The Short Story Becomes Essay Becomes the Short Story Again, or I Use Labels a Lot Even Though I Hate Them

So the wheels are moving on The Orchard Is Full of Sound. The call has been sent out by WVU Press for readers, which means the final touches are near. I started working again on short stories the day I sent the last manuscript their way back in November. Wrote quite a few and am still working on one that has stretched to an infuriating 15 pages. But then something else happened.

I must have missed nonfiction because I started writing essays.

And I'm reading the crap out of essay collections and anthologies of great creative nonfiction. I bought a total of 14 books along those lines around Christmas. Turns out I have enough already for most of a collection. So that might be something that happens at some point. Depends on whether or not I can actually write in that form in the way I feel a writer should be able to write. The line is thin that must be walked and still be interesting. A few names as examples:

Eliot Weinberger
Paul Crenshaw
Lydia Davis
Eula Biss
Anne Carson
Joan Didion
David Foster Wallace
Hunter S. Thompson
John Jeremiah Sullivan

There's countless others, but a list of examples needs to end somewhere.

I have been guilty in the past of trying to push myself into a form simply because I want to move around in it, wear it around the store for a couple laps, etc. I'm likely guilty in this case. But I do enjoy the essay, the personal narrative, the lyrical essay, nonfiction. Like short stories, it does have too many names, though. But that's just part of my crusade against labels.

However, work does and will always continue with my true form, the short story. I'm putting together the final touches on the new collection, Sway, due out from Cowboy Jamboree Press this coming spring.

So it's back to the 15 page behemoth I can't seem to wind down.

Pray for me church.

Servant To My Imagination

I'm procrastinating my way in a different direction than this latest story I've been writing for the past week or so. I promise you, this post will have no structure or definite point. I'm here when I should be on that story. I do this sometimes, stop with a story at the exact moment it starts gaining momentum during a writing session. I have no idea why.

It's really humming along this evening. The scenes are spilling out with conversational ease and without many hiccups along the way, characters are developing before my very eyes, there's even the glint of an ending becoming a little brighter up ahead. Of course I should stop. What's wrong with me?

Thing is, I don't actually question my process. If my instincts say move away, that's what I do; if my instincts say push and push and push even though nothing feels like it's sparking, that's what I do. I'm a servant to my imagination. It's only when I lose confidence in this approach that I lose the thread of a story and have to send it limping off to the potter's field. It sincerely is like a dance for me that way, balancing my own movements with the movements of the narrative. It's not magic by any stretch, but it's not mere drudgery either. It's why I can't understand formulaic narrative, why I can't imagine being a writer who would engage in that kind of behavior. 

The story is getting a bit longer than I usually write, though. And I'm trying to not get caught up thinking about this. I'm trying to block out that thought altogether, in fact. I hate that I still, after writing for 30 years, concern myself with page count. I only do that with short stories, never with novels. When I'm writing a novel I already know that it's coming in under 200 to 225 pages. I don't sweat that. But with a short story, a form I focus more fully on and with more energy and, frankly, hold in much higher regard, I get that old nagging feeling once I vault past about page 10. It is what it is.

And here I'm starting to feel a nudge to head back to the manuscript. Like I said, I knew this post wasn't going to come out nicely formed and neat. I knew I'd have to go when my gut said go. Nothing personal, dear friends. And thanks for listening.