Thirty Ways of Looking at a Blank Page

November Experiment – Hundred Word Stories

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1. IVF

“I can't eat this,” she said, and removed the half-chewed segment from her mouth.

“What?”

“It has seeds.”

“So? Spit them out. So we bought seeded by mistake, it's nature's way, y'know?”

“They didn't have seeds on Saturday.”

“I don't remember.”

“They didn't.”

“So?”

“So the seeds, they've grown in these mandarins since we bought them.”

“I guess. As they ripen...”

She pushed the segments and peel further away from her.

“What?”

“I can't stand the thought of the things in my fruit bowl... struggling. Not rotting but fighting for life. To make life. It seems so...”

“Pathetic?”

“Heroic.”

2. Half-life

I like bullet points, meetings with agendas, stationary cupboards, walking down the hall to collect something from the colour printer, holding it against my cheek, warm and smooth. I’m not built for construction or sales or science or medicine or piloting any sort of vehicle: I’m built for office work. I like semi-colons and ampersands and control-shift-8: the reveal key. If only there was one for life outside. Too much to absorb, filter, guesstimate. Give me a box of paperclips and a slow Thursday afternoon. Give me a farewell morning tea with sausage rolls and talk about the weather.

3. Medium

The television waited till everyone was in bed before it snuck out the kitchen window. It was rooting through a dumpster when the rain began. Under a cardboard box that may have once held another TV — the television couldn’t read — it hummed the theme from Bonanza. The same faint grey image continued to flicker on its screen: a young boy halfway up a hill of bison skulls. (The family had briefly switched over to a history of the Midwest while X-Factor went to a commercial.) The cardboard began to sag. The rain beat harder. The television resolved to stay.

4. St. Mary’s

I am standing in front of a huge stone cathedral. There are no paths. Grass is growing halfway up the door. It’s as if this building was moved here but never re-opened. Beneath the highest spire I find a man in a brown suit pressing a palm to the stone exterior. His head is turned towards me, one cheek hovering just off the pressing hand. His eyes are closed. It looks as if he is humming, but I can hear nothing. He opens his eyes, stares straight at me. His lips are moving, but I can hear nothing.

5. Soft

There were too many women talking at once for Chobe to understand a word of it. He did his best to look like he was listening, not wanting to appear rude. To keep a focussed expression on his face, he listed his favourite animals:

* Wombat
* Beaver
* Bison
* Kodiak Bear
* Highland Cow

He wondered why they were all so furry? And where were the animals from his own country?

Someone said his name, or so it sounded. He looked from face to face, but there were too many women talking at once for Chobe to understand a word of it.

6. The Six People You Meet Called Steven

The kid who taught you the fingers.

The learner driver who knocked you off your bike.

The video store clerk who always recommends Jules et Jim even though you always tell him you’ve seen it (and didn’t rate it).

The guy drinking at an airport bar who ends up asking you for a kidney.

The friend of your partner’s brother who does that thing with his eyelids, y’know?

The doctor who asks you to use his first name, but you persist in calling him Doogie, even though he’s too young to get it.

7. Leitmotiv

When I was a student, there were only a limited number of flats close to the university which landlords would rent to undergraduates. Somehow, I always missed out. Forced to live further out in the suburbs, the rent was cheaper but I still could not afford to catch the bus. Everyday I would walk passed houses that had passed me over, and houses that were deemed too good for my kind. But what really annoyed me were the vacant lots.
The effrontery.
After graduation, after marriage, the years of fidelity and filing, my memory is crowded with vacant lots.

8. Keynesian Slips

Any prolongation of the work will exacerbate an already alarming rate of deterioration.
The policy analyst read over this sentence a second time.

He control+C and control+V’d the sentence into an email and wrote: If I ever start talking like this you have my permission to kill me, pressed send and moved on with his life.

At the trial, the prosecution argued that the email did not represent a legal contract as it involved an illegal act.

The defense couldn’t think of any witnesses to call. He was too preoccupied with avoiding any prolixity in his spoken communications.

9. The Truth About Honesty

The morning after you lost your virginity, I was there. I wanted to ask how it went, but didn’t.

You bared your soul to me once, but I drank so much the black spots ate the whole conversation. You would never tell me what you said, just that you said it.

We drifted apart.

I feel I should apologise, but it may seem like I expect some apology in return. Like, for not replying to my emails. For having a secret that doubled with importance the second time you bottled it up. Perhaps I do.

Sorry.

10. Inventory

My knuckles have been replaced with grapefruit. My fist feels crowded. I expected this would come, one day. But my feet? The hinge between my foot and toes has rusted, the bolt buried in the middle aches to be released.

Grapefruit and rusted bolts.

My shoulders rattle like those hand-cranked cement mixers. My shoulders weigh so much. They never used to weigh at all, did they?

Perhaps this is the body’s way of taking an inventory. This is what you never knew you had. This is what we won’t let you forget again.

Grapefruit, rusted bolts and cement mixers.

11. Nodes

John looked up from his sandwich. “My kid, you know what he did? He went one better. He has this friend who moved away. Went to live with his mother in Auckland. But they kept in touch, you know, texting. Anyway, one day, this friend, his cellphone dies. His mother, she’s still finding her feet up there and can’t afford to buy him a new phone that minute. So he can’t text my kid. You know what he does, my kid? He writes a message on his phone, puts it in an envelope and posts it to bloody Auckland!”

12. Hear No Evil

This woman comes on the train with one of these modern prams with the oversized, off-road wheels. A real effort to find somewhere to park the thing, but she manages. Then I see the kid in this pram. It’s gotta be five years old. “You want to sit next to mummy?” she asks the kid, and hoists it out the pram. It’s wearing a fake fur coat, jeans and white boots with wee heels, listening to an iPod. The mother places her on the seat next to her and the kid just sits there, holding its ears.

