Story Ideas

Every profession has its plusses and its minuses.  For bank robbers, the big plus is in occasionally walking out of a place with a brace of large canvas bags that have dollar signs imprinted on them.  The downside is the inevitability of either endless jail or a gruesome death.  But those are just the things that you have to put up with if you are going to enter that profession.

The same, of course, holds true for writers.  The upside is, generally, that you get to write (and it should be a labor of love) and you do put your name in the sweepstakes for fame and fortune.  The downsides are that it is a difficult and competitive field and most people who go into the writing game never earn enough from it in order to support them and their loved ones in the manner to which they have become accustomed.  And, oh yes, one other thing.  Nearly every time you tell people that you write, they ask you the same loathsome question:  Where do you get your ideas?

Now, I can’t be too hard on people.  They are just trying to make conversation and “Where do you get your ideas?” is just a more specialized version of asking about the weather or the fortunes of the local sports team.  It’s a way of making a quick connection with someone you expect you’ll never see again.  And I understand and respect that.  It just doesn’t make getting asked that question any the less tiresome.

And so, for those who are actually interested, I will answer that question with an example of how its done.

This morning, I had the opportunity to ride the shuttle to work rather than drive.  I had my book and even my iPod, if I needed it, in order to preserve my privacy.  I sat down next to a young lady of Indian descent, flipped open Travels with Charley, and let the driver speed me away.

Now, here’s the part where the idea for the story came in.  When we were at least two-thirds of the way along, the shuttle stopped to pick up a few strays, one of whom was a gangly, acne-riddled, stick of a boy who was wearing a shirt and tie.  As he got on, he noticed my seatmate, greeted her, and planted himself next to me so that they could converse.  They clearly knew one another, but not well, and they sustained the conversation by restating the same observations in a series of variations:  “She doesn’t like to work much.”  “She’d rather be sleeping.”  “She’s not a hard worker.”  “She’s lazy.”

And that’s where I got an idea for a story.

It would be a short story of the variety I just got finished excoriating last week, a modern sort of story that would not really have any grand conclusion.  It would just be a little snippet of life, a story about a young man getting on a shuttle bus and having a chat with a young lady he fancies.  The trick in it is to set it out in such a way that what actors call the subtext becomes more apparent.  His uncertain longing and innocence and the bluff that a youth uses to pretend that he is actually a man would come out.  And we would see her ambivalence and patience, and even the hint of curiosity and romance that are inherent in her developing a relationship outside her culture.  It is a story of love, or at least lust, unrequited, and it would probably end up a tiny thing, a bauble, a moment of life given context and depth that it never had at the time.

And that’s how story ideas come up.  You watch life and try to drink it in both compassionately and critically, and let the result percolate for a while and see if anything happens.  You pick over your own life and lives of others the way that a hyena picks at the bones of a gazelle and try to turn whatever gristle you find into a story worth telling.  It comes from life, no matter the form.  Even in the strangeness of horror and the gadgetry of sci fi, human concerns make the stories go.  It’s just that those concerns are cloaked either in projections of our fears or aspirations, depending on the form.

And this is why the best advice for a young writer is to shut up and listen.  You’ll often find that your best stories come not from your imagination, but from a few dollops of conversation you hear on a shuttle bus.

Here’s the Story

Last night, I had a great idea for a post. Too tired to start it then, I postponed its composition until this morning. It is now morning, and the idea, of course, is gone.

And so, I will instead pick on a strand that I laid down a couple of days ago when I explained that I hadn’t had time to write any posts because I had been such a busy bee creatively. In it, I revealed that I was close to finishing a long short story (and yes, there is such a thing) called “The Xmas Revenge of Eliza Hackle.” It was, at the time, somewhere around 8000 words (although I think I overstated the length in that post), and I estimated its final length at somewhere around 10,000. As the uptick in the number of posts on this forum attest, I have finished the story. Or at least this draft. And now, like a pie, I stick it on the shelf and the cooling off period begins.

It ended up being about 8800 words long and started out with one ending and ended up with another. The first ending was modern and Checkovian. I wrote a sentence, “And the grass grew tall around them,” and called that the end. This is how they end short stories these days, ambiguously, with sentences that have the ring of finality, but complete nothing. It is all post-modern and hip and just the kind of thing that appeals to academics and technicians, but is also part of the reason why, outside of creative writing MFA programs, the short story is a dying form.

