I quickly became weary of waiting for “flashes of inspiration,” and the Internet was the natural choice of where to go in search of advice on how to get started writing fiction. There, I found a never-ending supply of prompts, most of which didn’t draw my attention at all.
In my reading, there are certain things I’m attracted to. Death. Desolation. Loss. I like bleak and dreary and nostalgic, and sad endings. So, a writing prompt found on the Internet stating simply, “an encounter with the dead” was predictably appealing.
Even with all of my scribbling and disregarded pieces in my notebook, “Poor Unfortunate Souls” is the first piece that I wrote in first person. While first person allows us directly access to the narrator, interestingly I find this piece to be perhaps the most detached from the narrator of what I have written. The characters themselves are not developed, they do not have fleshed out personalities—they almost feel like vehicles for the message rather than people, and the story’s supernatural elements only emphasize this.
One would expect us to truly inhabit the narrator’s mind here, but this is not really the case for a majority of the story. The story is all about voices, but what does the reader get of the narrator’s own voice? Even in the narrator’s brain we know very little about him or her (we don’t even know if it is a him or her!). She tells us what she thinks and therefore provides us with a mindset through which to analyze the story, but really, she actually tells us very little of what she thinks. The moment when we are most intensely immersed in her mind is the paragraph in which she relates her views on bookstores, where she seemingly goes on a rant, more than anything else. Mostly, she just relates what she does, what she sees, and what she hears in a rather straightforward manner. Through this, however, we get a sense of how she feels. Like her language, she is detached. Further, the story contains no names—the narrator is only “I” and her lost love one only “he.” This crafts a sense of universality, which simultaneously distances us from the narrator while also allowing us to identify with her and the other characters in their namelessness.
The narrator, whoever she is, has a sort of detached sense of whimsy that makes the reader question her. She makes jokes, and the reader is unsure whether she herself is entirely aware of her morbid comedy. When her mother and sister question her health in habitually returning to the bookstore, does she genuinely understand her sister’s meaning or is she truly ignorant to the nature of her behavior? It gives a dark twist the warm and comforting. The tone is light but dark, the descriptions are simple, and the story itself is very short, which contributes to the overall sense of being insubstantial— of a voice, or an idea, screaming to be heard but only emitting whispers. It’s airy; there are holes, like a breeze might whisk the words away, like the narrator herself is just barely tethered down as she simultaneously is heartbreakingly overwhelmed and calls her flailing, dead loved one “silly” as he obviously screams for help. Further, to whom is she addressing this story? Who is the intended audience of her tale? It is almost as if she is talking to herself.
She goes to this bookstore in a way that is oddly imbedded with nostalgia and desolation: the comfort of coffee, books, and cupcakes intertwined with the screaming loss of a thousand voices demanding to be heard, but lost. The only place we hear “his” voice is in her memories, and we cannot be certain that the voices she hears and the ghostly figures she sees in the bookstore are even real.
Unlike “Hail Mary,” “Poor Unfortunate Souls” relies very little on simile and metaphor. It is interesting to note that the singular moment of the story that hinges heavily on figurative language is also the moment where we venture into possible non-reality—when the voices she talks about the books having become actual, audible voices, “like walking into a packed stadium with sub-par noise cancelling headphones. A muted roar. A rowdy party a few houses down,”—not one instance of simile, but two together. Does this inform the supernatural scene that follows? When writing, I fully intended for these ghosts to be real. When reading, I feel like I naturally set myself up to make it seem as if they were not real, as if the narrator was seeing things in her grief. Or, perhaps as a reader I am just inclined to consider everything to be more ambiguous that it is meant to be.
It’s becoming more difficult to separate my reading self from my writing self. Writing about my writing, and reading about writing—it’s all really starting to confuse me. The lines are blurring. My head is hurting.
The more I read about fiction writing from fiction writers, the clearer it appears that they truly believe that anyone can learn to do it. That practice, while never quite able to make perfect, does make improvement. In fact, there are writers who assert that the only way to get better at creative writing is to write, to write all the time about anything you can as often as you can. When I started attempting to write some short flash fiction, that is probably what I believed most about the process of improvement—if I just kept trying, and kept writing, it was going to get easier, or better. Now, I don’t think that I’ve written nearly as much as these people on the Internet advise for aspiring fiction writers, but so far it doesn’t seem to be working. Here, you have read only the short pieces that were not even finished, but were close to being finished. There are plenty more in my notebook that I couldn’t sustain a connection with and didn’t come to anything at all—a bit about a girl who’s grandfather died when she was too far away to return for the funeral, one about St. Patrick’s Day, and another about an old gent who insisted on hiking difficult trails even though he no longer could, one about a college secret society whose symbol was a rat—just to name a few.
