Office Hours

"Sticks" - A short anecdote about an even shorter story.

Before we launch in, here’s something nice that we all did - thanks to “Insider” for this generous recognition of the good thing we’ve got going on here.

Q.

I have two young kids, one is six and the other is almost one. My time is, well, compressed by the wonderful labors of my domestic life. Maybe this is why I love Tillie Olsen (thanks for that) and Grace Paley -- their writing seemed to happen with a child on their lap, or at least in their view, and for sure within earshot. Given this compression, I'm really attracted to the idea of trying to write what I think people are calling "micro fiction." I don't know if that's a universal term, so maybe it's better to say there are some writers like Robert Walser and Lydia Davis that have done this really well. But one of my favorite examples of short-short (I'm from a Hispanic family, so I innately add syllables to make things smaller) fiction is your story “Sticks.”

I'm wondering if your writing process changed much when you wrote “Sticks.” I doubt you set out to write something that short, given how much you advocate for seeing what you say vs planning it out. I don't recall if you have written other pieces that are quite that short before. Was the story longer and you kept cutting pieces out? Or did you find yourself just moving through the events kind of quickly? It's such a complete, heartbreaking story and it can't be more than 500 words. I'd be curious to hear any thoughts on how writing short-short fiction might be a shade different than short fiction.

Thank you and best wishes to all. The comments here are the kind of conversation that I think I always imagined I would be a part of when I got old enough. Maybe now that we're getting our two kids sea legs under us more, I can clear the sleep out of my eyes enough to participate.

A.
Ah, you are definitely in the glory years, the phase that, years from now, you will romanticize and long for, completely forgetting how tired you were.

But I really love the appreciative, grateful way you write about this stage of your life, while, of course, acknowledging the challenges.

“Sticks” was written when I was, approximately, in that phase myself – somewhere around 1993, when our kids were 5 and 3. 

Sticks

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In the original contributor’s note, I said, "For two years I'd been driving past a house like the one in the story, imagining the owner as a man more joyful and self-possessed and less self-conscious than myself. Then one day I got sick of him and invented his opposite, and there was the story." 

And that’s pretty much the truth. 

“Sticks,” as you’ll see, is about a guy who has a pole in front of his house that he decorates, for holidays and so on.  The house that inspired the story was on the way to the church we were attending at that time (in Rochester, NY). 

This is not the actual house but…pretty close.

Mostly, I think, the real-world guy used that apparatus for sports purposes – the Buffalo Bills were having a good run at the time and he would celebrate it by hanging a Bill jersey and helmet up there.  

As a new parent, struggling with money and time, I admired the guy for having his act together enough to go out there and maintain that thing.  (“Where does he find the time, the energy?”)

I wrote the story at work.  I can remember the desk – I’d arranged it so I could sit there, with my back to the window, facing the door of the office I shared with a colleague.  That way, when someone came in, I could toggle back to the work document I was supposed to be attending to. 

As I remember it, I’d finished a longer story a few days before and was squirming a bit with the style I’d been using – this would have been about halfway through the collection CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. 

One day I mentally challenged myself to write three short-short stories before I left work.  (It must have been a day when I didn’t have much to do, or had a big, fat charge number I could bilk.)  “Sticks” was one of those three stories – the other two, I don’t know what happened to them but I think they weren’t great. 

“Sticks” was the first of the three that I tried. I had a guy and his pole and my sense of inferiority to him in mind - that’s what the story was going to be about. But, as I got ready to write it and mentally tried that version (disorganized guy admires organized guy) on for size, it didn’t feel promising or fun. I felt the need for one more twist; for one level of meaning beyond the one that I’d come up with conceptually.  

The whole text (392 words!) came out pretty much as it is, above. It was done lightly, in one quick (20 minute?) burst.  As you all know if you’re a Story Club regular, my dominant idea is “revise, revise, revise,” but that wasn’t the case here.  I think, honestly, I got lucky; maybe having just heavily revised that earlier story helped - I had some Mental Editing Clarity, that state in which one is so used to editing that you are essentially doing it as, or before, one types. 

It might also be that the story came out in that way because it so closely tracked my actual thinking and worrying at that time. I was very occupied by a “how am I doing” vibe, re parenting and anxiety.

