Tag Archives: writing

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Is the short story dead?…

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According to many literary insiders, the short story, along with the poem, has now officially flat-lined, the obituary that was written a decade ago, now soon to be published. I’m not sure that I agree exactly, but if the short story is not dead, then it is certainly prostrate on the gurney with the emergency team gathered, paddles held charged and ready.

Ted Genoways wrote a great piece in “Mother Jones” a couple of years ago regarding the imminent death of the short story. You can read it here. Genoways brings up lots of good points about the demise of the university literary quarterly, as well as the drying up of the short story market, as national magazines, such as The Atlantic, GQ, Playboy and Redbook (among many others), have moved away from publishing fiction.

Genoways also tells of Wilbur Cross, a Democrat who was remarkably elected governor of Republican dominated Connecticut in 1930, riding to victory based upon his credentials as an editor of the Yale Review. It is hard to imagine such credentials holding similar sway in an election today. Cross did not relinquish his editor’s post at Yale Review during his tenure as governor, and he remained dually employed throughout his four terms in office. When asked how he was able to perform both jobs, he replied, “By getting up early in the morning.” (Perhaps related to Trollope, see my blog-post of April 23).

Frankly, I don’t understand this. According to all studies, our attention span is now measured in micro-seconds, so it would certainly follow that entertaining fiction, especially collections of good short stories would fill a void. You’d think that people, especially young people, would be shying away from the 200,000 word novel in favor of a shorter length of work that would afford more immediate gratification – but not so apparently.

I went searching for a good volume of recently published short stories by an up and coming author who was actually selling books. To this end, I came across a book that has received quite a bit of acclaim. The Tenth of December by George Saunders met my short story criteria. Unfortunately, I don’t believe that this book is going to revive the short story, and it may in fact serve to hasten its demise. First of all, Mr. Saunders, a professor at Syracuse University, is an excellent writer. And to be quite honest, I started out liking this book, and for a short while, I was ready to have the short story moved from the gurney into ICU.

The first story in the collection, “Victory Lap” was great. It is a story about a young man who overcomes smothering parents to rescue a girl from the hands of a serial killer. After that point the remaining stories were too dark of me, and one caused me to bail after only half a dozen paragraphs. Don’t get me wrong, the stories are imaginative and were obviously crafted by a talented artist, but as I said – too dark for me. I would say forget about this book, had it not been for the final story in the collection, the story that gave the book its name: The Tenth of December.

Saunders obviously saved the best for last because this was a beautifully crafted short story. To fame it briefly, the story is about a cancer patient who goes out into the woods to commit suicide but instead finds a child in desperate need of help. So the book redeemed itself in the end.

An acquaintance of mine who has published a couple of novels tells me that he used to write short stories, but there simply isn’t enough money in it today for a professional writer trying to pay the rent. He finds that by the time he puts together a couple of good salable short stories to sell on the currently faltering fiction market, that he could be a third of the way through a longer work from which he could make more money.

So far, I think the short story is not yet dead, but how long can this literary artifact hang on is difficult to say. If you have a favorite short story author, or collection of stories, please feel free to comment. (Feel free to comment anyway.)

That’s it for me today,

Mahalo,

–Ed

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The High Line Drifter’s Lament

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April is National Poetry Month, so I want to post a couple of pieces of poetry that I have written. These poems have all appeared elsewhere. This poem, The High Line Drifter’s Lament, is one that I wrote several years ago. The High Line is a railroad freight line that runs between Seattle, Washington, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, in the United States. It passes just south of the U.S., Canadian border, and crosses the states of Washington, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota and Minnesota.

Back during the 1980s and 1990s, the High Line was terrorized by a gang called the “Freight Train Riders Association”. This gang was responsible for lots of violence along this stretch of track, particularly in the state of Montana. People who illegally rode freight trains were fearful.

