The Latest Bunch of Short Stories

The demands on a person can be many. From travelling for work to engaging with the children, finding time for other activities (like blogging) can seem practically impossible. That said, the past year has been pretty productive.

Since finishing the last draft of my latest novel manuscript, Another Blade of Grass, and setting it aside before query agents, I returned to short fiction. After spending two years working on a single work, it was a relief to turn to things with entirely different elements. The requirements of short fiction are fewer than the novel. It is easier to try different things, attempt different effects. And I wanted to purge myself of some of the ideas that had been floating around for some time.

I think the change was well worth the effort. I churned out six short stories that are already making the submission-rejection circuit. At least it feels like it's going full circle.

So, over the next few weeks, I'll present excerpts of each of the new stories. Just the first couple of paragraphs to give you a feeling for the direction of the new work. Any feedback you care to give will be appreciated.

Since this bout of short fiction, I've returned to the longer form, spurred on by an idea my wife provided. The notion stirred in my head for a few days, the story ever expanding, and I knew that I'd better get writing.

Keeping the Pen on the Paper

Sometimes the writing comes easily. Most of the time, in fact. With the pen in my hand, the facts and details seem to come right out of the ink. Not always the right word, but that's a discussion for another time. And then there are times when you need a particular scene, to serve a particular purpose.

Right now, I need a fight scene between my protagonists. This is late in the novel and so far we've seen how they are disconnected from each other, off in their individual struggles. But we haven't seen them really clash, not in a significant way. I need to show that they may be close to the end of their marriage than they believed when the novel began.

What, then, do they argue about? What would be so severe that it might show that maybe they shouldn't really be together? I don't want to go so far as to justify their later actions with this blow out. But it can't just be an argument about the house or money. It needs to demonstrate that Darren doubts Nicole's integrity.

I would like it to center around their son, Hunter. They both spend a surprising amount of time not thinking about the boy through the course of this thing. I'd like to show that they do take his upbringing seriously. And somehow I need to get around to the notion of his doubt of her.

Here, though, I should have faith in the writing. Over-thinking, over-planning, can debilitate. A vague notion of where I'm going and a vague objective should be all I need. Put the pen to the paper and see where it goes.

Writing a Philosophical Novel

I hadn't realized until this week that I am writing a philosophical novel. I thought of it as contemplative, meditative, psychological. A wandering quest novel. But, more than any of these, I believe now it is philosophical. Without a doubt, morality is at the center of the novel. Darren and Nicole are both having existential crises, but the book's root is in the question of morals.

Darren believes he has always had a strong moral sense. Some of this may be his nature, but in his adult life it comes out of his father's actions. Of course, one doesn't have morality without responsibility and guilt. Indeed, this is a key question. How does one live with a subjective morality without the guilt? He doesn't understand how his friend can commit what he sees as an immoral act with its accompanying guilt. The lines blur for Darren. What is wrong becomes more subjective. His experiment in the end is to see if he can live with the guilt of his actions. If guilt is part of the immoral act. He is held frozen by the prospect of the freedoms provided when guilt is absent. If he can commit the immoral act, the faithless act, without being held captive by his own guilt, then his future opens up. His morality, his sense of responsibility has locked him into his course in life. One should question if he can return, not only to his wife, but to his work as well. His work in law, in the area of contracts in particular, is rooted in his sense of moral justice. With that center gone, his work will lack meaning.

There is also the question of religion in the novel. Its blows within the text are glancing (and more of a concern for Nicole than Darren), but one cannot discuss morality without at least the undiscussed notion of Christianity. That Darren and Nicole are not religious, are lacking faith, opens them up to the moral questioning we witness. Not that faith, by itself, would wipe away their doubts about the righteousness in morality. But maybe some of Nicole's despair is 'the sickness unto death'.

Nihilism, I think, is also at play in the novel. Darren encounters people along the way who reject the standards by which we live, judge. He sees this as narcissism. An excuse to live by one's independent standards in rejection of one's inherent moral responsibility to others. This moral order is also part of his foundation, and in the end this might be more of a determining factor for him than any sort of inherent right or wrong.

I don't know that I can see Nicole's struggles in the same terms. She lost her notion of morality in her youth. Her feelings toward Darren are not guided by morals. She does not wonder whether her actions are right or wrong. Things for Nicole are more personal, less abstract. More existential and metaphysical. She does have trouble in her perception of the world. She seems to know that she sees the world differently, experiences the world differently. She feels its imposition. This part of what separates her from those around her. This difference.

But her real problem is the sort of void she feels within. There is a hole that, in her twenties, she seeks to fill with drugs and sex, experience. Later she chooses marriage and child-rearing to fill the void. And we come across her she is again realizing her dissatisfaction. Her thinking of life alone is not the end. It is not what she's after. Its a sort of displacement. A way of trying to fill the void with fantasy, another life. The internet itself is part of this alternate existence. It has not taken over her real life. Her cleaning is a way to constantly order her life, seeking to control and contain it. As much as possible. But life is an imposition. The outside world, the suburban city blocks, even the houses and lawns of the neighborhood, are part of an externally imposed order. What philosophical school of thought all of this falls under, I'm not sure.

Of course, some of my favorite novels are philosophical novels. I didn't set out to write one, though. And I certainly don't think I'm trying to forward some sort of treatise. The realization, though, has given me another way to look at what is happening within the pages of text.

