Energized by my experience entering NPR’s 3 minute fiction contest a few weeks ago, I searched high and low (on the Internet) for another fiction contest.  I stumbled upon The First Line, a literary magazine which, as the name suggests, “contains short stories that stem from a common first line.”

The purpose of The First Line is to jump start the imagination–to help writers break through the block that is the blank page…. The First Line is an exercise in creativity for writers and a chance for readers to see how many different directions we can take when we start from the same place.

Sounded good.  The nearest deadline was May 1st.  The line: “Rachel’s first trip to England did not go as planned.”  Sounded like chick-lit women’s fiction to me, but I started to hear the voice of a sassy, sophomoric, caring, but immature girl named Rachel telling about her misadventures in England and got interested in seeing where it woud lead.  I started writing, and stealing borrowed my structure from DFW and Jennifer Egan, I used direct address and had Rachel speaking to her therapist.  The first draft was mostly about her brief time in England.  She got caught by Immigration for planning on working in England, got sent to a detention center over night, and then flown back to America.  She has a complicated relationship with her overbearing Jewish mother (Rachel does not identify as Jewish) and as the middle-child, resents her sisters, who have been achieving worldly success. Read more »

A few weeks ago, Samantha Brick wrote an essay for the Daily Mail about the perils of being a beautiful women. But she has no idea what a tough life is really like:

On a recent flight to London, I was delighted when the attractive women seated beside me started rubbing my crotch.  “Will you need some help with that?” she coyly asked, when I glanced in her direction.  You’re probably thinking ‘what a great surprise’. But it wasn’t.  Not a surprise, anyway.  At least, not for me.

Since the age of twelve, I’ve had females of the species pursuing me.  There have been too many taps on the shoulder in bars from the admirer’s best friends to count.  The stack of high school love letters left in my locker would fill a studio apartment. And forget about the blatant propositions from college co-eds at frat parties—from shaking my hand and asking if I’d like a blow job, to just shoving their tongues down my throat, I’ve experienced it all.  I’ve taken it all in stride, and if I decide to get to know these women, I ask them what prompted their interest.  They all say it’s my handsome face, easy smile, and magnetic personality.

I’m not exactly Brad Pitt, but at 6’2’’, with a chiseled physique and ruggedly handsome features, my smoldering eyes are merely the icing on the cake.  I know I’m a fortunate one. But there are downsides to being such an Adonis.

If you’re a man reading this, you’ve probably already formed your opinion about me and it’s not a flattering one.  For while my overwhelming good looks and magnetic personality have given me many opportunities; as if in a cruel, Greek tragedy, they have also taken many away.

I’m very humble, and often think of others, but over the years I’ve lost countless buddies when they, if I’m merely in the same room as their significant other,  feel threatened by my raw sexuality. When their girlfriends—faces blushing, eyes adoring—actually got up the nerve to speak to me, a cold December chill would blow into the house. Read more »

Pivoting off Mr. Leunig’s not-so-recent-at-this-point post, I decided to try my hand at NPR’s three-minute fiction contest.  The stories have to be under 600 words, and this round, must begin with the line: “She closed the book, placed it on the table, and finally, decided to walk through the door.”

Perhaps overly influenced by Mr. Ligon, I’m not a big fan of quick fiction.  They seem to rely to heavily on some cute turn or twist toward the end, and being so short, so much is often lacking when it comes to characters development and plot. But perhaps overly influenced by Mr. Leunig, I thought the contest would make for good practice.

As I pondered story possibilities, I couldn’t avoid thinking how little I liked the first sentence chosen by Luis Alberto Urrea, the judge of the contest. (She closed the book, placed it on the table, and finally, decided to walk through the door) Let’s free associate.  Wordy.  Melodramatic.  Lifetime movie.  I checked out the website and found an explanation:

“The key being, of course, that ‘finally,’” Urrea tells weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz. “There can be an infinity in what’s going on with that ‘finally.’”

“I’m a book person, and honestly, I wanted the sense of life change that comes from a good reading experience,” he says. “I can’t wait to see where people go with it.”

Urrea says his editors at Little, Brown and Co. inspired his challenge. “My editor is often telling me, ‘You know what? Stop clearing your throat. Stop clearing your throat, don’t hesitate — get in the story,’” he says.

I see what his editors are getting at. That line is throat-clearing. Whatever comes next, that could be the heart of the story, or it could be more throat-clearing. Either way, I couldn’t help feeling any good story produced from that line would be better off without that first line.