The High Line Drifter’s Lament

I was riding on the High Line, on a trip across the plains,

Passing south of Enumclaw, soaked from late night rains,

Riding fifteen hundred miles, across the northern tier,

Choking hard on cheap red wine, cursing hard the fear,

I got a second hand Hi-Standard; I keep it in my pack,

I sleep with one eye open, because I have to make it back,

An old timer told me in Spokane, while we were playing cards,

How thugs had come to terrorize the rails and the yards,

They found a man in Kalispell, a month ago today,

He didn’t have a home or name, but now he has a grave,

They’re rolling drunks, and killing men, and raising lots of hell,

Killing them that ain’t like them, and anyone who’ll tell,

They don’t give any warning, and they don’t make any sound,

They’ll shoot you dead and disappear before the bull’s next round,

So I take a chance, I check my piece, keep my back against the wall,

In thirty two more hours I’ll be with you in St. Paul,

By morning light this train will pass, from the mountains to the farms,

And I’ll be that much closer to the shelter of your arms.

W E Patterson's avatar

Who is your literary role model?

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As a writer, or aspiring writer, you might be asked if you have a literary role mode, or to name a successful writer who particularly inspires you. If you do not have a literary role model, but you’re thinking of finding one, although nobody says you have to have one, consider these points.

First, don’t choose a literary role model for the sole reason that you enjoy their work. Instead, pick someone who embodies the work habits and traits that you want to emulate. For example, I have read and re-read The Great Gatsby countless times, and I believe it to be one of the finest books written in the twentieth century. Still, I would not say that Scott Fitzgerald is my literary role model. The same goes for dozens of other writers whose work I have enjoyed over the years.

Second, I suggest that one choose a literary role model who has been dead for a very long time. This will eliminate your running into him, or her, at a book signing or other similar affair, where you are likely to be blown off as an aspiring nobody. You will also be unlikely to read unflattering news about your role model when they are taken into custody for drunken driving, wife beating or plagiarism. Most importantly, dead writers do not have websites on which you will be tempted to malinger, robbing you of hours that could be better spent working on your own novel, short story or blog. Dead writers don’t Tweet, nor do they have Facebook pages, or any of the other time eating social media distractions that cause the aspiring writer to divert attention from their own writing projects, and generally dishearten the aspiring writer who falls short of 56,000 Twitter followers.

So of course I have a literary role model, or I wouldn’t be bringing this up today. In coming up with a role model, I sought someone with the following traits: he or she must have written prolifically, and they must have exhibited great tenacity and focus in their approach to work – tenacity and focus often trumping talent when the talent is unfocused and slovenly in their approach to craft.  For this reason, the writer that I would most like to emulate is nineteenth century literary legend, Anthony Trollope. Dead since 1882, Trollope will not be tweeting. Sometimes overlooked, as he stands a bit in the shadow of Dickens (a fact that some say drove him to write to extremes), Trollope turned out 47 full length novels, countless short stories, and a slew of non-fictional works in the course of his 67 years, including his 1859 classic “The West Indies and the Spanish Main”.

Starting each day at 5:30 AM, Trollope wrote for 3 hours straight, running only on coffee provided by a servant. In all of his writing years, the servant was never late with Trollope’s coffee, a fact that was not lost on the great writer as he attributed much of his literary success to this faithful servant who apparently kept him caffeinated enough to work. The first 30 minutes of Trollop’s day (from 5:30 until 6:00 AM) was spent reading the previous day’s work. The next two and a half hours were spent writing. Trollope was able, with much practice, to spend this time actually putting words on paper, and not as he himself said  “nibbling his pen, and gazing at the wall before him”. Trollope worked with a watch in front of him and clocked himself at about 250 words per fifteen minute period. Subtract that 30 minutes of review time from the allotted three hours, and you will find that he churned out an astounding 2500 words a day!

Trollope put a great deal of emphasis on his daily reading of his previous day’s work. He felt that this was one of the most important parts of the writing process, as it helped him to achieve the same tone and spirit throughout his finished work.

One of my favorite stories about Trollope confirms his literary discipline. Upon completing a lengthy work, with fifteen minutes left in his ‘writing day’, he penned the words THE END, and put the manuscript aside. A lesser writer would call it a day – but not Anthony Trollope. He pulled out a fresh sheet of paper and began his next book.

It is unlikely that I will follow the disciplined Trollope into literary greatness. But I do find that studying his work habits have inspired me to try to improve my own by adding more structure to my writing periods.

If you have a literary role model, or if you have any particular suggestions to help motivate aspiring writers to keep the words flowing, feel free to comment here.

