Category Archives: Writing

A Month of Short Stories 2015, Day 1 – What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

Posted on by Bill Chance

The last two years, for the month of June, I wrote about a short story that was available online each day of the month… you can see the list for 2014 and 2015 in the comments for this page. It seemed like a good idea at the time. My blog readership fell precipitously and nobody seemed to give a damn about what I was doing – which was a surprising amount of work.

Because of this result, I’m going to do it again this year.

Today’s story, for day 1 – What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, by Raymond Carver.

Read it online here:

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

This podcast has an audio version, read by the author. The actual story starts at the 6 minute mark.

It is no accident that I am opening the month of short stories with a Raymond Carver story. I have been reading his work a lot over the last year and I have decided that his stories are the stories I would write if I could.

Today’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is a classic, arguably his most famous. It is especially well known now – because it is a stage version of that simple story that is being developed and staged during last year’s Oscar Winning Best Picture, Birdman.

Birdman opens with the quote that is on Raymond Carver’s tombstone:

“And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.”

The plot of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is simple enough. Four people, two couples, sit around a table drinking and talking. There is a lot of drinking in Carver’s stories, and a lot of hopelessness. In this story one couple talks about her ex-lover, who never was able to get over her and was cursed with an unstable mind. It lead to his death.

Was this love? Or was it madness? Or was it both? Or is there even a difference?

Those are only some of the subtle and complex questions the story brings up – it is overflowing with ideas and questions, despite its short length.

That is one thing I love about Carver’s stories – the efficiency and the brevity. It is genius to be able to say so much in such a small space.

In researching and reading deep about how he worked I did discover one interesting fact. Carver didn’t write with quite that much brevity. His editor was relentless in driving him to down his word count – to cut his prose to the bone.

For example, once you’ve read What We Talk About When We Talk About Love – then go to this story, Beginners, from the New Yorker. It’s the same story, in draft form, before editor Gordon Lish had Carver chop away at the prose.

It makes for a very different story. I like the short version better. The stuff that has been exorcised – it’s all fluff, things you know anyway… or at least will know once you think about it. There is genius in brevity.

Thinking about Carver’s short stories and about movies… there is a well-known film, Short Cuts, directed by Robert Altman, that strings together several Carver stories, but not today’s. I watched the film to see if it gave me any more insight into the writing.

I was disappointed… even though the movie was well-done. It was more of an Altman movie than a Carver one. For example, it was moved from the Northwest to sunny Los Angeles. These stories need overcast skies, I think. Altman’s natural humor is sprinkled throughout – which dilutes the agony of the characters too much, I think.

Even though I haven’t said very much, I don’t think I’m going to say any more. Brevity…. well, you know.

Moby Dada

Posted on by Bill Chance

“With the sound of gusting wind in the branches of the language trees of Babel, the words gave way like leaves, and every reader glimpsed another reality hidden in the foilage.”
― Andrei Codrescu, The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara & Lenin Play Chess

hrule

de8

– Dada Poetry

– – Moby Dada 1

All visible objects call my shadow
unreasoning mask, reasoning thing
from behind the sweep in my soul
grooved to run over unsounded gorges
except by tranquil beauty and brilliancy
of the ocean’s skin, angle to the iron way!

de6

hrule

Kindle

Call Me Ishmael

hrule

de1

– – Moby Dada 2
We are too much like oysters
can ever be under torrents’ beds
the undoubted deed in looking at things spiritual,
I spit my last breath substance; from hell’s heart
they weary me, make me faint, I grapple with thee
–then, talk not to me of blasphemy and tow to pieces
To produce a methodically knocking
I’d strike the sun off from the comber of my death!
enveloped in topmost grief, not excluding its suburbs
though many there be who have tried it
Give me Vesuvius’ times of dreamy quietude
Ho, ho! for hate’s sake
as soon as I can. Towards thee I roll, from hell’s heart

de5

I didn’t use random words as in the link above, of course… rather seperate lines and phrases from quotes from the book, sliced and reaarranged at random.

I Love the Whooshing Noise

Posted on by Bill Chance

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

My secretary setup

One place where the magic happens

Every year at the end of October I, along with every other wannabe writer across the whole wide world (and many others), is faced with a tough choice. To do NaNoWriMo or not?

