Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook—even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united—united with each other and against earlier and later ages—by a great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century—the blindness about which posterity will ask, “But how could they have thought that?”—lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth.

None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.

It goes like this: when I lived in LA I went to a gym called 24 Hour Fitness, the one in Santa Monica. Before I stopped doing cardio (the way normal people define cardio) entirely I used to do the eliptical for fifteen minutes or so before a workout. I had discovered that I didn’t despise cardio if I listened to a podcast while I was doing it, so I would always listen to something: lectures on globalization, macroeconomics, neuroscience. And then I found out that Cory, who I had heard of but never read, was podcasting a reading from Bruce Sterling’s The Hacker Crackdown, a book about events I remember taking place in a scene that I was a part of (80s hack/phreak BBS stuff.)

Anyway, I was excited to have the opportunity to listen to this, which was possible because Sterling had licensed it Creative Commons (thus enabling Cory’s podcast reading) and because Cory had decided to spend all that time and trouble reading it and then putting it online. What I wasn’t excited about were the little prefaces Cory began each reading with, which were filled with current events about his life that I had no interest in. Until he happened to mention one day that he was going to be teaching at CW2008 in Seattle, how he himself was a Clarion alum, and how much the process had helped him.

That was really how it all started. No Cory podcast, no Shane in Seattle. My life would be very very different than it is right now.

Anyway, that’s really neither here nor there. The real news is that Cory’s in the news again, having proposed a fascinating experiment in publishing, which he will run on himself. The idea in a nutshell: his new collection will be available in a variety of formats (including for free), with a variety of meta tie-ins, and a variety of strategies to get the whole package into stores and into your greedy little hands. But how much will he make, in the end?

To be honest, I have no idea how much money that will be ($10,000 has already come in, of course). But I do know what I’ll do about it. I’m going to disclose it, all of it, every month, in a running tally in a monthly column here in Publishers Weekly. And incidentally, this article is grossing me all of $900, less my agent’s 15% commission, and the columns $400 hereafter. I will then put this into an appendix, which will be added to new editions of the book and compared to the revenues from Overclocked. That’s as close to an apples-to-apples comparison as I can come up with, but I think it will speak well to the question: what’s the best a writer like me can do on his own, versus with a traditional publisher for whom he does everything he can to aid in book sales?

And that really is what this experiment shows: a best-case analysis of what a guy can do, sans publisher, in the sci-fi industry. I say “best case” because Cory is a huge name, with big talent, probably the most rabid fan base in all of sci-fi dom, and an understanding of online culture that is second to none. I’m guessing this experiment will be a grand slam of epic proportions, not all of which will be measurable simply by tallying up the benefits he accrues from the book — his pre-existing books will sell more, too, and he’ll get even more publicity, accrue more notoriety, and acquire more fans.

Naturally these secondary benefits are impossible to quantify directly. But that’s the way this world works now, which Cory knows better than almost anyone. It will be exciting to see the numbers.

Even so, people still drop their cartons of free booktrash outside one of the awnings after hours, so when I’m walking to the U I usually stop and peruse. Even today, in full inundation, I had a moment to spare to see what had been left, and O Joy, I found a copy of Clifton Fadiman’s “The Lifetime Reading Plan”, a book I had read in the past but so long ago that the memory seems to belong to another man.

Now I’m sitting in the cafe, and it’s stopped raining, but Fadiman has something to say to you regarding The Plan, which is a chronological reading list of hundreds of ‘canonical’ books.

The aim is simple. The Plan is designed to help us avoid mental bankruptcy. It is designed to fill our minds, slowly, gradually, under no compulsion, with what the greatest writers of our Western tradition have thought, felt, and imagined. Even after we have shared these thoughts, feelings, and images, we will still have much to learn: all men die uneducated. But at least we will not feel quite so lost, so bewildered. We will have disenthralled ourselves from the merely contemporary. We will understand something, not much but something, of our position in space and time. We will know how we have emerged from three thousand years of history. We will know how we got the ideas by which unconsciously we live. Says Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

When I first read these words, fourteen? years ago, they seemed a godsend. I was looking for something to anchor me to a world that must (I thought) go deeper down than the idiocy around me implied. But of course I’ve already given myself away – I believe, now, that the idiocy around me is no more idiotic than it ever has been, and the profundities of today little less profound than the best the past had to offer. I wouldn’t argue too hard if you wanted to wiggle a little either way, but by and large I’m done with the enshrinement of the past as any particular repository of anything unlike what’s on offer today, at least if you’re paying attention.

