I’d just gotten a flyer in my mailbox announcing the World’s Best Short Short Story contest sponsored by Florida State University and the late Jerome Stern. I made copies of the 1991 winner, “Baby, Baby, Baby,” by Francois Camoin. We read it out loud. Everyone admired the story’s energy and wild inventiveness.

“Baby,” I wrote on the blackboard. I asked everyone to name a food.

“Rutabagas,” said the country singer.

“Pigs’ knuckles,” said the clown who liked to shock vegetarians.

“Honey,” said the shy, sweet girl from Vermont.

I asked for energetic verbs. “Anything but ‘to be.’”

“Spit,” said the boy who loved chewing tobacco.

They were catching on.

In my own notebook I wrote: “The sun spit honey.” I would never have thought of that sentence without the help of Vermont Sweetie and Mr. Chew.

On the blackboard we soon had our vocabulary. Simple words, edible, agricultural: stew, squash, dirt, fields. Body parts and household goods: Toenails, combs, castanets. Country Singer gave us a pick-up truck.

“We’re only allowed two abstractions. Loss and desire. Go.”

I gave us ten minutes. A student on the track team leant us his watch. When I do this exercise now, I use a meditation timer.

Everyone turned what they wrote into a 250-word story that night. Some of them would publish their stories later, others would never write fiction again, but they still liked what had come from this exercise.

I had never entered a national contest before and in May I found out that this thing I’d scribbled in the company of my students, then revised, had won. Twenty years on, I still do this exercise to limber up when I’m starting a new chapter or scene. It’s the best antidote I know for the problem of overthinking a story. Scavenge a salad of simple but sensory-rich nouns and active verbs then watch your brain spit honey—and dirt and rutabagas—onto the page.

Want more prompts? FWR’s entire “Get Writing” Archive.

Usually, I treat short stories like fine chocolates: I savor them, one by one, stretching a collection out over days or weeks to make it last.  But now and then, I go on a bona fide story binge.  When I read waitership applications for Bread Loaf, I read about a dozen stories a week for almost three months.  And this spring, as a first reader for the Pushcart Prize, I lost count: a 22-pound box of manuscripts arrived on my doorstep in late December, and I dove in and didn’t resurface until late March.

When you read so many in quick succession like that, the inevitable happens: they start to blur together.   Even very good stories—and in that box, there were many—can start to feel repetitive.  I started noticing that many of the stories covered the same ground—generally, extremely sad ground:

cheating partner stories

abusive childhood stories

dead parent stories

dead partner stories

dead child stories

I apologize if I sound glib.  I don’t mean to.  But while nearly every story was well-written—many by authors from well-respected schools, with impressive publication records—now that months have gone by, I can’t remember the specifics of most of them, only the way they seemed to fit into those assorted categories of loss.  Now and then I remember a striking and vivid image, or a neat turn of phrase, or an author’s name, but mostly I remember the stories as types.

Why didn’t they work?  Partway through a story about a couple at a party, secretly struggling with infertility and on the verge of falling apart, I realized something: the characters should have been desperately sad, but no one in the story actually seemed to feel much of anything.  And that was true of most of the stories I read.  Saddling a character with a Big Loss—whatever the type—seemed to be shorthand for “These characters feel sad,” a shortcut for giving the story emotional weight.  Insert reference to lost child (or dead father, or traumatic childhood), and that explained everything:  enough said.

But enough wasn’t said.  Those stories, and that shorthand, ask the reader to do all the work—of figuring out how the characters are feeling; actually, of feeling, period.  They assumed you knew what it felt like to be cheated on, or to lose a loved one—and that you’d feel the same way the characters did.  The authors seemed to hope you’d project your own feelings onto the character, creating instant depth, like a 3-D movie.  But what does that make the characters, and the story?  A blank screen.

