Christ What Have I Gotten Myself Into

Last week I ran into an acquaintance of mine — at a bar, because, yeah — and ended up drinking with him and two of his friends for a few hours. He’s a writer, and a good one: he’s published two books, one of nonfiction and one of poetry, has been included in a couple of collections in the lovely company of people like Jamaica Kincaid, John Edgar Wideman, and Lee Gutkind, and has written for publications like Pittsburgh Magazine, McSweeney’s, Mental Floss, and more. We drank, considerably, and had wonderful and wide-ranging conversation. At some point, we decided to each send around 10,000 words this coming Tuesday, and we’ll meet back up a week later to talk about what we’ve written.

The following morning I had a variety of thoughts as I walked to work:

1. Did I just network?

2. Holy shit I have to write another 4,000 in the next week. (I had, unfortunately, overestimated how much I had of this particular piece when all was typed up and collected.)

3. Was I really the only person at that table under 30?

4. What if my 10,000 words really, really suck?

5. If I don’t do this I’m gonna hate myself.

So there it is. I still have another couple thousand words to write in the next four days — though thankfully I have Monday and Tuesday off from work — but I am taking a proactive step and that feels good. Of course at this very moment I’m sitting and writing about this as opposed to actually writing, but it seems inevitable that I put everything off till the true deadline. It’s kind of my style.

If nothing else, I got two free books out of the evening. Both of the guys who will be reading with me have published novels and gave me copies. Christ what have I gotten myself into.

The East Coast Shall Crumble And Fall

I am not writing about the earthquake.

I finished Bolaño today.  The stories in the latter half of the book tend further towards the autobiographical than the early ones. Lots more of protagonists named “B.” Lots tramping and flitting in and out of people lives. I think the biggest overarching thing I noticed, however, was the fact that Bolaño seems incredibly comfortable being a writer. I’ve always tried to avoid having my main characters be writers, because it feels like a kind of circle jerk, the fact that writers write about writers. But not only is he comfy writing that way, he seems to happily embody the writer as icon or perhaps has a sense of the ideal writer and works adamantly to be that person. I am uncomfortable doing that. I rarely if ever refer to myself as a writer. Sometimes a journalist, but I don’t even do that very often.

Back towards the beginning of this blog I wrote about how Hunter Thompson and Matt Taibbi both have said that they became journalists because they couldn’t make it as novelists, and I said I had to start writing fiction because I couldn’t make it as a journalist. Well, Bolaño has a similar arc. All of the fiction that he is known and lauded for was written in the 90s, and very early 2000s before his death. Up until then he was a poet — a minor poet, it seems. But he got married and started a family, so he switched to fiction because he could make more money at it. Thompson and Taibbi were/are awesome journalists. Bolaño was an awesome writer of fiction. I mean, his poetry was badass as well, from what I’ve read of it, I’m just trying to get at the fact that these three were all incredibly talented at things they never wanted to do. I can’t decide if this makes me upset or not.

People Who Work At Weave Aren’t Allowed To Read This Because It Involves The Stories I Submitted

It’d been over a week and a half and I still haven’t finished The Nimrod Flipout. Maybe I’m losing steam; I seem to remember tearing through books in June and early July, but this little one has been in my bag longer than any of the others. Not that I’m not enjoying reading it, it’s a shitload of fun. My favorite stories so far? Fatso (which I talked about already) Actually, I’ve Had Some Phenomenal Hard-Ons Lately (one of the more realistic stories, about a man, his wife, his lover, his penis, and his dog. Keret likes dogs) Pride and Joy (about a boy who grows very tall very quickly, and for every inch he grows his parents shrink one — it’s a very rare disease) More Life (two sets of twins have relationships and drama ensues) and For Only 9.99 Inc. Tax and Postage (the secret to the meaning of life is revealed in this booklet! Buy now!)

On the other hand I did manage to submit to Weave’s flash fiction contest (very late on the last day, because I like to live on the edge. By the way, if by any chance you’re reading this and you work for Weave: Spoiler alert! Don’t disqualify me with your page views!) I only ended up submitting two pieces instead of three, but I’m pretty happy with them. Even if I don’t win, which would be nice but I’m not holding out too much hope, it feels very good to have written something and sent it off somewhere. It makes it feel like less of an exercise in futility or navel-gazing.