Any book lover could compile a lifetime reading list. Probably it wouldn’t be drawn from a sample as wide-ranging as Fadiman’s own, but it would be filled with sublimities of a kind, relevant to the story arc of that particular person. “Watership Down” meant a great deal to the person I was when I read it. What would it mean now? Would it merit inclusion in a “Lifetime Reading List” that I might prescribe for others? I dunno. And not knowing is the best part, the freedom to not know, and to not particularly care, and to not feel, as I once felt, that maybe Fadiman’s list could provide some critical piece that my own experience had lacked, and that if I only read every one of them, in order, that maybe everything would click into place. And if not Fadiman’s than somebody’s, or some history class, or some shitty apartment in some third-world country, or some new lover.

Man, that’s an exhausting way to think.

If you’re really into rock and roll, and your kid is of an age to really be into music, you don’t need to make him reprise the entire history of music for him to know it and love it and receive its revelation. The whole world is every few years made new, and you can’t tell, in the middle of the process, which piece is going where, and how it all ties together, and what it means. And now there’s new music, and now there’s new wisdom and new knowledge flowing past as quietly as a river, and you can’t ever hope to swim far enough upstream to swallow the source once and for all, you can only dangle down your tin cup time.and.again.and.drink. .

With that as background, I’m always interested in reading about how people with highly-developed skills in this arena manage things. This guy has a lot of interesting things to say about his own methodology. Hat tip to Tyler Cowen, who is an all-NBA first-team infovore.

The problem with reading for literary education is that just reading and enjoying isn’t enough. As it turns out, this is the problem with damn near everything: passive savouring just doesn’t cut it if you want to get better. You’ve got to do something with the information; you’ve got to get your hands dirty and tear shit apart. The first step in tearing shit apart is taking note of especially artful bits. That’s what I’ve done here.

What follows are some paragraphs and sentences from Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene, with brief commentary.

When the Chief had guests he dined at home and cooked his own dinner, for no restaurant satisfied his meticulous and romantic standard. There was a story that once when he was ill he refused to cancel an invitation to an old friend, but cooked the meal from his bed by telephone. With a watch before him on the bed-table he would interrupt the conversation at the correct interval, to give directions to his valet. “Hallo, hallo, Brewer, hallo, you should take that chicken out now and baste it again.”

This sentence demonstrates a number of the virtues that Greene brandishes throughout the book with easy grace: an elegant syntax, good rhythm, and the selection of details that, briefly and deftly, make some character both vivid and distinct. It’s difficult to imagine what could bring the Chief to life more effectively than the picture of him propped up on several pillows, cooking by proxy through the telephone. And it’s difficult to imagine a more concise characterization: here’s a man who has such a thorough sense of how things ought to be done that restaurants offer him no satisfaction, and who cannot cede control of a simple meal even on his sickbed.

After his exertions in the kitchen the Chief himself smelt faintly of gravy.

This detail is the final flourish: now we can see him, hear him, and smell him.

“Be careful, Mr Wormold. He is one of the torturable.” They both laughed, drinking daiquiries. It is easy to laugh at the idea of torture on a sunny day.

and

He had the ill-humored face of a man who is always in the right.

The first of these two shows another of Greene’s gifts: the collision of the quotidian with the sinister. Often Le Carre is compared to Greene, and to me it is in this that they are most similar, in their refusal to allow some seperate domain for the grand and the sinister and the tedious and the normal. Here we see two men sharing a drink; and lightly discussing a topic that is frightening and vile. And yet this is reality, both his and ours: characters that live in a world where torture can be discussed by a torturer over drinks and laughter. It is, indeed, easy to laugh at torture on a sunny day. Torture, and many more things, besides. The thought is so beautifully expressed that its profundity is easily missed.

As to the second quote, Greene uses an abstraction to create a physical impression that could scarcely be stronger if the reader were looking at an actual photograph. More, he not only gives you the physical, but marries it to characterization with astounding economy. We know both what this guy looks like and what he’s about, all in fifteen words.