First Draft Finished; On to Revision

Two hundred pages and 40,000 words, the first draft is DONE. Actually, I call it the second draft. The first draft is handwritten in three spiral-bound notebooks. It only gets minor revisions when I type it into the computer, but that complete version is "Draft 2." Now, begins the heavy lifting.

Actually, since it was written with the notion of just getting it written, I think it would be a mistake to just dig in to chapter one. I think the first step is to read the thing as a whole so that I can evaluate its form and structure. I need to sort out what is missing, what might need to be moved around.


The novel was written out of sequence. I wrote all of one character's story before writing the other's. So, I know some work may be necessary to link up the stories properly. And 40,000 words is much too short. I know that in the quick pace of writing the first draft, I skipped some moments of high conflict. I passed over the critical scenes, using exposition instead of taking the reader there to that moment or demonstrating something only described. Many, many pages still remain to be written.


What I have, at least for the character of Darren, the male protagonist, is a quest story. Triggered by a sequence of events, he sets out on a journey. I need to evaluate thre trials he encounters along the way. Oh, he's no hero and the decisions he makes throughout should prove it. Nicole, his wife, is on a sort of quest as well, though her story is less conventional. Her arc is not linear. She is dislodged in time and part of her struggle is in trying to find a now, an identity in which to exist today. I need to make sure her dilemmas, and the scenes used to convey then, are as evident to the reader.


It is said that you should really know everything about your characters. "Take him home and sleep with him," one writing teacher instructed me. Know how he does things, know what concerns him, know him intimately. You want to be sure that you give them the depth they need to make them real to the reader. The issue I have now is in differentiating what it is I know and what I've related in the story. If I know this thing happened in her past, I must remember that the reader doesn't know it until I reveal it. And then, I need to consider when I want to withhold information until some later point in the novel.

The first phase of revision, then, will involve rereading the manuscript in total and creating an outline, complete with notes on ideas for revising each chapter. Only then can I begin thrashing my way through the words on the page.

First Draft Almost Complete

I'm closing in on the end of my first draft of my current novel, tentatively titled Another Blade of Grass. And it's been an interesting process. Before, I used to get stalled, especially on key scenes, by trying to get it "right". This time, the goal has just been to get it down. More important it was to me this time to get it written and then go back and fill in the gaps, straighten it out. This, of course, takes its own bit of patience. It has been necessary to accept that a just "finished" chapter is a piece of crap. Sure, the elements were there, what happens is supposed to happen, but maybe the tone or the voice is all wrong, maybe a key piece of dialogue was left out, or maybe the writing just stinks. But when the window is open to write, when I have the scheduled or stolen hour to write, I am going to do it.

Because so much remains undone, I am looking forward to revision. I am looking forward to adding that missing exchange, adding the color, the elements of setting that were left out. There are whole chapters, I believe, that need to be rewritten from top to bottom, with a blank piece of paper and the original writing as a guide.

The goal, in a way has been to make revision a more integral part of the writing process. Too often it has been a chore. When the work feels more or less "completed", changes beyond simple line edits can be difficult to do. Now, though, I know changes I want to make, know that much is left to do to make it complete. All of which makes me anticipate the next part of the process.

When a Novel Begins to Write Itself

I thought I was writing a simple book. Straight-forward with a single point of view, taking place over a single afternoon and evening. Yet, as I brainstormed last night about what was left to happen in the novel, it became apparent that the book wants to be more than this.

The premise off which I was writing was this: When a man learns that his neighbors are having an affair, it shakes his own idea of marriage and of himself. But after last night, maybe it’s more like this: When a couple learns of cheating neighbors, their marriage is shaken, identity is questioned, and pasts haunt the present. Something like that.

The current narration is so close to the husband, Darren (though I’m reserving the right to change it; men’s names are so difficult to choose), that we can only know the wife through his eyes. Her character, though, is begging me for a chance to rebut. She is more than he thinks she is, her troubles more complex.

While Darren’s narration is extremely close, nearly stream of consciousness with plenty of questioning and jumping from one topic to another, the wife’s (Nicole) would have to be different. It would need to be as detached in a way as she is, trying to occupy herself in the domesticity of her daily life. Her past, though, pesters her and deserves some time on the page as well. Instead of flashbacks through memory (my standard way of revealing scenes from the past), whole sections taking place in the past may be more effective.

Darren’s issues are more with the present, who he’s become, his feelings of anonymity. He is waking up to his feelings of unhappiness. Part of it, obviously, has to do with his marriage. Another part comes from his not turning out as he had hoped. There is also, for him, a large issue of morality which also comes into question after learning of this affair between neighbors.

It is to be a suburban novel, with the influence of Richard Yates, John Cheever, and John Updike, but it is also about identity and existence, with the required hints of Sartre and Camus. It is not meant to skewer suburban life, or ridicule or demean suburbanites, but it should examine how one maintains, loses, or finds identity in the anonymous suburbs. It is in this line of thinking last night that I may have also settled on a title: Another Blade of Grass. It’ll work for now.

My recent reading of William Faulkner’s Light in August has opened my eyes some to what is possible in a novel. It is not necessary to get locked into anything during the writing process, not a single point of view or a particular course of action. As I sit here now, trying to do other work, the new possibilities fill my mind and the story gets richer by the moment.