Yet out of the hundreds of stories I read, I do remember a couple dozen—and I’m still thinking about them today.  A grieving widow commissions a wax model of her husband to ease her loneliness.  A surgeon tries to replace the missing thumb of a former Viet Cong, forging a tenuous connection in the process.  On a family trip, a young boy wrestles with his secret love for his own brother.  The best stories—the ones I still remember, months or even years after reading them, the ones that punched holes in my heart—didn’t assume anything.  They made you feel it.  Don’t know what it’s like to lose a parent? they say.  After me, you will.  Never lost the love of your life?  Never watched a child die before your eyes?  I’ll show you what it’s like. They didn’t use shorthand; they spelled out those feelings with painfully sharp details, so that by the end, you did almost know what it was like.

You probably know stories like that.  They are probably some of your favorites, as those memorable stories now number among mine.  Stories like that aren’t blank screens.  They’re the movies themselves, daring you to watch.

In his recent review of this collection, Shawn Andrew Mitchell writes:

There are plenty of writers who attempt to work in George Saunders’s style, one of absurdity and satire and capital letters, but what they often miss is the morality and heart at its core. Moffett misses nothing. He follows his own advice and listens closely, to the detail, to the mystery, and to his characters’ plights.

We’re giving away a copy of Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events next week to three of our Twitter followers. To be eligible for this giveaway (and all future ones), simply click over to Twitter and “follow” us (@fictionwriters).

To all of you who are already fans, thank you!

Further Reading

• Read the rest of Mitchell’s review.
• Read an interview with Kevin Moffatt conducted by the University of Pittsburgh.

Congrats! To claim your free copy, please email us at the following address:

winners [at] fictionwritersreview.com

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Thanks to all of you who are fans. We appreciate your support. Let us know your favorite new books out there!

Queenie As Portrayed in A&P, by Sarah Van Arsdale

It just kept nosing its way into my own novel—“A&P” by John Updike. I’d first read it when teaching lit classes years before, and now, as I finished my third novel, my characters kept making references to it: a girl’s mind “just a little buzz like a bee in a glass jar” or the way the boy at the register sees the girls’ bathing suits. Knowing it’s best to let the subconscious have its way while writing fiction, I let the story in, even as I wondered what it was doing there. My novel, Grand Isle, was in print a good two months before I realized—with a whoop of surprise and delight—why the story felt so present in the novel: the Updike story is really about class, about town and gown, and about a young person developing moral mettle. Um, just like my novel.

Updike does the thing I so envy about a brilliant short-story writer: he brings his precisely-focused eye to the singular moment in which the fate of the world turns. It’s like seeing a prism catch the light and fracture it into a full spectrum of colors. The story takes place over the course of about ten minutes, and yet it has stayed with me now for nearly twenty years—and stayed with me so deeply that there it was, having its way with my own novel.

Reading a Kevin Moffett story strongly resembles Kevin Moffett’s description of reading a story. This is so much the case that the titular opening story from his latest collection, Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events, almost serves as an aesthetic statement, an ars poetica, or ars fictiona. The narrator, Frederick Moxley, discovers his father has been writing and publishing stories under their shared name, stories which call into question Fred Jr.’s memories about their family and his deceased mother. Peppered throughout are aesthetic statements regarding fiction. The narrator’s former writing instructor, Hodgett, who is fond of citing rules and grandiose mantras while fondling himself behind his desk, says his stories are all real life, that anything worth saying can’t be said, which is why we write fiction. Fred Sr. says stories are dreams. Fred Jr., upset by the fact that his hobbyist father, who never studied creative writing, appears to be outwriting him, disagrees for the sake of disagreement and says they’re jars of bees. The rest of the collection consists of third person stories that somehow satisfy all these aesthetic statements at once. They feel uncannily dreamlike while remaining rooted in real life.

“Imagine a time for your characters, Hodgett used to say, when things might have turned out differently. Find the moment a choice was made that made other choices impossible. Readers like to see characters making choices.”