Because people out in the world want endings. It doesn’t have to have a moral, it doesn’t have to be happy, it can even be ironic, but it needs to have some kind of an ending for most people to care. I read someone a few months ago, I can’t remember who, who said that all the best writers in short forms were working on TV shows now. And I’m not sure that that’s 100 percent true, but I think it has truth in it. And I don’t want to work on a TV show.

And so, I changed the ending. As I went back over the whole story, it was the ending that had been indicated all along. It is not only an old fashioned ending, it is almost an O. Henry kind of ending. It’s the kind of ending that a mass audience would find satisfying, and I’m not ashamed to say that. In fact, I think that’s a positive strength.

It also means, though, that the story is not marketable as it stands. The magazines that buy short stories these days are not concerned with serving a wide audience. Most of the magazines are for specialists and are small journals devoted to limited audiences. The few general interest magazines that are interested in fiction, such as The New Yorker and Harper’s Magazine, have pulled their brows so high in regard to stories that it looks like they’ve had too many face lifts.

And so, I’ll hold it aside.

I have a number of Christmas stories that I’d like to tell, all of them short, and most of them much shorter than “Eliza.” With any luck, someday I will have the chance to collect them in convenient book form, and we’ll have a chance to see whether Middle America (whatever that is) takes more of a shine to traditional stories than the newfangled kind. Or maybe I’ll have to fall in line behind the apostles of the vague ending and a quiet air of desperation.

And the grass grew tall around them.

The Great American Novel

I stopped in at the Prairie Home Companion website this morning to catch up on Garrison Keillor’s column, The Old Scout, and most of all to see if any new Posts to the Host had been made. Now, it’s funny that I should do any of these things, because I haven’t really listened to A Prairie Home Companion purposely in years. Oh, there was a time. I’m one of those people who found it in the early years, back in the very early ’80s. When I started listening, one of the fictional sponsors of the show was Bob’s Bank (“Save at the Sign of the Sock”). And time went on and the show grew in popularity. Eventually, Garrison became involved with a Danish woman he had gone to high school with and publicly humiliated the woman he had been living with–the show’s producer, Margaret Moos. It seemed to me to be ungentlemanly behavior, so I stopped listening. Besides which, every episode now featured commercials for an album fictionally called “Songs of the Cat” at Bertha’s Kitty Boutique, and while that might have been humorous the first forty or fifty times, the whole concept had begun to wear on my nerves, and every Saturday night not spent listening to the recitation of the locations of Bertha’s Kitty Boutique stores or commercials for the Fearmonger’s Shop was time well spent.

And yet, as with any early love, interest may fade, but it never completely dies. And so I check in each week to see what the good middle and upper middle class folks in the heartland have to say and to see what Garrison is on about in his syndicated column. It helps fill up the week, and you never know what you’re going to come across.

Lately the trend in the Posts to the Host section has been for people to vilify Garrison for one reason or another. One was from a guy who was upset because Garrison used the word “fruitcake” in a Guy Noir sketch, which he took to be a slur against gay men. Of course, this is absurd. The term “fruitcake” refers to crazy people, not gayboys. No, had he been insensitive enough to want to slur gay men, he would have used the term “fruit.” Or Nancy. Or nancyboy. Or swish. Or Mary. Or sissymary. Or many others far too plain spoken and ribald for the typical audience for A Prairie Home Companion.

Another came when Garrison apparently had the nerve to suggest that the Baby Boomer Generation (a group from whose upper echelons he hails) were ever anything other than a collection of Christs-on-Earth. How dare he? Doesn’t he know that we came out of the ’60s (somewhere around 1975) living in a paradise on Earth where all problems were solved? How else could we have gone into the ’80s (somewhere around 1975) without descending into a narcissistic hash of drugs, greed, and meaningless sex? Oh, wait. We did.

And now, this morning, he is being excoriated for not considering The Great Gatsby “The Great American Novel,” and instead preferring something–anything–by Faulkner. Keillor’s response is inspired. It’s in moments like those when I remember why I loved him and his show so damn much all those years ago.

