Alan’s Comments (group member since Feb 28, 2011)

Alan’s comments from the Spring Short Story Panel group.

From Valerie:"Anything else that happens to your stories/novels is just gravy. But in my experience, no accolades or publications or pay checks ever feel as good as finishing something you truly believe is good."

Amen to that!! Well said!

Oh, and Charles Baxter is the smartest (and coolest) man alive.

First off, Danielle’s response is possibly the greatest thing I’ve read in years. Big smiles on that one.

Second, this is easily the topic I feel least comfortable with discussing and the one in which the most people have interest. And I think that says it all—I’ve found people rabidly interested in being published, but not as much in the writing itself. I also feel like when I do talk about this stuff I come off as smug. So here’s the deal: I’m going to just be straight with you all and tell you what I think. Danielle made me brave (ha). Of course, what I think is based on decisions I’ve made for my own career and may have no value to you. And that’s fine (with me, at least—ha)

I’ll start with a little anecdote. I first started writing because I loved the craft. I loved stories and finding words to tell them. When I got into grad school I found everybody sending out manuscripts, scrabbling about in the rat race that is story publishing. It felt like a race. If someone got a story published, it felt like they were getting ahead of me. So I scrabbled right along with everybody else, sending out madly, getting rejections by the handfuls. Then something happened. I got a story accepted, and by a pretty darn good journal. But here’s the problem: I reread my story (which they’d had for like nine months), and was horrified to find that the story wasn’t very good. In fact, it stunk. I knew it stunk because I’d been on a reading binge and when compared to Joyce and Hemingway and Rick Bass, Flannery O’Conner and Denis Johnson, et al, I wasn’t even close. Not. Even. Close. It wasn’t even the best story from my little grad. school workshop. And this story was going to have my name on it. People (a few at least) might read it. I felt like I’d lost something, and I wrote the editors and asked them if I could revise the story significantly, and maybe have it in a future issue (beyond the issue for which it was accepted). The editor was a little offended. “But I accepted it because I thought it was good enough for our journal,” he said. He wouldn’t budge. So…I did a crazy thing--I pulled the submission. It made the editor mad. It made my friends think I was nuts. It changed the way I viewed things.

For a long time I had a little note card taped to my computer that read, “This is not a race.” I switched my business model to noticing some of the authors I most admired didn’t publish a lot. Harper Lee had only one book. Marilynne Robinson had only a few books in thirty years of writing. Conversely, I had a friend who’d published 30 or so mediocre stories in the span of a couple of years and still couldn’t get a book deal. So I held my ground. I would only publish work I felt represented the highest standard I could, based on my understanding of the standards, abide. Again, I know this sounds smug, but I’m trying to be honest. This is how it went down. I don’t talk about this stuff unless people ask and I hate when they do because it makes me sound like a crazy person and it just bums everyone out. But…

I’ve only published six stories. That’s it. Six. I’ve been in some of the best journals and magazines (VQR, referenced in the question, being one of them), have been anthologized, won a National Magazine Award. My work’s been translated into seven languages, I’ve gotten to travel all over the place, have met great people, all over six published stories. Six. Six stories in sixteen years of writing. I've written MANY more than six, but six is all I decided to publish. That’s all. Six. But I’ve never had to solicit an agent, as the agents contacted me. We sent my manuscript to one publisher, our top choice (Graywolf Press), and they took it. No two book deals. No, “Where’s the novel?” clause. The book, even as a collection of stories, is selling really well, getting reviewed all over (including the NY Times), is a Barnes and Noble Best Book of the Month, a NPR Book We Love. I was told over and over and over that story collections don’t X and can’t Y and won’t get Z, that there’s a bias, and people won’t read stories for A and B and C, and, and, and…

I just tried to write the best book I could. I focused for a very very very long time on the product. The art. The craft. On keeping the horse before the cart where it belongs. I’m not really even giving anyone advice here. This is just my story. That said, this IS the advice I’d give my children if they someday want to become writers. It’s not a race. We’re not measured in quantities. I feel the business model I’ve followed has paid itself out. And that model is simple: write something that comes from deep inside you, a story no one else could tell better than you, and be patient enough to find the exact right words to bring that story in all its glorious insight to full and potent life.

Then…send it out.

I love what Danielle wrote: "Sometimes I’ve had an ending point in mind and then gotten there and found that it’s completely the wrong ending, that a character just flat out refuses to do something, and that’s usually fun because then you just have to watch and see what the character actually will do."

I love this and think it's important because its a reminder that it's our job as authors to abide the character(s), not have the character(s) abide us. Great stuff.

Chris: Do others have the experience of your stories ending themselves? By that, I mean, a character will do something I didn't expect and not only the ending, but the whole theme becomes obvious.

My answer: This happened with a couple of the stories in VOLT. I was following the story and then something happened and I realized something had revealed itself. I love when this happens!! It feels like the cosmos have smiled on me. Most of the time, though, my first attempts at the endings only reveal that I have no idea what I'm doing--ha. And...a couple of times I was completely convinced a perfect ending had been revealed, only to later realize it was just wishful thinking.

My endings must do two things.

On the literal level, the ending must set a trajectory that indicates the direction the story/character will go beyond the end of the words. I must give the reader an indication that something has come to fruition, that the character has been set on, or has set themselves upon, a track. That’s not to say that a story must be wrapped up with a little bow. Quite the opposite, in fact. I feel I’ve succeeded with an ending if I’ve allowed a reader to intuit the trajectory, to feel the path. They may have to think about the ending a bit to work out a conscious understanding of that trajectory, but as a reader I like to be forced to think and therefore have no problem writing to provoke thought.

