Gauntlet update -- it's a nail-biter, folks!
After kicking "Mertrude, Please!" around for a week, I finally know what the problem was: characteristically for me, I was trying to tell too much of the story in a story, instead of focusing on one pivotal moment, one flash of crisis. In real life, there are a hundred of these a day for each of us: turning points, decisions, indecisions, accidents, incidents, moments that crystallize who someone is, in an instant. A short story is about one of these instants, not four or five. Or forty or fifty.
I got the crit more than once at Clarion that a given story of mine was really a book masquerading as a story. It's not a function of how long the piece is, but how many crisis instants I've tried to shoehorn into that space. Too many — in other words, more than one, in most cases — and the story is muddy and overwrought. None at all, and the story is a wank.
So, looking over at my notes (and yes, I have been using notes and outlines and character-desire grids and all that for this story), I'm seeing that I've got enough in there for several decision points for each character. And that's just a big ol' game of Twister, which is never as much fun as it looks like on the TV ads.
So "Mertrude, Please!" is now just about one lunchtime meeting, rather than several weeks of rivalry and thwarted love. The trick will be, can I make this one decision point so rich that the reader can imagine the whole, full world of rivalry and love that keeps going on after the story ends?
The Gauntlet stirs: its gesture, a palm-up "Eh", a one-handed shrug. Then it points to the calendar: just over a week to finish two stories and polish all three for sendout.
While one cannot bite the nails inside the Gauntlet without breaking one's teeth, one can bite one's own nails....
posted by Laura E. Goodin @ 9:52 PM (permalink)
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1 Comments:
Your standard of reflection is very high here. This is very mature writer's thinking. It works for composers too. Most of the time one is left to wonder, "What am I doing WRONG?" The trick is to know all the WRONG possibilities rather than honing in on the right one first time. By such techniques do most of us survive.
In our library, where a book exists for every need (Is it the actual Room of Requirement?) we have the complete works of Wilfred Owen. Depserate, heartbreaking stuff, yes, but what is most illuminating is the section where there are pages and pages of handwritten drafts, with great scratchings and lines drawn every which way, often leaving the original line visible as well as the three or four alternatives. A great lesson for all of us.
Even Mozart changed his mind, as with Papagena's aris from "Magice Flute" which was originalyl in 3/8 and he put it into 6/8 by scratching out every other barline!
And he was a lot better than most of us!
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