christopher cocca

SMITH Magazine is looking for your six-word memoirs.  Register with SMITH and share your best shots.  Everything submitted to this project is posted, but SMITH will then compile the best six-word stories in a print edition.  Volume 1 is out now.  SMITH’s six-word project here.  Good luck.

Here’s my first submission, which I’d probably twitlit except for the facebook feed…people might get the wrong idea.

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A lot of people find their way to this blog by searching the term “dirty realism.” Dirty realism is currently defined on Wikipedia thusly:

“Dirty Realism is a North American literary movement born in the 1970s-80s in which the narrative is stripped down to its fundamental features.

This movement is a derivation from minimalism. As minimalism, dirty realism is characterized by an economy with words and a focus on surface description. Authors working within the genre tend to eschew adverbs and prefer allowing context to dictate meaning. The characters in minimalist stories and novels tend to be unexceptional.

Dirty realism authors include the movement “godfather” Charles Bukowski (1920-1994), as well as the short story writers Raymond Carver (1938-1988), Tobias Wolff (1945), Richard Ford (1944), Frederick Barthelme, and Pedro Juan Gutiérrez (1950).”

My favorite line from this description is: “The characters in minimalist stories and novels tend to be unexceptional” and this relates directly to the discussion we had last week about “Privy.”   These are stories about moments and it’s no coincidence that so much flash fiction is written in this voice.  Because realist stories aren’t really about what happens in them but rather what is evoked by the actions or lack thereof and by the author’s choice to relate these moments, the compulsions toward style and length dovetail by default.  Realism is the natural voice of micro fiction, and micro fiction is the natural expression of the realist voice.

This isn’t to say that there can be no great realist novels, or that these novels won’t have recognizable , unexceptional plots.  I suspect the trick in these pieces is to sustain the narrative voice around a series of short, evocative moments without burning it out in the process.  Good luck.

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“Fiction is war,” Roman said when he was touring the Midwest. “Narration is preemption. You control the language, writers, you control the rhythm. Your readers will take everything else, even more so if they know you. They’ll see you in each character, you or one of your hang-ups. They’ll see your friends and enemies and all your gods and vices. Know that going in, writers, and it will be a lot easier going home. Know that going in or be so successful right away you’ll never have to.”

Ben kept clips of his cousin’s trip. One week it was Pittsburgh and another it was Baltimore and then smaller places in between, bookstores in York or Bethesda or someplace in Ohio. He’d been to Wheeling, West Virginia, too, where it feels like you might fall right off route 80, and he’d been through St. Louis and St. Paul and Seattle and Orange County.

“Let’s cut it right up front,” Rome said when he was speaking in Chicago. “I’m here because I can’t sleep, shot all to hell and haunted by things I haven’t done, promises I haven’t kept. I don’t read much, so I don’t know why you’re here. Sometime, when the roles are reversed, you’ll have to tell me about that, because I’m sure it’s a fascinating story,” he said, and everybody clapped.

I just read the “Possible Announcement” of the new “Possibly Related Posts” feature across the WordPress platform.  Blog posts will now display links to similar posts/related topics on the host blog and other WordPress blogs.  As Matt says in the announcement:  ”One of my favorite things about Youtube is that you can start with a single video and then see something else interesting in the related videos and you lose yourself and next thing you know it’s four in the morning and you’re watching disco pilates videos. My fancy term for this is lateral navigation. “

Lateral navigation is how I’ve come to learn about a lot of things I’d never think to research on wikipedia and, via comments, trackbacks and other links, also how I’ve come across some great writers and blogs.  ”Possibly related posts” is another layer in the larger conversation and will help readers read more writers and writers read each other.  Nice work, Matt.

I had to share this. Make sure to click through a few of the previous strips. Fantastic. The best part is that Jim Davis is all about it.

The prompt was “something big is about to happen but history will get it wrong.”   This is a 100-word story.  I found the image here and used ComicLife to edit it and set up the graphic.

Progress first appeared at Robert McEvily’s Six Sentences. It came from a good paragraph in the middle of not-so-good something else and finished as a 100-word, six sentence story. It ranks with The Good Thief and Evensong among my favorite short pieces not written by someone else.

Progress

Rachel has these sweat pants with an old boyfriend’s college on the thigh and she wears them in the morning sometimes before she leaves. I don’t remember what she wears the nights before and sometimes I feel guilty. She says she sees there’s more to me and I say I’m not so sure. I say we can’t keep doing this and she repeats there’s more to me and I ask her where she’s looking. Rachel smiles and I see the red straps on her halter and think that might be something. She picks the letters on her thigh and nods.

We know that bad things can happen when you call fiction non-fiction. The other way around seems more a matter of preference.  Privy happened, but I mean the piece as fiction. It’s not interesting to me at all as a creative non-fiction because the point isn’t that it happened, it’s that sometime after I remember it a certain way and the narrative voice, my own view of it, is fictive. The details are all true, but who cares? I mean it as fiction because of what fiction is and what fiction does.

Hemingway said “All good books have one thing in common – they are truer than if they had really happened,” and that’s only partly true. Lots of his best work was cribbed directly from his life. On the other hand, if by good book we mean something with a classic plot structure and balance and foreshadowing and parallelism, he’s exactly right. That’s also why, for many, there will be a colossal so-what factor working against something like Privy or against what in fiction we’ve come to call dirty realism.

So, can a true, boring story be fiction? Anyone that knows the story will only ever see the writer in it and not the fictive, creative impulse that made him write it in the first place. But it’s fiction if he means it to be. Otherwise its journalism. As flash fiction, Privy works. As a news story it’s pointless.

I college-toured NYU with Ramon at the end of sophomore year and he lost the button from his shorts in a urinal at Port Authority when we got off the bus.  We left Milltown early and got there close to 9 and Ramon and his dad were both runners and I was in a thin stage so we had time to kill in Chelsea and then a steady pace uptown and I liked the way I looked in storefronts.  At 11 we saw the arch and purple banners with sliver torches and perfect letters matting Washington Square with a tree-line old brick frame.

They didn’t give out free t-shirts like Fordham but there was this gorgeous leggy blonde with a continental accent and eyes like your first hot babysitter. She asked about “flats” and I knew she meant apartments because I had been to England but she wasn’t British or anything like our friends and crushes who sang in musicals and took tours of FIT.  She was older or just maybe European and she knew everything she’d ever do and smiled back because you didn’t. 

Ramon went to Milltown Sate and I went to a small school, but that day in the city everything was out in front.  That’s ten years gone and sometimes when I take a piss it seems like much less left.