13. Scandal

A ribcage is found washed up on the beach. A child, or perhaps a woman — it’s hard to tell. After a head-count, the police are called. The townsfolk watch them bag the ribcage — from a distance their care and precision looks like squeamishness. It is sent for testing. Days pass. The ribcage falls from conversation, though the antique dealer exhibits an unnatural interest. It’s not like C.S.I., he is told. These things take time. Eventually, he reads of the results in the local paper. Chimpanzee? People come to his store, eager to gauge his reaction. No one buys anything.

14. Three Friends

“What are ten year olds like these days?”

“Oh, you know.”

“No, not really.”

“Me neither.”

“Well…”

“When I was ten I thought sex was like pumping petrol — you put the nozzle in and leave it there till it’s done.”

“When I was ten my only concern was making a pottle of yoghurt last an episode of HeMan.”

“When I was ten I got sick of waiting for my parents to buy me a Ken to go with my Barbie, so I cut Barbie’s hair off and drew on a moustache.”

“And then?”

“Ken-Barbie was just as lonely.”

15. Lecture Theatre

I had this psychology lecturer who was always drinking from a Pump bottle. One day I was late and the only available seat was on the end of the front row, right by where she kept her water. I didn’t think I was that late, but the bottle already looked empty. I was surprised, then, when I saw her walk over and attempt to have a drink. I figured she’d forgotten it was empty and pretended to drink to avoid looking foolish, but then, a few minutes later, she returned and had another drink from the empty bottle.

16. Hallway Sentence

Neil had come to the conclusion that whenever anyone asked How are you going? they didn’t really care — it was just a turn of phrase like gidday — and as such he ignored the question whenever it was posed and jumped right into his prepared conversation, which normally related to variance reports (with a hand shake for favourable variances and hands in pockets for unfavourable ones), though this one time, shortly after being promoted, he held up his hand like he wanted to high five me, but I just coughed and in the end he let the hand drop.

17. First Order Of Business

Ned suggested that, as an homage to Nirvana, they chose another Buddhist word. After trawling a website on Buddhist doctrines, Joel recommended they check Google for any existing bands with those names. Samsara? Melboune hardcore band. Bodhi? Exeter Jam Band. Kilesa? Students from Carlow, Ireland. Moksha was actually two bands, one in England, one in India. ‘What about Bad Karma?’ Neil, the band’s Warren Zevon fanatic, suggested, but another Melbourne group beat them to it. “The Dharma Bums?” ventured the Kerouac-enraptured Clayton. When the page loaded, Shawn suggested maybe they weren’t ready to form a band.

18. Switch

The problem bear turned out to be a Newfoundland named Waldo. The Missoulian couldn’t resist running the headline: Where's Waldo? along with a big photo of the rascal dog looking down the lens, his paw resting on the rim of a silvery rubbish bin. The photo later appeared with thousands of Lol Catz style captions around the internet. W.I.S.P.A. ran the photo as a full page ad in national papers with the caption: If I wuz a bear I wld hav been shotted. Waldo appeared boisterous but loveable on Letterman, while a man was being mauled back in Montana.

19. Hangovers

On my second Friday I went for a drink with my workmates and I found myself swearing a lot. I changed the topic away from my last job but the swearing continued. Conscious of the impression I could be making, I opted for silence. I looked over at the bar, to a woman with a black handbag the size of a For Sale sign and just as thin. A workmate tapped me on the shoulder. The bald buy in the corner was staring at me, apparently. “Fuck him,” I said. “Have you seen the size of her fucking handbag?”

20. _BC of Life (a pangrammatic lipogram)

In the spirit of George Perec, who wrote one complete novel without the letter 'e', this story does not use the first letter of the, um, list of letters in its common order. Without further fuss, the story goes like this: guy, girl, drive-in; necking, petting, cooling off; more necking, more petting, no cooling off; zygote, foetus, birth; teething, toddling, speech; primmers, juniors, high school; long locks, short locks, locks left on pillow slips; blue pills, red pills, purple pills; rest home, hospice, exquisite urn; silence/trumpets, void/cherubs on puffy clouds, nothingness/bliss.

21. If Six Was Nine

“I can't believe you had the balls to meet his wife!”

“I've had 'Ironic' by Alanis Morisette stuck in my head all day.”

“You deserve to suffer.”

“I wonder if it will rain on our wedding day?”

“Whose?”

“Mine and Brian's.”

“You're unbelievable.”

“Oh! O-o-o-o-o-o-o-oh, so you're unbelievable!”

“Who sung that?”

“Jesus Jones?.”

“No, they did ‘Right Here, Right Now.’”

“Second single?”

“I’ll have to wiki it.”

“Props bet?”

“It’s not Jesus Jones.”

“Whoever it is, it beats Alanis.”

“Woe, you’ve just invited her back in.”

“Haven’t.”

“I can see you want to hum it.”

“It’s…”

22. In certain weather, all you can see on the footpath is chewing gum

I decided economics was not for me today. Rudy Valentine was talking about sanctions, how they can have unintended consequences. His example: if you increase the sentence for rape from ten to twenty years, the penalty for rape is now closer to murder and may lead to rapists murdering their victims. “After all,” Rudy Valentine said, forcing his hands into his pockets, “it would eliminate the witness…” Bad example, sure, but it was the shallow laugh that we budding economists gave off that made my stomach slouch.

23. Memoir

The vice-principal’s rubbish bin. Too many pub bathrooms to list. Behind the recycling bins on Caledonian Place. In my mouth (swallowed). Every toilet in every house I’ve ever lived in. The path from the library to A Block before the debating final. The ferry back from Zanzibar. A truck somewhere in Northern Malawi. Over the side of a fishing boat off the Gold Coast. Outside a fish’n’chip shop in Taihape. The Kaimais. An ice cream container. A mixing bowl. An empty coffee mug. My hands. A plastic shopping bag. In the shower. Out the window of a moving car.

24. The Pohutokawa Wars, Pt I

After the flood there were potatoes and kiwifruit and onions over everyone's lawns. It seemed a kind of surreal pickmeup until it was discovered they were rotten. Nature continued to taunt with possibilities. The top half of Mr Jenkins’ pohutokawa, snapped free by the floodwaters, flowered gaily in the now-streaming sun, wedged between Mr Kellum's woodshed and back fence. Kellum left a note in Mr. J’s letterbox: Extricate your g-d tree from my g-d property. Miffed, he researched tree-related torts online. Extricate your head from your arse, he replied. The reply: a volley of onions.

