News -- Flash!

Today is the first day of my summer writing project. I'm sort of scared.

When I had just graduated college, I began working on a set of short stories with Appalachian themes. It took me about two years to "finish" them. There are twenty in total. These stories were something I'd wanted to do for a very long time. Every fiction I've read about Appalachia is always so nostalgic, so backwards looking; nobody wants to move past 1943, when everybody hoed a garden and quilted stuff. I was always more interested in what happened to those people's grandkids -- you know, the drug problems, the lack of jobs, the rift we feel between the culture we're in now and the culture of our grandparents, how we raise our kids, what values we think are important, religion, our frustration with people who want to romanticize where we live or keep seeing us as the culture of canning tomatoes and telling "Jack tales." etc. I don't think anyone is really interested in those issues besides us children, but really, they're our stories.

So, I wrote and I wrote and I wrote. I went to the flea market and sat there scribbling at people. I hiked up on mountains and took pictures and later just stared at them for a long time, asking myself "But what does it mean?!" I wrote a few things that made me cry. My best friend back home read two of my stories and she cried. "This is us," she said. And that meant more to me than getting a story published -- which has yet to happen. And it won't happen for a while, because publishing is a matter of A) skill B) connections and C) luck. Mostly C. I don't really want to be a "famous" writer. I just want published -- I want to share it. But that won't happen until the stories are a lot sharper. Talking about your skill (or lack thereof) as a writer is an uncomfortable thing, at least for me. My experience with writer's workshops and being around people who take themselves Very Seriously about writing makes me feel like it's one big pissing contest of who does it better. It's really hard to judge yourself, when the obvious measure would be to answer the question Have you published yet? But even publishing is really just a matter of luck and persistence topped with connections. Sometimes it's not a very good measure of talent at all. I'm comfortable enough admitting that I do have some raw talent -- but I'm also not a "master" of writing, and I'm not so egotistical that I can't admit that. I don't spend eight hours a day on it -- not even two or three. If I want to be good and not just "sometimes clever," that has to change. You have to approach writing like you do a job. You get your supplies together, you sit down, you start writing. Every single day, or damned close to it. Even if it's an exercise for practice. You just have to keep doing it.

I don't think blogging counts, but maybe it does.

I said earlier the stories were "finished" -- because nothing is ever really finished. I wrote as far as I could, I tried a limited run of sending what I thought were my best stories out to creative journals and magazines (which included an interesting return letter from an editor), and then I put them aside. I just couldn't look at them anymore, because I couldn't see the forest for the trees. So, four years later, I'm back to them again. And I'm terrified. I'm not sure why.

I've been writing ever since I can remember. The earliest thing I wrote I don't even remember doing. My grandma kept it and showed it to me years later -- it was a story about some creepy veterinarian who was busy bugging all the local animals so he could keep tabs on his neighbors and blackmail them. A brave and clever little girl found him out. I was under ten. Don't ask me how I knew about bugging and blackmail when I was under ten and we didn't have cable TV. I don't remember. I do remember that I wanted to be an international spy when I was about five years old and carried that dream all the way to third grade, where I traded it in for being President of the United States instead. I loved mysteries and short stories. When I was 12 going on 13, I spent the whole summer in front of my mother's heavy, gun-metal gray typewriter banging out stories where a clever and brave girl in her early twenties solved mysteries ranging from murder to kidnapping to embezzlement. They come with pictures provided by a 12-year-old illustrator as well, with her new set of colored pencils. All the faces have very large eyes. When I was actually in my early twenties that little collection, all bound in a pink binder, embarrassed the hell out of me. Now I think it's hilarious and I'm glad I didn't throw them away. Lots of little stories and books happened in between then and now. For my creative writing project in the tenth grade, we had to do kids books, and I made one in the shape of a bone about a puppy who runs away from home because he thinks he's all grown up, only to run into a wolf. Doing his puppy tricks is the only thing that allows him to escape and return to his suburban home a more appreciative puppy. It's a study in domestication and middle class values. LOL. Now, of course, kids books in various shapes are pretty popular. There wasn't anything like them in the stores when I was a kid. I wrote a Canterbury tale about WalMart when I was a senior in high school that won a prize.

But as an adult, I suddenly developed some weird notions about writing in my twenties that have been hard for me to get past. The stakes somehow were raised and things seemed more serious. Mistakes meant something more than they used to. As a 12-year-old, I could just rip the typing paper out of the typewriter and wad it up, call it "stupid," and throw it in the trash. As an adult, wadding the paper up somehow meant I was stupid, not the idea. Or that I had stupid ideas. Or that it had to be perfect the first time, or clearly I wasn't meant to be a writer. And then thinking of myself as a "writer" makes me really squeamish. When do you get to call yourself that? When you're published? When you're doing it as a full time job? When you forwent the rent so you could buy more notebooks? I've been writing stories since I learned how to write, but that doesn't seem "legitimate" anymore. Writing was For Real now. When I was a kid, it wasn't about publishing. It was about translating this awesome moving picture I had in my head onto paper. My head was full of little short films. I wanted to write them down on paper to keep them forever. As an adult, it seemed like I had to write them down just right so that other people would buy them. And if it didn't happen by the time you were 30, it was obviously never going to happen at all. After all, didn't Keats publish at 18 years old?! And speaking of publishing, my adult writing was wa-a-y too short for conventional short stories. An editor in a return rejection letter & email to me basically told me I was cramming too much in too small a space, that I needed more "development" and that the stories needed to be longer. I didn't want to do that, because to me, the stories were like little snapshots. Like photography. Here's the picture. You read into it what you want to. I didn't know how to make them longer without watering them down. So I did the best I could, took them as far as I could go, and then I put them down.

Once I put the stories aside, I took a deep breath -- four years' worth, actually. I'm on a sort of middle ground now, a grown-up place to be about writing. I still have those short films in my head, and they still need to come out on paper. But I also want to share them with people. I don't care if they buy them or not. But I do want to share them. And I figured out that I was sending the stories to the wrong publishing genre. I do flash fiction -- I didn't even know there was a name for it when I was busy doing it, and that's what tells me it's what I need to be doing. When I look for the "conventions" of successful story writing, I start getting nervous. When I do what I enjoy, I don't have problems. Flash fiction is a story under 1000 words. 1000-2500 are considered "short shorts," and I have some of those, too, although they rarely go past 1500; 2500 words are considered a minimum standard length short story. I don't want to say 2500 words (this blog post is a little over 1800 words). I like my own stories at 1000 words or less -- that's about two and a half pages, more or less.

And I realized why I always very much liked that old saying "A picture is worth 1000 words."

For me, writing is about making a picture. The beauty is in what is not said, in what your mind can do with the image you were just given. That's what I like, and that's what I'm going to do.

So, I pulled out six stories from my little collection for this summer. The first one is called "Darlene's Basement," and it's about a cable access religious service, the kind of born-again basement preacher you see all the time. The story reads in the rhythm of a born-again sermon. I like it. A lot. Four years later, it needs a lot of work, work I didn't see at the time. It's at about 755 words so far. It'll get reworked, and it might hit 1000 or a little above.

And I'm excited about it; but I'm also a little nervous, because I don't want to load the process with false expectations and demands. I'm blogging right now, because I just made a bunch of edits and I'm sort of scared of looking at them. Little girls grow up and become adults who have jobs; adults who want to "be" writers have to start approaching writing as a job. But a big part of me wants to get back in touch with that little girl who spent that summer eating cucumbers while banging away on that typewriter and illustrating the stories out on the porch with her new colored pencils.

-- Dante's Virgil