To those of you that don’t know – NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month. The idea is to hammer out 50,000 words (not quite a whole novel – but close enough) in the month of November. It’s a tough decision – you want to make an honest shot at it, but it is a huge commitment of time, energy, and pride. It is hard to do, easy to give up.

November won’t be the best of months for me. I’ll be in New Orleans for the first few days (Halloween in the French Quarter is not to be missed) and then off to Louisville, Kentucky for a week long business trip. I know it sounds easy to sit in a strange hotel room and hammer off a couple hours of work every evening – but in practice it doesn’t work out very well. I’m always really worn out after any work day – especially one on the road. Plus, folks always have extra work – want to go out to eat… that sort of thing.

I will almost certainly be behind right from the beginning – and playing catchup isn’t fun.

I’ve given this a serious shot about three times, and only succeeded once. My two failures were when I wrote myself into a corner and couldn’t figure out a way out. I know this sounds silly – the idea is to write, not necessarily write well – why didn’t I just change things up when stuck? Well, it doesn’t work like that. The characters take on a life of their own and sometimes they simply refuse to do anything worth writing about.

The one year I won I wrote a story that included a lot of flashbacks (the framing story was an old man in a beach house during a hurricane, the water is rising and he is taking stock of his life) so that I could always add another vignette if I was stuck. That worked.

The only problem is that at eleven fifty at night on the last day of November I thought I had finished. I ran my stuff through the word counter one last time and to my horror discovered I was about a hundred words short. Trying to hammer out that last hundred words in ten minutes with the clock ticking was unbelievably and unbearably difficult. I don’t want to do that again.

It helps to not be in this alone. A friend of mine is giving it a shot too – there are always some social events (there is something amazingly cool about writing in public with a group of strangers – all hammering away in silence) – maybe I’ll organize one or two.

My username is Chancew1 – if you want to write sometime. I can even post a snippet or two here, if the fancy strikes me.

Wish me luck.

Kindle

Call Me Ishmael

A Month of Short Stories 2014, Day 30 – A Horseman in the Sky

Posted on by Bill Chance

A year ago, for the month of June, I wrote about an online short story each day for the month. It seemed like a good idea at the time. My blog readership fell precipitously and nobody seemed to give a damn about what I was doing – which was a surprising amount of work.

Because of this result, I’m going to do it again this year.

Today’s story, for day thirty – A Horseman in the Sky, by Ambrose Bierce

Read it online here:

A Horseman in the Sky

When I think of Ambrose Bierce, I think of carefully written, exquisitely detailed military stories – with the wild addition of fanciful magic realism. I suppose that, today, well over a century after he lived and wrote, his most well-known tale, An Occurence at Owl Street Bridge, fits that description.

He also wrote The Devil’s Dictionary – which is a little dated today – but is still valid in its bitter satire on life and its foibles.

To wit:
From The Devil’s Dictionary”

LIFE, n. A spiritual pickle preserving the body from decay. We live in daily apprehension of its loss; yet when lost it is not missed. The question, “Is life worth living?” has been much discussed; particularly by those who think it is not, many of whom have written at great length in support of their view and by careful observance of the laws of health enjoyed for long terms of years the honors of successful controversy.

“Life’s not worth living, and that’s the truth,”
Carelessly caroled the golden youth.
In manhood still he maintained that view
And held it more strongly the older he grew.
When kicked by a jackass at eighty-three,
“Go fetch me a surgeon at once!” cried he.
—Han Soper

or, from the “S”:

SAUCE, n. The one infallible sign of civilization and enlightenment. A people with no sauces has one thousand vices; a people with one sauce has only nine hundred and ninety-nine. For every sauce invented and accepted a vice is renounced and forgiven.

(this is a fact that I agree with)

There is much to say about today’s short and simple story… but I want to point out one simple aspect. The story has, among other things, a surprise or twist ending.

This sort of story is hard to pull off. A successful surprise ending really has to be no surprise at all – at least no surprise after you have read it. Though you should not be able to see it coming, after it has passed you have to realize that things could not be any other way.

Bierce does all this in today’s. Through careful manipulation of point of view, time shifting, and judicious information release by the omniscient narrator the ending is concealed until the end, yet is foreshadowed to the extent that the reader knows that no other plot direction would be possible.