As Mr. Frey can attest, good writing prompts are few and far between.  So I don’t mean to be too hard on Mr. Urrea, who has won many awards for writing, as if I had to come up with an opening line for a short story contest I’m not sure I could do any better.  My favorite writing prompts don’t use a starting line, but rather some kind of free-association, low-pressure, brainstorming with a group, which often leads to an idea for a narrative.

It turns out I’m not the only person who had qualms with this opening line.  Kani Martin’s story “Action Verbs,” is a meta-narrative of a writer attempting to improve the quality of that line. Read more »

A brief and partial defense of Lionel Shriver’s new book, “The New Republic.”

Claire Dederer, writing at Slate, hates this book. I have yet to read it, so I cannot address what should be the bulk of her critique–the actual book.  But I can rebut Dederer’s unfair, childishly immature, and Gawkerish interpretation of Shriver’s author note.

There’s so much that’s wrong with this paragraph. First and foremost, there’s Shriver’s condescending tone about provincial Americans of 1998 and their supposedly dismissive attitude toward terrorism. (In 1998, al-Qaida bombed the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya.) Shriver, American by birth, has lived for over 20 years in the United Kingdom, and there’s a whiff of snobbery in the implication that she used to be one of those people, but fortunately has moved on to the higher cultural elevations of Europe, leaving all us dumbasses behind.

After astutely pointing out for the fourth straight week that my story or essay neglected to include much physical description of my characters, a member of my writing group asked why exactly I had trouble doing that. I mumbled a joking response about needing to work on it, but not until the drive home did I really start to consider why I shied away from physical description.

It’s not like I’m unaware that description is important. I’m sure every workshop leader has mentioned this fact, along with the apocryphal axiom: use all five sense by the end of the first page.

Over Saturday brunch with my mom, she suggested (in a nice way) it’s because my head is a bit in the clouds. “Like me, you don’t really pay attention to what kind of clothing people wear.”  True enough.

And, if I may play a small violin for myself, I was also classified with a minor learning disability as a teenager: poor visual memory.  So that could be part of it.

But I think the main reason is that when I read, I tend to skim over physical descriptions of characters and instead, form my mental image of each character based on his or her actions, thoughts, speech-patterns, etc, as found in the text.

Then I read this disturbing Jezebel article about kids being upset that the characters in the Hunger Games were correctly cast as dark-skinned. Read more »

It’s not like I feel I cannot communicate, but I’m tired of standing on a layer of ice somewhere in the mist and it comforts me to know that it doesn’t care if you had a bad day.  I was in a wonderfully stimulating and inspiring group, but for those of you who have yet to stumble, it’s required for all literary bloggers.

My voice is hearse. At least that’s what I’m telling my unemployable self.  Thinking of my own history, it’s fully responsive with all the touch-patterns, like gently moaning in your sleep or the outer stretches of terrain you scarcely knew existed.

If you haven’t stopped reading allow me to make a few suggestions.  You need some ‘me’ time.  Eat some food. Create successful images. Beg forgiveness. Keep on rolling.

I’ll admit I got sucked in. I made a substantial commitment and spent a lion’s share of my time keeping up.  The prototype means artistic pursuits—spontaneous bursts of passion—are utterly elusive.  Users create stunning commentary and careen through slushy streets.

The outrage over leaving the passenger seat can be utterly liberating so don’t ask permission.  Too few are listening.  10,000 variations of nomads make a Pulitzer Prize winner look like a Billy-Goat troll amid a thousand bohemian chumps who look just like me. Like the bald eagle that flew between two clear-cut hills and disappeared, I’m in favor of being stupid in all the right ways. Read more »

EWU grad Jessica Lakritz published in Slate.  There are nineteen others, but clearly, this is the best one.  And that black dog in picture #2 looks awfully familiar.

Dan Kois adds his perspective to the Whorfian Fact.  His piece is very good, and if you read it, and you should, you’ll see why I can’t discuss it much without ruining it.  But at one point, he compares John D’Agata’s fudging/making up/ changing facts in his essay to Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, “a hybrid of memoir and fiction that was a touchstone for a generation of writers looking for new ways to tell stories.”  I suppose it is fair to call TTTC a hybrid of memoir and fiction, the key difference is that O’Brien clearly states that the book is a work of fiction.  Of course, within the book, he creates the appearance of non-fiction, and you feel like you are reading memoir. There is a character named “Tim O’Brien,” who has had a very similar life to the author, Tim O’Brien.  And well before Dave Eggers got the idea for starting the creative part of a book before page one, O’Brien dedicated his book to the men of  Alpha company–all of whom are fictional characters.