The eight remaining stories revolve around the issue of choice: making choices, having them made for you, or dealing with the fallout. In “Border to Border,” for instance, Maxim, a worker in the Estonian corner of the capitalist-theme-park Small World, debates between taking out an expensive loan to replace the crown he’s swallowed, or waiting for it to come out the other end, wash it off, and have it put back in. The story’s setting and humor make it clear why George Saunders chose Moffett’s first collection, Permanent Visitors, as the winner of the John Simmons Short Fiction Award. At its core lies the simple choice of how Maxim will navigate his bizarro life and workplace. Other stories explore the time after an irreversible choice. In “First Marriage,” Tad and Amy have just been married by a judge in Lake Havasu City, Arizona (“Home of the London Bridge” according to the billboards: it seems the couple have just come from a setting much like Small World), and blaze eastward toward Florida in a borrowed car, feeling out the results of their impulsive decision. “English Made Easy,” on the other hand, concerns a lack of choice: Lena’s husband has passed away and she’s forced to cope.

“Why did this simple static image seem like such a rare coin?”

Moffett has a knack for teasing out the uncanny and letting it speak for itself. He constantly presents unsettling situations and images, uncalled-for and inappropriate feelings, conversations with vaguely menacing minor characters, miscommunications and misunderstandings—all of which foster a sense of unease. Lena spends a good portion of “English Made Easy” walking alone around her neighborhood. The strangeness of life without her husband pains her. The houses seem to take on their own lives; they “float together and separate like boats in a bay.” Lena hears “the hollow, bone-like tock of bamboo chimes nearby […] a mournful, an awful sound to broadcast through the neighborhood.” Lena lies to the other characters she meets without completely understanding why.

She encounters, repeatedly, an older woman named Mrs. Appleman who suffers from an “exquisitely benign dementia.” Sometimes she remembers Lena, sometimes she doesn’t, and either way it’s eerie, as though Lena beholds the future of her own fading mind. Mrs. Appleman offers totemic statements that don’t feel entirely welcome or accurate but are also spot-on in some obscure way, such as when she calls Lena’s son a “warm little fortune cookie” or says Lena looks like she “just found a lost race.” Later in the story, when Lena runs across some bikes and thinks “if bikes were horses,” she “leaves the thought incomplete, lets it grow untended, like a deep-woods weed.” This is one of Moffett’s biggest gifts: leaving a thought or image in its fragmented and suggestive state; trusting that it will grow untended in our minds.

At the end of “Further Interpretations,” after much stalling, Fred Jr. finds himself home for the holidays. Fred Sr., who can shake presents and divine their contents, shakes one in front of his son. Listen closer, he says. This is the warm-hearted center of Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events, the aesthetic that really distinguishes this collection. There are plenty of writers who attempt to work in George Saunders’s style, one of absurdity and satire and capital letters, but what they often miss is the morality and heart at its core. Moffett misses nothing. He follows his own advice and listens closely, to the detail, to the mystery, and to his characters’ plights. You’d be wise to do the same.

[Leader quotes from Moffett's story, "Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events"]

Further Links & Resources

• Browse inside the title story on the HarperPerennial.
• Buy a copy of Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events on Amazon, IndieBound or Powell’s.
• Read an interview with Kevin Moffatt conducted by the University of Pittsburgh.

You can listen to Air Schooner #9 on the Prairie Schooner website. Congratulations, Daniel!

• Like what you heard?  Read more of Daniel Wallace’s work on FWR, and visit Daniel’s blog to learn more about him.

“[T]he value of a short story is the same as the value of all literature—that it allows a person to confront the world in a new way, that at its best it has the power to act as a transformative experience, and to leave the reader changed—smarter and more empathetic. I think there’s something especially lovely about being able to have a complete, meaningful emotional experience in the time it takes to read ten to twenty pages.”

