Push It
Usually my artistic motto is “don’t push.”1
But sometimes you push and it’s cool as fuck.
In the past few weeks, I’ve had opportunities to push hard, with awesome results.
On Compression:
I wrote a complete 2976 word story between February 10 and March 1, after being invited to submit to an anthology. This is why I missed posting last week. Writing a complete story in a compressed period of time is amazing! At first I was like, fuck, I want to witness this story unfold in its own time but I canNOT, I have to push on it. Hard.
I had two threads I hadn’t used in fiction yet, from last spring.
One was a “dialogues” practice, as outlined in Subtle Maneuvers (shit, it’s locked for paid subscribers now. It’s a great practice, maybe the best. Basically, you write a dialogue between 2 unnamed people with no descriptions, backstory, etc, for 20-50 minutes, preferably 5 days in a row).
The other came out of researching2 benign/positive illegal activity in Spokane for my short story “Avoid the Darkness.” There, I ended up calling on criminal trespass during a protest against nuclear warhead transport by train in the 80s. The one I didn’t use was this long debacle about the crackdown on nude sunbathing at People’s Park. Put it together in a long-term T4T relationship with unstable power dynamics.
Of course, I could not have done this project without my partner, my first and best reader, Kaden, who always knows how to get right to the heart of what’s going on in my fiction, and isn’t afraid to say exactly what it needs. In this case, with about 36 hours until the deadline, he told me the dialogue in the penultimate scene wasn’t believable. I was like nooooooo. Of course, he was right. But, he said, it’s good that you wrote down what you did, the information is there, it’s just not how people speak during an argument. The next day, I pulled out a stack of short story collections I love, and I couldn’t find one goddamn verbal argument anywhere. Short stories are full of people avoiding confrontation! Because it’s so hard to write confrontation? I took this quandary to my writing meetup group text, and they were very helpful.
People don’t say what they want unless pushed to the brink. Make them fight over a symptom of the problem.
In verbal fights, people literally do not/cannot hear the other person speaking. The focus is on their own grievance. I think of it as a lot of talking at/past each other as opposed to with each other.
It’s hard to make characters you like say mean shit. But we probably all do it irl at some point. (only to those we love! I added)
So eventually, I sat down and I wrote a verbal argument, using these guidelines, and it opened/clarified SO MUCH about these characters and this story, and made the scene fit much better within the context. I basically felt really proud of it lol.
“The Alaska thing,” I said, then hesitated. I thought I understood something, but didn’t want to piss him off. “Maybe you’re doing it to make up for your parents’ failure?”
“Yes!” He leaned back, satisfied. “My astrologer said it would be good, for closure.”
Summer in the Alaskan wilderness, the actual farthest northwest an American could go.
“Then what?” I asked, laughing. “You’re not building us a log cabin.”
His pause was thick and unbearable, like waiting for a thunderclap.
“This is what you always do,” he said, with so much force he was spitting. “Act like you know what I’m about just to shut me down.”
“How could I possibly know what you’re about? You have this whole secret life.”
One night last week I came home to find him upside down in a headstand, face red but serene. “Did you know I could do this?” He hinged forward at the hips, righted himself gracefully. No, I did not.
He said, “You’re like one of those mothers who poisons their kid in small doses, so you feel needed.”
“You mean when I lied about the mac and cheese?”
“I mean you are smothering my vitality!”
“Did your astrologer tell you that?”
“Not many couples stay together through their Saturn returns. She said if I wanted to stick with you, I’d have to put it all on the table.”
“I just don’t think you need to make up for your parents’ shortcomings.”
“This isn’t for them. This is to heal my inner child, so I can have an adult relationship, preferably with you. I know you think I’m stuck in some gross in between place. You won’t even touch me.”
I’m able to revise on my own a lot better these days. I know that every time I think I have an ending to a story, it’s going to need “one more beat.” Always. Every time. If I didn’t, Kaden would tell me. So I do it myself instead of waiting for someone to tell me.
On Unhinged Joy:
NTS had another call for Supporter Radio, where listeners with paid accounts can submit shows. I use Virtual DJ and record with Audacity and I don’t know if the quality is good enough even when I use the recommended output settings. I don’t know and I don’t know how to know. I don’t know if my old ass computer has a shit sound card or whatever. I’m accepting advice on this!
The theme was JOY which was cool! I did this project in a compressed manner as well – the day submissions were due. But I’d been planning the setlist for several days. I titled my mix “Waiting to Blow My Mind,” from a lyric in “Walk Into the Temple” by Beach Skulls.
Waiting to Blow My Mind celebrates the joy of ten years of discovering music through Bandcamp, with fringe favorites from the 90s and beyond woven in. These songs push at the driving edge of excitement, where joyful expression starts to become unhinged.
Funny/telling/indicative of my outlook on life, or something, that all the songs I associate with JOY threaten to become unhinged.
If it’s accepted, I’ll make a huge deal about it, and if it’s not, I’ll post it to Mixcloud and elaborate on it here next month.
On Not Being Cocky:
I had a flash piece, “Delayed Gratitification,” accepted to Right Hand Pointing, an online magazine for short poems and short fiction. This piece had been rejected, but the editor invited me to do some specific revisions and resubmit. That was a first for me. He asked me to add a couple words for clarity, and wrote, “We felt the last two sentences fell flat…There is the option for a different ending, that bolsters the theme and hits us in the feels.” Of course, my first impulse was to be insulted - I thought my ending was already hitting the feels - but I quickly moved out of that and was grateful for the opportunity. This story has had 13 total submissions, 11 rejections, 3 of them good, 1 acceptance and 1 withdraw (after acceptance). I took the story to my workshop group (only 407 words) and my friends lovingly pointed out the gaps in information, which I filled, and I was able to clarify what I wanted the ending to express. And I sat for many hours to write the best 37 words to express it.
When I received the acceptance, the editor included a note. “I have to tell you, I almost never accept a piece that has been rewritten. It almost never improves. But this one is wonderful.”
And I was just like…thank fucking GOD I’m not too cocky to try to keep making something better!!!
So, push when you have to, figure out what’s weird about your sense of joy, and don’t be (too) cocky.
And, as always:
the title and subtitle of this post are from the first single off Garbage’s 1998 album Version 2.0, obviously.
shout out to newspapers dot com, an amazing, if expensive, resource