For me, writing fiction means staying wide open to human experience by giving myself permission to be vulnerable and to intuit how other people can be vulnerable in the same ways. It’s about representing that complex emotional mystery with as much sincerity and authenticity as possible—not as some kind of living camera, but as an individual person limited by defects and inhibitions, who is nevertheless willing to express what he feels. That’s why I will never be finished becoming a writer. I’ll never get it done. I’ll never be able to say, “Okay, now I’ve done my best work.”
Tag: Writing
You Do What You Are
Back in Michigan, I studied more literature than was required for my degree because I enjoyed being around lit professors and grad students. Once a well-meaning lit student in one of those classes said to me, “It’s great that you want to become a fiction writer.” I said, “Actually, I am a fiction writer. But I agree, it’s great that I want to become more of one.”
When you know and develop what you are–writer, artist, teacher, programmer, lawyer, entrepreneur, soldier, whatever–you radiate that. You become a catalyst for that kind of change no matter what you are doing or where you are. It’s not that you are what you do–because that implies that if you’re not doing it, you don’t exist. It’s that you do what you are, always.
So a photographer sits in the waiting room of her dentist’s office. She is a photographer in a waiting room. She is not someone who was a photographer for two hours yesterday and is now nothing or some kind of post-photographer waiting to be a photographer again tomorrow. She is what she is, and she is constantly thinking like a photographer. In her actions, conversations, thoughts, memories, and impulses, she is a photographer, whether she has a camera in her hands or not. By doing her art, she can deepen her sensibilities and technical ability. But she does not rely on anything outside herself to be who she is, even if she relies on cameras to express that state of being externally. Likewise, she does not need the recognition, money, or approval of the world in order to exist.
As a writer and a teacher, I am always writing and teaching–whether I am at my desk, in a classroom, watching a movie, or taking a walk across town. I radiate that and cause change around me according to it. It is the way I connect with the world. Moreover, I can recognize the same sensibilities in others.
My classmate understood this immediately. She said, “You’re right. I’m sorry.” But it wasn’t an awkward moment. I could see that she’d already turned inward and had begun to ask herself: “Who am I? What do I radiate? What am I becoming? What sort of change do I create?” It was a really good moment because these are the questions we all have to ask and never stop asking.
Problems and Solutions, Part 2: This is Why You Fail
Here are some random thoughts on getting creative work done with a minimum of grief.
Basic Artistic Needs. In order to write, I need, at minimum:
1. Quiet.
2. Solitude.
3. Minimal levels of discomfort – i.e. not feeling feverish and sick (including being hung over, exhausted, or otherwise ill), the heater not turned all the way up / down, people walking back and forth through the room or shouting / throwing things against the wall next door, the gardener blowing leaves under the window, etc. The idea is to be able to forget one’s surroundings for a short period of time in order to free the imagination. This can’t happen with constant chaos and upheaval.
Artistic Time vs. Regular Time:
Artistic time is subjective. If I haven’t written in 3 days, it feels like a week. When I haven’t written for a week, I feel dead–like I may never have the enormous amount of energy it will take to find the particular emotional structure I was working on before. This is why Bukowski, Hemingway, Carver, and probably every other non-hack in existence worries about waking up one day and realizing that one’s talent has disappeared. But such worries just amount to performance anxiety. I get back into the process and they disappear.
Money and Making a Living as Justification for Complaints:
I am unable to justify any of these needs in terms of what I need to make a living. It is not persuasive to say: maybe if I had a regular schedule (i.e. a better day job, more money coming in) I wouldn’t be having these problems. Money has nothing to do with it and publishing advances will not ultimately validate these needs. Personally, I am writing highly specialized literary fiction. I will be most likely to publish in literary magazines and small / university presses where there is an audience for my work. I will not be able to support myself with my work because there are not enough consumers to make it profitable. Therefore, all the demands I make about needing time, needing space, and needing minimum levels of comfort must always seem baseless and unjustifiable in any practical sense.
Keeping on Keeping on:
I meditate and exercise. Music plays a large role in my process. Whatever it takes to continue is what you need to do. The point is to continue.