That’s especially tricky because this is the most common and hoary of all twist endings, still being done to this day.

Hope I didn’t ruin it for you. It’s still a cool story.

For an instant Druse had a strange, half-defined feeling that he had slept to the end of the war and was looking upon a noble work of art reared upon that eminence to commemorate the deeds of an heroic past of which he had been an inglorious part. The feeling was dispelled by a slight movement of the group: the horse, without moving its feet, had drawn its body slightly backward from the verge; the man remained immobile as before. Broad awake and keenly alive to the significance of the situation, Druse now brought the butt of his rifle against his cheek by cautiously pushing the barrel forward through the bushes, cocked the piece, and glancing through the sights covered a vital spot of the horseman’s breast. A touch upon the trigger and all would have been well with Carter Druse. At that instant the horseman turned his head and looked in the direction of his concealed foeman–seemed to look into his very face, into his eyes, into his brave, compassionate heart.

A Month of Short Stories 2014, Day 29 – Catskin

Posted on by Bill Chance

A year ago, for the month of June, I wrote about an online short story each day for the month. It seemed like a good idea at the time. My blog readership fell precipitously and nobody seemed to give a damn about what I was doing – which was a surprising amount of work.

Because of this result, I’m going to do it again this year.

Today’s story, for day twenty-nine – Catskin, by Kelly Link

Read it online here:

Catskin

I have been a big fan of Kelly Link for most of this century after discovering a glowing review of her collection Stranger Things Happen in Salon Magazine.

She writes in a style of updated, modern fairy tales – swimming in tides of shifting reality. These are not children’s stories, however, they are unremittingly shocking, violent, and sometimes surprisingly sexually explicit.

But like all the best fairy tales and ancient folk stories they are emotionally true and tell of longing and loss that we all feel, even if we aren’t aware of it (until we read the story).

Today’s story, Catskin, is from her second collection Magic for Beginners. It is a long tale of what happens when you poison a witch (which, by the way, you should never do).

Go out right now and buy her books. And while you are looking or waiting for them to come to you in the mail, you can go and download Stranger Things Happen (and some other stuff) for your device. I love the fact that she does this – and love even more that it doesn’t seem to hurt her sales.

Now, since witches cannot have children in the usual way — their wombs are full of straw or bricks or stones, and when they give birth, they give birth to rabbits, kittens, tadpoles, houses, silk dresses, and yet even witches must have heirs, even witches wish to be mothers — the witch had acquired her children by other means: she had stolen or bought or made them.

She’d had a passion for children with a certain color of red hair. Twins she had never been able to abide (they were the wrong kind of magic) although she’d sometimes attempted to match up sets of children, as though she had been putting together a chess set, and not a family. If you were to say a witch’s chess set, instead of a witch’s family, there would be some truth in that. Perhaps this is true of other families as well.

One girl she had grown like a cyst, upon her thigh. Other children she had made out of things in her garden, or bits of trash that the cats brought her: aluminum foil with strings of chicken fat still crusted to it, broken television sets, cardboard boxes that the neighbors had thrown out. She had always been a thrifty witch.

Some of these children had run away and others had died. Some of them she had simply misplaced, or accidentally left behind on buses. It is to be hoped that these children were later adopted into good homes, or reunited with their natural parents. If you are looking for a happy ending in this story, then perhaps you should stop reading here and picture these children, these parents, their reunions.

A Month of Short Stories 2014, Day 28 – The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis

Posted on by Bill Chance

A year ago, for the month of June, I wrote about an online short story each day for the month. It seemed like a good idea at the time. My blog readership fell precipitously and nobody seemed to give a damn about what I was doing – which was a surprising amount of work.

Because of this result, I’m going to do it again this year.

Today’s story, for day twemtu eight – The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis, by Karen Russell
Read it online here:

The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis

I have written about a movie I saw once, in the theater… Limbo, directed by John Sayles. An excellent film, and one you have to see – but I have a warning. At the end, most of the (few) people in the theater stood up and screamed at the screen. They were furious at the ending of the movie. I chuckled a bit – there is no other way the movie could end… and there is that title, what do they expect?

