Languishing stories, when to let go

How is it that some stories never escape from my “stories in progress” folder, languishing there, only halfway through a first draft, for months or years?  I’ve been thinking about this question this week because a similar issue came up in a recent writing class. 

“When is it time to let go?” a woman asked.  She meant, “when is it time for me to stop my endless tinkering with this story and send it out?”  But the discussion centered on something else: whether and when to plod through a draft to some kind of ending, for the sake of seeing it through, even when it feels forced.  We didn’t come up with a good conclusion, but we commiserated with the student who talked about the multiple novel drafts that she’s gotten stuck on, with no apparent hope of moving forward. 

I think there’s no real answer to this kind of question.  No one else can say to another writer with any certainty, “your draft will never become a story, so give it up now.”  True, some scenes, concepts, images, even half-drafts may turn out to be just practice, just exercise.  Still, you never know: I had a partial draft of a story, blurry and short, about a lonely woman working nights in a lab and getting into a fight with her friend/co-worker.  I couldn’t figure out what the narrator might want, or even who the narrator should be.  This story draft sat quietly in the “stories in progress” file for a year while I did other things, worked on my novel draft and wrote two other stories and sent some things out. 

Then, not too long ago, I opened the file for this languishing draft, rewrote the first scene, and then kept going.  Now I have only one or two more scenes to write, and after that I can start revising it.  I wish I knew what got me to start again on this draft, whether it was a barely remembered dream, something in the news, something overheard, or just the passage of time.

I know there’s a lot of advice out there on getting through stalled stories.  Here are a few more thoughts:

I’m in Panera on this rainy Nor’easter morning, along with about a thousand other people.  So much conversation – one man pitching his plumbing supplies company to another; a woman trying to get a man to buy ad space in her magazine.  Two other men talking about their health issues, a broken wrist and rehab for one, and a tonsillectomy for a perpetually swollen uvula (!) for the other.  A table of six older ladies with their mugs, laughing about something, and ten feet away, a corresponding table full of older guys in windbreakers and sweatshirts. (I wonder if the women and men notice each other, an echo of long-ago middle school.)  

Still others, like me, alone with their laptops.  They laptoppers look intent, focused on work, maybe writing, but it could be that they’re just FB-ing or e-mailing.  And yet work does get done in places like this; I know a woman who wrote her entire dissertation at Starbucks.  Maybe it’s just me, distracted by all the activity – milk steamers shrieking, pagers buzzing, bread racks banging onto counters, cell phones chirping – and all this talking.

            I had planned to write another scene for my novel draft, and to take some notes and start a new story, but so far I’m not doing that.   Think I’ll just listen and look for a while.

Lovely looking-back essay in the American Scholar from William Zinsser, who's in his mid-80s now.  I don't usually read American Scholar (it's sent to Phi Beta Kappa members, and I was not one of those), but this week the website is running five new short stories from some stellar writers.

Paul Harding in Concord

Paul Harding, author of Tinkers, came to Concord last week for a reading.  Our independent bookstore Gibson's hosted him, and it was a full house, maybe fifty people, a mix of book groupers and writers.

Harding read a passage from early in Tinkers (tinker Howard's wordless relationship with Gilbert the hermit, Gilbert the improbable Bowdoin graduate and friend of Hawthorne).  Afterwards, he answered questions about the book and his writing path.  He was good-humored, at ease, and self-deprecating, and he made some interesting points:

-- His manuscript was rejected over and over, in short because agents and editors were pretty sure that no one wanted to read such a quiet novel (ostensibly) about an old man's death.
-- Harding had a pretty good life as a mostly unpublished writer, with his Iowa Workshop degree and his jobs teaching creative writing to Harvard undergrads and extension-school students, and reading nineteenth-century fiction.
-- Tinkers was originally published by Bellevue, a small nonprofit medical-issues press affiliated with NYU  (and maybe affiliated with Bellevue Literary Review?).
-- And one larger point: Small independent presses are taking over the mid-list authors, as large publishers shed their mid-lists.  Which gives me hope.

