Fiction Mondays: Work in Progress

As promised last week, today I've got parts of a new story, fresh out of editing.  I think I'm becoming a better editor, and as a result my stories are getting leaner and (I think, at least) better.  Here's the opening of a story, currently titled "The Wolf," about two men who hear from their long-absent mother only on holidays, and what happens the day they don't.  The title is only temporary, until I think of a better one.

Sam stood by the kitchen counter, slicing a loaf of Italian bread into half-inch cubes when Dave came in holding the blue three-ring binder. Sam kept cutting, as though this task required his complete concentration, and didn’t look up at his brother until he had chopped most of the loaf and swept the cubes into a glass bowl. He carried the two ends, which he had not diced, to the table. He sat down and handed one to Dave.

“This is good bread,” Dave said, sinking his incisors into the round piece and tearing it like it was a piece of meat. “It’s really crusty and chewy.”

“It’s from the bakery in town. Need any butter, or olive oil?”

“No, that’s all right. Plain is fine.” Sam looked across the table, not yet starting on his bread. He had a habit, carried over from childhood, of watching Dave eat first, at least for a minute or two. It was strange, like seeing himself eat. Once, when he was very small, Sam even managed to convince himself that by watching his twin, he could fill his own stomach.

Dave had let his hair grow long and his beard had filled in, so they didn’t look like each other as much as they once had; for Sam, it was like seeing what he would look like if he lived outside for half the year, without regular access to hot water or a barber. It wasn’t that Dave looked dirty—the Park Service expected him to be presentable and professional—but Sam could see his discomfort in dress shoes, his glances into the backyard like he could not wait to get back out. Sam took a bite of his bread and looked at the tabs sticking out of the binder, each of them labeled. He wondered if it had gotten much thicker than the year before, or if it was just his imagination: considering the information inside, he wouldn’t be surprised if he dreamt it into a larger, more mythical collection.

“Do we have to break out the binder already? That can’t wait for dessert tomorrow?”

The binder is Dave's record of everything they know about their mother, from the phone calls to photographs of strangers who might be her.  This next scene is Sam's last memory of her before she left, and is one of my favorite scenes.

Rhea sat them both on the kitchen counter, the spot where she always placed her sons when she prepared them to leave the house; every morning she would have them sit there, Sam on the left and Dave on the right, to inspect their faces and fingernails.  It was the same counter where she gave them haircuts, looking from Dave to Sam to ensure her work was even.  Tonight, she sewed their shirts together, a seam that began two inches above the waist.

“Don’t move,” she said.  “If you wiggle around, the stitches might come undone.”  She took an ashtray from the kitchen table and examined the cigarette she had left there a few minutes earlier.  Satisfied that it was still lit, she took a long drag and regarded her sons.  “I don’t know why I didn’t think of this sooner,” she said. 

She finished sewing and tugged at the seam a few times before standing up straight, pleased with her work.  “Get your pillowcases,” she said.  “And hop down together, would you?  I don’t want to have to sew you up again.”  The twins shuffled off of the countertop and shambled, conjoined, down the hallway.  When they returned, Rhea told them they were going with the neighbors, that she would see them when they came back later that night.  She kissed each of them on the forehead and said she loved them, shepherding them outside.

Three hours later, after an evening of wandering the neighborhood with Margaret, the woman next door, and her children, the boys returned home to find their father sitting on the porch, drinking whiskey from an empty jam jar printed with Tom and Jerry cartoons.  The porch light cast sharp shadows across the lawn, the only illumination on the dirt road.  Sam knew almost instantly, before Margaret even put her hands on their shoulders, that he would remember this moment for the rest of his life, the exact instant he and his brother, fused at the waist, transformed into pair of motherless freaks.

So that's about the first half.  I'm really happy with it so far, but like I said, the title is giving me some problems.  I am open to suggestions.

(Non) Fiction Mondays: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

I don't know about runners; long-distance runners, I mean.  I know there's a British "kitchen sink" movie called the Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, and I've known the occasional marathoner, but as a group, I have to admit that I'm wary of them.  Maybe it's because the ones in my neighborhood are so unpleasant, acting like the sidewalk was specifically made for them and they're just temporarily allowing you to walk there (and god forbid you walk a dog there).  So it was with this bias that I started reading Haruki Murakami's memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.

I guess the book is almost more of an essay collection, Murakami's thoughts as he trained for the New York City Marathon.  But I can see where calling it a memoir is accurate: Murakami's life as a runner began with his life as a writer, and so this book acts as an examination of where and how those aspects of his life intertwine and affect one another.  It contains my favorite Murakami legend, the one about how he became a writer: he saw a batter hit a home run and suddenly knew he could write a novel, so he did. 

For a writer who tends to keep his history and personal life kind of guarded, these glimpses into Murakami becoming a writer were really interesting for me.  I mean, there is the Murakami I know from The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore, but on a level of where he comes from and what aspects of his life led to his becoming a writer, he can be kind of a mystery.  Here, he talks about owning a jazz club, the way his life was before he became a novelist.  In his non-fiction, you can kind of see which parts of him have entered into characters and how his mind works.

I liked this book for the thoughts on writing much more than the thoughts on running, and I can see why Murakami chose to use one as a metaphor for the other.  Writing is a solitary activity that requires more endurance than talent: it's a frustrating occupation, and you need to practice every day if you don't want to burn out quickly.  I agree with him when he says there are writing muscles, that you can work to strengthen these day after day.