Now, my first question is this: How wealthy do you have to be before this is your concern in life? I mean, I like books and all, but I’m too busy paying bills and trying to survive to be able to spend too many hours building an imaginary hierarchy out of the corpus of American literature based solely on my own prejudices and limitations.

My second question is, why can there only be one Great American Novel? Aren’t there really hundreds? Can all the vast realities of American life be summed up in a single volume? And can that vastness really be summed up in a 40,000 word book about a bootlegger and a bunch of people with too much time on their hands? I’m not trying to dis Fitzgerald, either. The Last Tycoon, his final, unfinished novel, is an extraordinary performance, a great book written by a great writer who was finally in complete control of all of his gifts.

I haven’t read much Faulkner, which is more a sad comment on me than it is on him. I read “The Bear” in my literature book in 7th grade, even though–perhaps especially because–it wasn’t on the syllabus. I’ve also read snippets over the years, and the man was clearly a master. And you really don’t get a Nobel Prize for making sausage. He was a modernist, which is always going to alienate some readers, but I have a tip for them. Read it slow. Read it word-by-word and not sentence-by-sentence or paragraph-by-paragraph or page-by-page. I tried this with Ulysses, and it took over my brain. And I would have sworn before that that it was nothing but pretentious drivel.

Finally, my goal is not to write The Great American Novel, but to write A Decent American Novel, which is probably about all anyone can aspire to. There is not one greatest. I’ve had this thought for years. It started back when everyone was comparing Magic to Bird. Who was greater? And I thought, “What does it matter?” If you were choosing teams on a playground, would you pass up either? It was a meaningless question. And then I thought, you know, there’s a level in any field of endeavor that only a few can perform at, and once someone reaches that level, the whole concept of hierarchy loses its meaning. Deciding which is best is a matter of picking nits and relying more on prejudices than facts. It’s possible to love them all, and much more meaningful and enriching if you do.

Not that I have an opinion on any of this.

25 Books

It has occurred to me that I am getting dull. You go through life in the regular way, going to work, going to the store, doing the necessary chores that need to be done if life is going to be survived in any kind of order, in any kind of system, and it is easy to stop learning. It is simple to stop growing. There’s nothing lazier than growing dull.

And so, I have decided to do something about this. It is impossible to empty a thing that has not been previously filled, and that’s the trouble with my mind. It’s long since been drained, and I have not been diligent in seeing that it was refilled. And, therefore, I have set myself a challenge.

Next to the sofa in our newly created den is a bookcase. The topmost shelf has 24 books on it. I am going to read them all, with one caveat. There will be no time limit or anything of that sort, and I will use a regular method in achieving this goal. I will be allowed to drop books I do not enjoy without penalty. This is, after all, an attempt to refill my mind, not set an endurance record or punish myself.

The books are:
1. White Noise–Dom DeLillo
2. The Bean Trees–Barbara Kingsolver
3. In the Company of Angels–N.M. Kelby
4. You Are Not a Stranger Here–Adam Haslett
5. Consequences–Penelope Lively
6. A Christmas Carol and Other Stories–Charles Dickens
7. Agnes Grey–Anne Bronte
8. Suite Francaise–Irene Nemirovsky
9. One Hundred Days of Solitude–Gabriel Garcia Marquez
10. The Secret Life of Bees–Sue Monk Kidd
11. Ten Days in the Hills–Jane Smiley
12. To the Lighthouse–Virginia Woolf
13. Waiting–Ha Jin
14. The Eighth Day–Thornton Wilder
15. Old School–Tobias Wolff
16. Ahab’s Wife–Sena Jeter Naslund
17. Flowers for Algernon–Daniel Keyes
18. Midnight’s Children–Salman Rushdie
19. The Remains of the Day–Kazuo Ishiguro
20. Babel Tower–W.S. Byatt
21. A House for Mr. Biswas–V.S. Naipaul
22. Our Town–Thornton Wilder
23. Memoirs of a Geisha–Arthur Golden
24. Independence Day–Richard Ford

Now there are, actually, two caveats I must make to that list. First, I am currently reading Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck, and I think it proper that this fine book kick off the project. Second, Independence Day is the second book in a trilogy, and it strikes me as unfair to Mr. Ford to jump in at the middle. Therefore, when I get to that, I will read the first book, The Sportswriter, instead.

