed in his prose) and to ask the reader to follow the implied threads of argument. The point being, I have always associated voice with message.

In writing this collection of stories, I had no critic leaning over my shoulder, no patient mentor from an MFA program, no friends in a writing group, no publisher or editor eager for results. Just lots of time by myself with these characters talking to me about how they feel about things, and no idea any of what they say would ever make it into print. But once I have a voice in my head, a whole other world opens up for me to explore. I can’t resist.

One of the clearest examples in this collection is the story “Murder in the Red Barn,” which I wrote to flesh out a Tom Waits song. Tom’s song, same title, is powerful because it implies so much and leaves the imagination to fill in the details. So I listened to that song a hundred times, made notes, drew diagrams, invented a southern town (yes, a little like Faulkner), but it wasn’t until I decided on an Irish narrator that the story came together: He tells dispassionately the tale of his daughter who left home for America and who has always been a killer, who liked especially, even as a child, the butchering chores that need doing around the farm. The narrators’ folksy, non-judgmental, underwhelmed response to all the terrible things that happen in this story make the tragedy seem fated from the start. Or that’s how I see it. But even more, it’s the Irish idiom that takes the story deeper and wider, because it asserts a cultural response to tragedy. An Irish attitude. At least that’s how it “sounds” in my head.

John Elvis Smelcer on the Hardest Part of Writing a Story

In the seventh in a series of posts on 2011 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, John Elvis Smelcer, author of Alaskan: Stories from the Great Land (Standing Stone Books) on his struggles to turn a tragic event into a story.

Which story in your collection required the most drafts or posed the most technical problems?  
I had the most difficulty with the lead story in the collection, "Sunday Drive." The story is based on an actual, tragic event that happened about fifteen years ago. At first, I wrote it as a poem, but the story was bigger than the confines of a single-page poem. There was more gut-wrenching drama to the story; it needed to be told more slowly, building characters that we cared about or else the ending would fall flat. Over the following years, I tried to write it as a short story, but I couldn't figure out who or how to narrate it or the proper voice and tone. Often the hardest part of writing a story is pre-writing: who tells the story, past or present tense, where does the story begin and end? Sometimes these answers only come in the writing of the thing (the end particularly). The early versions of "Sunday Drive", written at various times over a decade, always ended up sappy . . . an injustice to the reality of the great tragedy and suffering.

There's another story that's been brewing in my head for about eight years. It too is based on an actual event. I've written a dozen drafts of the story, and each one has ended up in the garabage can. I just can't figure out how to tell it. But it'll come, in a dream or in a sudden epiphany. Of that I have no doubt.

Clark Blaise on the Steep Climb His Characters Face

In the sixth in a series of posts on 2011 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Clark Blaise, author of The Meagre Tarmac (Biblioasis), discusses the difficult cultural adaptation Indian immigrants to America—and successive generations—must make.

 
For the Indian immigrant characters in The Meagre Tarmac, material "success" in this country has been the easy part. After all, they were programmed to study hard, invest wisely, and live frugally. But that other Constitutional promise, "happiness," has been elusive. They were born and grew up in cultures that were warm and embracing but suspicious of personal initiative and prudish in matters sexual. Marriages were arranged between families with the hope (but not the promise) that love would eventually follow.

But this is the generation that came alone to America as graduate students, where, predictably, they learned and prospered, but—at least for my characters—love didn't follow. And so, these appealing men and women, so competent in so many areas, so esteemed, so charming, so poised, suffer from gaping holes in their souls. There's no training-school for dating, for wooing, for negotiating the snakes and ladders of courtship, for dealing with the demands and expectations of the native population of women (even America-born Indian women). Learning to expect—even to demand—personal and sexual happiness may seem natural to the America-born, but it's a steep climb for many Asia-born immigrants.

India has survived thousands of years by holding firm to its inherent value-system. But can a traditional culture stand up to liberal, individualist, secularism? This is a theoretical framing of the same question, and a fair-enough summary of the contents of this book.

That's the core conflict in this collection of linked stories. The Waldekars, Gangulys, da Cunhas, Chutneywalas, Nilingappas, Dasguptas, and their friends have earned earned everything they wanted but learned too late what they really needed. In India, as in most traditional cultures, family is everything, and roles within it are sharply defined. Remove any part, such as a child refusing a marriage arrangement, or a mother leaving the home and finding a job, or a husband abandoning his family and his responsibilities to it, and everything is torn down. I have been married to India (her name is Bharati Mukherjee) for 48 years, so I've been involved as husband, son-in-law, brother-in-law, uncle and cousin and friend to three generations of immigrants, Indo-Americans, and finally, just plain Americans who've finally negotiated the claims of duty to parents and culture, and the call of their inner child.