Today’s story The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis, shares one characteristic with Limbo. It sets up a mystery – and then sort of refuses to solve it. It’s frustrating if you are used to popular pleasing paint-by-number fiction, but there is really no other way for it to tell its story.

It’s a long-form short story, bordering on a novella. It needs this space to set up the characters of four urban bullies – a gang of thugs that, seen from their own points of view, aren’t as awful as they seem to everybody else. Though inside their own heads… at least the narrator, they are beginning to suspect that their place in the universe isn’t as inevitable or necessary as they had convinced themselves.

Then a mysterious scarecrow shows up tied to a tree in their own private universe, a wooded spot inside a run-down park in their urban wasteland of Anthem, New Jersey. Something about the scarecrow looks familiar… and when they figure that out a series of discoveries, unveilings, and violent reactions pull the four down a frightening path to… something.

Really good, worth the work to read.

Enjoy.

The central acres of Friendship Park were filled with pines and spruce and squirrels that chittered some charming bullshit at you, up on their hind legs begging for a handout. They lived in the trash cans and had the wide-eyed, innocent look and threadbare fur of child junkies. Had they wised up, our squirrels might have mugged us and used our wallets to buy train tickets to the national park an hour north of Anthem’s depressed downtown.

A Month of Short Stories 2014, Day 27 – Cathay

Posted on by Bill Chance

A year ago, for the month of June, I wrote about an online short story each day for the month. It seemed like a good idea at the time. My blog readership fell precipitously and nobody seemed to give a damn about what I was doing – which was a surprising amount of work.

Because of this result, I’m going to do it again this year.

Today’s story, for day twenty-seven – Cathay, by Steven Millhauser

Read it online here:

Cathay

After I read the story I found that Cathay is an alternate name for China in English. I wish I hadn’t learned that – the amazing world of the story should remain mysterious and shrouded – to tie it to a real place seems to dull the gleaming magic a little.

But this is a minor thing. It is still a place where golden mechanical birds sing as beautifully as real, where women have tiny paintings on their eyelids and elsewhere, and floating islands might be breeding.

In Millhauser’s Cathay the emperor’s concubines are so beautiful and artfully decked out they can’t even be gazed upon by normal men. All that do spend the rest of their lives wracked by tormented longing… which, I suppose puts them in the same state as the rest of us.

It’s an enchanted travelog to a plane of the imagination that ends with a battle of magicians and living statues.

A place of pure fancy.

So much the sadness.

YEARNING

There are Fifty-four Steps of Love, of which the fifth is Yearning. There are seventeen degrees of Yearning, through all of which the lover must pass before reaching the sixth step, which is Restlessness.

A Month of Short Stories 2014, Day 26 – In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried

Posted on by Bill Chance

A year ago, for the month of June, I wrote about an online short story each day for the month. It seemed like a good idea at the time. My blog readership fell precipitously and nobody seemed to give a damn about what I was doing – which was a surprising amount of work.

Because of this result, I’m going to do it again this year.

Today’s story, for day twenty-six – In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried, by Amy Hempel.

Read it online here:

In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried

Amy Hempel is one of only a few writers that work exclusively in short stories or other minimalist pieces. I like that. There is truth in brevity. There is efficiency in conciseness. There is power in knowing you don’t have the space to wander around.

In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried is the very first story she ever wrote. It came from Gordon Lish’s famous writing workshop – apparently in response to the prompt, write about “the ineffable, the despicable, the thing you will never live down.”

I don’t know about writing workshops (I suppose you can learn a lot – but it doesn’t take away the need to write for ten thousand hours) or about writing prompts (an icebreaker or maybe a handy crutch at best) – but this is one hell of a first story.

It’s definitely something that would be impossible to live down (although it’s something any of us would be capable of doing). How do you ask forgiveness of someone that isn’t alive any more? And who else would your really have to ask?

“Tell me things I won’t mind forgetting,” she said. “Make it useless stuff or skip it.”

I began. I told her insects fly through rain, missing every drop, never getting wet. I told her no one in America owned a tape recorder before Bing Crosby did. I told her the shape of the moon is like a banana—you see it looking full, you’re seeing it end-on.

