Being a Magpie, Proudly

Writers are invariably magpies, it seems to me, or at least the ones I admire are: they collect things--quotes, facts, ideas--and put them to new uses in their writing. Without feeling guilty.

I don't feel guilty about saving articles and ideas and borrowing them, as I did today when I found a valuable statement by the late poet J. D. McClatchey on "desire" that I used in completing the preface to a little forthcoming collection of my stories, called "Departures and Desires."  If I had not come upon the McClatchey piece, I would not have thought of the many implications of desire and their relevance to my stories. I am grateful to him just as he would be glad to know his readers are influenced by his words.

Writers must take whatever bits of inspiration they can find. Often, the results are worth publishing.  When I began a comic story called "Losing It" five years ago, I was conscious of following a plot device used by James Thurber--and I hoped readers would see my indebtedness and not accuse me of plagiarism or, more likely, weak imitation.

Anyone who reads this blog knows that I gather ideas from others and comment on them, trying always to give credit, building something new from the scraps: this is the kind of literary magpie made famous by T. S. Eliot in his "The Waste Land."  I  believe Eliot said something like,  "All writers borrow; good writers steal."

Anyone who studies Shakespeare knows how he borrowed lines and ideas from the books he found and, with his lively imagination, turned these borrowings into his memorable verse plays, which are utterly original even in their indebtedness to other works.  This was the traditional way of doing things and still is for many authors.  Yet some writers of fiction assume that creativity means starting from scratch and inventing everything, as if divorced from literary tradition. No wonder they experience writer's block.

Harold Bloom addressed this issue in his book "The Anxiety of Influence."

When we consider our debt to our language and to all we have read, such a notion of total originality is naïve. Every fiction writer, no matter how many rules and structures he changes or invents, is making use of what I call creative borrowing, the appropriation and transformation of what we have absorbed in reading. 

I, for one, owe a great debt to the community of writers, living and dead, who continue to feed us.

A first novel

After many years of presenting myself strictly as a non-fiction writer, I had a breakthrough four years ago, completing and publishing two short stories.  Two other stories followed, so far unpublished.  I had been (without knowing it) in the creative closet, with a long-held secret desire to write fiction. I was now "out."

And so I tentatively began a novel, which over two summers and two winters of revision, finally emerged this year, all 53,000 words of it.  Rather than wait years for some publisher to accept it, I decided to follow my wife Lynn's lead and publish it on Kindle.

Thus this week, on my birthday, after much revising and editing, I finally published Friends and Brothers, an elegiac novel of friendship and loss. It deals with two men who meet in high school, get acquainted in college, then stay close as their careers diverge in New York City. There are issues of betrayal, grief, and faith involved in this essentially simple story that some would label as "bromance."

A novel-long structure seemed right because the story takes place over 40 years, from the Sixties to the end of the 20th century, allowing me to indulge a bit of fantasy and have the main characters meet various NYC celebrities, including George Plimpton and members of the Kennedy family, real people who make an appearance in this fictional narrative.

I found myself half-unconsciously imitating Waugh's Brideshead Revisited in structure, with a first-person narrator looking back at his greatest friendship. I was also greatly influenced by other stories of male friendship and from having taught a course on masculinity and literature.  One of the topics in that course was the challenge of male friendship since most straight men tend to find their closest emotional connections with women; yet all men yearn for, yet often don't find, real friendship, caring and support with another man.

I learned many things about my own life in writing this novel. In terms of craft, I found, first of all, that if I worked for at least an hour a day for six months, I could compete a first draft of something much longer than a novella or short story, following my rough outline and keeping the plot simple.

The second lesson is that it is good, maybe essential, to put the draft away for a few months, as I did this spring, then return to it with fresh eyes. And I kept learning the hard lesson of "suggestion, not statement": showing, not telling.  As a teacher and non-fiction writer, I chiefly explain; in fiction, I must hint, using dialogue to suggest a mood and letting the reader complete the meaning. 

This became the focus of my revision just as eliminating wordiness and repetition became the focus on my editing. Even if no one reads Friends and Brothers (available on Amazon's Kindle), I have satisfied my long-held wish to do what seemed to me impossible: write, complete, and publish a novel.

Flash Fiction

Today I took the plunge into Flash Fiction, the new genre of stories so short they appeal to people with short attention spans. They also appeal to writers who, like me recently, have only a slice of life or little anecdote to write about.

Flash fiction, which offers many online publishing opportunities, is usually defined as anything between 500-1,000 words.  Some people and journals specialize in 100-word stories.  So far, I have been unable to think of anything worth saying in such minimalist terms as that, except in a non-fiction medium such as this blog.

Fiction for me usually involves not only a governing idea or insight but the characters, dialogue and detail to express this idea, experience, or insight. So the appeal of doing anything as constrained as under 1,000 words has been, until now, minimal.