25. Extra-curricular

“Where’s Ernesto?”

“Didn’t you hear?”

“He wasn’t fired?”

“No.”

“Another job?”

“Nope.”

“He was too young to retire… So what?”

“He finally sold a patent.”

“No kidding. Which one exactly?”

“You know how he was always walking into those Slippery When Wet signs?”

“Oh yeah.”

“And how he always said one day he’d make those signs a thing of the past?”

“Sort of.”

“Well, he did.”

“Huh?”

“He invented linoleum that changes colour when wet. Sold it for millions.”

“Ernesto, eh? Geez.”

“Yeah.”

“So what you up to tonight?”

“Karaoke competition. You?”

“Might take another look at my screenplay.”

26. Degradable Bio

When I was ten I had a calendar on which I crossed off the days till Disneyland. If there was a switch to skip the intervening months I would have flicked it.

When I was sixteen I had a journal in which I tallied my situps, though sometimes I just scribbled the whole page black. If there was a switch to stop existing I would have flicked it.

When I was twenty five I had a blog where I posted graphs and made nonsense calculations. If there was a switch to slow time it would be long flicked.

27. Workie

I pulled a workie today. I just couldn't face another day on the couch. I put on my black slacks and polo, walked down the road to the big Tesco and straightened shelves for four hours. After a cigarette and a Yorkie by the loading bay, I straightened shelves for two more hours until a guy with bluetooth earpiece asked me if I was able to work a double shift. I told him my kid was sick -- he looked disappointed -- but my wife was a doctor. He gave me a huge smile, and two jars of Dolmios.

28. Cliffhanger

…but he was only clinically dead. Paramedics managed to revive him after fifteen minutes and six broken ribs. The doctors were amazed he wasn't a vegetable, and warned Sadowitz, Mendez and the band that his brain function would be reduced. “Reduced from what?” we asked with straight faces which evolved to tense-but-smiling faces. Two weeks later Robbie returned to the studio to work on Live And Let Dog. Little did we know he would be dead in six short months. Skin cancer. From a mole he never got checked. A crummy way to go. So uncool it killed us.

29. Solitude With Options

The comedian was a regular on celebrity quiz shows, well known for his garish shirts, buggy eyes and knack with accents. One day, he appeared with a ventriloquist’s dummy that looked just like him: same buggy eyes, same orange shirt. His normal voice was the dummy’s voice. Snippets of this particular show became popular on YouTube for the wrong reasons. The comedian refused to appear without the dummy. The shows acquiesced. The comedian hid behind the desk, refusing to show his face. The dummy remained a regular on celebrity quiz shows. The comedian was never seen again.

30. Curtains

You could see his tragedy coming a mile off. He’d worked up this momentum and there was nothing that could stop him, except, you know, the big full stop. Like how with some gas hobs you have to go though “full flame” to get to “off”. The last time I saw him, he was in full flame. It was probably the alcohol, poisoning from the inside, which made him sweat in the cool of the corridor. “I want to change,” he told me, stroking my lapel. All I could think was: A snowball’s chance in hell. A snowball’s chance.

Halloween Story

[I wrote a story earlier this year that featured Halloween. While I don't have stories stashed away for all the forthcoming holidays, I thought I'd post this one:]


Somewhere in Southern California...

When the power went out, the writer’s sister went to bed early. The writer did not. She lit a candle and dusted off the old Underwood Five typewriter someone had given her as a joke, or perhaps as objet d’art.

But it worked.

She found herself clacking out a story about a woman roughly her own age — which was forty-two — who lived alone — as the writer had until her sister moved in — preparing for the trick-or-treaters on Halloween. This woman had bought a wide variety of candy for the occasion and placed it all in a glass bowl with a wide circumference so the children could select their favourite types of candy without having to dig around too much. The woman in the story, who had not been given a name and perhaps never would, feared digging around could lead to children knocking pieces of candy onto the floor, and then, as she stooped to pick them up, the children — dressed as pirates, werewolves and stormtroopers — would surge into her apartment and begin listening to her record collection with unimpressed werewolf faces, grinding black pepper from her ornamental pepper grinder all over her salt and pepper shag pile carpet, unzipping the backs of her sofa cushions, and changing her answer phone message:

The lady with the big butt is not home. Press 1 for the Pirate. Press 2 for the
Werewolf. Press 3 for the Stormtrooper.

Even with the bowl with the widest circumference she could find, the woman in the story no longer felt comfortable opening the door to trick-or-treaters. She sat on her sofa in silence, waiting for the doorbell to ring, and when it did, she would let them ring and knock until they gave up and went to the next apartment. To calm her nerves while the trick-or-treaters hounded her, she ate candy from the bowl with the wide circumference.

The writer, punching this story out on a typewriter by the light of a candle, suddenly had an incredible urge to eat a Mintie, which is a hard, white candy popular in Australasia. The first time the writer had a Mintie she was on stage for a panel discussion at a book festival in Sydney. She was rendered mute by the chewy mass in her mouth while several topics she was dying to discuss arose and sank, only finishing the Mintie as the chair brought the session to a close. She was then ushered by festival staff wearing headsets to the book signing tent. If it wasn’t for these people wearing headsets she would have slipped away to the airport. Despite her silence during the panel discussion, there were six people already lined up in front of the signing desk. A woman in a headset waved the man at the front of the line forward. The writer asked the man’s name after he placed the opened book before her, but he said, “You can just put, ‘Dear Reader.’”
The writer looked up at this man. He was wearing a blue baseball cap which said, “Seaworld, Gold Coast,” and had not shaved for many days. She looked back at the book he had placed before her. She closed the cover and looked at the spine.

“This is a library book,” she said.

“Yes it is.”

“And you want me to sign it.”

“Yes please.”