I sent the resulting story around, it got rejected, and then, finally, it got accepted by the (sadly now defunct) Story Magazine.  A few years later, Harper’s Magazine re-ran it.

After Story and Harper’s ran it, I kept trying to put it into the subsequent collections, but it never felt right, until I was putting Tenth of December together, in 2011 or 2012 (i.e., some twenty years after the story was originally written).  Then it just dropped right into place in the collection.  I put it second, right after “Victory Lap” and before “Puppy.”  I felt it might be a nice pace-changer; the reader would come out of “Victory Lap” and maybe not be quite ready for another long, multi-voiced story (which “Puppy” is). 

Both “Victory Lap” and “Puppy” are pretty manic and comic and wild and, in comparison, “Sticks,” is a bit stoic and minimal – its clipped voice, is, in part, I guess, because the narrator is hurt, resistant to big admissions, maybe. 

It was interesting, to have had the story done and published for so long, and then to hear peoples’ positive reactions to it after Tenth of December came out.  Other writers have written about it, it’s been anthologized, and people use it in their teaching (like here and here and here). 

So, of course, this is gratifying.  It’s also a little terrifying, because, as a teacher, I have nothing to say about the story.  It literally just happened.  I thought about writing it on Sunday, came into work on Monday, sat down, wrote it.  Something like that.

I suspect that one of the reasons I’ve become such a fiction-theory wonk is that, for me, thinking about how good writing works, and developing an approach, is a good hedge against – well, against the truth that (as William Goldman said of Hollywood) “Nobody knows anything.” 

A person can have all the right ideas about writing and be wonderfully articulate in talking about it, and his work can be bad.  A person can be a great writer and, when the time comes for her to be interviewed, she can find herself talking in circles because 1) she doesn’t know how it works and/or 2) feels that trying to suss it all out might mess her up. 

But, to answer your question – the big difference between this and my “real” writing was that I’d set myself that challenge: “write three short-shorts before leaving work.”  There wasn’t going to be any extensive re-writing.  That was part of the contract I’d made with myself: just blurt it out, see what happens.

As we’ve discussed here before, a constraint can sometimes pop us right out of our habits.  In this case, I was saying to myself, “OK, Mr. Rewrite, what if rewriting isn’t allowed?  What have you got, in that case?  Can you imagine – quickly – a (shapely, meaningful) idea and then just…jot it down?” 

I didn’t cut anything out of it, that I recall.  (There are some small differences between the Story/Harper’s version and the one in Tenth of December, but not much.) 

And yes – it’s the shortest thing I’ve ever published.  There’s a story called “My House” at the end of my latest book, Liberation Day, that was written in the same spirit – I carried a rough outline around in my mind (although, in the case of “My House,” it was for about a year, as opposed to a day, as was the case with “Sticks”) and then, one day, just sat down and wrote it – not in a day, but more like five days, per my computer records.

I think, by definition, this kind of story is going to be less exploratory, more straight-forward - like a joke or a pithy anecdote.  There’s some idea of an arc in my head and then – boom – I type it up, accepting that whatever presents – whatever ornaments I come up with to hang on the Christmas tree that is that arc – will be just right. 

In other words (as with the other approach), I’m trusting my subconscious mind.  It’s just that I’m putting it under pressure, by giving it less time to work things out. (I guess it’s something like improv.)

One thing I’d add – this story and, really, all of my work, are so much a result of that sleep-deprived, love-rich, pressure cooker time that you describe so sweetly and concisely.  (I loved “Maybe now that we're getting our two kids sea legs under us more, I can clear the sleep out of my eyes enough to participate.”) I never really found much to write about until we had our kids and it seemed that stuff had begun to matter, i.e., I could screw things up, i.e., my decisions had import.  (Obviously, not everyone has to have kids to arrive at that insight. But I can be slow about such things.) That was when my fiction first started to carry a moral charge. And I think a reader can feel this pressure in “Sticks” - this feeling that being a parent is a huge responsibility, and that it happens so fast, faster than we can make sense of it, and that the consequences are real, and can linger…

Anyway – best of luck to you and your family. I hope this helps and I hope you enjoy every minute with your family.