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 »

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 »

Look ma, my computer took a picture

I spent the long weekend at my family’s small cottage on Skaneateles lake, located near Syracuse in the finger-lake region of upstate, New York.  As usual, combining the idyllic with active pursuits makes for a personal paradise.  Some highlights included: a hike to a waterfall, bean-bag toss on the front lawn, reading DFW with an afternoon beer, watching my brother’s dog undergo water-therapy, and, with iced-coffee beside me, writing from the banks of the lake. But sitting lonely in my room, only occasionally checked upon, sat the new love of my life: an iPhone 4.

This recent purchase proved I could maintain my grumpy-old-man-persona and resist joining my generation for only a finite time.  The obnoxiously high monthly-cost had held me back for years, but upon realizing I could use the iPhone’s easy-to-use video capabilities to record tennis students and instantly, on the court, playback and show them their errors, the words “business expense” rang gloriously through my head.

I didn’t need an iPhone, but as one lusts after physically-attractive potential mates, a waxing and waning desire made its presence felt.  So sleek, so powerful, so light, so easy to use, and it makes me feel good about myself: forming the perfect, if one-sided, relationship.  I can not claim this reasoning as original.  At the recent commencement address at Kenyon College, my alma mater, Jonathan Franzen made much the same point:

Let me further point out how ubiquitously the word “sexy” is used to describe late-model gadgets; and how the extremely cool things that we can do now with these gadgets — like impelling them to action with voice commands, or doing that spreading-the-fingers iPhone thing that makes images get bigger — would have looked, to people a hundred years ago, like a magician’s incantations, a magician’s hand gestures; and how, when we want to describe an erotic relationship that’s working perfectly, we speak, indeed, of magic. Read more »

Funeral of Soviet cosmonaut Komarov, 1967

NPR recently aired an extraordinary report on the sacrifice that lead to the death of Vladimir Komarov. In 1967 Komorov and national hero Yuri Gagarin were assigned to the same mission in a craft: a vessel that the two men identified as having hundreds of errors and was in effect unflyable. Nonetheless, because of the USSR’s blind rush to win the space race, one of the two men would essentially be forced to fly in a death trap.

Komarov, knowing that if he refused to fly, the back up pilot (Gagarin) would be sent in his place. On his decision to go instead of his friend, Komarov said, “He’ll die instead of me. We’ve got to take care of him,” before bursting into tears. Read more »

This weekend I wrote a post about something that happened when I was nine. That was the year that I decided the red-headed girl with the ponytail was too normal to be my friend, the year I first held a hearing aid in my hands, the year the school counselor sprinted down the hallways chasing a half-naked kid and slamming him into the lockers at the end of the hall. Also, I changed my name for the first time.

But Tom Ashbrook, as he so often does, changed my morning routine. Tom hosts On Point, and is the greatest interruptor I’ve ever heard. But more important, his shows cover an incredibly wide range of topics, and he handles them all with respect. This morning the topic was recession-era letters to Santa Claus, and they broke my goddamned heart.

Read more »

Yesterday NPR posted rules for the fifth round of their Three-Minute Fiction contest. As in previous rounds, all stories must be 600 words or less and must incorporate a prompt (past prompts have included a list of words and a photo). This time, the judge is Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Cunningham (The Hours, Specimen Days, the upcoming By Nightfall, and others), who also selected this round’s prompts. The story must open with, “Some people swore that the house was haunted.” The last line must be, “Nothing was ever the same again after that.” Entries are due September 26.

Anybody thinking about entering? Sounds fun to me. For inspiration, check out the story Ann Patchett chose as the winner of Round Four, Yoav Ben Yosef’s “Not Calling Attention to Ourselves.”

Listening to NPR’s On Point on Tuesday morning, I heard something that gave me pause.  The show, which was about new technologies and their effects on the brain, included the writer/journalist, Nick Bilton, who said that the brain isn’t programmed to read. He said that we’re programmed to communicate, but reading is actually quite unnatural. It’s something we teach ourselves to do despite our natures. I don’t know if I believe this, but it does kind of make sense. Most people, barring those with developmental disorders, who are exposed to other communicative people learn to speak, but reading is something that takes years of practice to get really good at, and even then, some people never get to the point where they can interact with texts in complex ways (locating implications and assumptions, arguing with the text, finding logical fallacies and holes in reasoning, making connections, etc.), so maybe, as Bilton later states, reading is much like other technologies that have an effect on the brain; it teaches our brains to behave in certain ways in order to collect information, just as using the Internet, iPhones/Pods/Pads, cell phones…do. The worry, though, and the difference for me, is that reading doesn’t seem to contribute to attention problems while these other communication technologies promote short attention spans, according to anecdotal evidence and other studies that were brought up on the show. The other guest, Nicholas Carr, who wrote the article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” and the book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, argues that these new technologies are changing the way we pay attention. Read more »