She looked at the bag of books the man was holding. “You’re going to take this book back when its due?” she asked.

“I’m the librarian,” he said.

The writer read over what she had written so far of her Halloween story, pulled the current page from her typewriter and inserted a fresh one.

On Rejection

I've read two quite different articles about rejection (of the literary kind) in the last two days.

The first, via the IIML's newsletter, an editor and writer's thoughts on rejection in the latest The Kenyon Review.

The second, via Beattie's Book Blog, a humble bookkeeper saves editors time by rejecting manuscripts.

I haven't thought a lot about rejection lately, as I haven't really been submitting things. But earlier in the year I had a patch. I wrote a story about it...

Perfectly Crafted

Mitzi Visitacion had done everything right.

She had the pseudonym, randomly generated from to U.S. Census Data.

She had the MFA.

She had permission to quote her manuscript assessors’ words of praise (“Ms. Visitacion writes like English is our second language…”; “Blue Belly Blues is unforgettably… memorable”).

She had the perfectly crafted submission letter.

And of course—of course!—she had perfectly crafted stories.

But all this got her was rejection. Rejection letters, rejection slips, rejection emails, rejection text messages, rejections scrawled on Denny’s napkins and slid under her bathroom stall, rejections instead of prizes in her cereal box.

When she received a rejection note from a journal she had never submitted to—she’d thought she was signing up for an annual subscription—enough was enough.

She opened a new Word document and typed:

Dear Famous Writer,

We here at Xyzphage are looking to publish writers at the peak of their powers, though it is admirable you are still toiling away. So it’s a no from us.

Yours in pre-emption,

Xyzphage Editorial Board

She looked up American Writers on Wikipedia and copied and pasted the names into an Excel spreadsheet. One by one she tracked down each writer’s email addresses and rejected them. If she could not find their email address, she left a comment on their website or advised their agent of their rejection. Rejections for deceased writers were sent to their estates.

It felt good to reject Ernest Hemingway (“not butch enough”), Hunter S. Thompson (“too constricted”), and Grace Paley (“reads like another writing workshop prodigies’ pale imitation of Grace Paley”).

If a writer was really old, but still writing, like John Updike or Elmore Leonard, she still addressed the rejection, “To The Estate Of…”

She was surprised at how many replies she received to her rejection emails. The audacity. It had never occurred to her to respond (let alone object) to a rejection email. Maybe this was what was holding her back.

But she was having too much fun writing rejections to worry about her own perfectly crafted stories.

When she finished the list of American Authors, she broadened her horizons.

Dear Midlist Author,

Someone told us to check out your most recent short story collection or novel, which we did. Unfortunately we here at Xyzphage do not consider your writing to be an appropriate fit with the current direction of our publication.

Yours in pre-emption,

Editor X

Then she began trawling the internet for e-zines, noting down the contributors and rejecting them when they least suspected it.

Dear Emerging Writer,

We here at Xyzphage have noticed your writing around various journals and websites but you have a ways to go before you should think about approaching this publication.

Yours in pre-emption,

Uncle Xyz

To add sting to these rejections, she created a website for Xyzphage, complete with submission guidelines, and posted some of her less-than-perfectly-crafted stories under various randomly generated pseudonyms.

“They think this is good?” she imagined the Emerging Writers thinking. It made her feel warm. Physically warm. The word that seemed to fit best was Chuffed.

But then Xyzphage began to receive submissions. Why she used a real email address, she couldn't remember.

Mitzi Visitacion was forced to stop sending out random rejections and focus solely on rejecting Xyzphage submissions. Soon she could no longer personalize her rejections—there were that many submissions.

So she sent out acceptance letters instead. What was stopping her? She accepted anyone who sent her an email. Even eBay’s ‘Summer Savings’ and Rudolfo Zurich's ‘Cheap Cheap Cialis’ made it onto Xyzphage.

But why stop there? She went into her sent items and retrieved every rejection letter and changed a few words.

Dear Writer,

We here at Xyzphage have noticed your writing around various journals and websites and consider it an appropriate fit with the current direction of our publication.

Yours in prevarication,

Uncle Xyz

For some reason, this got her more irate replies.

Writers emailed asking to have their stories removed from the site. Submissions dried up. The hit counter for Xyzphage stopped ticking over.

The flare up had fizzled.

And all Mitzi Visitacion was left with was her perfectly crafted, unpublished stories.

The Shame of Naming

The time has come to think about a title for my short story collection. To the right you will find a poll. These are five titles that make some sense to me. The three with asterisks double as titles of stories in the collection. I'm not going to explain what each title means, or how it fits with the rest of the collection - this is just to gauge reactions on first blush. A bit of fun, that's all.

Until now, I've never had to come up with an umbrella title. When I did my MA, I wrote a novel, and I had the title from early on. Even when questions were raised about the title and I went looking for something better, I only had to think about the one story (a long, complicated one, but one story nonetheless).

But there were others in my class writing short story and poetry collections, and I remember well the time toward the end of the year when they were all furiously trying out titles for their manuscripts. In workshops, others would have their say, and I certainly offered a few potential titles, argued for and against some alternatives - but it was different then. I hadn't written the poems or stories. I wasn't clouded by parental attachments.

But now, as I play around with which stories make the cut, and the order those that make it will appear in the manuscript, I have a serious perspective problem.

I've leant towards a different title each of the last four days. Tomorrow I will think of something new, and convince myself it works with all the stories. But that's the thing: with a collection of twenty stories (with another ten sitting on the sidelines should they be a better fit with the new title...) you can usually find enough evidence of any theme.

For example, I'll just turn on the news and see what they're talking about... Golf. Okay, well there's a reference to golf in this story, and I could be smart and have eighteen stories to represent the eighteen holes of a golf course, and order the stories like a good course: opening with a straight-ahead par four (4,000 words), then a dog-leg par four (a story with a sudden change of focus or direction), a sprinkling of par threes (2,000-3,000 words) and rounding out the front nine with a massive par five (12,000 words)... I'd probably need to write a story explicitly about golf to open or close the collection, but I sit down and write every evening, I should be able to knock something decent out in a fortnight...