The Germans formed a group apart, rather suitably against the West wall. They carried the superiority of the deutschmark on their features like duelling scars.

See above.

They can print statistics and count the population in hundreds of thousands, but to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people. Remove those few and a city exists no longer except as a pain in the memory, like the pain of an amputated leg no longer there. It was time, Wormold thought, to pack up and go and leave the ruins of Havana.

In one sweeping paragraph Greene zooms in from abstract narrative commentary to indirect character speech, so smoothly that you don’t notice you’ve been giving a talking-to, and so perfectly observed that you are likely to feel that Greene has just given voice to something you’ve long believed yourself, but lacked the subtlety to fully notice and the words to properly express. Last but not least, he leaves you with a cliffhanger sentence, that will drive the story and the reader’s interest relentlessly forward.

She walked quickly away without answering among the sage-green chairs and he saw that she had talked herself to the edge of tears. Ten years ago he would have followed her, but middle-age is the period of sad caution.

This speaks for itself. As a man fully in the grip of sad caution, I can only shake my head at Greene’s surgical precision in cutting to the heart of things. Sad, yes, but also Beautiful and True, which balms a little the hurt of being so completely known.

Articles like this are indeed practically porn to me, but maybe not for the reasons Pam thinks. I read the first essay by Gary Lutz (the one which is quoted at length) and found it, in the main, tedious and annoying. Once upon a time this would not have been so. Well, I still would have found it tedious and annoying, but I would have figured that was because this guy was way more thoughtful than me, and that my tastes were somehow ‘wrong.’

I spent a surprising amount of time making this mistake. My efforts were most comical when it came to poetry; most particularly evident in the work of Seamus Heaney, who got the Nobel prize a few years ago for reasons I cannot fucking fathom. After he was awarded the prize I bought his collected works, thinking that if I banged against them hard enough that eventually I’d realize his genius. Nope. His poems are obscure, impenetrable presentations in a language not completely unlike English, and in the rare event that I understand what he’s saying, I find myself utterly unmoved. The only exception to this characterization I can remember was his poem Blackberry Picking which someone fortunately put online:

Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were full,
Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard’s.

We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn’t fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they’d keep, knew they would not.

These days, I’m smart enough, have read enough, and am generally well-enough educated to think that if I, among all possible English speakers, do not come within ten miles of understanding what the fuck you’re on about, then maybe it’s you and not me. I realize that this isn’t the sort of thing that one politely proclaims, and is exactly the sort of claim that Janie lives to induce me to make, purely for the medicinal effects she enjoys by protesting once I make it.

Even so, I think I’m right. But! (and this is the important part) I admit that I could be wrong. Perhaps I am still arrogant to the point of delusion, and in truth a veritable throng of English majors is wobbling about, bumping into each other, having been made rather dizzy by Heaney’s genius for imagery. If this is true – if my own literary tastes are so laughably removed from the norm – then I admit to being a little upset. But I guess I shouldn’t be – as Tennyson wrote, he has his work, I mine.

Coming back to the Lutz article, take this for instance:

In Christine Schutt’s two-clause formation “her lips stuck when she licked them to talk,” the second half of a sentence from the short story “Young,” the conspicuous content words are lips, stuck, licked, and talk. These four words are not all that varied consonantically. The reappearing consonants are l and k. Three of the four words have an l: two have the l at the very start of the word (lips and licked), and in the final word (talk), the l has slid into the interior. Three of the four words have a k in common—we go from a terminal k (stuck) to a k that has worked its way backward into the very core (licked) and then again to a terminal k (talk). In the first three words, the l and the k keep their distance from each other: in the first two words, they don’t appear together; inside the third word, licked, they are now within kiss-blowing range of each other over the low-rising i and c that stand between them. In the final word, talk, the l and the k are side-by-side at last—coupled just before the period brings the curtain down. A romance between two letters has been enacted in the sentence: there has been an amorous progression toward union.