Objection 1: Resentful voice from the Internet: “I am a scholar / artist / salesperson / programmer / thought-worker and I need time and space, too!” (Yes, I completely agree. This doesn’t mean that just because you are having trouble along the same lines, I stop having trouble as a writer.)
Objection 2: Spouse / flatmate / friend / parent / magical talking dog who lives in the closet: “I am doing my part to help you have the conditions you need to write (so stop complaining)!” (My complaints come from my sense of frustration not from any perception of insincerity or failure to help on your part.)
Objection 3: Regular reader of my blog: “But you write in crowded cafes all the time.” (I can write in cafes when I am surrounded by strangers I can ignore and only when they are sufficiently quiet or oblivious. I am unable to write in cafes (a) where there is someone I know staring at me or walking back and forth; (b) where people are emoting too much–like irritated tourists or upset locals; and (c) where people are sitting too close to me. Because the art-production process is rarely 100% systematic, there will always be experiences that stand as exceptions to these things. Still, I am talking in general, not about the exceptions.)
Objection 4: Upset writer trolling posts tagged with writing terms: “So-and-so produces ten times the amount of work you say you produce and has none of these complaints.” (So? Many writers and artists have these complaints. If you want to point out an anecdotal counter-example to me, I can again note that there will be exceptions. Unfortunately, I am more typical in my needs than atypical. If this makes me somehow complicit in my own misery, so be it. But if that is true, then I am joined my many, many others experiencing the same problems.)
Objection 5: My disillusioned ex-girlfriend who wanted me to stop writing and go into sales to support her modeling career: “Why do you choose to do this work in the first place when it is so difficult and thankless?” (Because even though it is difficult and thankless, writing fiction provides me with intellectual, emotional, and spiritual relief that would be lacking if I were merely working to make money. People have said that an artistic calling is a curse because once you develop yourself artistically, you typically feel compelled to continue no matter the personal consequences. Nevertheless, I can say with a certain degree of conviction that if I didn’t have this relief, I would exit life as quickly as possible. This is not to reduce art to the level of therapy, but it is therapeutic. And I believe that is a large part of what makes it compelling. That said, no artist actually chooses art. It chooses the artist, my young apprentice.)
Objection 6: Well-intentioned genre writer with anxiety from listening to editorial advice on how to be more formulaic and saleable: “I read that in order to be a professional you need to (a) produce 1-2 novels a year; (b) write at a 7th grade level; (c) have your work vetted by test readers that function like focus groups, guiding your revision process to the most genre-acceptable trajectories; (d) spend twice as much time self-promoting as you do writing; (e) give away free content to entice readers, etc.” (No. These things come from a particular stratum of the publishing industry that is usually heavy with genre fiction aimed at a very tight reader demographic. These professional standards are neither right nor wrong. However, they are definitely narrow enough to apply only to the new pulp fiction industry that has emerged from the convergence of e-publishing, self-publishing, and a powerful online consumer base. If you are a literary writer or someone whose aesthetic does not fit into the highly calculated style sheets of these pulp houses, don’t fucking worry about it. The publishing industry is a lot bigger than it seems. Do not make the mistake of thinking that just because a particular writer on a particular blog says this is how it is, that is how it must be for every writer everywhere. Apply critical thinking. And don’t forget to do that with what I’m telling you here as well. Remember that I am just another writer with a perspective on his industry.)
Objection 7: One of my Facebook friends: “You like James Altucher, but he says publishing is dead and we should all self-publish. How do you reconcile that?” (I don’t. Altucher is a good writer and is entitled to his opinion about publishing. I don’t completely agree with him because I have had some success in traditional publishing. I have not made much money; though, I am not concerned with making a living this way. I will probably always have a day job. If I were writing Harlequin romances to make a living, I would be very concerned and would probably put all my books on Amazon.com via Createspace instead–because I fundamentally believe what he is saying about skipping the middleman in the publishing process. It makes sense. I actually like that idea and am not ruling out self-publishing for myself at all. I just don’t think that self-publishing is the only viable way to publish. And if you’re alright with the (admittedly crazy) traditional methods, then relax and put your manuscript in the mail. He uses 50 Shades as an example of a successful way of bootstrapping oneself into publishing using self-published material. Okay but I would like to point out that the books he mentions reading are somewhat different from that and any given piece of his own writing is superior to that of EL James (I have read some of her work and am not making this criticism arbitrarily). Altucher is too modest to make that claim for himself. I also think 50 Shades of Grey is a good example of a turd that everyone has decided to eat. For that matter, I think Eat, Pray, Love, She’s Come Undone, The Notebook, and most of what Random House releases every year is comparable. This doesn’t mean I won’t read such books. I will read them to learn more about what I like and don’t like. Maybe I’ll check them out from the library instead of giving my money to the Big Six.)
