By Candace Walsh • “We live in a world that has unconstrained wildness, and we like to forget we are part of that wildness,” says Madeline ffitch, author of PEN/Hemingway Award–finalist Stay and Fight. Fiction that only acknowledges characters’…
I picked Jeff up from the airport. We’d met online and chatted for a few months. Newly divorced, he said, about fifteen years older than me. But he was normal, and he was from somewhere else. I’d spent hours…
My girlfriend has a pet rock that watches us in bed. A cold lump of gray with googly eyes, a feather headband, and a red glitter mouth that Becca would never wear. It used to be in a box…
On a warm, wet November day like this one, I saw what I thought was some drunk, some ambitious drunk, stumbling up Route 376 with his takeout. It was the sort of thing I might have been tempted to ignore.…
That morning, when they set out to follow the fence line that surrounded their property, Sarah Billard didn’t expect her daddy to stop at the southern section. She could hardly recall the last time seed had taken root there—all…
Cassie found the book at a bus stop next to a pair of abandoned men’s shoes: The Study and Practice of Astral Projection: The Definitive Survey on Out-of-the-Body Experiences, by Dr. Robert Crookall. On the cover was a drawing…
By Nicole Barney • Garth Greenwell’s second novel, Cleanness, revisits the territory of his debut, fleshing out the experiences of the narrator beyond those of his encounters with Mitko, a young man he meets in a public bathroom and…
“I wish she’d just hawk it up and spit it out. You know? Loogie-style.” That’s what I say to Dave in front of the Kwik Stop. We’re on our lunch, drinking off-brand iced tea in plastic bottles and as…
By Melissa Benton Barker • The stories in Mary Gaitskill’s collection Don’t Cry are like tiny mirrors held close, all the pores and blemishes of her characters offered up for the readers’ inspection. Published in 2009, the collection scrupulously…
There are funnel cakes. There are deep-fried Kit Kats. There are even deep-fried sticks of butter. Sam’s feet sink into the mud that’s covered with straw because it rained ten inches in forty-eight hours and it’s probably going to…
A couple of years ago, my then elementary-aged son started getting anti-Semitic messages from a former friend. It started small: a GIF of a Lego swastika sent via DM. But within a few months, he was receiving a relentless stream of Trump propaganda and graphic pictures of WWII German firing squads. For complicated reasons, he worried about blocking this kid, and for equally complicated reasons, we were hesitant to contact his parents.
A seed of all of this lodged in my brain, and I tried through many drafts to write that story from the perspective of someone like my son, my son’s age, in a similar life situation, etc. But it didn’t work. I must have done ten or more drafts before I set it aside and decided I couldn’t write it.
About half of my stories have some foot in my real life, and those stories are often the most difficult to write because there’s always a long period of disentangling and fictionalizing that has to occur. It often takes months to see around the constraints of whatever real-life situation may have inspired a piece and find a structure and voice and perspective that really work for the material.
Once I set this aside for a few months and let it rest, I was able to see that it might be stronger with multiple perspectives, older kids, and I wanted to try to give voice to the “villain” in the story and make him a little nuanced and even sympathetic.
This entire process reminded me that thinking about writing IS writing. It’s an essential part of the craft. I know this isn’t earth shattering, yet I forget it all the time. Sitting at a laptop staring at an open document, deleting, revising, tinkering… not always the answer. The walking, the listening to music, the conversations, all of the things we do while these ideas are percolating are essential to the process. We all know this on some fundamental level, but with the emphasis on product and being prolific and publication, it’s easy (for me, at least) to forget how key that period of thought and incubation is to creation of product, especially when the material springs from something personal. (Caveat: I know this is a privileged position, and if we’re writing on a deadline or relying on publication for income, waiting around isn’t always an option.)
The situation with my son ended as well as it could have, with a kind of détente and an apology. But I wanted this story to build up to something a little terrifying but murky and unknown so there’s tension but no resolution or finality, at least none that’s overtly stated.
Some stories emerge in a breathless few hours, and it’s easy to divorce from craft and think, who needs craft? Writing is a mysterious fever. Craft is a dark nothing, a black box, a mindfuck designed to lead grad students in circles of torment. But this story was not like that; it felt very crafted in its process: lots of thoughts about shape, voice, perspective, form, and lots of time spent drafting, going away, and drafting again. I’m still not sure it’s finished.
AMY STUBER’S work has appeared in Triquarterly, Passages North, Wigleaf, Joyland, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She’s an Assistant Flash Editor for Split Lip Magazine and is on Twitter @amy_stuber and online at amystuber.com.
