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- Writers tend by temperament to be either sprinters or marathoners, and I learned early that the long haul was my stride... I preferred more narrative room.
- The clown comes to play Hamlet, and vice versa; the long-distance runner itches to sprint. Just as there are musical ideas that won't do for a symphony but are just right for a short story: quick takes, epiphanies that even a novella would attenuate, not to mention a novel. Over the years, I had accumulated a few such narrative ideas in my notebooks.
- Moreover, I teach stories as well as telling them, and like most writing coaches I find the short story more useful for seminar purposes. You can hold a short story in your hand, like a lyric poem; see it whole; examine the function of individual sentences, even individual words, as you can't readily do with Bleak House or War & Peace.
- ...but I wanted to be in those anthologies. Not all of a writer's motives are pure.
- "Ours not to stop and think; ours but to swim and think..." because a moment's thought reveals the pointlessness of swimming.
- The thoughtful swimmer's choices, then, they say, are two: give over thrashing and go under for good, or embrace the absurdity; affirm in & for itself the night-sea journey; swim on with neither motive nor destination, for the sake of swimming, and compassionate moreover with your fellow swimmer, we being all at sea & equally in the dark.
sep 6 2020 ∞
sep 6 2020 +
sep 6 2020 +