What Kind Of Writing Are You For?

Rob (from 6S) sent a link out today to this post about the kind of writing Tom Robbins is for.  Thinking about what kind of writing you’re for isn’t a bad corrective exercise when things start to get away from you.  Below are some of mine.

I’m for writing that is not pleased with itself.  I’m for writing that shops at Kmart.  I’m for writing that gets embarrassed easily.  I’m for writing that doesn’t sleep.  That can’t sleep.  I’m for writing that looks bad in the morning.

I’m for writing that breathes and has rhythm.  I am for writing that crawls and walks and loses its breath.  I’m for writing that has dirt under its nails. I’m for writing that has acne.  I’m for writing that makes me angry and for writing that delivers me from anger.

I’m for writing that laughs at me and sneers.  I’m for writing that doesn’t try to be my friend.  That doesn’t need to. 

I’m for writing that is rude with truth and I’m for writing that is nuanced.  I’m for writing the exposes and I’m for writing that just is.  

 

 

100 Words About A Good Man

This is called The Good Thief. It’s been published here and at Tuesday Shorts.  We lost him recently, but he gave me this and many things. 

My grandfather cannot walk now but his arms and back are strong. He wears a v-neck work shirt and a gold and diamond Christ-head and he’s kneeling on the den floor looking for his pills. His forearms are Italian-dark with latent bulldog power, still big from turning Navy mounts and tagging Mitsubishi Zeros by blood-red dots behind their wings. Now he’s moving the recliner and sweating from his nose and steel wool shadow. His chair crashes heavy and Jesus weeps the nose sweat while my daughter crawls behind him and he doesn’t know I see.

Find the red dots, Pop. 

 

All Literature Is Personal

We talked a few weeks ago about the degree to which we can legitimately frame creative non-fiction as fiction.  It’s worth mentioning that even when you’re self-consciously writing fiction (that’s not the same as writing self-conscious fiction), readers will always be tempted to take your character’s words and thoughts and gods and vices as your own.  

Yesterday I said all literature is local because it’s wrung through the life-narrative that’s shaped by your immediate setting. Another way to say this is that all literature is personal, all your pensive poetry and all your pretty prose, all your fiction and non-fiction–it’s really all the same. It’s the real and imagined ways you move up and down your world, it’s the conservations you’ve been having with yourself since there’s been a self to speak and listen to.  Let’s hear about that and forget about the filters.

Don’t protect yourself on paper. Don’t settle for cliche and tired phrasing. If someone else could have written what it is you have to say, then you probably haven’t said anything that’s you.  Your job as a writer is to discern the things worth saying and to say them in the same artful way you hear them, to use the same unsettled, shaky gut by which you know the ones to keep.  

 

The Old School Is a Jealous Ghost

This 100-word story came from this prompt: “write about a magical pencil.” That’s pretty bad but overall I like what I came up with.  I don’t like that an adverb snuck its way in there but that’s one of the limits of the form. I do like the last phrase. And I do love sucking potato guts from french fries. And shooting them at people.

It sunk fast into his thigh like a wax straw through the flesh-pulp of a melon. The thick blood on the floor extended the comparison; he used to suck potato guts from french fries and fill the pockets in with ketchup like a sweet red tang epoxy. The pencil above his femoral artery rolled patiently ignored between the keyboard and the disk drive and he finished the last page of his section of the paper as its deep sting hit his flank. Every newsroom has its legends; that the old school is a jealous ghost became for him a fact.

All Literature Is Local

It’s perhaps a little known fact that Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania, has been home to at least two literary notables. Stephen Vincent Benét was a poet and writer and the author of what some consider the quintessential American short story, “The Devil and Daniel Webster.” Hilda Doolittle, otherwise known as HD, is another important figure in American letters. Both were born in Bethlehem, PA, and while Bethlehem is noted for its strong musical, spiritual, and academic heritage, there’s not the same kind of literary scene as such.

That said, I’ve always thought that the myth of a place is central to the stories its people produce. The narrative here is urban decline and renewal, suburban sprawl and now, maybe, contraction, old and new populations, disappearing green space and agrarian cultures and the general homogenization of the mid-Atlantic and resistance to it. The same could be said of hundreds of other places but each one has its touchstones. Billy Joel made the Lehigh Valley’s into a prescient song called “Allentown.” I’m sure local writers could do just as well artistically, and because realism requires reality, it doesn’t matter much that nothing ever happens here; the context is what’s exceptional, the local lens through which you grope at larger forces.

All literature is local, and all literature starts with the writer’s internal narrative, the stimulus-response she’s been hearing since words started making sense. What’s your local legend? What’s your tension? Where do you see something universal in something so no-one-cares specific? Do you have six words on Lodi, Ohio or Elizabeth, New Jersey or Wheeling, West Virginia? Six sentences on East LA or Tallahassee or Nowhere, Pennsylvania? I think you need to share them.

Six Words about Philadelphia

SMITH Magazine is running a contest: Six Words about Philadelphia.  

More Six Word Stories

My collection is growing, here.

Use Your Confusion

FrootBat31 has a good post up about music to write by. Through some lateral browsing I also came across musicovery.com, a site that populates playlists based on mood and preference information inputed by users. You can also filter for decade. Somehow musicovery knew that when I input “dark” as my mood I’d be all about hearing “Winds of Change” by the Scorpions. I’m a sucker for perestroika rock.

This strikes me a great tool for writers because writers are moody by default and definition. It’s not wallowing if you know you’re doing it, and you’re going to obsess about whatever it is you’re obsessing about anyway. Might as well get some catharsis and inspiration out of it.

Ohhhh…the Stereophonics just gave way to “The Wind Cries Mary.” See what I mean?

Call for Collaboration

Admit Two has a good premise:

“We’ll consider almost anything. There’s only one condition: it has to be done by more than one author.”

In the spirit of collaborative, open-sourced lit, I’m putting out an invitation. Anyone interested in writing something with me for submission? Let me know via the comment feature at the bottom of this post, and be sure to fill in the email field. I hope for some takers.

Six Words I Hate

I shared a link yesterday to SMITH Magazine’s Six-Word Memoir project. I have a new post there that for me sums up what I said here about voice, form, and purpose in micro fiction and nonfiction.

The preceding paragraph is also an emotional buffer. I hate that this six-word piece is true. I hate that it’s been true for so many. Maybe you’ve had this experience and know what I mean.

There’s a tendency toward clever in micro fiction. Sometimes it works. This isn’t that. Sometimes it’s lament. Sometimes there’s not more to say.