Um. Huh? Yeah, I understand what he’s saying. But “her lips stuck when she licked them to talk” does not transport me to the rapturous place Lutz describes in such tedious detail. Setting aside the sort of half-assed phonological deconstruction he offers in this paragraph, there’s nothing in his analysis that resonates, and nothing you could really use, even if it did. It’s a paragraph of masturbatory word salad, which I guess is appropriate, because the sentence that kicked it off – the one about the lips sticking when licked – doesn’t actually make any fucking sense either. I mean: what? I’ve spent way too much time caring about words and sentences to pretend that I know what this means when I actually don’t. The sentence has some nice enjambment from the sequence of glottals and stops, but as far as being clear? As far as giving me something to hold onto? Nope.

Now that I’ve admitted that I don’t actually understand “great literature” you’ll understand why I take such a deep and abiding pleasure in the second article mentioned in the one Pam shared, which I remember my friend Wendy raving about years and years ago but which I had never read, and oh, how I now regret those lost years! Imagine what I might have amounted to had I found this soulmate in 2001!

Proulx once acknowledged that she tends to “compress” too much into short stories, but her wordplay is just as relentless in her novels; she seems unaware that all innovative language derives its impact from the contrast to straightforward English. It is common to find her devoting more than one metaphor or simile to the same image. “Furious dabs of tulips stuttering in gardens.” “An apron of sound lapped out of each dive.” “The ice mass leaned as though to admire its reflection in the waves, leaned until the southern tower was at the angle of a pencil in a writing hand, the northern tower reared over it like a lover.” “The children rushed at Quoyle, gripped him as a falling man clutches the window ledge, as a stream of electric particles arcs a gap and completes a circuit.” In one brief paragraph in The Shipping News a man’s body is likened to a loaf of bread, his flesh to a casement, his head to a melon, his facial features to fingertips, his eyes to the color of plastic, and his chin to a shelf.

This isn’t all bad, of course; the bit about the ice mass admiring its reflection is effective. And every so often Proulx lets a really good image stand alone: “The dining room, crowded with men, was lit by red bulbs that gave them a look of being roasted alive in their chairs.” Such hits are so rare, however, that after a while the reader stops trying to think about what the metaphors mean. [emphasis mine.] Maybe this is the effect that Proulx is aiming for; she seems to want to keep us on the surface of the text at all times, as if she were afraid that we might forget her quirky narratorial presence for even a line or two.

I always love it when people beat the shit out of someone by quoting them and then jumping up and down on the quotes until the words are broken into little pieces. And while this article is full of that sort of joyous ass whupping, the essential idea is that somehow We (that’s the royal we) have got into the habit of not actually expecting “literary” writing to mean anything. You just sort of impatiently wave your hands at the mis-shapen atrocities on the page, like those guys with light wands beckoning would-be parkers into lots before Timberwolves games: yes, come in, plenty of room, hurry up, there’s people behind you. They don’t look at you very carefully because why would they bother? All they care is that you’re in a car, and you’re gonna pay them eight dollars.

Anyway, if you’re a reader or a writer, worth checking out. Thanks Pamster.

POSTSCRIPT:

Now that I’ve written all of this I’m asking myself if my exercise from the other day – the one where I dug into the first paragraph of that story – is me being the same kind of ass-face that I’m taking Lutz to task for. For that to be true my analysis would have to be just as particular to me as Lutz’s is to him; and my confident trumpeting of the various techniques employed in the writing no more ‘universal’ than any other personal preference.

In other words, both Lutz and I wrote about What’s Good. I find his presentation alternating between uncompelling and misguided, but I find my own article right on the money. (heh.) So is this just more youthful-Shane, forcefully opining for no good reason?

I’ll have to think about it. I have a suspicion someone else might have a thought to share, though.

On a hill by the Mississippi where Chippewas camped two generations ago, a girl stood in relief against the cornflower blue of Northern sky.  She saw no Indians now; she saw flour-mills and the blinking windows of skyscrapers in Minneapolis and St. Paul.  Nor was she thinking of squaws and portages, and the Yankee fur-traders whose shadows were all about her.  She was meditating upon walnut fudge, the plays of Brieux, the reasons why heels run over, and the fact that the chemistry instructor had stared at the new coiffure which concealed her ears.

That’s good frickin’ stuff.  It’s pretty good when you read it the first time, at the start of the book, and then it turns really good when you read it again after you’re done with the book.  So started the really good part of Sinclair Lewis’s career.

