New forms

And unexpected inspiration

I’ve always been vehemently against the short story format, with few exceptions. 

I liked Palahniuk’s Haunted, but there was a connecting thread. Short stories, but woven together with an overarching narrative that continued to grow in horror and intrigue. 

I loved Rebecca Makkai’s novel, The Hundred-Year House—a story with a truly original structure that I still think about years after reading and rereading it.

So I thought if I’m going to try short stories, I might like her collection Music for Wartime. To be completely honest, I didn’t know they were short stories until I got the book from the library, and I was disappointed to see so. I was also disappointed when I finished the collection. Her lyricism was there, but short stories, as a whole, have rarely captured my heart.

So it was surprising, to say the least, to realize that I might want to try writing one myself.

The thought struck me while I listened to Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act on Spotify. Rubin says that we shouldn’t immediately give form to an idea or inspiration, which is the complete opposite of what I’ve done. 

When I write down my ideas, I almost always give them form too. Idea for a book. Idea for an interview. The form always feels like part of the inspiration itself. But I realized, as Rubin says, that I might be getting ahead of myself. Encouraged by his calm, dulcet voice, I did something I’ve never done before. 

Instead of opening up a notebook, I opened my sketchbook instead, and I drew the story. I sketched out the apartment block where I saw the whole thing taking place. I made notes on the side and watched the thing take shape. As I outlined brick by tedious brick of my little building, the story came together in my mind, constructing itself with an invisible crew of drywallers and carpenters. 

After that, the story—a short one, indeed—materialized in my notebook. I thought I would be frustrated by the lack of space. I’m used to runways of 90,000 words that give me room to stretch my legs and tease out the plot. How much yearning can possibly be communicated in a few pages? How invested could I, or a reader, possibly be in something that’s over before you can even get comfortable in your chair?

But the characters only had so much to tell me. They easily handed over their hearts and deepest desires, their shameful little secrets, their most unappealing truths. But afterwards, they went quiet again, and I didn’t miss them, even though they were as real as anything else I’ve written.

As I’ve learned this past year, short connections aren’t always shallow or lacking. With some people, with some places, a lot happens all at once and then the happening is all wrung out. It goes fast because it’s meant to; it ends because there’s no more left to do. 

To stretch it out any further is to force something delicate to tear, and even if tear is what it was designed to do, we all have the choice to do so gracefully or otherwise: on the perforated edge of a notebook page, or right down the middle, jagged and bleeding, the words interrupted halfway through.

I haven’t been writing much lately. 

I’m working and building furniture. I’m taking vitamins. I’m getting my feet under me after years of tripping up a hill. But I miss it badly. My notebooks sit on a shelf, along with my creative inclinations, which I sometimes sift through to consider whether chrome and wicker can be well-paired in a living room. 

With every gain comes a loss, even if it’s not forever. This new life is what I wanted and asked for. But in some ways it’s always easier to have nothing but the thing you love most. Now I have a lot of things I love to some small and negligible degree, like a leather couch, and a paper lamp that looks like a little UFO. 

It’s better but it’s also worse. Am I allowed to say that? 

I understand why artists are so comfortable in lack and wanting. It’s the purest form. It’s reliable and safe, even when it’s the exact opposite of those things. It’s far easier to be striving towards—a noble and commendable way to be—than to have and to celebrate. I keep saying I’ll do my celebrating when. 

Even as I’m grateful for hot cups of tea and back lane views and the smell of men’s cologne and a warm cat with white paws, I’m still, ridiculously, waiting for bigger things to celebrate.

At this point, I’m afraid it’s been too long. I think I forget how it goes.