Woof? Woof.
The Stars Our Destination
Writing seriously means nursing enormous egotism, believing that your inner life is worthy of concrete expression, worthy of sharing. The outside world wants to constantly remind you that you are nothing but a small, failed, decaying byproduct of its grand mulching system. But bringing forth what’s inside you gives independent life to something that never before existed outside your mind, something that cannot be immediately quantified, digested, and mulched. Therefore, writing is subversive. Writing is Occupy Consciousness. Writing is black magic. It’s an external frame of reference, a constellation of ideas, a place outside the compost heap. And we can go there together.
Cognitive Bric-a-Brac
I spend a lot of time writing about writing, but I don’t say very much about reading. Since the line between what we write and read is always very thin, I think I should remedy that. I’m planning a “creative writer’s reader response” post sometime soon. For now, I think it would be fun to post something like an annotated bibliography of current reads.
Websites & Blogs: Here is a short list of some of the things I read online. I’m fascinated by blogs that show me something new, and I find the following sites really interesting. The subject matter skews sharply toward my interests in architecture, civil engineering, creative writing, Asia, funerals, life-hacking, languages, and abandoned places.
- The Forgotten City of Iram – Natasha Edgington’s image blog.
- Bones Don’t Lie – A PhD student in anthropology who specializes in mortuary archaeology.
- Bridgioto! – A gifted animator who isn’t afraid to show her work toward becoming a better painter.
- Grinding.be – Articles about dystopias, architecture, and post-humanism.
- I’ve Infused Myself with Puppy DNA – Voice-driven creative nonfiction by a gifted, if sometimes unfocused, writer.
- Japanese Rule of 7 – Ken Seeroi’s thoughts about living in Japan as an English teacher. Smart and often very funny.
- My Hong Kong Husband – Multicultural marriage, Hong Kong, strange things afoot.
- Functional Shift – Lisa Minnick is a linguistics professor and a gifted teacher. Her thoughts on the implicit and explicit uses of English are fascinating.
- Ribbonfarm – Venkat Rao’s writings on the relativity of perception and other interesting concepts. Very smart guy.
- Rune Soup – Gordon White is a funny, insightful, somewhat pissed off, chaos magician. Reading his blog gives me story ideas and that would be reason enough, but I should note that he is clearly one of nature’s prototypes.
- Order of the Good Death – Caitlin Doughty, licensed mortician and founder of the Order of the Good Death, a blog dedicated to fostering an intelligent discussion of death and “death theory.”
- Things I Don’t Understand And Am Definitely Not Going To Talk About – Jen Snow’s small, highly absurd posts sometimes read like status updates and other times like well-crafted micro-fiction pieces.
- Judecca – a webcomic by Jonathan Meecham and Noora Heikkilä about three lost souls who live on an island in one of hell’s rivers. It’s well done. A love story in hell.
- Damned to Deutschland – Poems and short shorts.
- The Witch of Forest Grove – Sarah Anne Lawless is a real-life witch / shaman as well as a very talented crafter, illustrator, and herbalist.
- Du Fuchs – Photography and urban research in Tokyo.
- Life in Russia – Traveling through post-Soviet spaces.
Books: What am I reading right now? What will I be reading after that? (I do update Goodreads from time to time as well.)
At present:
- The Beautiful and the Damned – F. Scott Fitzgerald.