That's what it's like in my head at the moment. Not that you'll be seeing Love on the Links and other stories by Craig Cliff in any book store soon.

It's almost a shame to have to name the thing at all. No name will tick every box without setting of some unintended firework halfway through story and ruin the spectacle of the end. I can almost understand how bands come to release self-titled début albums.

Almost.

I'm not about to do a Michael Martone, though.

Word I’ve Known For Quite Some Time, But Am Yet To Hear Anyone Else Say

Bouleversement n.:
Complete overthrow; a reversal; a turning upside down.
(Literal French translation: ball rolling over)

How you might use this word in a sentence if you were F. Scott Fitzgerald:

For the second time in his life Amory had had a complete bouleversement and was hurrying into line with his generation. (This Side of Paradise)

Modern equivalent: backflip (I guess).

But backflip (the sound and the manoeuvre) is too angular for the process of gradual but significant overturning. Bouleversement (\bool-vair-suh-MAWN\) is more rounded; the image of a ball (or planet) rolling over more apt for what I touched on in last Sunday’s Status Report. My bouleversement on Novel A.

In that post I discussed my waning enthusiasm for Novel B and alluded to my preference for the kind of fiction Novel A aspires to, but I omitted one important, specific point.

Here’s that point:

The book I had been listening to on my iPod was Haruki Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase (1982), as read by Rupert Degas. In January/February this year I listened to Murakami’s The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (1997), which I blogged about here.

From the first words of A Wild Sheep Chase the similarities to the later novel started to spring forth. Both novels have a male, late 20’s/early 30’s, passive, detatched (etc etc) first person narrator. The voice of narrator—his way with words, the way he manoeuvres through a story—was almost identical in these early passages. I thought perhaps this was due to the same person, Rupert Degas, reading both audiobooks. This may have alerted me to the similarities sooner, and underlined them, but it was not the ultimate source of the similarities. Perhaps, if it were just the voice of the narrator, I could also point a finger at the translator, Jay Rubin, but it was not just the voice of the narrator, it was his character. And the similarities between the books did not end with the narrator. Oh no. That was only the beginning.

Structure: Sheep Chase evolves into a quest for a) a strange looking sheep with a star on its backside, b) understanding what lies behind the quest itself and c) understanding what lies behind life itself. Wind-up Bird is a series of quests (finding a lost cat, discovering why his wife left him…), each one supplanting by something bigger, until the quest is, once again, to attain understanding.

Characters: the narrator’s unnamed girlfriend with the magic ears is split in two in Wind-up Bird to become Malta and Creta Kano; the boss with psychic/supernatural powers becomes the Okada’s brother-in-law Noboru Wataya.

Style: There are chapters in both books in the form of letters from other characters to the narrator (the Rat, Mei Kasahara); historical information/anecdote is crowbarred into both contemporary narratives (both books feature the Manchukuo episode in WWII).

Minutiae: in Sheep Chase the narrator describes a bird’s call as being like the winding of a watch spring, and darkness as like “the bottom of a well”.

…

It was sort of fun to find these parallels, but a ‘sort of fun’ game is not enough to usher me towards a bouleversement.

Wind-up Bird is more than twice as long as Sheep Chase, and is more than twice as good… No surprise given Murakami had fifteen or so years to think about the re-imagined passive divorcee on a reluctant quest story, and the lessons learnt writing four more novels before Wind-up Bird (one of which, Dance Dance Dance, was a non-contiguous sequel to Sheep Chase).

This was the important thing for me. That Murakami essentially rewrote a story because he knew it could be done better. No matter that the first book was already out there and people could accuse him over going over the same ground.

Perhaps it was all the similarities I was finding while listening to Sheep Chase, but it only seemed natural to look at what Murakami did and compare that with my situation. I had a manuscript which garnered me praise from agents and publishers like, “I really like Craig Cliff’s brain” and “terrific set pieces”, but these were the blow-softeners for the inevitable, “Who would buy this book?”, “I don’t know how to cope with this book”, “it never quite came to life for me as a novel.”

[These are all exact quotations. I’m not one to burn a rejection letter.]

When I tried rewriting in late 2007, I changed the setting and re-focused the narrative, but it there was still something off. I had that sinking feeling that I was throwing bad money after good (or should that be the other way around?): the changes I was making would not make it a sellable proposition.

So I stopped working on it.

The more time that passed, the better I was able to align the flaws I saw in the novel with the problems important publishing people had with it.

Then I had an idea for a story that bore some striking resemblances to my shelved, semi-butchered, manuscript. It was the same, but different. But I was afraid to go back there because I had roped that whole mental area off with Danger Keep Out tape.

Seeing Murakami write the same novel, but different, gave me the kick up the bum I needed to return to Novel A. I haven’t left it fifteen years and written four novels in between like Murakami, but I think I’m a smarter writer now than I was fifteen months ago.

And my other learnings from the last few months (my heart isn’t in cut-and-dry realism; I can write 3,000 words a day if the planets align) help set the ball rolling over.

So here I am. At the beginning of a new Novel A. I have the advantage that my Wild Sheep Chase was not published, so I can borrow liberally from it and no one (except my gran and my girlfriend) will call me out for being a dried up hack.

But I am changing most of the character’s names, if only to convince myself that they are different and this is a different story.

And I’m on the look out for a snazzy working title. It doesn’t need to have anything to do with the book. Just something I can name the folder in which I save everything related to the novel.

I can’t believe I said “snazzy”. I sound like a drunk version of my mum. It must be time for bed.

Blank Hippo Blank

I've been looking through the word documents I have created so far this year. Specifically the ones that never became anything.

The Quickly Abandoned.

The outlines for unwritten novels; ways to link short stories. The snatches of dialogue overheard at work that could be something more. The first person rants which I couldn't bring myself to fictionalise, nor could I bear posting them here as "What I Actually Think."

Even though it's only been a hundred and something days, I had already forgotten some of the things I'd written. That's what happens when you don't revise something. It is only once I begin revising that a piece begins to assume any importance.