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.

Tiphanie Yanique and Elizabeth Nunez at The Center for Fiction

By Phedra Deonarine

Tiphanie Yanique at The Center for Fiction, June 15, 2011

I recently went to The Center for Fiction’s conversation between Elizabeth Nunez and Tiphanie Yanique. The Center for Fiction is located on East 47th Street and has a wonderful bookstore full of new and used books. The discussion was held in a cozy room, which afforded a more intimate atmosphere between the audience and the two writers.

Yanique started the evening off by acknowledging the work that The Center for Fiction does for writers as “the only non-profit in the U.S. dedicated to celebrating fiction.” She read from the title story in her collection How to Escape from a Leper Colony. She then sat down to speak with Nunez, award-winning author of seven novels and fellow Caribbean writer.

Yanique’s first book spans the Caribbean, but Nunez pointed out a shared connection between the two writers: Both wrote about the Leper Colony located on the island of Chacachacare off the coast of Trinidad. It was interesting to hear these two writers speak of Chacachacare because even though I lived in Trinidad for eighteen years, I’ve never actually been to the island. Listening to Yanique describe the file cabinets located on that island made me think that perhaps I should visit one day.

Nunez requested that Yanique read a story that involved the beating of a young child. Both writers then discussed child abuse in the Caribbean and the role of the author in dealing with this charged issue. Nunez was also interested in Yanique’s choice of including a Caribbean jail cell in her story because the jails in the Caribbean are located near the sea and have the special torment of offering spectacular seaside views to the inmates.

Prompted by an audience member, Nunez discussed the seduction of writing in first person and the distance that writing in third person allows. Fielding a question from the audience, Yanique spoke on the burden placed on Caribbean writers to explain perceived strangeness in their stories. She used “calalloo” as an example and stated that if a reader was genuinely curious about calalloo they would research it. She went on to say that explaining such a dish would harm the authenticity of her characters who would never describe something so well known to them. This was a highly gratifying answer for me because I’m often confronted with the burden of explaining minor details in my own creative work.

Both writers also responded to audience questions on the benefits of MFA programs and the business of writing. The evening concluded, and I was able to ask Elizabeth Nunez to sign my copy of Grace, newly purchased from the Center for Fiction’s bookstore located on the ground floor.

Jay Neugeboren: Love of Story, Then and Now

In the fourth in a series of posts on 2011 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Jay Neugeboren, author of You Are My Heart (Two Dollar Radio) discusses what makes the short story such an enduring form.

By the time I wrote my first short story, at the age of 23, I had written five unpublished novels. What I couldn’t figure out until then was how to complete a story in fewer than several hundred pages, for once I began making things up, one thing led to another—one set of events, or characters, led to more events, more characters—up one path and down another: to detours and dead ends and turnabouts, and to characters and incidents that, when I started out, had not, as far as I (consciously) knew, existed. A novel gave me the sheer space I needed to be able to tell a story.

Now, a half-century later, when a fourth collection of my stories, You Are My Heart, is being published, I notice that the stories I’ve written generally take up more space in time—often a half dozen decades of its characters’ lives—than my novels, which usually occupy only a few days or weeks.

During the years I taught writing to undergraduate and graduate students, most writers, I found, worked in an opposite direction: they began by writing stories, and worked their way toward novels; it was as if they believed that in order to write novels they had first to serve apprenticeships in shorter fictional forms. Not at all, I’d suggest, for the short story is as different from the novel as, say, an oil painting is from a marble sculpture. Just as some artists excel and/or are more at home in one form of visual art than another, so too with writers: some notions simply arrive as stories, and some as novels. Many wonderful writers—Isaac Babel, Anton Chekhov, Alice Munro, Flannery O’Connor, Grace Paley, among others—never wrote a novel, and the most exceptional work by writers who have worked in both forms (e.g., John Cheever, Henry James, Jim Shepard,William Trevor) has often been the short story.

When I started out writing stories, in addition to literary quarterlies and the annual Best American and O. Henry anthologies, there were many large-circulation magazines that regularly published fiction: The New Yorker, The Saturday Evening Post, Redbook, Playboy, Esquire, Harper’s, Harper’s Bazaar, The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Collier’s, McCall’s,Vanity Fair, Yankee, Mademoiselle, etc. Now, of our large-circulation magazines, only The New Yorker publishes a story in every issue. Most Americans are still brought up, through elementary school, high school, and college, on short stories, however, so that one wonders where, once they are done with formal schooling, unless they subscribe to literary quarterlies or to The New Yorker, they will ever again, in any regular way, come across short fiction. 