- The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea – Yukio Mishima
- The Walk – Robert Walser
- Oxfordshire Folk Tales – Kevan Manwaring
- The Melancholy of Mechagirl – Catherine Valente
Waiting on my desk:
- The Informers – Bret Easton Ellis
- Amerika – Franz Kafka
- Chasing the Dime – Michael Connelly
- Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell – Susanna Clarke
- The Prague Cemetery – Umberto Eco
The Discipline: In Your Head, Off the Street, and Away From the Club
The discipline has three steps. It begins at home.
You want to do something–paint, write, act, play the hammered dulcimer, whatever–because it calls to you. It’s more than just a passing interest and you’re aware of this (I think hammered dulcimers are kind of cool, but I feel no compulsion to start taking lessons down at Bob’s Dulcimer Academy). This thing calls to you more deeply than it does to the dilettante. You think about it when other things aren’t distracting you. Then it becomes the distraction. You love and even idolize existing practitioners of the art. You read their interviews, their Wikipedia pages, the pretentious Rolling Stone pieces that treat them like geniuses or flops. You fantasize about that being you.
So you take a step and get some training. Lessons. You pay for a class at the Gotham Writers’ Workshop. Extension courses at the local community college. Don Webb’s class at UCLA. Maybe you get a method book or join a group that meets in the back of a bookstore once a month. Maybe you hit the pawn shop and buy that beat-to-hell Mexi Strat in the window with some Dylan tablature. Maybe you just get some paper, a pen, a stack of your favorite Stephen King novels, and start imitating. The point is that your brain is a learning computer and, whether you’re aware of it or not, you’re learning.
So it goes: you produce a lot of bad material that you soon come to recognize as such. Then maybe you make something small and good. Then a few more small good creations like it. Things begin to seem possible. Your teachers (if they’re ethical) encourage you and suggest possible directions. You start to calibrate your “built-in, shockproof, shit detector.” You’re at the door of the Shaolin Temple. Again, whether you know it or not, you’re standing there looking for admittance with your duffel bag and $300 in personal burial money. You are not coming into fame and fortune at the top level with connections, Aspen lift tickets, and a sugar daddy to introduce you to literary agents or casting directors. You’re doing it yourself. And you’re probably starting to get pushback from those who now identify you as competition and want to end the threat before it begins.
As soon as people start trying to stand in your way–friends, family, other practitioners, teachers, coworkers–you know you’re moving forward. This is also the moment when you truly have to apply “the discipline.” Here it is as I have formulated it for myself. This is a theme that runs throughout my writing on this blog and, in a more subtle way, my fiction. The two things I care about most in life are helping people find their “thing” (bliss / true will / highest actualization–whatever you want to call it) and being able to follow my own path as a creative writer. This has led me into teaching, which I love, and a lot of philosophical / sociological / life-hacking explorations.
Step 1: Mental Discipline: orienting all ambitions toward your art but expecting nothing in return save the art itself. Just as publishing houses care primarily about volume of sales and production companies about box office returns, see commercial art for what it is. In exchange for the freedom to make the art you want to make (if you’re not a commercial artist–if you are, you have a different set of problems than I’m addressing in this post), accept that “industry values” come from a vastly different universe than those of fine art and never think commerce cares about art beyond its baseline profitability.
You can’t control whether someone wants to buy your work. You can slavishly imitate the trends, hoping that there will be room for one more clone. Or you can recall what inspired you to start doing art in the first place–the possibility and texture of self expression. So if you want to be authentic and original, save yourself a lot of pain and disappointment by accepting that your work may or may not be appreciated by those who seek to profit by the creativity of others. By all means, submit your creations for publication and consumption. But make that peripheral to your emotional center as a practitioner. Make the work come first and the marketing come second.
This is the first step of the discipline because there will be enormous pressures levied against you for even thinking that you have the right to be original. The publishing industry, like the movie industry, does not run on originality. It runs on predictability. Taking chances can be disastrous for them in the worst, career-wrecking sense. You will be told a version of this in 1000 different implicit and explicit ways: try to imagine your audience and write to their expectations. The serious artist will be following something else in her work than trend and established taste–something industry professionals may not even believe exists. Two different sets of values. Different universes. Thus, the serious artist must be disciplined in what she believes, how she lets herself be influenced, what choices she makes about the integrity of her work. The best way I know to do this is to embrace the real possibility of being ignored while continuously putting your work out there. It can be emotionally difficult at first.
