Short Story Connect discussion

Join us on Wednesday, October 1, 2014 for a special discussion with author Clifford Garstang. If you have a question for him, please post it in this thread, where Clifford will be discussing his writing and his books.

Remember - you can post questions here throughout the duration of the Featured Author Read at any time!

Hello Clifford ,

What are three things you use for inspiration? What are a few experiences that has influenced your writing? When did you know you were a writer?

Hi Clifford,


I have a question I often ask fellow writers: Do you have a specific writing process or do you plan your writing time? ie. do you fit your writing into the rest of your life or does your life revolve around your writing?

Iesha (In east shade house at...) wrote: "Hello Clifford ,

What are three things you use for inspiration? What are a few experiences that has influenced your writing? When did you know you were a writer?"

Thanks for your questions! I sometimes give a talk called "From Idea to Story" where I discuss a few sources of inspiration. They include my own family, newspaper articles, and things I observe around me. The biggest influence on my writing, I'd have to say, is my international travel. Even if I am writing about a domestic situation set in the US, I think I have a very broad perspective because of my experiences travelling. The last question is the hardest. I knew I WANTED to be a writer when I was a kid, reading a lot of books. But I wasn't sure I really WAS a writer until my first story got published.

Amanda wrote: "Hi Clifford,


I have a question I often ask fellow writers: Do you have a specific writing process or do you plan your writing time? ie. do you fit your writing into the rest of your life or does ..."

Great question! Because writing is my "job" I make the rest of my life fit around it. Theoretically, I write in the mornings and do everything else in the afternoons. I say "theoretically" because as I'm sure you know life tends to intrude, and I'm not that great about setting boundaries.

I am the editor of a new anthology of short stories that this group might find interesting and there is currently a Goodreads giveaway going:

https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/sh...

Hi Clifford! Yes, I find life intrudes quite often! Do you write from home, in a coffee shop, library, office? I do all of the above depending on how life is flowing ;)

Yes, all of the above. I'm in a coffee shop right now--and am supposed to be proofreading galleys, but of course I checked email!

What if any role did an editor(s)play in the completion of In An Unchartered Country or What the Zang Boys Know? Also, should a writer be concerned that in following an editor's advice, the final work may turn out to be more the editor's story than his own?

Hi, Joe. There is often tension between a writer and editor, and sometimes a writer may feel an editor has meddled in the work. (Carver, Lish, as we have discussed!)

My view as an editor is that the work is ultimately the writer's, and my advice can be accepted or not. As a writer, I do listen to the editor and make my decisions based on my own instincts. With both Uncharted Country and Zhang Boys, the editor used a very light touch. With a collection of stories that have been published elsewhere, this may be expected--they've already been vetted by editors. Still, the editor did make some suggestions--we changed the titles of a couple of stories, and tinkered with the order--but editing was mostly limited to copyediting (getting my punctuation right, usage consistent, etc.).

Hi, Clifford!

Since you have experience writing in both forms, I wonder if you'd talk a little about what you see as the single most distinct difference between a novel a short story.

Thanks!
Kristin

Hi, Kristin! I should ask you what the difference is between writing a novel and writing a non-fiction book!

Apart from length (heh heh), I would say, seriously, that the most distinct difference is breadth. (Or depth, depending on how you look at it.) A short story is all about focus and forward momentum. Ideally (there are exceptions, of course) it is focused on a short span of time and space and limited characters. Some teachers I know advise short story writers to cut out flashbacks. Most of what the reader needs to know about the characters' past can be implied, or slipped in, without stopping the story's forward progress. In a novel, though, the opposite is true. While we still need that forward momentum, a reader is willing to take a more circuitous route--diving into backstory through flashbacks, for example--and will tolerate more characters.

In my classes I use a lens metaphor: A novel is a wide-angle lens, a short story is a close-up lens. (And flash fiction is a microscope.)

This is super helpful. Thanks, Clifford!

Hi Clifford,
I'm finding your comments very helpful.Thanks for that. Still, there are so many questions to be asked. Here's another:
What is your view about the role of description in the short story? I believe one of the reasons the great Raymond Carver became so popular was his economical and judicious use of it. I'm interested in what you think.

I love writing description, and then I usually have to dial it back some, especially in a short story. My view is that we shouldn't overdo it--stories need to be focused on the moment and momentum--but description can be great for setting, mood, and tone. When I teach, I usually use Chekhov's The Lady with the Pet Dog to talk about setting. Chekhov isn't as spare as Carver, but we do get a clear picture of Malta from his few lines about it.

But pure exposition is likely to slow a story down too much. One of my favorite examples of the perfect way to get description into a story is Bullet in the Brain by Tobias Wolff. He's not just describing the setting (first the banking hall and then the interior of the brain), the character is experiencing it. The reader sees it because the character sees it.

Thanks. I love that you use well-known stories as part of your explanation. Doing so is similar to the way a master musician attempts to explain the intricacies of improvising jazz music. One needs to listen to(and hear!)the sounds of the great ones in order to understand.
I believe it also underscores something we discussed before; if an artist... writer, musician, painter... is going to create something of value, he/she must start with the kind of talent that cannot be taught but only developed.