Some promising answers: new online sources of short stories (Narrative, Guernica), magazines that are publishing stories for the first time (Commonweal, Columbia University Alumni Magazine), new and adventurous venues for stories (One Story, Tin House, Black Clock), and an abundance of new, often annual short story anthologies (New Stories from the South, The Year’s Best Science Fiction , The New Granta Book of the American Short Story). My own sense—faith?—is that though literary forms change—some fade, others thrive—the love of story remains.

Helen Phillips: My Own Private Bob Dylan

In the third in a series of posts on 2011 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Helen Phillips, author of And Yet They Were Happy (Leapfrog Press), reveals how a cassette tape captured her imagination and, eventually, inspired her book.

My Own Private Bob Dylan: Why I Spent Years of My Life Writing a Book So Bob Dylan Might Someday Read It

In the early nineties, when my parents installed a CD player, I absconded to my bedroom with the family tape deck, escaping the chaos of a home that contained four children between the ages of five and twelve, one of them (my older sister Katherine) severely handicapped due to the neurological disorder Rett Syndrome. I needed my own small empire amid the mayhem.

I brought with me a tape with the mystifying title Blood on the Tracks. Inside the beat-up plastic case, the profile of a shadowy, sad figure in sunglasses. I was a decade old and just beginning to sometimes feel a weird sort of shadowy sadness.

The tape was old and ratty when I rescued it from upstairs, and it got older and rattier with every listen. A buzzing, muddy sound ran beneath each song. Each time I listened might be the last before it snapped; who knew if I’d ever hear these urgent songs again?

It never occurred to me that this Bob Dylan was famous. I’d grabbed the tape from the family collection, just another of my parents’ random singer-songwriters, many of whom would never make the leap from cassette to CD.

*

Blood on the Tracks is a parade of women, and I assumed I’d someday identify with each—the vagabond divorcee, the millionaire’s widow, all the elusive girls.

But it was the flower-adorned goddess of “Shelter from the Storm” whom I knew he loved most. I harbored the fantasy that someday I would serve as shelter from the storm for Bob Dylan, that he would show up on my doorstep after searching fruitlessly for all his lost women in Honolulu, San Francisco, Ashtabula.

At ten, eleven, twelve years old I was already touched by that sense of inevitable loss. When I was ten, I started losing my hair. By the time I was eleven, I was bald and had been diagnosed with the autoimmune disorder alopecia universalis.

There’s a notable emphasis on hair in Blood on the Tracks, and on red hair in particular. All these magical women with their entrancing hair! And here I was, completely bald, a hopeless little monster. When I did get a wig, it was auburn.

Dylan’s proclamations about the unkindness of the world started to ring true: the boy in lunch-line asking if I was a skinhead, the stares and smirks. I entered adolescence feeling hunted by crocodiles, ravaged in the corn. But: I wasn’t the only one.

*

As a writer, I’ve stolen from Dylan, or tried to. The confidence with which he tosses us into his alternate universe, the conviction with which he delivers his haunted visions. The bizarre yet resonant leaps he makes from one world to another, from neon signs to diamond mines, from cold cityscape to fraught fairy tale. It’s a courageous (and generous) thing to do, to open that door into your private world in all its peculiar particularity.

And it’s as a writer that I’ve gotten as close as I can to my naïve-yet-enduring desire to offer Bob Dylan shelter from the storm. In And Yet They Were Happy, Bob Dylan is at my side. He’s dancing (grudgingly, but still) with me as the old family farm starts to flood. He accompanies me to the emergency room, and to the farmers’ market.

It’s not an insincere wish, the wish expressed in And Yet They Were Happy: “I want this to be published so Bob Dylan might read it before he dies.” He is my ideal reader. Or my ideal of him is my ideal reader.

*

It would annoy me greatly to see an essay titled “My Own Private Bob Dylan.” I’d consider not even reading it. But I would, as you did. And perhaps, like you, I’d have made it this far.

Because there are so very many of us who know that he has, all this while, been singing just to us. His world is so idiosyncratic, yet I get it, we each think. It matches my idiosyncrasies.

I know I’m not alone in my twin feelings of joy and despair when I hear Blood on the Tracks playing in Starbucks or a clothing store—glad because I am always glad to hear it, sad because shouldn’t it just be me and the worn-out tape of some guy named Bob Dylan?

That said, imagine my relief when the tape finally snapped and my parents explained to me that it would not be hard to replace it, not hard at all.