David’s Comments (group member since Sep 30, 2007)

David’s comments from the Short Story lovers group.

Thank you!

Well, you have to write what's urgent for you to write -- not because an editor likes or doesn't like it. To my mind, first person is only bad if it doesn't work.

Thanks, Betsy -- that's definitely a help!

Yes -- most collections are a mixture, I think -- often that variety is a good thing for the reader!

Thanks, folks -- this is all really helpful.

Thank you, Geoff! Yes -- this is about something I'm writing -- but it's not a single piece -- it's a collection I'm working on. I'm trying to read just a huge amount as food for creative thought.

I do have Saunders on my list, and some of the others as well. But do you have a particular Curtis story in mind?

Hey, folks -- I'm wondering if any of you have recommendations for really great short stories that are told in the first person, ones with especially memorable first-person narrators -- either because the voice is unusually strong/captivating or because the narrator is talking actively to the reader (or someone else), spouting off, maybe trying hard to convince the listener of something, or all of these things. I'm interested in first-person-plural stories as well. Any recommendations?

Gabrielle, I read the Salon article. We're not going to agree on this one. I think the author of that article is pointing to superficial rather than substantive similarities between the stories, and so I think your argument rests on superficialities as well. These are the kind of similarities that fall apart when you look at all closely at them -- the friend in Lawrence is hardly sexually unthreatening; the conversation at dinner is trivial in Carver and extremely intense and probing in Lawrence, which means very different things for the plot; the touching between the men is entirely dissimilar in the way its initiated and in terms of its content and import in the two stories; and so on. And the Chekhov analogy is even more superficial (if the characters' country of origin is what makes for plagiarism then Lawrence and Carver share no similarities at all! You're off the hook, Ray.), and not particularly relevant to this comparison, where you see two stories that share no details of such specificity as the type of trees involved.

Anyway, no need to belabor it. You're not going to convince me by talking about train rides, and I doubt I'll be convincing you, either -- but it's okay for us to agree to disagree!

It's hard to argue with O'Connor's mastery of the form. Still -- I don't like her work. I'm not sure if it's fair to judge a body of work by its underlying philosophy, but she seems as hateful as Ayn Rand to me. O'Connor sets her characters up, again and again, not just to fail but to be judged and severely punished, and in doing so, sets us all up to be punished. In her tightly-manipulated world nobody ever has even a chance to be decent or good. I see that as an artistic failure -- too much control over what's possible in her work -- but also something worse. Her stories, it seems to me, lack psychological courage, and pieces like "The Lame Shall Enter First," embody a kind of literary evil.

Those are some pretty strong words, David! Calm down.

Okay. I will. I'll calm down. But I can't shake the feeling after reading an O'Connor story that (1) she has dazzling skill and (2) her stories are acts of (semi-intentional?) psychological violence upon the reader.

Welty, though -- yes -- great addition. She's wonderful. Harrowing and wonderful.

Carver's original story is "A Small, Good Thing" and the Lish edited one is "The Bath." People often have that order mistakenly backwards because "The Bath" was published first. It wasn't written first, but it was published first. Carver only later had the courage to reverse all of Lish's edits (which had produced "The Bath") and restore "A Small, Good Thing" to its original form.

Anyway, I continue to be baffled by the argument for calling "Cathedral" and "A Blind Man" the same story. First of all, reworking an old storyline (especially this loosely) isn't plagiarism (how many books would we have to throw out if that were true?) -- and Carver's extreme rethinking of what this kind of interaction might reveal turns Lawrence's misanthropy on its head and instead reveals a radically different view of humanity. That's difference enough, even if we ignore differences in tone, character, mood, pacing and so on -- which we shouldn't. If fiction's greatness inheres only in its storyboard plotline, then fiction doesn't have much to recommend it.

Oh -- and I'd say it's a little premature to add Etgar Keret to the list of the best, though he is a lot of fun...