This is a memory from 1964 on the subject of the short story:
in a writing class that Peter Taylor taught someone asked him "What is a short story?" He said," A short story is a one-act play." The next week another person asked the same question. Peter said," It's a lyric poem, but without the visible pyrotechnics" (Peter had a lot of poet friends--Randall Jarrell and Robert Lowell among them--as well as Peter's wife Eleanor Ross Taylor.)
The next week someone asked the same question. Peter said, "The short story does the work of a novel but in fifteen pages."
So...all of the above?

Every writer has his short story metaphors, and some have several! :)

Clifford,

A question we often ponder: How do you select the title for your books? Do they grow from your writing or do you have the title in mind before you start to write?

I like this question. With my first book, In an Uncharted Country, I didn't know I was writing a book. It was just short stories and eventually I had a bunch of them (linked in various ways), so I had to come up with a title. I tried various titles, but settled on the title of one of the stories because I thought it summed up one of the themes of the book.

With the second book, What the Zhang Boys Know, I began with a working title for the book which was the title of the first story in the novel in stories. Later, I tried a couple of others, but again I thought the final version reflected one of the themes. By the way, the title is a truncated version of the title of one of the stories in the book, What the Zhang Boys Know About Life on Planet Earth.

With the novels I've written--unpublished so far--I did start with a title, but have always changed it at some point to something that better reflects what I've actually written, rather than what I set out to write.

Clifford,

I read "In an Uncharted Country" with great pleasure - what I thoroughly enjoyed was seeing the characters come back again and again in various stories, and then in the final "Red Peony". This is something I find often missing in short stories - you come to like a character and then your interaction with them is so short-lived! Even more so, in this book, we get to see a generation unfolding with Hank's reflection on his father, and then Hank's sons as he himself ages. What I'm curious on is whether you initially planned for more than one story for each character?

Thanks for the question, Monica, and thanks for the comments about the book! When I began writing the stories, they were just stories. I didn't have a plan. But what happened was that I also didn't want to let the characters go. I like a story ending that "opens up" rather than resolving things too neatly, and this approach to endings invites a "sequel," so that's what happened. And it also seemed natural as I kept writing, because the small town is organic and these people move through it and really live in that sense.

Interesting that you got attached to the characters as well! It comes back to that question of short story vs. novel, doesn't it? At what point did you know they were separate short stories and not becoming part of a larger novel?

I thought about developing some of the stories/characters into a novel, and to a certain extent I have. (The novel my agent is trying to sell now is set in a similar landscape.) But these always felt like stand-alone stories to me. My second book, What the Zhang Boys Know, is a different "story." That feels like a novel to me (although not everyone agrees!) because there is one through-line to the narrative in addition to the plots of individual stories.

Hi Clifford,

It's always interesting to see how authors arrive at book titles!

Speaking of titles, if someone is new to your work, which book should they start with and why?

I can't choose between my children, so I'll say it this way: linked story collections or novels in stories are inevitable compared either to Winesburg, Ohio if they are set in a rural area or Dubliners if they are set in an urban area. My first book, In an Uncharted Country, is set in a small town in Virginia, so it makes sense to compare it to Winesburg, Ohio and the books (like Olive Kitteridge) that are influenced by it. So if you like Olive Kitteridge, you might like In an Uncharted Country. My second book, What the Zhang Boys Know, is set in Washington DC, and so it might be compared to Dubliners (although unlike Dubliners it has an over-arching narrative). So if you like Edward P. Jones's story collections, which are compared to Dubliners, you might like What the Zhang Boys Know.

Or if you prefer novels, Zhang Boys might be the choice because of the overall narrative arc.

Hi Clifford - just wondering, which of your works did you find most challenging to write and why?

Which of your works did you find easiest to write and why? You mentioned that "In an Uncharted Country" expanded naturally as you kept writing, do you find this often the case for your writing?

Another question we like to pose to authors - What would be the most important message that you would like the reader to take away with them after reading a story of yours?

As well, do you have a favourite theme that you like to explore?

The challenges were quite different for the two published books. I was still finding my way in the short story form while writing In an Uncharted Country, so that presented its own challenges. Plus, I was quite insecure, being a relatively new writer. With Zhang Boys I had a plan from the beginning so the writing seemed much easier--it really flowed. It helped, too, that I was telling one big story as well as independent stories, although that was also a big challenge.

The work does expand naturally, in everything I've done so far. You start and one idea leads to another and just grows, and THEN the challenge is reining it in, cutting what doesn't belong, etc.

DigiWriting wrote: "Another question we like to pose to authors - What would be the most important message that you would like the reader to take away with them after reading a story of yours?

As well, do you have a..."

I guess I missed the second question while I was answering the first.

As far as messages, go, I don't really deal in "messages," per se, although I'm sure my world view comes through. For example, in In an Uncharted Country, the stories are about a pretty diverse group of people, even though it's a small town. The book treats that as a normal situation, and people settle in without questioning it, for the most part. In the second book, What the Zhang Boys Know, which is set in Washington DC, the reader is less surprised by the diversity, I suppose, but it's still an important part of that community.

In terms of themes probably a favorite is the outsider trying to find a place where he or she fits in. I've noticed that the novels I'm working in also reflect that theme.

Hi Cliff,
I know when I was in college and graduate school professors spent a good deal of time discussing various types of writing (naturalism, realism ,minimalism etc.)How would you categorize your own work? Does it fit more or less neatly into any one type.

I'm definitely in the realism school, but I've experimented with magical realism, and the novel I'm currently working on might be called post-modern realism (that might be called minimalist).