Helpful posts for writers

A few blog finds:

 Jim Harrington's Six Questions For... blog runs brief interviews with editors at literary journals and small presses  (Coachella Review, Crab Creek Review, Our Stories, Dzanc Books, Prime Number -- mostly newer, less-known lit mags, it looks like).

Check out this recent post from novelist and teacher Alexander Chee, on the whys and hows of author blogging -- maybe it's all been said before, but he says it all so beautifully.  I like to read his blog now and then for the his thoughts on writing, politics, literature, teaching.  He did a great three-part series a while back when/whether to get your MFA.

And a response to Jennifer Weiner's noisy irritation with Jonathan Franzen and his literary darling status.  (Franzenfreude, she calls it on Twitter.  Pretty funny.)

Hilary Mantel: Writer as shape-shifter

I'm kind of obsessed with Hilary Mantel right now.  Wolf Hall was such a feat --  historical fiction about Thomas Cromwell, his rise from abused blacksmith's son to Henry VIII's closest adviser.  It's in close third person, and even though the book is hefty and runs hundreds of pages, it feels economical and quick.   

This interview ran in The Telegraph (UK) about six months ago.  Here's a quote from it.  She is talking about the intersection of her difficult childhood and her long writing life. 

 'As a writer you owe it to yourself not to get stuck in a rut of looking at the world in a certain way. You have no business saying, “My character is this and my character is that. This is my habit, this is what I am like.” That is no good for a writer. You have got to be absolutely fluid. You have to become everything your material demands of you. You have to be mutable. You have to be constantly ready to change shape.’   

Writing tips, historical fiction

Janet Fitch (White Oleander) posted these ten writing rules on her blog last month, and then the LA Times reprinted them, and after that the piece went around to other writing blogs.  These are helpful revision tips, even if you've heard them all before.  Fitch posts writing exercises and and craft tips on her blog.  She also teaches at USC


The Guardian (UK) has a great books blog.   A recent entry, The Lying Art of Historical Fiction, caught my eye.   I've been thinking about Hilary Mantel's book Wolf Hall since finishing it, all those wonderful details of Thomas Cromwell's life that she had to have made up.

The writers you love

Christina Baker Kline's thoughtful blog recently featured a lovely guest post from writer Justin Kramon. He described the trouble he had with his first novel. He diagnosed his problem as wanting to be a great writer. Reading the great writers, the important writers, he says, "made me feel like a slow runner in sixth-grade gym, sweating and hyperventalating while everyone else rushed by. They were doing something I could never do, that I wasn’t built to do."

So he went back and made a list of the writers he loved, writers like John Irving, Charles Dickens, and Alice Adams. (Alice Adams! Gone but not forgotten.)

Kramon writes: "Part of the process of becoming a writer has been acknowledging my own limitations, the things I don’t know about. And also being honest: about what I like, what I enjoy, what moves me." Good things to think about.

Domestic pleasures and perils

Two recent novels -- Jane Smiley's Private Life and Helen Simonson's Major Pettigrew's Last Stand -- examine married life, coming to pretty different conclusions. Smiley's new novel follows main character Margaret through fifty years of marriage to Andrew, an eccentric, Aspergian astronomer, while Simonson's novel (her first) follows buttoned-up widower Ernest Pettigrew as he falls for Jasmina, a Pakistani widow and shopkeeper.

Smiley's novel feels essentially like a tragedy -- marriage is a life-long trap for Margaret, who watches Andrew's flashes of brilliance and then his slow unhinging. Simonson's novel is part satire, skewering petty racism in small-town England, and part comedy, a contemporary Jane Austen with a 68-year-old man as heroine. For Major Pettigrew and Mrs. Ali, marriage is a deep, remembered pleasure.

