A Fool’s Wager

Hey, kid. Why the long face?

Oh, the usual. I want to write a new story. Something quick, and fearless, and maybe a little ridiculous.

So what’s stopping you?

I've got too much else to do! Revising and finishing something from my drafts folder means getting myself back into that specific mindset, and I just can't muster the concentration for it. If I could write something new, something fast and short... but I can't even find the time for that now.

Are you yanking my chain right now? Look, you’re headed into the can right now for five, ten minutes of uninterrupted privacy. 

And how does that help me, exactly?

Tell you what, genius: Instead of taking a magazine in with you, just grab your little digital recorder from the pile of junk on top of the dresser there, and freestyle a dramatic monologue. Problem solved.

Yeah, but what's it about?

Oh, please. Aren't you a little too old for this "Where do you get your ideas" stuff? Look around you. Improvise.

What — in the can? Come on. I need something to work with.

You're overthinking this. Just pick up the recorder and then, I dunno, grab something else at random out of the pile, look it over, and start riffing.

…huh. 

Yeah, okay. Thanks. You have some good ideas, sometimes.

Yeah — when you're not busy being your own worst enemy.

Shakedown and Update

In January, as noted below, I took a lovely phone interview with Khrista Rypl of Studio 360. The idea was that as I wrote my 52 short stories this year I might share my progress with a national radio audience in a five-minute chat every six weeks or so.

Radio, of course, is a narrative medium, and as I talked to Khrista I could sense her trying to find a narrative frame for my Bradbury Project. What made you want to do this? What are you hoping to get out of it?

Now, I’ve written at some length in this space about my goals and motivations for this folly, and they’re admittedly a little… abstract. My main aim is to shake up my process, to jump-start my ideation; to work in different modes; to use deadlines to inspire velocity; to do the thing for its own sake. My goal, when deciding to write 52 short stories, was mostly just to write 52 short stories. Nothing more, nothing less. My end product would be 52 stories in my trunk and some incremental improvement in my writing. 

Explaining all this to Khrista, I began to realize how unsuited for radio this project really was. As I described it, it all seemed so nonlinear, so entirely process-oriented. There was no arc, no milestones along the way. It didn’t build to anything. It was just ticking off weeks on the calendar and piling up stories, one after another. 

When Studio 360 ultimately declined to include me in their ongoing coverage, I was disappointed but ultimately unsurprised. There was no proper language, no frame that could make the Bradbury Project compelling for radio, and that’s Khrista’s job: to make compelling radio. No harm, no foul.

I kept writing stories anyway. Not one a week, by any means — I should have 30+ in the can by now, and I’ve got nowhere near that — but stories. And any stories I wrote would be more than I wrote last year, so I was satisfied with my numbers. I just kept my head down and worked on thinking up ideas; I focused on the process and had not a worry in the world.

Then a funny thing happened; some of the stories, I thought, turned out pretty good.

This surprised me. When I decided on this exercise, quality never even entered into the equation. If I wrote anything good, it would be strictly by accident.

But I made my way through a batch of stories, and I caught myself thinking, I should pitch this somewhere.

And I’ve been doing just that. Over the last few months, I’ve pitched a number of new stories. They’ve all been dinged, so far. So barring a couple that are still outstanding, I’ve decided to retire this batch — most of which have been rejected by multiple markets — and present them here over the next few weeks, so that at least somebody gets a kick out of them.

First one runs tomorrow. See you then.

Face Made for Radio

I rashly decided on this cockamamie Bradbury Project a couple of months ago, and regretted it almost immediately as freelance deadlines planted their boots on my neck. That might have been the end of it, had I not been so foolish as to mention it in public — not just here on this blog, where it might have gone unnoticed, but in the comments on the website for the public radio arts program Studio 360.

Studio 360 (which I listen to in podcast form, these days) does an annual series wherein they track the creative New Year's resolutions of four individuals, providing updates throughout the year. I figured I'd add my name and my ambition to the hundreds on their site, and have pangs of fellow-feeling every time I heard an update from one of the chosen four.

Today I got an e-mail:

Hi Jack,
I’m writing you from Studio 360 because we saw your comment on the website and thought your resolution sounded interesting! Would you have time to chat about your idea on the phone tomorrow (Thursday) morning? Let me know if there’s a time that works for you, and a good number to reach you.

Looking forward to hearing from you,

Khrista Rypl 
Web Producer

...Huh.

So that is a thing that is definitely maybe happening and there may soon be thousands of public radio fans on my ass, keeping me accountable to do this unbelievably stupid thing I promised to do, and basically I want to set myself on fire right now.

The Bradbury Project: An Introduction

So this was going around the Web a couple of weeks ago: Ray Bradbury Gives 12 Pieces of Advice to Young Writers. Now, I long ago aged out of the “young writer” demographic — though I still feel that I’m a beginner, and if God is good to me I suppose I always shall — but there’s a lot of good stuff here for anyone, at any stage of their career.

I’ve been on a bit of a Bradbury kick since late last year anyway. My annual Halloween reread of Something Wicked This Way Comes (inspiration for this mixtape from the Popdose Conceptual Theater of the Airwaves) was a forcible reminder of his considerable strengths and equally considerable weaknesses. His long slide into right-wing crankdom was sad, but hardly unprecedented; even leaving aside the long screed of Fahrenheit 451, you can discern traces of bitter judgmentalism in those early shockers, where he was apt to insinuate that it was perfectly okay to murder someone if they didn’t love the same books that you loved. The fact remains that as an imaginist, Bradbury is nearly unparalleled; as a stylist, though, he’s a distinctly mixed bag. At its best, his prose has a kind of lucent poetry to it — but when he stumbles, boy howdy! Vague and prolix.

The failings in others that bother us most are the ones that we fear we might share, and the remedy they find (if any) might be the one that we seek. Bradbury is at his best — the power of his ideas is best matched with, but not overwhelmed by, the vividness of his prose — in his short stories. So this piece of advice at the top of the list really jumped out at me:

Begin your writing life ... by cranking out “a hell of a lot of short stories,” as many as one per week. Take a year to do it; [Bradbury] claims that it simply isn’t possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row. 

narrows eyes
hitches up belt
spits

Mister, I’ll take that challenge.

Look. The Honeythief is out in the world now, a feral thing learning to tolerate the company of human beings before I bring it out to society in the months to come; I’m pondering my next long fiction project while keeping busy with contract work and freelance proofreading, and nursing a general unhappiness with the slack tone of my fiction muscle. It’s grown accustomed to the slow lope of a novel; I want to tighten it for the sprint.

So here’s the idea for the exercise: One new short story per week — most likely very short — in this space, for one year or as long as I can manage it. (I’m painfully aware that I barely made it to 100 days on a long-ago attempt at 40x365.) Stakes so low as to be non-existent. I’m not going to write anything that’s purposely terrible, but I’m not gonna lose any sleep sweating the content, either. The important thing is just to do it. It’s about the process, not the product. And if nothing else comes from it, I will have written a bunch of short stories.

I don’t know that Uncle Ray was entirely right. I have a suspicion that it is all too possible to write 52 shitty stories, one after another; but I do believe that you can’t write 52 stories in a row, however awful, without learning a thing or two.

And learning — that’s what being a beginner is all about.

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