A gentle correction from Barry Hannah: “Good, but this is a ruckus more than a story.”
Let’s begin with some context: last fall, I published a short story. I wrote it in a burst of two or three sittings. It was about a small southern college town that worships writers, so much so that the local bookshop owner offers up sorority girls as blood sacrifices to a mysterious deity in his basement. It was, in many ways, a kind of exorcism of all the demons that had plagued me since my MFA days at the University of Mississippi.
Which is NOT to say I had a terrible experience there, or that earning an MFA was not worth it. In fact, I had many good teachers, learned at the feet of a couple of true masters, and published a few short pieces in online and print literary journals. But when I left the program in 2004, I realized that I didn’t know how to write a novel, and novels had always been the things I’d wanted to write. Throughout my mid- to late-twenties, I made a few haphazard starts, usually got about 50 pages in, then just gave up. I gave up because I never knew where to go after those first 50 pages. I had yet to learn—or, if I’m honest, teach myself—the discipline of outlining, of thinking about a story from the inside out, as Robert McKee might put it. I didn’t know anything about key images or the relationship between story and plot, or story and character. I had, of course, spent three years in a masters’ program and learned how to write really good sentences. And I could put two or three of those sentences together into a paragraph, and then do that again a few more times, all in service of a very simple structure: beginning, middle, end.
Maybe that’s why I stopped writing short stories: I’d done nothing but that for three years. Reworking, rewriting the same dozen or so stories in service of an academic degree had left me numb to the pleasures of writing. And so, from roughly 2007 to 2020, I did not write a single short story. In much the same way that I got sick of eggs when I had a brief dalliance with the South Beach diet, and to this day cannot choke down tomato juice and scrambled eggs for breakfast, I just couldn’t bring myself to write one more goddamned story.
That changed in 2020. After publishing two novels, I decided to try my hand again at a form so many of my new friends and peers were working in. The horror genre, after all, was arguably the original spark that set American short fiction to blaze. So my return to the form ought to be a horror story, which would make it markedly different from the stories I’d written in graduate school, which I remembered, first, as a bound collection of heavy cotton sheets notarized with my thesis advisers’ signatures—second, if I was feeling generous, as a handful of funny, sad portraits of lonely young men who all seemed like me filtered through the prose styles of Raymond Carver and Barry Hannah.
It was inevitable, I guess, that the most horrifying thing I could think of to write about in a short story was, in fact, the act of writing a short story. So I wrote “In Our Town, Everyone’s a Writer,” and Max Booth and Lori Michelle over at Dark Moon Digest were kind enough to publish it. Admittedly, when I saw it in print, it was as if something inside me had broken loose and let a ray of light into my soul. I can do this again! I’m free!
But then, like an Alabama snake handler caught up in his own righteous fervor, I made a dumb mistake. I got greedy. I went scavenging for a quick story-writing fix, thinking I’d resurrect some old failures with my newfound short story writer’s faith in Jesus. So I dove into a folder, buried deep in my fat old Compaq’s hard drive, of a handful of unfinished stories I’d written in the waning days of my time in Mississippi, when I was at my loneliest. And what I found in these was a writer I didn’t recognize: a writer whose characters were stunted by narrow, often angry or bitter points of view, usually rendered in the first person, so that the distance between narrator and author was painfully thin. There was no saving these, in part because, I’m now convinced, they were written by someone else. Someone whose mind and heart were tangled up in lost love and bitterness, though he offered smiles and affability to most everyone. They weren’t even capable of being crafted into decent horror stories. Just horrible stories.
Maybe one day I’ll look back on my first or second novel and say, “Boy, I was different then.” But I’m not sure I will. Ten years of not writing short fiction is what gave me my voice. Those ten years of life, of happiness and heartbreak, they forged something new out of what was, essentially, a played out form. And, like most things re-forged, the new thing was stronger, sharper.
In “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” Flannery O’Connor writes: “If you go to a school where there are classes in writing, these classes should not be to teach you how to write, but to teach you the limits and possibilities of words and the respect due them.” O’Connor goes on to say that the process of “learning how to write” is always with us, no matter how long we’ve done it.
Years after I left my own school, I looked back and saw the limitations of a weird doppelgänger “me.” The person, the writer, I was. The writer I might have been, had life not had other plans. Now, when I sit down to write a short story, I see possibilities, not limitations. I feel optimistic, as all acts of writing should be. I hope for my characters to find their way out of the darkness, even if the darkness is closing in.