Step 2: Financial Discipline: keeping survival (but not respectability) always within your peripheral vision. The second wave of pushback comes with the very real threat of extreme poverty. Staying away from the infectious and materialistic mechanisms of the business world, status jobs, job trends, upward corporate mobility, and attendant notoriety is essential. At best, these things are distractions from your daily commitment to furthering your art. At worst, they will lead you into value systems that are openly antagonistic to serious, non-commercial productivity. The same attitude behind “A BA in philosophy? What are you going to do with that?” is the one that will frame you as an unrealistic dreamer who is certainly crazy and misguided, possibly stupid in a number of hidden ways, and someone we don’t want our daughters dating.
But these worlds and their inhabitants will be more than willing to ignore you if you ignore them–if you do not ask them for a handout or add to their unabated misery, jealousy, and covetousness by showing them the contrast between your values and theirs. Rather, the second step in the discipline involves smiling and waving good-bye to middle-class ambitions; practicing “cheerful retreat”; and going your own way. Being non-threatening (actually invisible) to those who hold status and money as the highest good will allow you to (1) avoid being influenced by their values; (2) avoid having to defend yourself against them; and (3) the space and time to simplify your life financially. You are not a threat–so the fact that you are living humbly and frugally is a non-issue for them.
Simplifying your life is easier said than done. And it may not seem like others would have a problem with this, but people will actively try to prevent you from simplifying and reducing your levels of consumption if they feel threatened by this. However, you must arrange it so that the bulk of your personal responsibility can be shifted toward your art.
Because it’s good to live in human society–because that, too, provides fuel for your work–accept that “shifting personal responsibility toward your art” will entail a certain amount of discipline. You may have to take the kids to football practice. You may have to do what seems like an all-consuming job as a psychologist or a Zamboni driver or an IRS agent or a drug lawyer or a hot dog vendor in the mall. All of these can be scaled down. Take fewer hours. Accept two (or three?) part-time jobs instead of a full-time job if that will build in greater flexibility. Plead your health, your ailing family life, your grandmother’s lumbago, but reduce, reduce, reduce. Become a freelancer. Become a contractor. Become a minimalist in everything but your work (and even in your work if that’s where your creativity leads you). Read and apply The Four-Hour Workweek, Choose Yourself, How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World, Possum Living, The Shoestring Girl, Working, The Outsider and Gordon White’s brilliant blog, Rune Soup–especially “Apocalypse Timeshares: Radical Strategies from Inside the OAT.”
Step 3: Be Determined / Take Your Lumps. Do not think that frugality means limited options in any sense. This is another cruel fiction propagated by the industries that depend on a manufactured, highly misleading, and unhealthy post-WWII middle-class will-to-respectability. As a person practicing this discipline, you can do anything you want to do as long as you are willing to approach it in a transactional way (ironic, given the degree to which I inveigh against zero-sum materialism, but this is not always synonymous with transactional thinking as I use it here–see Browne’s book linked above).
In other words, if you want to, say, study herbalism in Shanghai, you can. You may have to become a dishwasher, an ESL teacher, a private tutor, a person who carries pipes in a shit field, a dog-walker, a nanny. You may have to cut costs by mostly eating rice, thin broth, and yam cakes. You will have to learn a version of Chinese to a practical extent. You will have to sharpen your social skills in order to get along and get what you need. All of this takes energy. All of this is disruptive and sometimes painful. All of this can be done while functioning as an artist. But you will have to pay for these experiences through a degree of chaos, stress, effort and the disapproval of others. There will be dreadful moments. But if you want to lead a different life–one that includes art and new experiences, you will accept the trouble as a necessary payment for doing what you want to do. The discipline means taking your lumps and eternally paying dues. Nothing comes for free but sometimes the payment is fun and sometimes it doesn’t even matter.