The camera made me self-conscious and I stopped. It was trained on us from a ceiling mount—the kind of camera banks use to photograph robbers. It played us to the nurses down the hall in Intensive Care.

“Go on, girl,” she said. “You get used to it.”

I had my audience. I went on. Did she know that Tammy Wynette had changed her tune? Really. That now she sings “Stand by Your Friends”? That Paul Anka did it too, I said. Does “You’re Having Our Baby.” That he got sick of all that feminist bitching.

“What else?” she said. “Have you got something else?”

Oh, yes.

For her I would always have something else.

A Month of Short Stories 2014, Day 25 – The Half-Skinned Steer

Posted on by Bill Chance

A year ago, for the month of June, I wrote about an online short story each day for the month. It seemed like a good idea at the time. My blog readership fell precipitously and nobody seemed to give a damn about what I was doing – which was a surprising amount of work.

Because of this result, I’m going to do it again this year.

Today’s story, for day twenty five – The Half-Skinned Steer, by E. Annie Proulx

Read it online here:

The Half-Skinned Steer

I know Annie Proulx from The Shipping News – that wonderful novel about icy cold and family history. I knew that she wrote about the West, though. I knew that she wrote about Wyoming. Once I had a book of her stories – Close Range… I think it was, checked out but never was able to crack the cover.

So I was happy to find The Half-Skinned Steer online and an excuse to take the time to read it. It’s the lead story in the Close Range collection (which includes the better known Brokeback Mountain).

The Half-Skinned Steer is a story smeared across a long swath of time that winds around a timeless country. It is an illustration that you can take the boy off the ranch (a life so isolated and strange that the young man’s introduction to the mysteries of sex are from finding anatomically symbolic rock paintings done by ancient natives) but even after eighty years and a life riding an exercise bicycle in Massachusetts – you can’t take the ranch out of the boy.

It’s a rough, horrific story – about a rough and horrific life on a rough and beautiful land. But it’s told in language so languid and exacting that the snow, blood, and rock jump right off the page.

Pretty good stuff.

He dreamed that he was in the ranch house but all the furniture had been removed from the rooms and in the yard troops in dirty white uniforms fought. The concussive reports of huge guns were breaking the window glass and forcing the floorboards apart, so that he had to walk on the joists. Below the disintegrating floors he saw galvanized tubs filled with dark, coagulated fluid.

A Month of Short Stories 2014, Day 24 – A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

Posted on by Bill Chance

A year ago, for the month of June, I wrote about an online short story each day for the month. It seemed like a good idea at the time. My blog readership fell precipitously and nobody seemed to give a damn about what I was doing – which was a surprising amount of work.

Because of this result, I’m going to do it again this year.

Today’s story, for day twenty four – A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Read it online here:

A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

Magical Realism is a tricky and mysterious thing. When done badly it is horrific. When done well, it is a thing of wonder. And, of course, nobody does it better than Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

I remember reading A Hundred Years of Solitude for the first time. It is a massive tome – but I was so enthralled at the text I never wanted it to end.

Reading magical realism in a short story is different than reading it in a long novel. If you spend enough time in that colorful world you get used to it and wonder why every day isn’t like that. But in a short story it comes as a shock – like gazing through a peephole into another universe.

Though you never find out who the very old man is or why he has those enormous wings (surely he is an angel – but what a decrepit one) and you never understand his speech – you feel for the poor wretch. Dragged from the mud and exhibited in a chicken coop until the owners become rich from the admission (and finally outshown by a spider woman) he still exhibits patience and understanding. It isn’t until his duty is done that he….

Well, read it and find out.

The curious came from far away. A traveling carnival arrived with a flying acrobat who buzzed over the crowd several times, but no one paid any attention to him because his wings were not those of an angel but, rather, those of a sidereal bat. The most unfortunate invalids on earth came in search of health: a poor woman who since childhood has been counting her heartbeats and had run out of numbers; a Portuguese man who couldn’t sleep because the noise of the stars disturbed him; a sleepwalker who got up at night to undo the things he had done while awake; and many others with less serious ailments. In the midst of that shipwreck disorder that made the earth tremble, Pelayo and Elisenda were happy with fatigue, for in less than a week they had crammed their rooms with money and the line of pilgrims waiting their turn to enter still reached beyond the horizon.