Revision is what separates writers writing for themselves and from writers writing to be read.

But, having said this, some of these unrevised snippets are interesting -- in an archaeological sense. I've been writing all over the place (short stories, novels, poetry, blogs, memoirish indulgences), and these Also-Wrotes fill in the gaps of the story of this year.

The piece I'm about to cut and paste below was written on the sixth of Jan, so very early on in the Year of a Million Words [sic]. At the time I didn't really know how to go about writing circa 3000 words a day, every day. I was half drunk on the challenge, half baffled by the numbers.

The 532 words were the last I wrote that day. An effort to pad out the numbers, sure, but I thought they could be useful for something (perhaps that should be: something *big shrug* ?)... but now, four months later, I know these words are better left where they are.

Rest in peace, casualties of the War of Words.

Blank Hippos Blank

We were walking along the beach at Portobello.

“If I had to describe it, I’d say fizzy.”

“Sorry?”

“What?”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “You can’t just start a conversation like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like you’re continuing a conversation. What’s ‘It’? You said, If I had to describe it… ‘It’ is only a placeholder for something the other person already knows.”

“They do it in short stories all the time. You do it in your short stories. I remember.”

“This is real life.”

She made a snickt sound; suction between tongue and roof of mouth. Said, “My life is like one long short story.”

I laughed.

“It. Was. Fizzy,” she said. “My stomach. Last night.”

“Oh.”

“When you go to the library next, get me Moby Dick.”

“You won’t like it.”

“It sounds like I’d like it.”

“The plot is like the tiniest part of the book.”

“What’s the rest?”

“Stuff about whales. Whaling. Ships. In the 1840s.”

“Could be interesting.”

“It’s great, but I don’t think you’ll like it.”

“What about that other book?”

“What other book?”

“The one you mentioned last night. It probably doesn’t have hippos in the title, but that’s what I’m getting.”

“I don’t remember mentioning a book with hippos in the title.”

“It didn’t have hippos in the title—”

“You could make a great title with hippos somewhere.”

“It was three words.”

“I don’t remember.”

“I didn’t dream it.”

“Hey, I just remembered a dream I had a few days ago. I was forced to eat human flesh.”

“Yeah, you told me.”

“What?”

“You told me.”

“But I just remembered.”

“You must have told me when you weren’t awake yet.”

“Did I recommend this hippo book when I wasn’t awake yet?”

“It was night. We’d just turned the light out.”

I shook my head. “Blank.”

“It was three words: blank blank blank.”

“Blank blank hippos.”

“Hippos blank blank.”

“Blank hippos blank.”

“I like that one. You should name a story that.”

“Okay.”

“Can I be in it?”

“But your life is one long short story. If you turn up in one of mine, it’ll be like plagiarism or something.”

“No it won’t.”

“Or fan fiction.”

“I don’t have fans. I’m destined to be ignored in life, mourned in death, remembered in eternity.”

“Sounds like the best kind of short story. Was it Gogol?” I pronounced it Gaw-gol, the way Nabokov says to.

“What?”

“The book I told you about.”

“No.”

“You should read some Gogol. ‘The Overcoat’. ‘The Nose’.”

“I prefer ‘Blank Hippos Blank’.”

“Only coz you’re in it.”

“Yes! I’m in your story, I’m in your story.”

“Secretly.”

By this time we’d walked up and down the promenade. It isn’t very long.

“I used to hate stories with writers in them,” I said.

“And?”

“And then I realised everyone finds writers fascinating. Everyone thinks they have a novel in them.”

“Or a long short story.”

“Exactly.”

“I don’t mind that you’re a snob,” she said. “I’m not a snob, but I don’t mind you being one.”

“I am a snob. I am also white trash. I am a long short story, too.”

“Home time?”

“I’m hungry.”

“Guess what? So am I.”

March Experiment - - a 248 word story

A screaming comes across this guy.

"Call me an ambulance."

There is no blood.

"Oh! Isabella."

There is no Isabella.

We think he's crazy.

We give him our shrinks' phone numbers and offer generic antidepressants but he just keeps screaming, "Ambulance! Isabella!"

"Some people," the guy next to me says.

"C'mon," someone else says, "let's get frozen yoghurt like they do on Full House when things get too real."

So we stick our hands in our pockets and turn away from the guy, who's still shouting, "Isabella!"

"She's not coming, pal," someone says in a fake New York accent. Some of us laugh.

At the frozen yoghurt vendor the queue is long. "Lot of people," says a woman with thinning hair. I agree.

They are out of wildberry when I get to the counter.

"I wonder if that guy is still screaming?" a woman asks.

People shrug.

"I once fell in love with a beautiful woman," I tell the man with a tub of apricot beside me.

"Yeah?"

"You can probably guess what happened."

He nods. He knows.

"That Isabella must be something to behold," I say, then, "Isabella!"

People look around the frozen yoghurt vendor’s store.

"Isabella!"

"Hey, are you alright?" the guy asks.

"Oh!" is all I say.

"Oh!" groans someone behind me.

"Ohhh!"

"You've flipped," says a woman with a fleck of frozen yoghurt on her top lip.

"Isabella!" another woman cries.

Outside it is raining. A dog leashed to a lamppost begins to howl.

About the March Experiment

When pondering the affect of the extra day on my quest to write a million words in a year, I decided to see what 8 extra words a day really meant by writing a story in 8 word instalments over the month of March.

I set out with the intention to write with a blank slate each day. The first few days the idea of writing only eight words was full of possibility, and I played around with how much meaning you could pack into those words by referencing other works (see the first line of Gravity’s Rainbow, Neil Young’s ‘Ambulance Blues’) and using cliff-hanger endings (e.g. on the first day, there was an incidental reference to Blondie’s ‘Call Me (Theme from American Gigilo)’).

But after a few days, I realised I had to actually write a story, and without the ability to go back and change the foundations, I just had to forge ahead with this story of a screaming guy and sceptical onlookers.

And upon my return from Norway, I realised I had to wrap this thing up somehow.

