I’ve been in a bit of a bubble with writing the past couple of months, an idealized space where I could imagine that the writing process was composed only of the short, sparkly part of producing new things, of creating a full piece in a single, sustained burst, or of spilling out the first promising scene, to be continued later. Even on the days when crafting a poem spanned a few days, or when it took several failed attempts to arrive at a microfiction for the day, or when inspiration was lagging and it was an effort to get something out—even then, there was the promise of brevity. I could abandon the piece if it wasn’t working. I would be on to the next one tomorrow.
Now, though, I’m reminded of what I hate (yes, hate) about short story writing.
I often can’t get situated in short stories, in the way I do a novel, where there can be a deeper kind of investment in the characters to carry you through the piece, and also a tacit permission to wander. In a short story, I feel less grounded. I know I’m not going to be here for the long haul and so I’m thinking about containment, how to keep it to form. Voice is what often gets me into a short story, or sometimes an image or scene—and while that might be enough to carry me through the length of a microfiction piece or even a flash fiction piece, with a more traditional-length story, I tend to lose this spark a few scenes in. I get stuck in short stories, wondering what I’m doing in them—where I’m going or if I’m going anywhere at all.
I forget (every time) how messy the process is, that I can’t just write my way straight through a story, that the story may be “short,” but the process won’t be.
And so, below: a little log of the stops and starts in the story I’m currently drafting, with the hopes that, in the midst of this narrative about the mundane day-to-day struggles of writing, lies something helpful.
Monday. Writing about writing.
At the laundromat this morning, I was working on a story that came out of a shared image prompt, brainstormed collectively by my fiction classmates.1 Part of my stuckness, then, comes from the fact that I need to include a very specific image at the end of it (a very weird, specific image: a boiling head) and right now what I’ve got is two girls in a car, driving to a beehive: two girls who’ve recently realized that they’re not sisters, but cousins.
It’s an odd story, one that is not following a fully organic process because it’s bound by a prompt. But I often have this same stuckness even when I have complete say in where a story goes: I’ll have an idea for a final image, but I won’t be sure how to connect the dots. I’ll have happened upon one scene but not know why I’m there.
I realized, today, as I sat down to the scene, how long it had been since I’d done this: opened the computer to a scene where I had no idea what I was doing with it. I’d had chapters of the novel where I’d been uncertain about how to write it or what exactly would happen—but by the middle of the draft, the broader arc of the novel felt clear to me, even if I didn’t know exactly how it would end. I’d been uncertain, this spring, about directions for a microfiction or poem—but that uncertainty lacked the feeling of being caught in the middle, of complete unknowing.
And so I started recalling a few old practices that I’d forgotten, for just this stage of writing, some things for tinkering with the story to get it moving again.
What I ended up trying today is something I often do when I do morning pages, and that is: writing about the writing.
After I read through what I’d already written, I paused with the girls stuck in the car, and I wrote about what was going on: the conflict at hand, where I thought the story was heading, where this boiling head could appear. I realized I needed to know more about the family structure in the story. Right now, the girls know the identity of their parents—so I began wondering how the story would change if they didn’t. Right now, the large extended family in the story belongs to their presumed father—but what if it belonged to the mother instead?
The process produced no actual writing that I could use, but it began to unlock some simple things and clarify parts of the story that had felt fairly hazy to me before. I realized that the ending would largely depend how the relationship between the protagonist, Bea, and her cousin (who’d only just appeared on the page) shook out. I began thinking both in terms of themes and scene, and though it all still felt uncertain, there was a bit more energy and direction than before.
Tuesday. Exploratory scene.
After Monday’s exercise, I knew my next step would be another kind of process writing: I needed to let the girls have a conversation in the car. I was familiar with Bea as a character already, but I didn’t know anything about the cousin in the driver’s seat, other than the fact that she was “chatty”—exactly the kind of person who would be talking on this drive. I knew the dialogue I wrote wouldn’t necessarily end up in the final draft of the story—I don’t know enough about the arc of the story to decide what they should talk about, and the scene itself might prove unnecessary—but I also knew that working through such dialogue would help me figure out how these characters interact with one another, which I do need to know for the story right now.
Matt Bell, in his book Refuse to Be Done,2 talks about writing an exploratory draft for novels, a draft in which the writer’s main goal is simply to find the story. In short stories, too, this kind of writing is useful—and it’s easier, in a shorter form, to allow for the throwaway scene, to write purely for exploration.
Thinking about the car scene as an exploratory scene, for me, shifted the purpose and took some of the pressure off—I could tell myself that I was *only* exploring, not *actually* writing, and it came out much more easily than it otherwise would have.
Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Research.
I kept opening the document throughout the week, rereading it, and closing it to research instead. I’d gotten the the girls all the way to the house where the beehives were, but instead of writing the next scene, I’ve been immersing myself in YouTube videos about beekeeping instead.