Yet there is always something about the challenge of a contest or word limit to spur a bit of creativity--like the poet who wants to try his or her hand at the sonnet or any other fixed form.

And so I expanded a bit of chit-chat about a couple who refused to turn up the heat during a cold winter because of their two dogs, never mind the comfort or health of the people involved. When I heard about this from a friend, I was, like her, outraged at the selfishness of the couple involved.

But when I turned it into a little story, I found myself taking a humorous bent. I also found myself using many short sentences, limiting my dialogue and description, and needing only 500 words--for the first draft.  Then, with each revision stretching over 8-10 hours, I ended up with 882 words.  It took discipline as well as time to limit the focus and the length to meet the flash fiction rubric.

I sent the result, "The Way It Is," to a journal that seemed promising. If it's published, I will be pleased. If not, I am glad I took up the challenge of trying something new and proving to myself that I can now write not only a novel (soon to be published), two short stories (published) but a piece of flash fiction, which, like all writing, takes much more time than its length might indicate to the reader.

I doubt if I will become a master of flash fiction, but there are times when small is beautiful, when a tiny episode of a life becomes worth sharing, when the broader range of longer fiction won't do.

Fussing with Sentences

As I teach my summer writing workshop while working on a piece of fiction, I continue to think about style and the way fussing with sentences is at the heart of prose style.

Four years ago, I would tell my students that my experience has convinced me that I am strictly a writer of non-fiction, having published various books, articles, reviews, etc., some academic, many not.

Now I can say that I am having fun as a fiction writer. But I am learning that my enthusiasm for long, cumulative, rolling sentences that have the elegance, surprise and wit that people like Gay Talese bring to them does not always apply to fiction as it does to literary non-fiction.

At least, not when the point of view is first person. In my present draft of a novel, as in my first published story, I have my narrator-protagonist talk directly to the reader, and only rarely can he use the kind of sentences I admire. They are too artful, too literary.

My second story, however, told from an omniscient point of view, can put such sentences to good use, but still sparingly.  I found that the following sentence about an obnoxious high school principal named Mrs. Wicker (who is challenged by a veteran teacher named Crane) should be broken into three sentences.

I wrote: Mrs. Wicker, her mouth flung open, her penciled eyebrows lost in the furrows of her wrinkled forehead, was rendered speechless by Mr. Crane's finest hour.  I was pleased with that sentence until I listened to it.

My revision:  Mrs. Wicker gaped, her penciled eyebrows disappearing into the furrows of her wrinkled forehead.  She was rendered speechless. This was Mr. Crane's finest hour.

I like the force of the opening verb 'gaped' and the punch given to the second and third sentences.

Sometimes three sentences have more emphasis than one elaborate one. It took me five or more rewrites to get this sentence to sound right. Now, you might ask, is all this bother worthwhile?

If you are a writer, you would never ask such a question. When he was asked what problem caused him to revise the ending to A Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times, Hemingway said simply, "Getting the words right." He knew that fussing with words is what writing is all about.

Opening Doors

I have had my first piece of fiction published in the first issue of a new journal, The Provo Canyon Review, based in Utah, and I am amazed.

The article, "Opening Doors," about the life of a New York City doorman, is available at: www.theprovocanyonreview.net.

I find it hard to believe that, after years of insisting that I only write non-fiction (my poetry has never been sent out for publication and my numerous attempts at fiction have gone unfinished), I have completed a longish short story and got it published, all in about two years.

Although I have never lived in Manhattan, my wife grew up there, and we have visited the city, including the Upper East Side, where the story takes place, many times. I have long been intrigued by the city's doormen, who see a lot but say little. This point was made in an article thirty or more years ago by Gay Talese, and it got filed somewhere in the recesses of my brain as an idea that I wanted to explore some day.

Then, about two years ago, I happened to see a documentary about an elderly fashion photographer, Bill Cunningham, of the New York Times
and was moved by the contrast between his humble, ascetic lifestyle and his glamorous job. Somehow, the idea of writing something about doormen merged with the story of Bill; the rest of my story--including the narrator's relationship to the doorman he has known for forty years--came quickly.

I don't know if this is to be a once-in-a-lifetime achievement, or whether I will do more fiction. This story idea percolated for more than thirty years, so time is not on my side.  Non-fiction writing comes easier for me, seems to require less stamina and courage, and has many rewards.  I have a lot of experience in this genre, and as a teacher find that explaining things comes naturally.

It is a pleasure to see my experimental and creative side now get a bit of attention and to have in Chris McClelland a fine editor, who was able to prune my story by a thousand words while losing nothing. And, as with so much publishing, luck was on my side: Chris, a former student of mine, began a new journal with his wife, Erin, just as I completed my story.

I wish all the writers who may read this good fortune as well as the gift of patience as they revise, polish, and submit their work.  It is encouraging to know that, with online journals, the chance of being published has increased in recent years.