I'm still on the fence about runners; after all, I didn't expect Murakami to change my mind about the entire sport.  But I do feel that this book gave me a deeper look at Murakami the runner, and Murakami the writer, who were the same person all along.  And it made me want to start an exercise regimen, because I could use that kind of structure and working out daily would be good for my overall health.

But it won't be running.

Fiction Mondays: Check out My Story!

Today's post is a short one--book reviews will continue next week, when I'll be writing about Jedediah Berry's excellent The Manual of Detection. Today, though, I have news: in case you missed it over the weekend, I have a story up on Opium Magazine's website! Go check it out!

Fiction Mondays: First Drafts

It's kind of strange how stories come together at different speeds: even when you have two stories of the same word count, one may take months and another get knocked out in a matter of weeks. I have one in a notebook that I keep adding too, trying to see the shape of the story I'm telling; I mostly write it while I'm on breaks at work, and it's a slow process of discovery. The idea was initially built around two scenes, but the further into it I get, the more story there is between those scenes.

Last week, I wrote the entire first draft of a short story. I started it on Monday and finished it yesterday. The story is about twins whose mother ran off when they were kids and now calls only on holidays. I jumped into it with a few images and a small line of description, and the story came together incredibly quickly. For a first draft, I'm really proud of it. It was one of the fastest drafts of a story I've ever written, and when I re-read it, I was surprised to find that I really liked the shape of the story. Of course, it needs a lot of work, but I feel like I got the framing done now I can go in and start to work on the smaller details.

The other story feels more like I'm drawing the blueprint as I go, and I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. It's a first draft, right? So what if it ends up with no doors and four chimneys?

Fiction Mondays: It's That Time Again

I mentioned a few months ago that I was getting back to writing short stories, and last week I realized that even though I have a few polished stories sitting here at home, I don't have any out there, making the rounds to literary magazines. This is a problem--finished stories, or stories I feel are finished, aren't doing anything just hanging around the house. So this week, it's time to start mailing (or e-mailing) them out again. Any suggestions for new and interesting venues to send these stories out to?

I know I was trying to get a book review a week up, but this week the only thing I read was Ghosts by Paul Auster, which was pretty interesting, but was really more of a long short story. It's about a detective watching a man who might be watching him back, and the confusing situation they find themselves in. It had a lot of elements of City of Glass, in which a detective gets so deep into a case that he starts to lose his own identity and question his reality. It's written in a really odd way, as though it's someone years later who only heard about what happened, and it has a lot of nods to itself as a story, which is a big theme in Auster's work.

I have some books at home I'm really excited to read and talk about, including Wells Tower's Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned and Audrey Niffenegger's Her Fearful Symmetry. With any luck these will be reviewed here next week and the week after. And then there's my ongoing reading of Ulysses, which I really like, but probably won't get done by mid-June (unless I quit sleeping and working and just spend hours of every day with it). But who knows? Maybe I'll read two hundred pages of it next week.

For now, I'm off to work on other stories. I just got through the first edits of one called "Hey Mercury," which I first had an idea for a long time ago and has finally come together, and I'm working on a first draft (handwritten!) of another one that doesn't have a title just yet.

Fiction Mondays: "Then We Came to the End"

Lately, it's rare for me to get through a novel in a matter of days; between working full time, writing for a local magazine, and keeping up with my own fiction and plays, my schedule and level of energy just doesn't always lend itself to getting through a book quickly (see: The Savage Detectives). But last week, in probably about four days, I burned through Joshua Ferris' Then We Came to the End, a hilarious and surprisingly affecting novel about workers in an ad agency.

When I bought the book, I was worried I would grow tired of its narrative style, written in the first person collective, but I don't think it would have been as amazing if it had a more traditional voice. The book makes you, the reader, complicit in the actions of the narrators, and this at times can be an uncomfortable feeling, as they don't always act in a way you agree with. They gossip, they watch a grieving woman on her lunch break, they judge everyone around them. But they also, despite the fact that they lack names, faces, or any other characterization, manage to produce some real insight into the nature of work and all of the human interactions a day job can bring you.

There's a middle section that steps out of this voice, where Lynn, the narrators' boss, tries to figure out the best way to spend her last night before surgery to remove breast cancer. The author called it the "emotional core" of the novel, and I agree: to step, for just a few pages, out of the office and its trivialities and to exist with one character facing the possibility of death changes the way you read the second half. I think it changes the book from a dark comedy to a kind of tragedy, and towards the end of the book, when a character who is being let go from the agency talks about how they're all losing their minds, it makes more sense because of the closeness of death in the middle section.

I don't want, in reviewing this book, to give too much away, but I have to mention Tom Mota. He's one of the first characters we really get to know, and he is central throughout the entire book as something of an angel of chaos, sending long cryptic e-mails and appearing in an insane, dark, funny scene that serves as the novel's climax. From the first chapter, we know that he is fired, and that he probably is a little insane. He begins to wear three company polo shirts, layered over one another, around the office, and when they ask him what he's doing, his response is, "You don't know what's in my heart." That was the line from the book that resonated with me, and I think about it a lot while I'm at work. I am surrounded by so many people, who I see every day, who I complain about the job with, who I make small talk, but it is true that they don't know what's in my heart, any more than I know what is in theirs.