Burning Down My Short Story House
January 12th, 2012 § 2 Comments
Last night I was re-reading Charles Baxter‘s brilliant book Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction. The first time I read it last year I raced through it and moved on to something else. Last night I chose a random chapter and read it again. Slowly. Digesting its content. How could I have missed such important stuff the first time?
- Cover via Amazon
Here’s one small example. I’m a genius for stating the obvious in my story drafts. I’m also clueless when it comes to writing emotion–afraid of it, perhaps, or not observant enough of it in my own skin. Baxter directs me away from all that.
Miss Lonelyhearts has nothing to do with the pleasures of recognition. Its impatience with realism is quite feverish. The book has instead a peculiarly pure interest in the derangements of meaning. Recognition is forced to yield to a sort of comic-grotesque literary cartoon of the unnameable. Shock has something to do with the experience. So does the perception that profound emotions, at least in America, often feel cheap.
It’s the kind of reading that pulls you into your own glaring flaws and allows you to simmer in them as you peer outside the soup pot at the bowl, i.e., the container where your soup will be served. And you want it to be as tasty nourishing as possible. So, this morning I splurged and helped to stimulate the economy by buying three used books: Nathanael West‘s Miss Lonelyhearts, Charles Baxter’s The Art of Subtext and Mark Doty‘s The Art of Description (I’m painfully learning that place always matters. It is character and vice versa).
As a writer I’m always castigating myself for my a-social habit of looking like I’m not doing anything, when in fact I’m engaged in what I think is the most difficult process of work in existence: crafting a compressed and efficient story with characters that lift off the page and stay with you for days, months, years. Pondering the marrow of Baxter’s essays is just what I need at this point in my process.
As a side note, I’m curious what side of the fence readers are on about the viability of the short story. Is it dead?
Related articles
- DeLillo a finalist for short story prize (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
- Just one kiss (misslonelyhearts2012.wordpress.com)
- Bloomsbury embrace ‘year of the short story’ (robaroundbooks.com)
That thinning part always does feel a bit like arson; making a story that uses its time to the greatest possible effect.
In traditional publishing, it’s a dying breed. But, traditional publishing is in trouble anyway. In the era of the short attention span, the short story is not only not deceased, but probably on the rise. The ability to download stories with a click means being someone with many short stories is probably a viable marketing strategy. Especially if you have a novel or two to anchor off of. Like DLC in a video game.
Yes, I’m just now learning the importance of time in a story. Especially the ticking clock aspect. Your insight into the future of the short story is heartening indeed.