Short story writing belongs only to the young?

Oh, Mr. Benfey, of this that you’ve written,

The short story is a genre in which, for mysterious reasons, Americans–along with Russian and Irish writers–have excelled. Perhaps it is because these are countries that, in their ragged and unsettled histories, have maintained oral storytelling traditions in tightly knit rural communities. It has often been pointed out that the American South, with its agrarian past and its experience of military defeat and occupation, has produced an unusually strong crop of short stories. At the same time, the writing of stories seems to be a talent, like a knack for chess or mathematics or lyric poetry, that lives and dies with youth. In the years before her death, O’Connor felt the well running dry; she wrote no new stories in 1962. “I’ve been writing eighteen years and I’ve reached the point where I can’t do again what I know I can do well,” she lamented, “and the larger things that I need to do now, I doubt my capacity for doing.”

I’d ask, in response, you’ve heard of Tobias Wollf, surely?

But Tobias Wolff, who is one of our great contemporary masters of the short story, says that the difficulty of the short story is its own reward…

The Anti-Twitter: In Search of Lost Time?

Or how many tweets would the volumes take? (In Defense of Distraction, Sam Anderson.)

The prophets of total attentional meltdown sometimes invoke, as an example of the great culture we’re going to lose as we succumb to e-thinking, the canonical French juggernaut Marcel Proust. And indeed, at seven volumes, several thousand pages, and 1.5 million words, À la Recherche du Temps Perdu is in many ways the anti-Twitter. (It would take, by the way, exactly 68,636 tweets to reproduce.) It’s important to remember, however, that the most famous moment in all of Proust, the moment that launches the entire monumental project, is a moment of pure distraction: when the narrator, Marcel, eats a spoonful of tea-soaked madeleine and finds himself instantly transported back to the world of his childhood. Proust makes it clear that conscious focus could never have yielded such profound magic: Marcel has to abandon the constraints of what he calls “voluntary memory”—the kind of narrow, purpose-driven attention that Adderall, say, might have allowed him to harness—in order to get to the deeper truths available only by distraction. That famous cookie is a kind of hyperlink: a little blip that launches an associative cascade of a million other subjects. This sort of free-associative wandering is essential to the creative process; one moment of judicious unmindfulness can inspire thousands of hours of mindfulness.

Interesting article. Yes, free-associative wandering is essential to the creative process. But a quibble here: that’s not really the same thing as having tabs and tabs of your browser open simultaneously with email, texting, tweeting, etc and so on, is it?

In the dark

Struggling with, in what I”m writing — this novel in stories, not knowing what will happen. (Again.)

That long slog. Just writing, writing, writing to find out what will happen with this character. Will it add up to something? Will he go somewhere? Can it be or become something meaningful — something worth reading about?

These are the hard parts. The hardest parts. Trying to trust that this dallying around on paper is going to become.

The long sentence

I love a long sentence, written well. I love to hear a long, well-written sentence read aloud. The cadence, the music, the breath. I love to take a good breath and read a good long sentence aloud especially if that good long sentence is mine. I love to hear its sound, how it plays out.

The other night at a writers’ thing I read a piece I’ve recently written aloud. Someone reported afterward, as a criticism, he had counted 75 words to one of my sentences. My thought was: And?

How does that work?

I was reading a short story and, finished, went back to a phrase that stayed with me: a sliver of birthday cake, and next thing I knew I was writing a poem about a satin slipper.

How did that happen? I don’t really want to know. The best times are those with mystery.

Avoiding the enervations of modern life

Why I sometimes cannot do the blog, what at those times seems to be a pointless activity.  Jeanette Winterson explains very well in her [August] column.

There’s a common myth that creativity is linked to dark states and depression; it isn’t anything like as simple as that. I think it is to do with being open, which you have to be if you want to be honest in your work, and it is to do with the liminal state of creativity – a place that happens on the cusp or the boundary of two worlds and is exhausting, exhilarating, but also frightening, and full of shapes that are unknown.