I have read Travels with Charley, White Noise, Old School, and Remains of the Day before, but all four are great books that deserve another look. I have, of course, seen Our Town, but have never read it, so that should be a new experience of an old friend. Also, I have read A Christmas Carol, but not the Other Stories, and I hereby pledge to read the whole thing from stem-to-stern. Also, I have read the beginning of Midnight’s Children, and am ashamed that I did not make the proper time available in order to finish it. The fault there was entirely mine and not the book’s.

I don’t know if I am going to chronicle the progress of this journey or not. I can’t even be certain that I’m going to be even the slightest bit more interesting when I am done than I am now. I just know that I will be no worse off then than I am today, and that odds are that I will benefit significantly from the effort.

And now you will have to excuse me. Charley awaits.

The Write Way

A big part of the reason why I have been so silent of late is that I have been, as a writer, otherwise occupied.

After a short period in which it seemed that I couldn’t put one coherent sentence after another (a.k.a. George W. Bush Disease), I started once again to write. Putting the Drayton website together seemed to help, as did sending off the manuscript to an agent.

That burden lifted, I started work on my next major project, another novel. And not another Drayton novel, either. This one concerns a lawsuit and the parties involved in it, including the lawyers and paralegals. I had actually worked on it a bunch in the early ’90s as a teleplay, but since the odds of getting a teleplay produced are slim at best, it seemed like turning it into a novel might work.

I’d taken a couple of shots at this in the past few years, but couldn’t get the narrative voice right. That was until 10 days ago when the prologue came out in the voice of the attorney–a senior associate at a small firm–who will represent the defendant in a civil suit. That fixed everything, and now I have the prologue and a big chunk of chapter one.

I’d have more, but I set it aside temporarily this week so that I could finish off a story I’ve been writing for a while now. It is a Christmas story, and it started out as two comments on Phil Austin’s Blog of the Unknown. That version ran maybe 1500 words and struck me as being more of an outline in draft form (my favorite kind of outline) than a true story. I wanted to flesh it out a bit, get to know the characters more, and to show more and tell less. I started the new version four months ago.

Yesterday, it passed 8500 words and will undoubtedly hit 10,000 before all is said and done. And I think it’s come out pretty well. It’s entertaining and interesting and even has some good writing from time-to-time. The thing about it though is this: It will be too long for almost any magazine outside The New Yorker, and since I’m neither well-known nor well-connected, it’s unlikely to find a home there, either. (This isn’t really a criticism of them, by the way. They get thousands of submissions every day, and the only possible way to wade through that is to rely on reputation and the advice of friends. Perhaps submissions do get through over the transom, but if they do, I can’t recall the last one I’ve seen. )

However, I’m thinking about trying something new. Since I now am somewhat proficient with desktop publishing software, I’m thinking of putting together an occasional newsletter called something like The Lengram that would feature my stories in nice fonts and a professional, magazine-like format. I could then distribute these free to anyone who emailed me as a PDF.

If you’d be interested in receiving such a publication (to run no more than a few times a year), just email me and I will put you on the mailing list.

Life Is Risk

I seem to go through spells when it comes to linking to articles, especially from The New York Times. Right now, I’m apparently on a Timothy Egan kick. Last week, I linked to and discussed an article he wrote about the state of journalism. Now, I’d like to discuss both his article “Mountain Madness” and a common theme in some of the comments to it. (My comment can be found here.)

The article itself is about people who climb mountains, particularly Mt. Rainer, and die while doing so. Mr. Egan at no point says that people should stop climbing mountains, he’s only pointing out that an inordinate number of people who do wind up dead at or near the top and that those people leave behind loved ones who must bear the brunt of the person’s decision to climb in the first place.

In many of the comments, especially those by people who either climb or participate in some other extreme activity, the argument is made that the people referred to could have died just as easily in some more mundane pursuit, and isn’t it a better thing to die while doing something you love than to die while standing at a copy machine or while watching bowling on TV. Perhaps.

