Reading Room – Page 13

Short Story Reading Challenge

How to make the most of your reading time to boost your writing: create a short story reading log!

It’s going to be harder to write during the summer months, with boys underfoot and trips to here there and everywhere (bonjour, Bretagne!), so I’m going to spend my summer months feeding the creative monster.

I’ve been finding it hard to write recently, partly because my brain is begin pulled in fifteen different directions. I’m feeding it with information — about education, about fitness, about nutrition, about cognitive behavioural therapies, about music, about all kinds of practical stuff — but I’m not feeding it with the kinds of stories it needs to lift itself out of the everyday world and into the world of stories.

So I’m going back to the Bradbury Method of creativity-boosting. I did this last summer and it worked like a charm: I read a new story every day (and an essay and a poem as often as I could manage that) and found myself drowning in ideas. I had a burning urge to write; I sketched out ideas for stories; I wrote some of them over the next six months and released them as Kindle ebooks that have sold actual copies and generated actual profits. I have others that are still in various stages of drafting. But more than all that I was happy.

Follow Along?

So that’s what I’m going to do: Read and log as many short stories as I can this summer. I’m logging my activity at my personal reading log and you can do the same.

Your Own Reading Log

I’m using Google Docs to log my reading.

Here’s a copy of the form that you can use yourself if you want to join in and you like Google Docs. Save a copy of this form to your own Google Drive and rename it.

If you click on “Tools/Create New Form you can create a Google form, which i find to be a nice, clean interface for entering info. It’ll update the spreadsheet automatically (no silly little cells to click on).

Here’s a screenshot of my form, for reference.

…and here’s how my ugly-but-useful spreadsheet looks:

Bonus Tip: Create A Handy Shortcut

If you’re an iPhone user, you can follow these steps to get an app-like link on your phone, to make logging your reading easier (I’m a big fan of ‘easy’)
Step 1:

Go to your form on in your browser (drive.google.com/)

Then:

Then

Then

How it looks on your phone:

Voilà!

Just make sure you save a copy of this document to your own Google Drive and don’t send me an email requesting permission to edit this copy, OK?

[Reading Room] Heat by Joyce Carol Oates

I hated this story.

Not that there was anything really wrong with it.

It painted vivid pictures of the setting that are seared into my brain.

It created realistic portraits of the twin girls around whom the story turns — fun, selfish, nice-nasty, typical preteen girls — and of the protagonist who is both a girl with the twins and an older woman looking back on things.

It wove the story really well through non-linear story-telling. It has suspense, and emotion and is terribly well written.

But.

It’s part of that school of literary stories from the second half of the twentieth century that are unrelentingly grim. Everyone’s a pervert or being hurt by someone or cheating on their spouse or living a life without hope. People are murdered, raped, declared bankrupt, abused, tortured, depressed… It’s fine, I suppose, and good that people can write about these things. I don’t want people to pretend these things don’t happen or isolate victims by not allowing them to share their experiences. But there seems to have been a sense that you couldn’t be a literary (for ‘literary’ read: good) writer unless your world was devoid of hope, humor or heroes.

And I hate that. It’s why I fly to cozy mysteries and space opera and anything where I can find a hero and a bit of relief. [updated: And I totally respect that you might find this kind of writing challenging, rewarding, comforting, or sublimely moving, and may hate my kind of humor-laced frippery-faves. I think I mostly get annoyed by the seeming ubiquity of grimness in “literary” fiction.]

So, I’m glad I read this story because I will come back to it to see just how Ms Oates created that indelible sense of place; and how she made her characters so realistic; and how she wove that story so well. But I’ll never like it. And I never want to write this kind of thing.

What about you? Do you rage against a particular style of writing? Harlequin Romances? Happy endings? What gets you so angry that you feel moved to write something just to prove that stories can be better than that? Let me know in the comments:

[Reading Room] Sticks by George Saunders

I’m on a George Saunders kick.

I mean, when someone can write a story with fewer than 500 words that makes you actually say “oof” out loud at the end? You’re going to want to go on a kick, reading their work.

“Sticks” is a grown man’s reminiscence about his father. It begins,

Every year Thanksgiving night we flocked out behind Dad as he dragged the Santa suit to the road and draped it over a kind of crucifix he’d built out of a metal pole in the yard.

That use of the word ‘crucifix’ is key. Doesn’t that make you want to keep reading? You know there’s more to this than just a funny story about fatherly quirks.

The story is extremely well crafted. You get the sense that there must have many revisions, re-revisions, reversions and more revisions to make it this tight.

That’s only depressing if we think our job as writers is to get as many words out into the world as quickly as possible. If we believe that our job is to craft stories, and that rewriting is a crucial (and enjoyable) part of writing, then George Saunders is our new mentor.

Write the crappy first draft. Then spend as much time as you need to, reworking it until it is art.

How Do You Feel About Revisions?

[Reading Room] Victory Lap by George Saunders

OK, so everyone’s been raving about this collection, The Tenth of December by George Saunders.

I’m such a skeptic about hype that it was with some trepidation that I plunked down my money and opened the book.

But: wow. If the first story is anything to go on, this is going to be one fabulous collection.