There’s a bit of a danger in this, of using research to procrastinate the story, or of oversaturating the story with facts, and I’m veering close to that right now. But as the story’s themes are beginning to emerge, research is useful both practically and creatively: I need to know more about the topic of bees so that I can accurately depict some of the setting and actions when the girls get to the hives. I need to know more so that I can thoughtfully intertwine this aspect of the story with the familial part of the plot.
But there’s also a bit of a mystery in research as well: I don’t know what the research might unlock. There might be an image that prompts a later scene. There might be a fact or detail that opens up a thematic thread. Who knows, I thought—maybe the key to this boiling head somehow solves itself through facts about beekeeping.
Friday, sitting at a coffee shop with the other fiction writers, all of us stuck in the stories we were drafting, this happened: I went from a video of a beekeeper making the rounds in California and treating hives for mites, to a video of a beekeeper explaining how to make food for bees with heated water and sugar. You’re not supposed to bring the water to a full boil, he said. But my characters don’t know what they’re doing—they might boil that water.
The point is that brief forays outside the story can provide all kinds of direction when you go back in.
Saturday. Stuck again.
I tried, ill-advisedly, to write a scene of the girls at the hives after my shift at the brewery. It was a long, busy shift, and I was tired—and also friends with too many of my coworkers, so there were interruptions and conversations more interesting than the scene I was trying to write. I kept shutting my notebook and opening it again.
There were other problems too: I am working on other stories, and these were more appealing. I still don’t know enough about the hives to really write this scene.
Sunday. Some Saunders and a walk.
In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain3, George Saunders talks about reading a story and asking yourself, at the bottom of each page, what expectations it has created, what questions it is posing. I found this helpful as a stage of revising (with the novel) and realized it would be useful drafting as well, at this point of being stuck.
This morning—paused, still, before the hives—I did what Saunders often suggests, and imagined myself the reader of my own story. If I were reading this, and got to the point of the girls at the edge of the clearing, what questions would be running through my head? What would I be waiting for, what kind of scene would I be anticipating?
I’ll probably send a half-draft of the story to a friend later today. And share it with another friend later this week, which is a way of passing those questions on to them. But I’ll also try to sit with them myself.
In the meantime, I think I’ll leave the page and the research for a bit and go for a walk.
A classmate at Notre Dame once described me (accurately) as “devoted to walking.” I think this is the correct phrasing, that I have something of a religious attitude towards it. I walk for a lot of reasons, though—for very practical ones (errands and exercise and transportation) and for the simple fact that I like it.
With regards to writing, I find walking to be one of the best times to let a story idea work itself around in your head. I’m not actively trying to solve a problem most of the time when I’m doing this; I’m just letting the story live imaginatively in my mind, surfacing and dropping as I meander for an hour or two or sometimes three. It doesn’t have to be that long. I’m not thinking of the story all that time. But it’s a space, an openness for the story to wander in and move around a little.
In this way, I feel like I am always working on a story even when I am not working on it, so that even the novel—which I am neither writing nor reading at the moment—has remained present this spring. I’ll be making my way through the neighborhoods of Bowling Green, or circling through the prairie trails of Wintergarden, or following the straight path up Slippery Elm, and the characters will present themselves to me again in some scene, or a question will rise up and I’ll contemplate it for a minute or two, before letting it drift off again.
It’s when the work of writing feels the least like work. When the story does some of the work for you. I know that the next day the scene I’m struggling with will likely still be an ill-formed mess or a blank on the page, that there’s no quick fix to the difficulties a story poses. But there’s a kind of lovely rest in feeling the work move from the mind to the body, in feeling the narrative turn and tumble and run on its own inertia through your head, in getting to inhabit the story and trust in its small movements forward.
This is an activity we borrowed from one of our professors, who uses it for an assignment he calls a “common image story.” Unlike a simple word restriction prompt (where you have to work a set of words into a story or poem) this organizes the words into a single image that each writer must incorporate into a short story. As an example, one of the images we ended up with (not the one I’m using for the story) was: “The serrated record player exits the crinkly accordion.” The sentence itself doesn’t have to appear verbatim, just the image itself, which can be placed at any point in the story.
Here’s how the process works: Each person writes one word, with a designated part of speech, on a piece of paper to compose the sentence. Similar to exquisite corpse, you fold the paper over so that the next person can’t see the other words in the sentence (which makes the resultant image quite strange.) Do this in a circle, to produce multiple sentences, then choose the best one. You may need to edit the sentences a bit to have them make sense. The parts of speech are: adjective, noun, verb, adjective, noun. (The verb should be a transitive verb—a verb that takes an object—for the sentence structure to work.)
Bell, Matt. Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts. Soho Press, 2022.
Saunders, George. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading and Life. Random House, 2021.