What I've learned in the last six months.

Hm. November. Last time I wrote in this blog, it was May.

Six months.

I wish I could say I had more to report on the story front. Ink-on-paper reports. Unfortunately, I don't. What I can say, though, is that I've thought a great deal more about stories and writing, and I've learned some things about myself as a writer. Specifically, I learned two things about my process and method.

I am a slow writer

I lied in the introduction. I did write a brand-spankin' new story. It was garbage except for the initial concept and one of the characters. A janitor and some fucked up kids sneak into the local high school every weekend to play elaborate games of dungeons and dragons--but the moment of time I'm focused on is a game that never happens.

I wrote this story for a graduate-level fiction workshop. I wanted to try my hands at a "realistic" story--but about something that didn't involve alcohol, adultery, romance, or any of the things I've come to expect from my peers in this workshop.

While my peers were supportive and considerate, it wasn't hard to tell that the story was poorly conceived and executed even worse.

I wrote the story in two weeks. That's the shortest time it has ever taken me to move a story from brain to scribbles to digital draft. The only scene that worked--for me or my peers--was the first scene, where the Janitor dumped a wheelbarrow of cattle feed over the students' cell phones in the cafeteria freezer, and told the "main" character (the close third person PoV) that nobody would get their phones back until the dragon was slain at the end of the night--or the party died in the process.

The Janitor--Ron--was frightening, which is what I wanted, but the rest of my characters were just empty vessels, space fillers. The only character I really had was Ron. Everything else was forced.

Given a month or more of contemplation, I might have developed more of a narrative, or made my characters more believable. But I didn't have that kind of time. I usually sit on a story idea for months before committing anything to pen(cil)--and then, after writing it, it usually takes me about a week or two to draft the story into digital format--making notes along the way to make changes or rewrite certain sections.

Then the revision process prior to allowing others to read my work is usually another two week affair.

If these were short short stories (3-5k), this would be a problem, I think--but I tend to write novellas. 15k-20k monsters, which brings me to the second thing I realized...

I have mammoth story ideas

My peers in the fiction workshop are all short story writers. They like their tight, controlled, restrained pieces of prose. Their stories are as much about what's on the page as what is made liminal by remaining off the page. The stories are sometimes beautiful, other times haunting.

But they don't really transport me anywhere. They don't grab me and drag me through a messiness. I feel like when I'm reading a short work, I'm look askance at a scene--like I'm prying as opposed to watching.

My stories and my approach to them are unapologetically big. It's not about a brief insight into a little drama in a banal world--I want you to gawk at an ugly scene and watch it spread, like watching a flooded river gradually overwhelm the river's banks, the streets, the sandbags, until it reaches your porch and begins to dribble under your doors. I want to bind you in a chair and hold your eyelids open and make you watch everything unfold.

Which takes time. And space. Which means more words, and more pages.

I don't think the short story can do that. And I don't think short story writers--whose tendency is to try to condense and contract a story--know how to provide feedback to feed that impulse, or to make it work for an audience.