Both writers have such good-humored affection for their introverted, slow-to-act and slow-to-change characters. Simonson's novel is slighter but optimistic; Smiley's is heavily researched -- we follow Margaret from the late 19th century to the 1940s -- and in the end, kind of sad.

I'm looking forward to reading Tracy Winn's new book, Mrs. Somebody Somebody, a collection of linked stories set in Lowell, MA. I've read only the first couple of pages of the title story, which is set in 1947, but the first sentence is pretty great:

"Lucy Mattsen was nobody -- like all the women I worked with -- until the day the baby fell out the window."

I think readers will likely compare it to Olive Kitteridge, another linked story collection set in a small New England town in the present and near past. But the title story made me think of an earlier Elizabeth Strout book, the novel Isabelle and Amy, which is set in a fictionalized New Hampshire mill town in the late sixties.

Winn will give a reading at Concord's independent bookstore, Gibson's, on July 1. Winn's website also offers the title story from the book in PDF.

Help for procrastinators

I was procrastinating and not writing and feeling sorry for myself, and I came across this post, which struck me as funny and helpful. In her writing-advice column for The Faster Times, Nancy Rawlinson shares the way she settles down to work: a start-up list. She prints it out and checks things off (things like 1) make a cup of tea; 2) check e-mail; 3) turn on Internet-blocking software). Sounds obvious and simple, but it's a routine that works for her -- maybe it's the act of checking a few things off, or maybe it's just blocking her Internet access.

Unusual conference-type things

The Hedgebrook Foundation, which sponsors all-expenses-paid residencies for women writers, has a new (new to me, at least) program of small workshops with writers like Jane Hamilton, Carolyn Forche, and Theresa Rebeck, each at a different time of year.

It sounds pretty great -- seven days in your own little cottage on Whidbey Island, WA, and a five-day master class in fiction, memoir or poetry. It's expensive ($2000-$2500) but the workshops are limited to six participants, and the fees help support the regular residencies.

And Crazyhorse Journal runs the Crazyhorse/Tupelo Press Publishing Institute at the College of Charleston in June. It looks like a kind of brief internship in which students read manuscripts, learn about the editorial and publishing process, learn about judging a contest, and have one of their own manuscripts reviewed by an editor.

Crazyhorse is one of my favorite literary mags -- I enjoy their fiction and poetry sensibility, and it's nice looking, too -- the cover art is beautiful, and it's a nice hefty size and shape.

Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It

A writer friend sent me Maile Meloy’s new short-story collection, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It. Here’s the first paragraph of the first story, “Travis, B.”:

“Chet Morgan grew up in Logan, Montana, at a time when kids weren’t supposed to get polio anymore. In Logan, they still did, and he had it before he was two. He recovered, but his right hip never fit in the socket, and his mother always thought he would die young.”

Not your usual contemporary story beginning. Meloy is still in her thirties, but she writes like an older person, someone who’s seen it all, a kind of Munro-Hemingway hybrid. Her writing is spare, translucent, vivid. These stories feature characters going to the edge of something – betrayal, murder, a love affair – sometimes plunging off that edge, but more often pulling back. Eight of the eleven stories feature male narrators, inarticulate but deep-feeling guys in complicated situations. She’s even written a short-story version of a Bruce Springsteen song (“Lovely Rita”): lonely, orphaned Stephen, who’s stuck in his beater Rhode Island town working on the new nuclear power plant and falling in love with the wrong girl. It’s set in 1975 and refers to “Born to Run,” and it’s a terrific story. (Though in my book a great Springsteen song will always beat a great short story.)

Many of these stories are set in Montana, which has probably led readers to compare her to Annie Proulx. I see more of a resemblance to Ellen Gilchrist, with Meloy’s close focus on family: middle-aged brothers who can’t stop fighting, even on double-black-diamond ski trails; teenage girls who adore their fathers and get subtly betrayed by them.

Meloy is a novelist, too, but I hope she keeps writing short stories. I can’t wait to read more of her work.