Tales
I like to play. I think it’s the theatricalist in me. I spent about a decade studying theatre, mostly performing. Gotta figure some of it stuck. It’s fun to set up a situation—a unique narrative point of view, or a frame that constrains a tale, or some finagling with rules or genre—and see it through. It can yield surprising results. Constraints breed creativity, after all. I come at a piece like a director, blocking and arranging and orchestrating the different elements of the tale, and yeah, I like a bit of spectacle.
And I like stories. Many authors—maybe most—start with character. I tend to start with the narrator, with the lens. Before anything else, I think of the perspective. I like pieces that explore and tease the limits of narrative, that challenge us to think about what a story can be, where they can be found, and whom is capable of the telling. Realism is terrific, and one thing I’ll give it is it allows us to discover and invest in the mundane a spirit of tension and significance, of Climax, of Catharsis. But for entertainment value, you can’t beat a good performance, and in a prose tale you find that in the narration.
I tend to be guided, in those narrative performances, by Poe’s view of the purpose of a short story. Here’s what he said in “The Importance of the Single Effect in a Prose Tale":
"A skillful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents—he then combines such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design."
Mind you, it needn’t be a lofty design; a story doesn’t need to be profound. It does need a purpose. It’s the provocation of a response that’s important. Andy Kaufman understood it. (Artaud, too, for that matter.) He knew what Poe meant, even if he maybe never read that particular passage in his life. “I just want real reactions,” he said. “I want people to laugh from the gut, be sad from the gut—or get angry from the gut.” Sometimes the response isn’t pretty, but neither is life. And neither should be art.
Some things I strive for in a piece:
—For better or worse, a dominant narrator. The archetype of the Storyteller with firm control over the narrative.
—A precision in phrasing. A laser pinpointing of the exact vocabulary and syntax to convey the most specific impression/meaning/significance.
—A touch of the macabre, or of horror, a glimpse at the darker parts of our lives.
—Sometimes (intentionally) and often (inadvertently), a bit of comedy.
—A final tableau. Again, the theatricalist in me. I like a strong picture to end on.
And if this all seems a little academically lofty, or pedantically effete—well, here’s the self-deprecating part: None of the above is to say that everything I write always has to have all the described features, or even tries to. And it’s certainly not to say that a) I execute my intentions effectively; or b) that what I’m attempting is even worth it. It’s entirely possible that I have utterly mistaken aesthetic notions. I laugh at plenty of shit that no one else thinks is funny. Why wouldn’t the same hold true with my stories? I’m fully aware that I might be chuckling into the void on a lot of these pieces. Crickets in the audience. Oh well.
The stories you’ll read here fall into two general categories: tales and triptychs. A tale is a short story, more or less as defined by a couple of centuries of literary canon. See Poe. A triptych is a short-short story, a flash piece, and they are usually the result of a game. A person gives me three things to include in a story of 1,00 words or less. That simple. The challenge of constraints is a good recipe for stimulating the imagination. (For more details on the triptychs, click here.)
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