I guess my point is, if you want to fudge the facts of a real-life story to make it better, to make it art, then call it fiction.  Naive?  Maybe. Read more »

In the CNBC guest blog, professional matchmaker Samantha Daniels provides some wonderful unintentional comedy in her post, “How to Date a Wall-Street Man.” Here’s a cliffnotes version: lose all self-respect and accept you’ll be treated like shit.  But if you want some specifics, here are a few choice passages that stuck out.

Tell stories that are short and sweet because the mind of a Wall Street man is always moving so rapidly and focusing on so many different things that his attention span for social stories is very short; don’t be insulted by this, just tell your stories in a way that he can listen. Save your long, draw-out stories for chit-chatting with your girlfriends.

His mind has adapted in a way that is able to make a lot of money, but with the attention-span of a dead flea.  Focus on the fact he is making a lot of money.

Unfortunately, a lot of guys on Wall Street have a hard time leaving work at the office; it’s your job to get his mind on you and off the S & P.

It pretty much impossible for a man to work hard all day and also be expected to make conversation on a date.

Be sexy. Wall Street men tend to like women who are attractive and that other men notice when they walk in the room. This does not mean that you should look sleazy or inappropriate…

Be hot enough that other men check you out, but don’t dress like a slut.  How hard is that? Read more »

Since I stopped seeing girls as “soft boys who smelled nice,” (in quotations because I read that somewhere many years ago and it neatly sums up gender relations from the POV of a elementary school boy), until early adulthood, I nursed two fantasies about where I would meet my soul-mate.  The first involved wandering the aisles of a used book store (okay, Barnes and Noble).  The second was serendipitous seating on an airplane.  I never really outgrew this phase, and while working for Willow Springs I added a third category: the slush pile.  You might logically ask, how is that even possible?

In my head, I would find a great story by a fellow aspiring writer, and while the story wouldn’t be accepted for publication, I’d be tasked with sending her a personal rejection from my email account asking her to submit stories directly to me in addition to the online submission manager.  She would, and perhaps she would ask to see some of my stories, and then the timeline of this fantasy gets a little murky.  I suppose we’d somehow eventually meet up and live happily ever after.

I never pursued anything like that because, unlike the bookstore or airplane, it would have been super creepy.

It’s been many months since I’ve read Willow Springs slush, so I relegated this bizarre fantasy to the nether regions of the brain.  Then, a few months ago, I really hit it off with a woman on a date.  Like me, she had recently finished an MFA and was struggling to make it as a writer.  The date went so well that we started emailing and g-chatting later that night and I learned her full name.  And it was really familiar.  Tip of the tongue familiar.  But I couldn’t place it. I wondered and wondered, but the only possibility, longshot and all, was, you guessed it, “Willow Springs slush pile.”  Memory is not exactly my strong suit.  But when I asked, she went and checked her submission records, and sure enough, she had submitted to Willow Springs a couple years ago when I worked there.  The short synopsis of her story struck me as very familiar, and when she sent me the manuscript, my suspicions were confirmed.

I don’t like to brag, but this was pretty amazing.  Out of at least hundreds, if not thousands of manuscripts, her name had lingered.  To be fair, her story had been discussed at a meeting, so I’d read the piece at least twice, but still, this seemed like a sign.  Was it meant to be?

Unlikely.  As she flaked out on our next date, and flaked on our rain-date (get it?) and then didn’t respond to a third date request.  Such is life.  Time to buy some new books or do a little more traveling.

Early in the new Murakami novel, a young writer named Tengo edits/rewrites a novella, originally written by a teenage girl, to win a debut literary prize.  As the novel progresses, the world he lives in changes to resemble the world Tengo embellished/ created in his work.  Notably, he describes two moons in the novella, and lo and behold, eventually he notices there are two moons in his world, and the second moon looks exactly how he described it.

On occasion, I’m struck by the similarity of something in the real world to something in a story I wrote.  Am I special person, like Tengo?  (I’m aware Tengo is a fictional character) Or did my sub-conscious give me the idea, which I used in the story, and then noticed in the real world?  I lean toward the latter.

I tried NaNoWriMo this year.  I failed.  I wrote about 1,500 words my first day, but decided they were so bad, and I mean really bad, that I couldn’t bear the thought of pounding out 48,500 more terrible words.  (NaNoWriMo seems to work for some people and that’s great)  I share this because in those first few pages, my main character hits a little girl with his car on his way to work.  It’s not his fault.  The girl darted out in front of him, but he feels guilty, and wonders if he could have prevented it had he been paying more attention.   Read more »