~ Danielle Evans

• Read more about Danielle Evans on Fiction Writers Review
• Looking for something to read? Check out the Stories We Love
• Need inspiration? Try our Get Writing exercises

Sound familiar? In a post-Sex and the City era, much of Bierlein’s literary ground feels well-trod. We’ve come to expect the cheeky sex talk, the blasé infidelity, and – above all – the redemptive power of female friendship. We’re no longer shocked when a woman who seemingly has it all considers throwing it away for a man who doesn’t deserve her. And the remaining storylines are equally predictable: a grieving woman finds solace in a European lover; a wife battles her mother-in-law for her husband’s attention; friends from college gather to celebrate an engagement and marvel at their varying life paths. Although Bierlein’s prose is cleanly delivered and snappily paced, her collection too often tells us stories we’ve heard before.

Which is a shame, because the glimpses we catch of Bierlein’s originality take us beyond the tropes of chick lit to someplace magical. In the opening story, “A Vacation on the Island of Ex-Boyfriends,” two girlfriends head off on a vacation to Nantucket, only to find themselves instead on an island inhabited by every man they’ve ever dated, lined up in chronological order. It’s a fantastic premise, and Bierlein heightens the payoff by juxtaposing the impossible scenario with unassuming, economical prose: “In three days we have played, cried, ran, fought, laughed, danced, and built fires with them all —every man we’ve ever wanted. We’re exhausted.”

Similarly, the final story in the collection, “An Interrogation at the Prison of Ex-Girlfriends,” gives us a roomful of mistresses tied up for questioning by an angry wife and her whip-cracking assistant. Like, “A Vacation…,” there’s a suspension of disbelief required here, and a sense of time-out-of-time. Our narrator ponders

If this had happened when we were together I would have told him, Your biggest problem right now is that I sort of like her. Certainly undertaking a group abduction requires more verve that I had ever imagined from a wife.

In Bierlein’s world, revenge is a dish that tastes even better with a little self-deprecating humor.

With these two stories, Bierlein demonstrates exactly how much verve she’s capable of delivering. Here’s hoping her next collection will serve up even more.

Extras

• Read Bierlein’s writings, including a self-interview, at The Nervous Breakdown.
• Listen to a podcast of Bierlein’s AWP conference panel, in which she offers advice to emerging writers.

I’ll be totally honest: I really did not expect to like Frankie Thomas’s “The Showrunner” at all. It starts off at a casting session for a fictional Disney-esque tween series, and not only am I biased against stories that saturate themselves in current pop culture—I tend to like a little patina on my cultural references—I expected the story to be as flimsy as the TV show at its center.

I was completely wrong. Within half a page, I was unable to put the piece down. (No joke: I was late to pick up my son from daycare, I was that immersed.)

Roger, the showrunner of the title, takes Peter Lane—the adolescent, adorably innocent, unabashedly gay kid he casts—under his wing, promising himself to protect Peter from everything bad that he himself has experienced in show business:

Roger looks over at Peter, who’s sitting there strapped into the passenger seat at groping distance from Roger, humming along, his eyes closed and his legs apart. It’s strange to think that Peter is the same age that Roger was when he ran away from San Antonio, and that Roger is now older than the guys who fucked him back then. Peter would never expect to be fucked the way Roger was—no, Peter expects to be loved, and why shouldn’t he? Peter was born to be loved.

How easy it would be for Roger to drive home instead, talk Peter into coming inside, pour the kid a drink and sweet-talk him and undress him and then pound him into the mattress so hard he’ll never smile that trusting smile again for the rest of his life. It scares the shit out of Roger, how easy it would be and how much he must not let it happen, never, not to Peter Lane.

In fact, the story has only one thing in common with tween sitcoms: you can see where it’s going almost from the first scene. And yet, unlike with those sitcoms, you won’t be able to look away. You have to keep reading, keep watching, even as the story hurtles to its shattering conclusion, even as it breaks your heart.