As for me, the hour grows late, and I have a 5:30 AM date with my laptop.

W E Patterson's avatar

The relevance of poetry today…April is National Poetry Month…

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A long, long, time ago — just after the Presidential Inauguration last January, Alexandra Petri wrote in her Washington Post blog, a piece generally directed at inaugural poet Richard Blanco, but more specifically aimed at the art form of poetry in general. I had intended to comment on her piece back in January, but I didn’t get to it, and I forgot about it until now. But, since April is National Poetry Month here in the U.S., I thought I would revisit her words and comment on them.

If you want to read Ms. Petri’s blog-post in its entirety, I shall provide a link here. For those of you who do not care for links, I will summarize some of her sentiments. She writes:

“Poetry has gone from being something that you did in order to Write Your Name Large Across the Sky and sound your barbaric yawp and generally Shake Things Up to a very carefully gated medium that requires years of study and apprenticeship in order to produce meticulous, perfect, golden lines that up to ten people will ever voluntarily read.”

While I don’t take issue with some of the points she brings out in her piece, Ms. Petri goes on to ask, “Can a poem still change anything?” To which I would answer that maybe it depends upon your definition of ‘change’. Perhaps poetry is not up to the task of making the wolves lie with the lambs, or encouraging the takers to become givers, or to opening the minds of the intolerant, but perhaps that is too large a task for any art form. Nobody is suggesting that novelists cease to novel, or painters cease to paint because something grandiose may not take place. Of course Ms. Petri isn’t suggesting that poets don’t write poetry either, but she is suggesting that it is no longer relevant.

When I was in the seventh grade, my English teacher assigned a poem to me on a Friday, and tasked me to learn the poem by Monday morning. The poem that I was to learn was Shelley’s 1817 classic sonnet, Ozymandias.  It was good training, as it was not to be the last time in my life that I would receive an assignment on Friday for Monday delivery. At the time, however, I had little interest in spending my weekend learning to recite poetry. But I did learn the poem, and I did recite it in front of my English class the next Monday.

In its brevity (14 lines), Ozymandias describes the temporary nature of life in a way that few tomes of doorstop proportion can equal. In this poem, a nameless narrator meets a “traveler from an antique land” who describes visiting what is believed to be the tomb of Rameses II in the Egyptian desert. The traveler ruminates upon an inscription on a statue, left by the once mighty pharaoh, which reads:

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

The last three lines of the poem describe the ruins of Ramses’ II’s tomb decaying in the desert – the impenetrable edifice built by the once powerful pharaoh slowly being consumed by the literal and proverbial sands of time. The meaning for us all being that the mighty will one day fall into decay and ruin and we shall all return to the dust of the earth, regardless of our station in life.

I can recite this poem to this day, and I find these words that Shelley penned so long ago both sobering, and in a strange way comforting. So in answer to Ms. Petri’s question, “Can poetry still change anything?” I should answer that in a small way it changed me, and the way I view the world around me

Of course, I realize that Ms. Petri is speaking more about today’s poetry and the state of the art today, and not really about old, long dead poets, and musty old poems committed to memory by seventh graders. I think she is talking about an entirely new breed of poet, and to her credit, some of what she writes about the over intellectualizing of poetry seems to indeed be true.

One of my favorite poets, who has been dead for far fewer years than Shelley, is Charles Bukowski. A one time postal clerk, Bukowski wrote nearly every day of his life, although he did take a decade off from writing, a decade he referred to as a ten year drunk. He died  in 1994 at age 73. He wrote primarily about his own tumultuous, hard-bitten life in Los Angeles, a life spent working at mundane jobs, excessive drinking, gambling and womanizing.

So if you aren’t acquainted with Charles Bukowski, here’s a good place to start: “back to the machine gun” (analyze that). You will find that Bukowski did not produce the “meticulous, golden lines” that Alexandra Petri mentioned in her post. You will probably be either repulsed by Bukowski, or you may find yourself wanting more. Should you want more, his books abound, so pick one up – but don’t purchase online, or in a big name book store. I suggest you look for a dog-eared copy in a used book shop – preferably in a run down part of town (don’t go there alone, or at night). There will probably be an all night diner across the street, and a liquor store next door with a Pabst Blue Ribbon sign in the widow. So find your way there and buy a book and if there is any change left from the sale, leave it for the clerk. Then pick up a pint of Gilbey’s gin and take the number 5 bus home and start reading.