However, the thing that these commenters miss is that, according to Mr. Egan, one out of about every 500 climbers of Mt. Rainer dies while doing it. That is an extraordinarily high mortality rate. The fact is that the odds of dying while making a copy or, as one commenter would have it, while attending a cocktail party are probably one in some multiple of millions. These are not the same thing.

If I told you that a certain make of car was great except for one thing–one out of every five hundred would blow up while being driven–would you buy the car? Or would you think it a needless risk? This is the question that those who want to climb should ask themselves. If we could ask the people who have died climbing Mt. Rainer if it was worth it, do you think they would answer “Definitely!” or would they only wish that they had seen their families one more time?

Yes, we will all die eventually, and we will all die in a vast variety of ways. And yet, do we not consider those who take unnecessary risks, those who needlessly court death, fools? To me, the beauty and joy of life are constantly around us, and it is not necessary to nip off to the nearest mountain in order to encounter grandeur and wonder. I’m not wise enough to always sample from this cup, but I do get the occasional sip.

Now, I’m not advocating the abolition of climbing. If someone wants to take that risk, let them. What I am advocating is making the attempt to live our lives in a way that makes such pursuits unnecessary. Perhaps if every day is an adventure and every moment an experience of grandeur then climbing mountains and jumping off bridges with rubber bands tied to your feet lose their allure. Perhaps it’s even better if the mountaintop is inside you rather than way out in Alaska.

Press, Press, Pull*

Timothy Egan wrote an interesting piece in today’s Times concerning the state and necessity of the Press. He’s concerned about the failure rate of newspapers far and wide in this land of ours and fears that journalism, as a profession, is on the wane. And although I think that his concerns are reasonable and his fears understandable, I also think his conclusions are incorrect.

He’s afraid that local reporting will go the way of the do-do and that all national reporting will come from online sources such as The Drudge Report and The Huffington Post. He claims that “the Web format will never generate enough money to keep viable reporting staffs afloat at some of the nation’s biggest papers,” which is a pretty big statement. For example, what is a “viable reporting staff”? Also, can we say with certainty that the Web-based model for news reporting has played itself out and “will never generate enough money” to support this clearly theoretical “viable reporting staff”?

The Internet has clearly changed the world of news more than anything else in our culture, except perhaps pornography and the distribution of cut-rate pharmaceuticals. The old foldable newspaper is an artifact of the past, and the industry itself is changing rapidly. Magazines are also having to deal with this, but a little less rapidly, I think. And the point is that the victory of the Internet over the Linotype machine is inevitable. The other point to keep in mind is that the Internet, which its founders had hoped would be mostly a vehicle for information, is in fact mostly a vehicle for commerce. The Internet exists as it does mainly because it generates money.

And this is what news organizations are going to have to come to grips with. They are going to have to figure out where the money is and how to extract it from the average web-trolling dupe as efficiently as possible. Now, what occurs to me is that over the coming years you will see an increase (not the decrease Mr. Egan fears) in local coverage. New sources will pop up and existing ones will morph into the new model. People will continue to get paid simply because, in order to get the work done properly, they’re going to have to. There will probably be a greater number of sources all focused on more narrow issues.

The large newspapers will survive, but people will also get national and international news from a wider variety of sources and will sample from magazines and television news, as well as more foreign publications. It’s going to change, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. That’s always been the way, and society stands to continue working in that way for the foreseeable future.

As an artist, I’m struggling with some of these same notions. How can I turn a website into a work of art? How is it possible to use these tools in a way to make valid points about life and society and still make a living? Where would the money come from with which to construct the site in the first place? Is 99% of the Internet always going to be confined to the level of amateur night in Dixie?

I think and hope that the Internet might ultimately be the artist’s salvation. I suspect that youtube is a weigh station rather than a destination and that we are likely to see more professionalism and less rampant amateurism. That’s the problem that rampant amateurism always runs up against: Professionals can do the same thing better. Since the tendency has always worked that way before, I think we can look for it to work that way again in the future.

The trouble is that we just don’t know. We live in a time of transition and turmoil, and most prophecies will turn out to be flawed or just plain wrong. Unfortunately for Timothy Egan and everybody else, all we can do is to hold on tightly and hope that the landing is smooth.

*N.B. The title to this piece is taken from a Three Stooges movie and should have been followed by a “nyuk, nyuk, nyuk.”