I had to edit a bit as I went as I often slipped into past tense some days. And today I noticed when I exported the whole story into Word and did a wordcount, there were 250 words rather than 248 (31 x 8). So twice this month I screwed up the simple task of counting to eight… some accounting graduate, huh?

So I’ve gone back, identified the culprits, and massaged the text slightly so it’s 248 words.

I don’t think the story itself has much to redeem it besides the story behind the process. Like most experiments, it was more Learning Experience than Significant Achievement.

Ah well.

Time to come up with my next experiment.

I think it might have something to do with translation. Watch this space.

Status Report: Week Eleven

So this week I cracked 200,000 words. This did not give me a sense of achievement or increase my happiness.

Why?

Where are these 200,000 words now?

A fair chunk are suspended in amber on this very blog. Occasionally someone will google “George Harrison All Things Must Pass” or “Rorschach Tests Steven Hall” and read something I threw words at. But.

I really really really want to dive back into a novel. Not Novel A. I’m done with that for now. I vow not to touch Novel A again in the 00’s.

[Serious Question: what will we call the decade 2010-2019? The Teens? No thanks. The person who comes up with the best alternative may just be suspended in amber on Wikipedia… I think this is something to aspire to.]

Which leaves Novel B. Or Novel C, which does not exist, even as an idea.

I watched ‘Awakenings’ (1990) on TV yesterday and it got me interested in Novel B again. There’s brain damage in Novel B, you see (but no parts for Robin Williams or Bob DeNiro).

I also read that Jermaine Clement wrote a cover blurb for Duncan Sarkies’ new book. This made me feel like writing a book was an okay thing to do in 2008

But.

I find it hard to write long, continuous narratives while working a day job. My new job is good, relative to other day jobs I’ve had and could have, but still. Good jobs take more energy than bad jobs. I can’t think about brain damage and the Wellington Visual Arts scene while I’m occupied (damn occupations).

I admire writers like Nigel Cox who had day jobs and never begrudged the world for the financial realities of being a novelist. I don’t want to begrudge the world. I just want to write another novel. I don’t even care if it gets published (I don’t clench my teeth nearly as much now that I’ve let that balloon drift out of sight… Another balloon man will come in time).

I am a book-shaped person in a credit card sized world.

That’s all.

I am going to Norway for Easter. Before then I am going to get books by Oliver Sacks M.D. out of the library. After Norway, I am going to blog less, review less stories on Zoetrope, write less flash and short fiction, and work on Novel B.

For serious.

Week Eleven – The Stats

Weekly word count: 16,920 (lowest weekly haul to date)

Average: 2,417 words per day (compared to 2,662 last week)

Most productive day: Sunday 16 March, 4,254 words

Least productive day: Friday 14 March, 316 words (this is not a typo… work drinks etc)

Year-to-date: 213,417

Orbital Resonance

About three weeks ago I mentioned something I was calling ‘Orbital Resonance.’ At the time I think I called it a love letter to Wikipedia. Well, I’ve made it into a kind of ouroboros e-book for your reading pleasure.

Read it: Orbital Resonance c/o Xyzphage

The Xyzphage thing will make sense once you read part three of ‘Orbital Resonance.’

It’s pretty much all tongue-in-cheek, especially the hyperlinking.

This is not to say that I don’t sometimes stand back from the e-book and think: Wow! this is like a hypertext Pale Fire meets Cloud Atlas.

Actually, that was tongue-in-cheek also.

Happy reading.

{{If you like it, spam your friends. If you hate it, spam your enemies.}}

Shameless Self-promotion

I have two (2) stories in Etchings 4, which is out now. My contributor's copy is currently somewhere between Melbourne and Edinburgh, but cool people would click here to buy a copy or subscribe, because any journal with 2 stories by Craig Cliff and an essay by Robert Dessaix has to be good...

'Untitled (Crimson and Gold)': The Process

The one thing I think that sets this blog apart from every other blog I’ve come across (due to the vastness of the blogosphere—hideous word BTW—I’m probably not alone, I just think I am) is that I try to open up my writing process for outsiders to observe. There’s my weekly stat and sanity checks (which are less to do with process than progress), my thoughts on books and music (two key natural resources for the production of my Fiction McNuggets) and, occasionally, I open up my notebooks or my W.I.P. folder and reveal the Wizard is just a man pulling knobs and twirling cranks behind a curtain.

Today I am going to walk you through the unique process I underwent for my latest short story, ‘Untitled (Crimson and Gold)’. It’s only wee (1,400 words) which should help this discussion no end. It also means I only went through two drafts, one on the seventh of February and one today on the first of March.

But before the drafts, there was an idea. I said this was a unique process, and this is because the idea was not mine. When I woke on the fifth of February 2008, I had an email from a friend in New Zealand called Laura, which, among other things, said:

it occurred to me today that if i could write, i'd write a short story about a girl who has never picked up a hitchhiker due to the horror stories about crazy psychokillers, but on a whim when she's having a good day decides to pick one up, and then kills him in a car accident.

What immediately got me thinking was not the hitch-hiker idea but the “if I could write, I’d write X.” A lot of people think they have a book in them, and keep their good ideas mum in the hopes that they will one day sit down and write. A much smaller percentage actually make it to the end of their book. A smaller percentage still will actually get that book into print. Rather than try to discourage this anti-social, anti-commercial impulse, I think everyone should try and write their story. But I also believe, with all the potholes a beginner writer must face, it’s a good idea to get people to think about certain things before they put fingers to keypad.

[I hope this blog functions in a similar way. Not that I have much to prove I have left the realms of the beginner after my seven years of writing…]

So my reply to Laura laid bare the thoughts which ran through my head as I considered how to write the story of her hitch-hiker idea.

If I were to write the 'girl who kills her first hitchhiker in an accident' story, I would have to call her Laura…

The story would probably do something else for the first few pages, probably Laura having hilarious relationship problems or feuding with her parents, which would precipitate her getting on the road and having that whim to pick up a hitchhiker. The story would be between 2500 and 4000 words. The crash would occupy only the last 500 or so words.