Right now, it’s not the writing itself that is the hardest part. It’s coming up with something, anything at all, that feels worthy of being written about. This, I suppose, is the “creative” part. The part where I must generate something new from nothing. It’s not the words, but the idea. Give me a prompt and I’ll write it, but give me a blank sheet of paper and I’ll make popcorn and stare at it for hours. As I venture away from prompts and most writing advice tells me to “practice,” I just want to scream back at the pages of these books and screens of computers, “How do I practice having good ideas?” The only answer is to have as many as possible, and most will just be terrible, and maybe none will even be good, but I just have to pick one and try.
But trying is intimidating, because as one book, The Accidental Creative, told me, “there is no formula for creativity…however, there is a pretty certain formula for mediocrity.”
Now, I may not be a fiction writer, but “mediocrity” is a word that strikes the fear of God into any sort of writer (…or person).
Just starting off, it feels inevitable I will be anything but mediocre. Just staring at the lines of my notebook page, entirely unsurprisingly, wasn’t inciting anything brilliant to happen.
So, for several days I kept a page in my notebook where I wrote down passive observations of things around me that I simply liked, like images that caught my eye, phrases I heard someone say on the bus, or people I saw walking alone. Crumb-dusted tiles. Toast with butter and honey. The library, late at night, empty. Frat boy in the snow and a tank top. Things that could maybe have a story, if I wanted them to.
Assuming I don’t know how to do this, or that I can’t do this, is my first and greatest problem, but recognizing my assumptions and my frustrations and anxieties regarding this process doesn’t make them any less agonizingly difficult to overcome. At this point, the words “creativity” and “anxiety” are intimately intertwined in my mind. They are inseparable. The very thought of “being creative” sends my whole body and mind into a strange buzz-numbed tizzy of dread and excitement. The possibility and opportunity are the buzz; the mediocrity and failure are the numb. If this is what creativity feels like, I’m not so sure I’m on board, after all.
Something that I read often was that in order to write, I had to read. Now, reading fiction I’m no stranger to, but short stories have never exactly been my go-to reading choice. So I had to familiarize myself. I checked out some books of short stories from the library. I subscribed to a short story recommended reading tumblr. I read Dave Eggers in the mountains of Colorado, Katherine Mansfield on the floor of Mason Hall, Neil Gaiman on my aunt’s couch. I took notes. I wrote down what they did, what I liked, what I didn’t. What was special, what made the hairs on my arms stand on end, what made me close my eyes and stop reading. I had always thought that short stories were too short, there was just inherently not enough time to get into the grit of things, into the rusty or glittering cogs of the characters, there as a hook at the beginning and probably a twist at the end, but I always felt like I was left a bit empty.
But I’m really starting to get it now. As a reader, characters have always been my favorite part. The fact that there’s not three hundred pages to build up the characters and their flaws and triumphs, but rather only a few thousand words, is actually pretty magical. There’s a certain brevity that’s unbeatable, a sense of anticipation that’s more palpable with each page flip no matter how mundane the setting or the middle-aged white man or the twenty-something young woman in the city. Short stories want to hit you where it hurts, and they’re going to try. Coming from a writer whose consistent feedback includes “too long” and “too wordy” and “be more concise” – the art of being short is one I would love to master, or, take a beginner’s class in. Short stories, at their finest, can say something, something beautiful, in a space that’s small.
I like the idea of something big in a small space.
I like the mundane, simple things. The things you notice on your walk home but forget about while making dinner, the little, tiny things that feel huge, like a meaningful look, or a pointed look away.
But there’s exactly where I struggle, so far. These things are exactly that—common and mundane. Because I create something doesn’t make it creative, right? Or does it? How much of the “creative” is valued on the basis of the idea itself?
When looking into learning creativity, I came across a guy named Sir Ken Robinson—a big voice for creativity in education— quite often. He gave a TED talk that challenged the way creativity is viewed in schools and in education, and attributes creativity’s lack of value in education to misunderstanding what creativity is. He disagrees with the idea that creativity is difficult to define, saying that, “creativity, as I see it, is the process of having original ideas that have value.”
“Original” and “value” are both terms that I am struggling with.
If it’s not original, did I not create? If it’s not valuable, did I not create?