He won the Pulitzer for Arrowsmith and then gave one of the all-time great anti-fist pumps in his refusal letter.  Here’s a snippet that would be sour grapes from a Pulitzer runner-up, but is just plain mighty from a winner:

The seekers for prizes tend to labor not for inherent excellence but for alien rewards: they tend to write this, or timorously to avoid writing that, in order to tickle the prejudices of a haphazard committee. And the Pulitzer Prize for novels is peculiarly objectionable because the terms of it have been constantly and grievously misrepresented.

He was the first American to earn the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930.  Lewis’s Nobel Lecture is really funny because he takes some shots at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, but he also won’t say America is hopeless.  It’s worth reading the whole thing.

It might be answered that, after all, the Academy is limited to fifty members; that, naturally, it cannot include every one of merit. But the fact is that while most of our few giants are excluded, the Academy does have room to include three extraordinarily bad poets, two very melodramatic and insignificant playwrights, two gentlemen who are known only because they are university presidents, a man who was thirty years ago known as a rather clever, humorous draughtsman, and several gentlemen of whom – I sadly confess my ignorance – I have never heard.

It is my fate in this paper to swing constantly from optimism to pessimism and back, but so is it the fate of anyone who writes or speaks of anything in America – the most contradictory, the most depressing, the most stirring, of any land in the world today.

Here was the Nobel presentation speech given by Erik Axel Karlfeldt:

Yes, Sinclair Lewis is an American. He writes the new language – American – as one of the representatives of 120,000,000 souls. He asks us to consider that this nation is not yet finished or melted down; that it is still in the turbulent years of adolescence.

Which brings us to the point of this post–America in its adolescence, but an adolescence that hasn’t ended.  The genius of Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street is that the almost 100-year-old conversations from Gopher Prairie, MN are still being repeated on every Main Street in the country.  Think back to your Christmas conversations of a few weeks ago.  Pretty similar to the conversations from Thanksgiving the month before and Christmas ’07 and Thanksgiving ’07 and Christmas ’06…  And another genius of Lewis and Main Street is in the realization that the idealists–the ones reading and thinking and typing away in their dark basements–aren’t any better or worse than the Main Street realists who don’t care about Broadway plays and different educational systems and sprucing up the town.

Lewis was so perceptive of the qualities and values that would endure in Americans, and not just in Main Street.  How about this line from the main character in his political satire It Can’t Happen Here (1935):

Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut ‘Liberty cabbage’ and somebody actually proposed calling German measles ‘Liberty measles’?

Freedom Fries aside, the book itself is eerie in it’s description of a “common man” president with a behind-the-scenes secretary who runs the fascist show.

Is it a case of Groundhog Day, and every day is essentially the same as the last, is it a repeating loop that we need to watch for every century or so, or is it Jack Nicholson walking out of the therapist’s office and saying, “What if this is as good as it gets?”  Probably all three.

Ponder that as you go to work tomorrow and Monday and Tuesday or talk about the weather or fill up the gas tank or listen to a talking head explain the similarities between today and the Great Depression.  But most importantly, go find a Sinclair Lewis book, read it or reread it, and cherish the brilliance that Sauk Center, MN helped inspire.

The names had the sound of the History Channel: Pearl Harbor, Eniwetok Atoll, Guam. His father had been to each during the Second World War and he, the son, had never known about it. Fifty-one years he’d been alive and to find out who his father had been he had to get like this: drunk, lost, estranged from a minimum of two wives, and a murderer in the eyes of his sister, and maybe the state of Indiana.

This is the paragraph of a story called Presently In Ruins by Gregory Blake Smith. I present it to you because one of my little practice things is to pick apart openings and see how they work and how they don’t. And since I’m doing this, why not let you share in the fun? And also because when I post stuff that’s a bit too cat-bloggish all the other LSH contributors tend to run for the hills. So let’s put away our angsty revelations and get out our protractors and scientific calculators, and try to figure out why this is such a stellar opening.