Alternately, the story could start with the hitchhiker in the car and be dialogue heavy. The hitchhiker would do most of the talking, initially, which makes Laura uneasy, but then sets her at ease. She confides in her passenger that it is her first time picking up a hitchhiker. She explains what precipitated her decision. There would be a hint of a love connection, of a serendipitous bringing-together, and then the car would smash into something.

Or, the story could mostly be about the aftermath of the accident. Some people would like this story for its psychological realism. But the irony of killing the hitchhiker would mostly be lost, like starting a joke with the punchline.

The hardest part with the story would be the ending. Knowing when to stop, and getting the right mix between irony/twist/punchline pay-off, and the sense that this is just a slice of Laura's life which will continue on and she was not just created for the duration of the story.

The story would probably be in third person in order to suppress elements of Laura's guilt which would realistically creep into her first person narration before the crash and spoil the twist…

To which Laura replied:

…I found your comment about 1st vs 3rd person really interesting. I guess it never quite occurred to me that when you write a character they are such a real person to you that their thoughts… could shine through without you necessarily intending them to.

Anyway, that's all really interesting - and if you do seriously want to do anything further with it, then absolutely, it's all yours.

She actually gave me permission to write the story twice in her email… so of course, the days later when I stalled at 1,700 words for the day, I opened a new Word document and started typing.

The day Laura killed the hitchhiker began like so many other days that month. An argument with her partner – and one time fiancée – Otto. “You are the least German Otto in the world,” Laura had yelled at him once, to which he had replied, “Entschuldigung.”

That German thing looked set to derail the whole story, so I quickly switched to the Laura fighting with her parents lead-in:

The day Laura killed the hitchhiker began like so many other days that month. Since she had moved back home her parents had slipped into the habit of popping into her bedroom to say goodbye before they left for work, but couldn’t leave it at that [clumsy sentence!]. Her father had popped in first this particular morning 7:15am, and said, “Good luck with the job hunt, sweetie.” She had covered her head with a pillow. She then felt the side of her bed sink as her father sat down, placed a hand on her shoulder and said, “I’m sure today’s the day.”

That didn’t really do it for me either. I switched back to the fighting with her partner, changed his name to Guy, and managed to get all the way to when she picks up the hitch-hiker before throwing my hands up and saying, “It just won’t work.”

Sometimes you have to write 948 to find out you can’t pull something off.

And so the file entitled “Laura killing hitchhiker 7 Feb 08” sat in my short stories folder untouched until today.

Had I thought about this story over the intervening three weeks? A bit. I must have been thinking of it yesterday, because I realised I could combine it with another idea, which again did not come from my own experience.

At some stage during the week 11-17 Feb, Marisa came home and told me the story about a woman breaking bottles of wine in the supermarket and just walking away (I noted down this idea on the notebook page which appears here).

Yesterday I thought: maybe the character of Laura I built up in the hitch-hiker story (whom I liked as a character) could be transplanted into in this wine smashing story as the observing narrator.

So today, after writing 500 words in five hours on my novella (working title: Fat Camp), I opened “Laura killing hitchhiker 7 Feb 08.”

I read through what I’d written. Scrolled back up to before she picks up the hitch-hiker and thought, “Right, so now she just goes to the supermarket?”

Part of me believes you should always start a rewrite from scratch. Especially if you’re doing an overhaul of the magnitude of this one (same character, different story). But I never listen to this part of me. This leads to a lot of contrivance and wasted energy, but sometimes it leads me to a third alternative.

Looking at this hitch-hiker story and this (unwritten) wine smashing story, I realised neither were strong enough to stand alone and yet they seemed to be speaking to each other. There would be smashes in both stories. In one, Laura acts when she wouldn’t normally and has an accident. In the other, Laura observes another’s accident, but this person doesn’t seem affected by her misstep. It was this gap, this yawning guilt-gap, between the two stories that told me I could write these stories as one.

I started with Laura in first person (the hitch-hiker story was in third person) talking about guilt and leading in to the supermarket scene. Then I looked back at the third person story and thought a lot of the humour would be sucked out in first person, and went through it imagining it was Laura writing in third person as a kind of therapy.

And so I came up with the new first lines:

It’s okay to attribute your memories to other people. To talk of your past in the third person. It’s healthier than not talking about it all. This is what Dr. X says.

I’ve already used the ‘first person quoting a therapist/grief counsellor in the first paragraph’ technique (in ‘Copies’, forthcoming in The Best New Zealand Fiction Volume 5), but that was actually a positive because in the short story collection I’m bringing together, the idea of copies (!) and imperfect repetition plays out within and across the stories. So two therapists? Bring it on.

This essay on the process of writing ‘Untitled (Crimson and Gold)’ is already longer than the story itself (I blame all those emails in block quotes), but I should probably talk about the last key element of the composition which ties together the title and the final image of a roll of paper towels in the middle of a puddle of red and white wine. When I came to name Laura’s therapist, the first name that came into my head was Dr. Rothko, which sent Laura, our 1st person narrator, off on a run about her doubts about a shrink with the same name as the artist behind “all those depressing colour field paintings” (her words) who eventually killed himself. To fill out the detail of this run, I needed some typically vague Rothko titles and ended up here. I inserted, “with titles like 1957 #2 and Untitled (Blue, Green and Brown),” into the story, but was actually more arrested by this painting:

White Center, Mark Rothko, 1950. (Entschuldigung if I’m annoying anyone by posting this reproduction without permission… it stays till I get told off).

Okay, so it’s more pink and orange rather than crimson and gold (I’m aware of the Tommy James/Joan Jett/Jimmy Eat World echo), but if and when you read the story it should rings some bells.

Speaking of “if and when”, most publications get shirty if stories have appeared anywhere online before, blogs included, so I’ll try eek a publication credit out of Laura and Marisa’s ideas (and my elbow grease) then post the link on this blog. Deal? Check back in 6-12 months.

[This essay: 1,836 words. The actual story: 1,418]