Saturday, September 30, 2017
Short Story Time Again
Gonna set poetry aside for now and return to the form I'm really supposed to be trafficking in, flash fiction and the short story. That's where my instincts lie, my raw ability. Every time I write a poem, I feel like I'm pretending. I even wrote a poem called "The Good Pretender" and only today thought about what might have been going on under the surface of my thoughts when I wrote it.
I know I can write short stories. I wrote a novel and it was mediocre. I've written some poetry and it was whatever it is. I don't even know how to judge it. Something's got to give here.
So look for more short stories, maybe here at Bent Country, because I'm becoming disillusioned again with the publishing community. I shouldn't allow rejection to cause this within me, but I do. I'm not even sure I have a choice; it's just how my mind works, a self-pitiful wheel that turns me back again and again to the forms I'm most comfortable with rather than the forms that are fun to experiment with.
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I'm only aware of your 2016 novel, "Brown Bottle". Are we talking about the same book? Because it's far from mediocre. It holds treasures like this sentence: "It was something like a poem seeing Nick trying to hard." I know you have to look beyond the quality of a line or a paragraph when judging the quality of a novel but "how you do anything is how you do everything". What you say about judging poems resonates with me. My poems were and are pitiful. My own "raw ability" is a caged animal like Rilke's panther: "As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,/ the movement of his powerful soft strides/ is like a ritual dance around a center/ in which a mighty will stands paralyzed." (Stephen Mitchell's translation). I agree that certain forms seem just right to make the dance happen, but I also think that one's aim can be improved over time in different forms - almost to the extent of true mastership (which at any rate can only really be appreciated by masters of whom there are, by definition, few - sometimes fewer and fewer, it seems to me but I'm probably being too literarily conservative). In any case: write on!
ReplyDeleteBrown Bottle is the only novel I've had published. I've written a few others and they all seem to display this some flatline characteristic. Well, okay, that might be too harsh. But it's for sure that all of them would have worked almost as well as short stories. If I do publish another novel it will be the one I've been working on since September of 2015, and I cut that manuscript in half not more than four months ago. It's basically a novella at this point and probably will remain. The long form, I'm mostly perplexed by it. Too much detail and not enough return, at least for me as a writer and as a reader to be honest. I'm reading Infinite Jest right now and finished 2666 earlier this year. I loved 2666 but it wasn't so much a novel as numerous, wonderful scenes lightly spliced together. And, in fact, it's really more closely classified as four separate novels, if everyone just spoke plainly about it. That's how Bolano wanted it released, as five different books, so that says it all, I guess. I'll keep working on the poetry and the novel. I just don't want to take away too much more time from my short stories. That's where I'm happiest is about what it adds up to.
ReplyDelete"That's where I'm happiest is about what it adds up to." is the most important thing, I agree. I'm writing a long novel now, back to a daily routine, and I don't think I have ever been this happy when writing. Having said that, it is the 50th attempt or something like that over the past few years. I don't know what or how dislodged the boulder that sat in front of the entrance to my personal cave for so long but it seems to be gone. - I don't much care for the writers/books you mention. Too postmodern for my taste - I also enjoy magical morsels but not ten thousand of them lined up like an army of angry ants. I like a good yarn, spun over many pages, not too disjointed, not too clever. When I write flash, I tend to want to be too clever, like a coy predator: not enough courage to bare my teeth and just bite. (Apparently,
ReplyDeleteI enjoy being too clever for my own good when writing comments, too - it's too easy to fall in love with words! ;-) — I've never got into short stories like you - your collections are fantastic. I suppose at the end of the day we do read what we like to write, or perhaps we write what we'd like to read, or both, and I most enjoy long, coherent novels. I'm writing hard-boiled Sci-Fi, btw, nothing fancy. Enjoying your blog, too, mate. Cheers! [your comment function is odd...I cannot seem to post with my wordpress acct/marcus speh]
Ha! I have no idea how the comments section is situated on this thing, brother. I'm excited to hear your working a long novel (and Sci-Fi!) and I'll be ready to get my hands on a copy as soon as it's out. It's good to be back blogging for sure. It feels more real than social media. Maybe because I've been doing this longer than I've been on social media lol.
DeleteYeah, I know what you mean about blogging. Not enough time here to do both writing and blogging though. But I AM enjoying our conversations. Never have that on social media - there is never enough space for me to ramble on and on as I like to...I think it is more real. A little like playing chess by mail, the way people used to do it: 3-4 weeks for every move...somehow I know it's a conversation when bits of it get stuck in my brain and come out later during writing. -- Also: booking you as a first time reader for that new novel. My wife reads it in morsels (500 words a day) and refuses to read the whole thing once it's done so I need to find other humans to help with that ;-) Cheers from Berlin, mate
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