The most obvious culprit is style: the paragraph reads beautifully. Smith varies the rhythm of his sentences, the word length, and the syntax. For instance, we have two sets of lists – the first of places, the second of what I guess you’d call states. Not only are these lovely changeups from a more traditional writing style (not too many lists in serious literature. Or even un-serious literature), but they work in parallel to contrast the far-ranging locales visited by the narrator’s father (Pearl Harbor, Eniwetok Atoll), with the rather pedestrian and cliched miseries of the son (drunk, estranged from two wives).

This last example is also telling of another of this writer’s gifts, one difficult to catalog precisely but eminently noticeable, which is a keen awareness of how word placement, word ordering, and word choice affect the overall ‘bouquet’ of a sentence. For instance:

Example 1: The narrator describes himself as estranged from ‘a minimum of two wives.’ If you’re like me, you find this sentence amusing without even thinking about it. But why is it funny? For one reason, estrangement from one’s wife is not something about which one is uncertain. You are estranged, or you aren’t. But Smith’s ‘a minimum of’ phrasing not only casts this normally digital state into doubt, which is funny by itself, but it implies that perhaps the narrator is even estranged from 3 wives, or 4, or god knows how many. Multiple marriages are a hallmark of a certain kind of shitbag, and shitbaggery is something we look upon with a sort of contemptful amusement, provided the emotional distance is great enough, and tricks of phrasing like this one ensure that it is.

Example 2: The narrator admits to being ‘a murderer in the eyes of his sister, and maybe the state of Indiana.’ This sentence utilizes a more standard technique of mentioning the most salient and important aspect of a sentence in an incidental manner, often last. Here’s another made-up example: ‘DDB was in a black mood. He’d missed lunch, which, since it was Tuesday, had been pizza, his favorite. Also, someone was trying to kill him.’

The effect created with this trick isn’t precisely humor, but rather a mental frisson, a surprise and a wonderment. Probably part of this is simple novelty – how many times did your teacher tell you to say the most important things early in a sentence? – but there’s something more, too. When you read one of these backwards sentences you know you’re in the presence of a different kind of mind, one that sees the world differently. Whether this perspective is given voice by one of the characters, or is delivered by the author himself, via narrative voice, you feel that you’re about to sit down to a meal that’s not the usual meat and potatoes.

Huge power is stuffed into just five and a half lines in this opening. We learn a lot about a father and a son, and we’re left with questions: what’s the deal with the two or more wives? And a murder? And how does your sister factor in? Are you on the run? Are you really such a shitbag as you appear, and if so, why? And finally, what changed, if you lived your whole fifty-one years without knowing these details about your father, and now you do?

It’s not so great a thing to ask or imply questions. The real achievement is presenting them in such a way that the reader wants to keep reading to find out the answers. I haven’t read any more than what I’ve quoted here, but I’m looking forward to seeing how Smith pulls it off, and whether the piece holds up to the promise of that first paragraph.

As evidence of this last I offer this: when I was in New York a few weeks ago meeting with some of my beloved Clarion peeps, I threw down a gauntlet. A clean slate! A contest! On who could finish the most new work, from that point till the end of the year. This wasn’t just self-flagellation, either, since many of my colleagues had fallen into the same trap of non-production as I had, though I don’t think any of them are as steadfastly mired in that damnation as I am.

So far, things are going well, though I began and then jumped away from four stories before finishing a single one, which you can read here. But bit by bit I’m getting back my mojo, and if I get it back then look out world, hello t-shirt with my face on it, which is the prize for winning. There’s a story behind that that I’ll tell you later.

You know what the biggest hurdle to finishing things is, for me? The certainty that what I’ve just done is garbage. I have a pretty sharp critical mind, and can find flaws in damn near anything. It’s hard to turn something in when its myriad imperfections scream so loudly from the page, but you know what? That’s what you’ve got to do. You have to do a rough cut before you can do a fine one, and do you know the difference between an artist who’s a perfectionist, and a non-artist?

Nothing.

View that as a big-ass disclaimer, but view it also as God’s own truth. If I can turn in ten finished stories that have serious problems I will congratulate myself on turning in ten more stories than I would otherwise have turned in.

Poco a poco, my friends. And if you have any thoughts on this topic – about how you do or do not struggle with these issues in your own life, a list of techniques that have been helpful to you, whatever – then please, let’s have it.