I think I'd defend Carver to the death. There is, of course, the issue of Lish, but that's easily overblown. Those heavy-handed Lish edits only happened in one of Carver's books (What We Talk About When We Talk About Love), and Carver's best stories are undeniably his own. In the later collection Cathedral, for example, Carver published some stories he had written earlier (before Lish turned into a professional story-shredder), and Carver printed them exactly as they had been written before Lish got his hands on them. Lish, in other words, is largely responsible for "The Bath," as one example, but Carver and only Carver wrote (the much superior, in my opinion) "A Small, Good Thing."

The story "Cathedral" is in that collection, too, and I think it's a masterpiece -- one of the best stories ever written. I've also read Lawrence's "The Blind Man," and the resemblance is only to be found in superficial details. You have a man visiting a couple, and the visitor is a good friend of the woman, and one of the men is blind (though in Lawrence's story it's the husband, which turns out to be a crucial difference), and there's some feeling around with the hands, but that's it as far as a resemblance. The plots are only loosely similar, and the stories are incredibly different in terms of tone, pacing, atmosphere, the origin (and therefore the meaning) of the blindness, the nature of the characters' personalities, in the feel of the ending, and above all in what the authors are saying about human nature and the experience of life. And since Carver's story is (I'd say) entirely devoted to an understanding of human potential, and because he comes to such different conclusions from Lawrence, his story couldn't be any more crucially unlike Lawrence's.

In any case, even if it had been a remake, I don't think that would besmirch it much. Kurosawa's movie "Ran," for example, is a magnificent film, not made any less impressive because of its origins in and faithfulness to King Lear.

And I'll throw in a vote for Hemingway. He did revolutionize the form, and I don't mind that he only had a handful of stellar stories, given how stellar they are. The rest are pretty good anyway, and reaching magnificence a few times is better than being an author who's 80% (and no better) all the time.

I re-read the collected Chekhov stories this year, and liked them (and admire what he did in revolutionizing the form himself), but I have to admit they didn't stay with me. I don't really know why. His stories never stay with me.

I'm glad you enjoyed it, Harley! And thanks for that interview excerpt, Andrew. I definitely can't agree with Geoff. A novel may be long, but that doesn't make it harder. It just makes it a different task. After all, many of our most celebrated poems are quite short -- does that mean they were easy to write? Was Pound's tiny poem "In a Station of the Metro" easy just because it was short? He started with thirty lines and ended with two (aside from the title), not because he wanted to write an easier poem or couldn't sustain an idea, but because the content called out for extreme economy -- the kind of economy that an acclaimed and prolific novelist, a person for whom plots and subplots and elaborate structure and slow-developing ideas come easily, might find impossibly difficult to attain.

Successful writing, I think, is writing that allows content to take on its most appropriate form, whatever that form is. Sometimes it's a novel, sometimes a short story, sometimes a sonnet. Producing successful writing of any kind is plenty hard, hard enough to make it pretty pointless to worry too much about what's harder than what.

Hey -- for those of you who might be interested, I just wrote a guest post for a blog about writing, and the theme of the post is short stories -- specifically, why some people should write (and read) them instead of novels!

Here's the link:
http://christinabakerkline.wordpress....

I think you've come up with a lot, Zybahn -- thanks for these great ideas!

Great ideas -- thank you!

Yeah -- that's a good one by Carver, and I do know it. I'm happy to take any and all others, including your own!

Hey, all ---

I'm looking for examples of literary short stories that one might call uplifting or funny or focused on awe or hope or possibility, as opposed to stories focused on darkness, failure or despair. Not Pollyanna stuff and not anything with an evangelical agenda, but stuff that makes genuine art of these positive things. I'm already thinking of Sherman Alexie's "What You Pawn I Will Redeem," Raymond Carver's "Cathedral" and Etgar Keret's "The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God."

Nothing against stories plumbing the darkness -- that's what most of my favorite stories do, and it's what I usually write, actually -- but I'm hoping you have some examples of stories doing something else.

Maxine Swann's "Secret"? BASS 2006?

Hey -- Myfanwy posted this link to a very interesting article on the short story by Larry Dark:

http://bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com...

Thoughts?