When I think of an ending I wanted to emulate, James Joyce comes to mind. James Joyce is brilliant at everything, but I love his endings. I’ve read the last two pages of his story “The Dead” probably more than any other piece of writing. In that story, we’ve been following a husband and wife at a party in Dublin on a snowy night, dancing, singing, making polite conversation. We know there is something on the wife’s mind, but it’s not until the very end we know the whole significance of the evening. The last page made me have to reconsider all of the pages before, made me want to immediately reread the story. I hesitate on being more specific for fear of ruining the reading experience for anyone.

I thought about my story “The Staying Freight” with “The Dead” in mind. In my story, and without playing spoiler, I put a character through a long and harried journey. I wanted, in the end, to recast that journey, to provoke a reader into feeling and thinking differently about everything they’d read until that point. I wanted to switch tracks at the very end, to reset the character’s trajectory, and send the reader off into the white space with some things to settle in their minds.

The second thing an ending must do, which is in concert with the first, is to be the final note of truth that will enable a reader to glean the meaning of the story. What statement am I making with this narrative? What insight am I trying to reveal? My understanding of story is that all stories, regardless of if they’re simple or complex, funny or tragic, romantic or brutal, make some statement of meaning. We’re at the mercy of this. The statement doesn’t have to be as clear as a fable, but I feel it helps me to know that part of my job as author is to communicate some greater truth from the narrative. I mean, I’m aware of this. I mean, I actually consider this. I actually choose my ending to enable a certain commentary. Because I’m aware of it I’m able to not be heavy-handed. I can be conscious of how I can nuance that meaning in with subtlety and implication. Usually when I’m working on a story I know it can end any number of ways. I choose the ending I feel directs a reader toward the human truth I’d most like to convey. I’ll add here that often writing the story instructs me on which ending—which human truth—is appropriate. I’m not just the teacher, the commandant, but also the student, open to what’s revealed in the writing.

A few other short story endings I greatly admire: “Upon the Sweeping Flood” by Joyce Carol Oates”, “Winter Chemistry” by Joy Williams, “Indian Camp” by Ernest Hemingway, “The Caretaker” by Anthony Doerr, “The Five Forty-Eight” by John Cheever, “The Knife Thrower” by Stephen Millhauser, “Refresh, Refresh” by Benjamin Percy, to name a few.

Sarah: How do you manage to maintain this strong and full empathy when terrible things are happening to your characters?

Answer: I make a simple deal with myself. If I going into a character, I'm going in all the way. It's sometimes unpleasant, sometimes awful, but that's the job. So...it's purely a act of will.

The truth is that the overall process is different with every story. If I think about the eight stories in my collection, each has a very different path to completion. A story like “Furlough” started off as being semi-autobiographical, but ended up being not about me at all. The story “Peacekeeper” was born out of a girl being murdered in Waseca, Minnesota, a town where friends of mine lived, and where I visited often. “The Daughter” started with an image of a corn maze, while “The Staying Freight” started with something I read about Harry Houdini. On and on, they’re all different. Some, like “Lazarus”, I knew from the start exactly what I was trying to say and knew the exact paces of the plot. Others, like “Volt”, I followed blindly into the dark recesses of my imagination. All of the stories, in one way or another, ended up as ruminations on things that scared or confounded me, though even that I didn’t necessarily control.

The one thing I can say is constant is that I’m what I call an “empathetic writer”, which means I try, as best, as wholly as possible, to become the character. For me, the art of fiction writing has a greater kinship with method acting than it does with, say, journalism. Much of my process entails me getting my imagination, my emotions, as deeply into the character as possible. My job then, as writer, is simply to find the language to convey the truth of that life, the character in full—their intellect, emotions, their imagination and psychology, as well as their physicality. I believe the most powerful place to write from is from the place of full empathy, where the reader becomes someone who is not them. In fact, I would argue that the great advantage story writing has over every other artistic medium is that we can create full empathy. All other art forms (film, music, dance, visual art,…) do their best to imply empathy. For example, when watching a film we read an actors’ expressions, mannerisms, listen to the theme music, all to gain an implied understanding of who they are in that moment, but we never see out of the characters eyes, smell what they smell, feel the wind on their cheeks, or think what they think. We, as writers, can create empathy in full. This is an advantage we should always use to our favor.

So my process is first figuring out who this character is, in a particular situation, in a particular place and time, and bringing it all to life in my imagination. I’m a big note taker. I draw pictures. I watch videos. I do whatever I need to get that life real in my imagination.

The biggest quirk to who I am as a writer is that I don’t like sitting at the computer until the life is full in my imagination. I call this “hitting critical mass”—the point where the character (in the situation, in the place) is so alive in my imagination that it’s clawing at the backside of my eyes to get out. About 80% of my process is spent not putting words of a blank page, but doing anything I can/need to do to reach critical mass. By doing it this way, I’ve found my writing takes on an urgency that I struggled to capture before I worked in this manner.

I'd like to introduce myself. My name is Alan Heathcock, one of the panelists, author of the story collection VOLT. I'm very excited to a part of this panel, as I'm passionate about writing, and especially about the short story. My collection just came out last week from Graywolf Press--I worked on the book for well over a decade, so it feels pretty darn good to have people reading my work. I'll say a whole lot more next week, but for now I just wanted to say hello to everyone and say how much I'm looking forward to our discussion. Have a great weekend!!