Victory Lap is a supreme example of ‘show, don’t tell’. If you’ve ever wondered what that piece of well-worn advice means, run to your bookshelf and grab this (you probably bought it when people were first raving about it instead of, like me, pretending to be too cool).

The story starts in the voice of a fourteen year old girl who is coming down the stairs in her house, consumed with her own, fourteen-year-old fantasies of herself: still childlike but on the verge of adult-issues. It so thoroughly captures the inner voice of a teenage girl that it is disorienting, but you adjust quite quickly.

Just as you’re getting comfortable with this voice, it switches into the head of the boy next door, who our hero has spotted through the window, just before the inciting incident of the story.

The boy next door is equally well-realized, equally complex and oh, so painfully awkward. Told only in his inner thoughts, the author builds up a picture of his home-life: the only child of extremely protective, ambitious and unbearable parents; a good boy whose parents are (perhaps unwittingly) perverting that goodness.

I defy you to read this story and not root for the two kids; not have your blood run cold at the thought of what might happen if things don’t go the way you fervently hope they will. Aargh!

Not only does Saunders get right inside the heads of these kids, he brings you along, shows so much without once ‘telling’, and makes you empathize to the point that you’re thinking dark thoughts about what you’ll do to the author if things don’t turn out ‘right’ (or was that just me?).

And that, my friends, is the mark of an excellent story: suck the reader in, make them care, don’t spoon feed them the details, make something happen; make it matter; raise the stakes; write an ending that forces the reader to go on thinking about the ramifications of the events in the story for your characters, long after they’ve finished the story.

Oh, and go and buy a copy of this collection if you haven’t already!

[Reading Room] Golden by James Scott Bell

Author James Scott Bell, as well as being a successful lawyer, novelist and writing coach, has been a good friend to StoryADay (giving us both an interview and a writing prompt for last year’s StoryADay May).

So of course, I wanted to like his new story, which veers from his usual style. No mysteries here, no fast-paced action, just the story of a guy dealing with the legacy of something in his past that he’s not proud of.

Writing (and publishing) this story was a big leap for Bell (as he explained when he announced it). he was nervous. It wasn’t like anything he’d ever written before and he was worried that he might fall flat on his face.

Don’t you feel like that, a lot of the time when you sit down to write? I know I do.

So I went into this story wanting to like it. but I wasn’t sure I was going to. I mean, what do I care about a middle-aged, middle-class divorced father on a playdate with his son?

Well, Bell quickly made me care. He does it by using all the craft available to him. Within the first paragraph I’ve learned a lot about the guy, his divorce, the ex-wife. Look how much information he packs into sentences 3 & $ of the story — and not just information, but attitude, character background, exposition, the whole shebang:

“Judy and I reached an amicable settlement on custody, mainly because I didn’t want to fight her anymore. Her family is well off and were not shy about retaining the biggest shark tank in L. A.”

The story is about more than just a bitter divorcé, though. Rather it is about a father reliving something that happened when he was a kid, a little older than his son.

One of the things I noticed about this story (and all of Bell’s writing) is the strength of the narrator’s voice when he’s writing in first person. It is always dipping with character, attitude and is firmly rooted in wherever the character is from (usually L. A.). In this story, even when he takes the character back in time to his teenage years, the voice is distinctive and unmistakably the voice of a teen,

“That’s what got him in bad with Robbie Winkleblack…”

“I ran away, too, but I wasn’t laughing. I was thinking it was all over for me now. I’d be kicked out of school, maybe thrown into juvie.”

How can you make readers care about your characters whether or not they think they are going to?

Read James Scott Bell’s article on why he wrote this and why short stories are so awesome

[Reading Room] There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradbury

A house stands alone in a post-nuclear-strike landscape. It is one of those Tomorrowland kind of houses that people dreamed of in the 1950s: the stove is cooking eggs and bacon, the mice-robots are scurrying out to clean, the automatic systems are trying to entertain the absent occupants. Absent? Yes, and we find out what happened to those occupants in a shocking moment that is less shocking nowadays, because we’ve seen it before. But Bradbury was writing when these ideas and fears were new.

The story continues without a single human in it and yet it we come to know the former occupants of the house, their culture and also the character of the house.

Dig Deep And Find Your Unique Voice

Ray Bradbury’s writing is deeply poetic and thoroughly unique. It is a wonderful example of how you can find your voice only be being unapologetically yourself. Written by anyone else, this kind of lyrical writing would be overblown and possibly embarrassing. In Bradbury’s handling, it is just….well, Bradbury.

How To Write A Story Without A Human Protagonist

It’s also a wonderful example of how you can write a story without a traditional protagonist and yet still have a character.

In this story the house is definitely the protagonist, if a protagonist’s job is to guide us through a story and show us a new world in a new way. The house in this story is very much that protagonist. It tells us about the world that humanity has created for itself. It tells us what we have done to ourselves and points out the folly of the story’s human race: concentrating all its creative energies on making gadgets to make life comfortable instead of on solving the looming nuclear threat.

The story has secondary characters too: the family that lived in the house and the former household pet (who play the classic ‘secondary character role’ by being referenced in the story only when they contribute something to our understanding of the protagonist — in this case, the house).

Read the story here.