The fun part was that for the second story, which is a (hopefully not too derivative) decline-and-fall-of-a-relationship kind of thing, I finished it in a semi-blackout state of drunkenness on a Friday night. I got to rediscover my own writing, which is new for me. I wrote the first three quarters of the story weeks ago, which brings the “plot” right up to the precipice of a big fight, but didn’t yet know how exactly I wanted it to go, nor whether I wanted the relationship to survive or not. Drunk me, apparently, is more decisive.

When I think about it now it’s kind of odd I wrote a fight. In my relationships, even the ones that last way too long and get into that sick state where there’s nothing to do but drag it behind a barn and shoot it, my partner and I almost never have big screaming matches. I guess it’s just not my style. I mean, even when my parents screamed at each other it was usually about something academic or esoteric like the Barnes Foundation. The most recent fight I had to draw on while writing happened two and a half years ago, and took place in a bathtub. The fight in the story didn’t take place in a bathtub, but now I’m kind of regretting that decision.

Bathtub fights can get pretty intense.

Iron Man in Deep Creek

I’m headed to Deep Creek Maryland in a couple hours. There are a few things I like about this. First, I don’t know where Deep Creek is; my very good friend Harrison is driving us there and there’s something very great about not knowing where one is. Or, rather, it is good not to need to know where one is. I’m hardly working this summer, what with my internship being only two days a week at the office and a couple out at events, but I’m still getting the burnt-out sensation that takes me every time I do something I don’t want to do for longer than a couple months.

That’s the other sensation I’m struggling with right now. I legitimately do not like my internship at the City Paper. When I’m in the office, my job is essentially transferring information from 200-word press releases to 100-word “Come see this!” listings. Out of the office, I have to go to events that I have very little interest in, and then interview people who have very little interest in me. It’s something I’m not sure my editors understand, that after events (concerts, shows, receptions, etc.) people who are just spectators don’t really want to talk to reporters for more than thirty seconds, and I have to get at least three minutes from them.

So the best conclusion I can come to is that journalism is really my bag. And that’s fine. I don’t need to be a journalist to be a writer, and I certainly do plan on continuing to write. I’ve been working on fiction this summer and I feel like the no-deadline, low-stress writing I do when I don’t need it to be seen anywhere is probably my best. That’s good enough for me, for now.

Now I’m going to go back to watching Robert Downey Jr. build the Iron Man suit in a cave!… from a bunch of scraps!

The Comparative Heights of American Presidents

I realized something very important today: in the drawer by the shitty free coffee there are single serve Coffee-mate creamers. No more powdered creamer for me!

(Side note: In a shitty hotel restaurant in Iowa, my Mom and I were discussing where Naugahyde comes from; we settled on large, ugly brown herd animals named Naugas that produce Coffee-mate instead of milk.)

The other, more important thing that I realized was how hard it is for me to write when I’m not reading anything. As if to prove my point, I spent the time between that last sentence and this one reading about the comparative heights of Presidents, which like the population in general are trending taller. This is very important for me to know.

Trying to write flash fiction for the Weave contest has gotten me back interested in short fiction, so I’m currently in search of a good collection of short stories. For some reason I want one all by one author, instead of a “Best American..” style conglomeration. If anyone has any suggestions, please pass them along. The last one I read, I think, was Men and Cartoons by Jonathan Lethem, which is, at its base level, fucking awesome.

I’m so out of practice with short fiction that I think what I’m looking for are some clues about how to make a short story something more than a long piece of flash fiction. What I mean is that flash fiction, on the level that it works for me, is snapshot-based, image-based, or moment-based, however you’d like to describe it. And it seems that some short stories have a tendency to be the same way. Michael Chabon, who else would I reference?, called them “quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory stor[ies],” which we landed on because plot became something tainted and out of the pulp magazines.

That’s what’s nice about working in flash fiction right now: I can be as plotless and quotidian as I damn well please. I don’t have to try to cram a plot into a thousand words, because no one expects that to work.

I really have no idea how to make plot work. That’s why I started writing nonfiction, because I didn’t have to make anything up, and even if it was ridiculous as long as I was telling the truth it didn’t matter.  But in fiction even the stuff that is essentially true to my life can come off as unbelievable or far-fetched, which turns readers off (it always did me anyway). So how do I create a believable plot without it being so cold and routine that I fall into the quotidian and the plotless? How do I write a plot that’s interesting enough to keep people reading but not too interesting as to be unbelievable?

I feel like I just spat my coffee at my keyboard and this blog entry is what came out.