OUR COLUMNIST REDISCOVERS THE SHORT STORY . . . AND SOME LESSONS FOR US ALL.
July 1990
Last year I settled in at a writers’ colony in Virginia. I had a book to write and a six-week residency to devote to it and nothing else. The book had been very much on my mind for the preceding six months; I had a lot of it worked out, including virtually all of the last several chapters, and I knew quite a bit about my characters and the scenes they’d be starring in. I was keen to buckle down and get on with the job.
My routine was the one I usually follow at the colony. I rose early each morning and hurried off to my studio, where I worked nonstop until dinnertime. Occasionally I returned to the studio for a few hours’ more work in the evening.
I kept it up for two weeks, and at the end of that time I had just over 200 pages of manuscript. I sensed that the book would run somewhere around 350 pages, so I had a nice chunk done, almost certainly more than half.
There was only one problem.
I didn’t like what I’d done.
Let me qualify that. I liked a lot of what I’d written. Most of it, actually. But it seemed to me to be rather less than the sum of its parts. I felt it was rambling and dilatory, that I was moving in too many directions and not making real progress toward any of them, and that I had begun work with an insufficient sense of what I wanted to accomplish. Because I did in fact know so very much about the book’s ending, I had lost sight of the fact that I didn’t know enough about the earlier portions. I had plunged right in, and some of what I’d come up with was very good indeed, but it didn’t make a book.
Nor did it make any sense to go on.
But what was I going to do? There I was with four more weeks booked. The place is idyllic, but people go mad hanging around and not working. I had to write something and I didn’t have anything to write.
Short stories, I told myself. I’ll write some short stories.
I figured short stories would be fun. They always are. I think I probably enjoy them more than novels. When they go well, they provide almost immediate gratification. When they go horribly hopelessly wrong, so what? To discard a failed short story is to throw away the work of a handful of hours, perhaps a couple of days. In a short story I can try new things, play with new styles, and take unaccustomed risks. They’re fun.
I tell you all this, not just because I’m in the habit of keeping you informed in the hope my experience will prove instructive, but because it seems to me that clear lessons can be learned from what followed, and I for one want to make sure I learn them.
The first lesson, I suppose, is that every apparent setback is an opportunity. I was deeply dismayed when the book ground to a halt, and especially annoyed that it had happened with a month of colony time to go. If this hadn’t happened, I never would have written the stories I did—and I’m very pleased to have written them.
Another lesson would seem to lie in Woody Allen’s observation that 80 or 90% of success owes itself simply to showing up.
Here I was in Virginia, stalled on a book, and thinking that I ought to write some short stories, that I would like to write some short stories. Having come to this decision, I awoke the next morning, trudged off to my studio, and wrote almost half of a short story. The next day I went back and wrote the rest of it.
It was a story about an abusive husband, and I had had the idea for it once before—two years ago, at the same writers’ colony, at which time I wrote four or five pages of it, didn’t at all like what I’d written, and tore it up. I don’t think I gave the subject five minutes thought overall during the intervening two years, and when I did think of it I regarded it as a bad idea for a story that wasn’t really my kind of story in the first place.
This time I saw how to write it, and I think it’s as good a short story as I’ve ever written.
The day after I finished it I was fresh out of story ideas, but I had an idea for my monthly column and wrote that. The day after that I woke up with no ideas at all, but I had breakfast and went to the studio anyway. I stretched out on the couch and tried to think of something, and an idea came along, and I sat down at my desk and started work on a story. The idea wasn’t an absolutely brilliant one, and I was fairly sure that only a limited story could grow out of it.
Well, so what? You don’t have to hit a home run every time you step up to the plate, and you’ll probably be well advised not to try. I wrote the story. It took two days, and it was easy to write. (The first one had been tricky, and I’d had to work at the top of my form to get it to work. This one was a cinch, and I had fun with it.)
That night I went back after dinner and got an idea for a story set on a mink ranch. I wrote two pages just to feel my way into the character. I decided I needed to know more about mink ranching, so the following morning I went to the library at a nearby college and did several hours’ worth of research. It was productive, and I carried my newfound knowledge back to my studio and tried to plot a story about the mink ranch, but it wouldn’t come. Later in the day, though, I shoved my notes and photocopies aside and started writing something else. I had a sort of half-baked idea for a story, or at least for the opening of a story, and I wanted to see where it would go.