Bukowski’s work is not for everyone, but whether you like him or not, he had some very profound things to say about writing in general. This quote from Bukowski should be taped to every writer’s keyboard, or notebook:

“An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.”

Mahalo

–Ed

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Remembering Edgar Guest and some thoughts on the state of poetry today

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When I was a child we had a small, slim, blue, book of poetry in our house. The title of the book was It takes A Heap o’ Livin’, and it was written by Edgar A. Guest. The book, published in 1916, was one of Guest’s most popular. If you have not heard of Guest, here’s the brief bio: He was born in England in 1881 and died in Detroit, Michigan in 1959 – in the course of his 77 years, he would hammer out over 11,000 poems which would eventually be collected into over 20 poetic volumes.

Guest started out as a newspaperman, first working for the Detroit Free Press where he would quickly rise through the ranks from copy boy to reporter. Somewhere along the way he started writing poems and published his first in the aforementioned newspaper on December 11, 1892. Guest would go on to become a naturalized American citizen in 1902, and he quickly developed an earthy poetic voice, steeped in local dialect that would captivate rural America.

Guest’s poems were usually sentimental, sometimes inspiring, always rhyming, and most often corny, but they were written for mass consumption, and Guest certainly knew his demographic. Guest published almost all of his work in newspapers – the internet of the day. You needn’t be an MFA grad student, or an ivory tower English professor to understand his verse. He was a simple hard working poet, writing for a simple hard working audience, in what were, undoubtedly, simpler times.

Not to say that Edgar A. did not have his detractors. Dorothy Parker said of Edgar:  “I’d rather flunk my Wasserman test than read the poetry of Edgar Guest.” But we all have our naysayers don’t we. I will leave the link in place for those of you who might not know what the Wasserman test entails — enough said.

I mention Guest only because he authored the first poetry book that I remember reading from cover to cover. It was not the most sophisticated verse, but I believe exposure to poetry at an early age instilled a desire in me to play with words and put them together in an order that would make people want to read them – or maybe not…

Later in life I would go on to discover poets with a different voice, particularly the beat poets, Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg and my all time favorite (quasi-beat) poet, Charles Bukowski – a gentleman who is perhaps the anti-Edgar A. Guest of poetry (more on Bukowski in another post).

So why write about Edgar A. Guest and old folksy poetry? It is probably because I have been reading more poetry lately, thanks to the many new friends that I have made on Twitter and Facebook. Over the past few weeks, many of you have passed along links to your websites and I have been looking at as many as I can, with the limited time I have. What I am discovering is some really high quality work. Some people have sent me links to some masterfully produced websites, with truly professional content. Thanks to all!!

An acquaintance of mine, a gentleman who has been fortunate enough to have a couple of publishing credits under his belt, growled to me in an email the other day that the internet was filled “with rubbish”.

He went on to repeat a line in his email that I have read somewhere else, although I can’t remember where, that ‘when everyone becomes a writer, no one is a reader’. Now my acquaintance can be a bit condescending when it comes to writing, not because he has a graduate degree from a very well known East Coast Ivy League university hanging on the wall of his study, and not because he has a publicist that calls him to schedule signings at distant Barnes and Noble bookstores, no — he was quite like that before he’d published a line. I do not entirely agree with him.

I fired an email back saying: “reading a great poem online right now”. I sent along the link…so far no reply.

Frankly, I am seeing some really good work on the internet by some very talented writers. So, if you have anything you’d like me to link to from my little blog, please just ask and I will be more than happy to do so. Just don’t be surprised if I ask you to link back, and maybe in some small way we can all help each other.

So that’s it for this Tuesday. I think I will close with one of the greatest (undeniably corn ball, but nonetheless uplifting) motivational poems ever written:

You can do as much as you think you can,
But you’ll never accomplish more;
If you’re afraid of yourself, young man,
There’s little for you in store.
For failure comes from the inside first,
It’s there if we only knew it,
And you can win, though you face the worst,
If you feel that you’re going to do it.

— Edgar A. Guest (from Secret of the Ages; 1926)