People enmeshed / immobilized in a fugue of “respectability” (in my opinion, a parasitic set of social mores and strictures that slowly consume the time and energy–life–of innocents whose only mistake was doing what they were told from an early age) will say you are crazy, unambitious, stupid, a loser. They will do this because you haven’t had the time and wouldn’t spend the effort to become a stakeholder in their hierarchy of values. I have experienced this firsthand and still do from time to time when the ripples of life-decisions I made in my late 20s come back to me. But I do not have regrets. I have largely overcome my personal demons, the emotional, familial, social fallout associated with owning my life. That’s why this is a discipline. You have to practice it. It’s not something you do once. It’s a way of life. And I want that for you if you want it for yourself.
Art is Your Right
Don’t buy into the romantic assumption that being a creative artist is easy for those who are truly talented and meant to do it. This is a materialistic commercial lie. Something I believe: art is part of being human and must therefore be available to everyone. And those who do it right never find it easy; though, the publishing industry, for example, may find it easier to sell certain books if readers believe that the writers being published are like idiot savants.
Everyone has an aptitude for some kind of creative process. Finding out what it is means finding out more of what it means to be human and alive. Not investigating this firsthand means voluntarily accepting an impersonal, commercially interested assumption about one’s creative potential—some external story about you imagined and written by someone who doesn’t even know you. It’s an affront to everything unique and valuable in the individual self.
Moreover, it elevates money over art, which is fundamentally disconnected from the reasons we make art in the first place. This is essentially stupid. Therefore, we need to appreciate art. We should create it and consume it, but we should not assume that it is something mysterious, selective, elite, or random. It is better to think of artistic ability as an attainment, a product of self-cultivation that uses materials we already have. And our job is to understand it, interact with it, develop it, and teach this praxis to others. Our job is not to worship those being held up to us as a select, anointed group. Our job is to understand how commerce reacts with art and then to set all that aside so we can do our own work.
By an Inner Sky I Chart My Way
The structure of what I write is the structure of my emotional life. My fiction isn’t autobiographical in any overt way. Yet how I approach my subject matter depends on the way I see the world and myself in it. Therefore, conceptually, perceptually, structurally, I write the narrative of my life the way I write any narrative—certainly in words but, in a deeper sense, in images. Strung together in the mind, they form a constellation of emotions unique to me. The physical manuscript is a chart of these moments, an inner star map, a personal zodiac that makes it possible for others to see what I have seen and feel the way I have felt. The secret of such navigation is not in the words but in the structural relations between them, not in any given star but in the proportionality of the constellation.
This is my current understanding of creative writing: building associations between emotional states instead of focusing on monolithic things (characters, paragraphs, settings, scenes). A character is a humanlike set of particularities that exist in relation to something else. A paragraph is a movement, an emotional gesture. A setting is an environmental set of particularities, also significant insofar as it relates to something else (even to the eye of the reader, Mr. Fish). A scene is all of the above moving together and in relation to all the other scenes. And all of it exists for one purpose—to map a structure of intricate emotional movements that took place first in my mind, now in yours.
Is this difficult or complicated? Not really. But it is more honest, more elemental (-ary), than saying, “according to so-and-so, a character should do X, Y, and Z in a dramatic scene.” Focusing on X, Y, and Z misses the point. I don’t write to fulfill a preset arrangement of static constituent categories. I write to move my reader. And that is just as dynamic, relational, and variable as any emotion I might feel.
The White Space and Transitions in Short Stories
The following is taken from my response to a former student who asked: “When writing a story and you find that you need to hop around from one scene to another, but not start a new chapter, what do you do?” In other words—how I decided to construe the question—how do you break scenes and create implicit transitions between them?
When I started training myself to think in scenes, I relied heavily on the “white space” as a time lapse / separator. The visual analogue of this would be the classic “wipe” transition from TV and movies. It’s technical shorthand for “there is nothing more of significance to show in this particular time and place.” We can use this because modern writers have pretty much stopped trying to adhere to the Aristotelian unities of time, place, and action.
Here is one theory about this departure. As a form, the novel is older than the short story and the stage play is older than the novel. Each form owes a lot to its predecessor. Even late British stage melodrama generally observed the Aristotelian dramatic unities. In other words, the only “jumping around” were the extremely conservative transitions between acts and scenes on stage—existing primarily so the stage hands could change the scenery and the actors could change costumes, etc. But as western culture changed, public and private space got redefined, and middle class leisure reading became important (Habermas is the man to read to understand this in conjunction with the rise of the novel). Fiction in English began to transform from highly episodic, picaresque shipwreck narratives (think: Defoe) and expositions of female morality (think: Richardson) to the highly stylized escapism of the Gothic novel. The aesthetic of Gothic romance rebelled against tightly controlled forms.