Sometime the following afternoon it went to the end of the story. Again, it’s a somewhat uncharacteristic story. The idea for this one wasn’t all that compelling, and it wasn’t even all there when I began trying to write my way into it. But I think it works, and I think it will probably get published somewhere, and I enjoyed writing it and enjoy having written it.
Then, the next day, I got up and went to my studio and found myself thinking about the novel. The first chapter functions almost as a sort of curtain-raiser, having precious little to do with the ensuing story. It follows my detective, Matthew Scudder, as he does a day’s freelance work for a detective agency, hassling street merchants who are selling articles that infringe his client’s copyrights. I thought when I wrote it that it could almost stand as a story by itself, and I went back and read it with that in mind. It needed some trimming and shaping, to be sure, and it needed to make another trip through the typewriter, so I spent the day giving it just that. I don’t know if it’s a story, really. It doesn’t come to a conclusion, doesn’t have a plot in the traditional sense of the word, but I’m glad I did what I did with it, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it gets published.
What does all of this add up to? Something like four finished stories in something like ten days. And the one thing I did every day was to show up at my studio ready to work. That made me receptive to ideas, and it enabled me to do something with them when they came along.
My third lesson was I realized the inherent weakness of my longstanding policy of writing stories only when I had a compelling idea for one.
From a standpoint of dollars and cents, it’s not really reasonable for a writer to concentrate much energy on short fiction. The market is narrow and shallow. There are not many places to sell short fiction, and they don’t buy much of it, and they don’t pay a whole lot for it.
The economic facts of life have their effect. Some years ago I decided that there was no reason to write a short story unless I happened to get a genuinely good idea for one. And, ever since, I’ve written a story when such an idea occurred to me. But those ideas didn’t come around very often.
They didn’t during the time I pursued them in Virginia. The first story was based on an idea I’d managed to ignore for two years. The second was based on an idea that wasn’t all that compelling. The third wouldn’t have been written if I’d waited for the idea; I pretty much found my way into the idea in the course of writing the story. And the fourth, the salvaged first chapter, is one I never would have bothered to form into a story if I hadn’t made short stories my occupation for the month.
Several times over the past decade it’s struck me that I’d enjoy writing more short stories, that there’s enough unstructured time in my schedule to facilitate their production. While they may not be enormously lucrative, two days spent writing a short story puts more money in my pocket than two days of sitting and staring out the window. If I were to write, say a story every other month, I’d be adding considerably to my overall body of work.
Besides, short stories pay off in surprising ways. They keep turning up in anthologies, bringing me a few dollars each time and keeping my name in front of readers. Two or three times they’ve been adapted for television; this is neither as glitzy nor as enriching as selling a novel to the movies, but it’s not bad, either. One story, written to keep a promise, won me an Edgar award and a Shamus award and, greatly expanded, became what is arguably my best novel. What kind of shortsightedness could lead me to the belief that short stories aren’t worth writing?
I think I’m going to have to make a standing appointment with myself. I think I’m going to have to budget time for short stories. If I show up, I suspect the ideas will show up, too. And the stories will get written, and I’ll be glad to have written them.
For heaven’s sake, I’ve been writing this column for 14 years now. On more than 150 occasions I’ve managed to find something to say about writing. It hasn’t been a home run every time, as all of you can surely testify, but I’m up there every month anyway, swinging the bat, taking my cuts at the ball. If I didn’t have a regular appointment with myself to write a column every month, do you imagine for a moment I would have happened to have 150 ideas about writing worth setting down on paper?
Necessity is the mother of invention, and the wish is father to the thought. If I provide a birdhouse, if I set out wisps of straw and bits of string the bluebird of inspiration will come nest nearby.
I hope I’ve learned this lesson, and I hope I’ll apply it. I don’t know whether I’ll try to devote a few days every month to short story production or if I’ll try to book an annual colony stay for that purpose, but one way or another I want to start budgeting the time and energy for it. Because that seems to be the best way to make it happen.