Enter: Jane Austen and Northanger Abbey, her first published novel and pretty much a parody of the Gothic style. As soon as we got this, we were ready for Victorian realism in the novel, which kept the idea of what a novel could be (a long, sometimes convoluted, graphic portrayal of a person’s life) and dropped the Gothic melodrama. This is important because Edgar Allen Poe, one of the most significant figures in the early development of the short story form, argued (roughly around the same time) that a story should be readable in one sitting (back to Aristotle). His reasons were less aesthetic and more practical: he wanted to encourage magazine fiction as a legitimate market (here is a good summary of his motivations). So the story form emerged in a time when the novel (as the dominant form of fiction) was breaking away from classical, formal assumptions about when / where / how. And the short story was defined (and marketed) as something compact that you could read out of a magazine in a single setting.
This is where the use of white spaces comes in. Early story writers either used them to tell broader more “novelistic” stories or didn’t use them and scaled everything down in order to tell a more compact tale. The idea was to produce a single emotion (incidentally, where we will get the modernist concept of epiphany). Twain used white spaces like this. Hemingway adopted them but more sparingly (we see them also in Fitzgerald and Maupassant)—still trying for that definitive emotional moment. But in the 1960s, the maximalists rebelled against this, arguing that life actually wasn’t at all the way modern realism made it out to be. Given the highly subjective, variable nature of human experience, the early maximalists (think: Elkin, Barthelme, Coover) found “minimalist realism” to be highly unrealistic! This means that in their work technical moves like white spaces could be a lot of different things (look at the Coover link).
Realists loudly criticized such maximalist departures from what they considered to be a highly defined, clearly articulated form. Needless to say, their vehemence fit right into the tradition I’ve been describing (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Pirsig is a wonderful exploration of the tension between classical and romantic aesthetics).
Can we use the white space to good effect, defining what it will be the way Coover does in his famous story or in the way of William Vollmann, David Foster Wallace, Lorrie Moore, Denis Johnson–the recent postmodern maximalists? Yep. We can.
So back to the original question: “When writing a story and you find that you need to hop around from one scene to another, but not start a new chapter, what do you do?” Given everything I’ve said, here’s the answer that might not have made sense otherwise: first determine what you’re trying to make the reader feel. Because “form” should follow function instead of a set of classical assumptions about how to dramatically interpret experience through structure.
Moreover, everyone wants to write a story that will show up in the New Yorker or a novel that will make them famous with the NYC publishing machine. But the corporate model for success as a fiction writer actually cannot be taught or learned. That kind of success is as serendipitous as any other—no matter what the book industry would have young writers believe. So if I were to tell students, “Do what feels right and make your own rules,” no one would listen. Instead, I have begun with “let’s follow some of the rules.” Only later have I followed that with: forget about what people say you should do. Study literature as your guide and learn from what other writers have done. Then do your own thing.
Right now, I’m writing a story, a novella, and working on a full-length novel. In each of these, my only goal is to create the emotional movements / moments I need to create.
AIR AND LIGHT AND TIME AND SPACE – Charles Bukowski
AIR AND LIGHT AND TIME AND SPACE
”– you know, I’ve either had a family, a job,
something has always been in the
way
but now
I’ve sold my house, I’ve found this
place, a large studio, you should see the space and
the light.
for the first time in my life I’m going to have
a place and the time to
create.”no baby, if you’re going to create
you’re going to create whether you work
16 hours a day in a coal mine
or
you’re going to create in a small room with 3 children
while you’re on
welfare,
you’re going to create with part of your mind and your body blown
away,
you’re going to create blind
crippled
demented,
you’re going to create with a cat crawling up your
back while
the whole city trembles in earthquake, bombardment,
flood and fire.baby, air and light and time and space
have nothing to do with it
and don’t create anything
except maybe a longer life to find
new excuses
for.– Charles Bukowski