Best American Short Stories and O. Henry Prize Stories 2014--Part II

In my last post, I commented on the four most frequently-cited "sources" of stories in the 2014 BASS and O. Henry. Here are a few others:

"Ripped From the Headlines"

T. C. Boyle, always the consummate professional writer, usually seems quite "deliberate" in constructing his stories from material "ripped from the headlines."  He says his story "The Night of the Satellite"(BASS) is about his awareness of our increasingly cluttered sky and is built around his common structural device of slamming two different scenarios together to see what will result. For a professional writer like Boyle the job is to "make a story," and Boyle makes them out of whatever strikes him, often news items ripped from the headlines (or snipped from the back pages.)

Stories sometimes come from something the author has read or seen on television or the Internet. Colleen Morrissey says her story "Good Faith," (O. Henry) began with her watching a BBC documentary about the Westboro Baptist Church whose hateful anti-gay, anti-Semitic rhetoric she says holds a "train-wreck fascination." She felt there was an uneasiness in the young people  about what they were saying. She coincidentally read two pieces about snake-handling and began thinking about how such an act was both empowering and self-hating.  She says what she wanted to capture in the story was the tension between power and surrender.

Poetic Rhythm

Benjamin Nugent's story "God" (BASS) began with a poem written by one of his creative writing students in which a guy prematurely ejaculated while having sex with her.  When he told his fraternity brothers about the poem, they started calling her God. Nugent says one day the first sentence of the story came to him and he liked the sound of its iambic pentameter rhythm.

This notion of stories beginning with a rhythm is a fairly common idea.  Most recently, I ran across it in the Nov. 2, 2014 Los Angeles Times review/interview with Denis Johnson.  Johnson says: "When I write, I don't think in terms of themes—or think in any terms, really.  I'm making what T.S. Eliot called 'quasi-musical' decisions I'm just improvising and adapting, and in that case I suspect the story's course reflects the process of trying to make it…. I get in a teacup and start paddling across the little pond and say 'In seven weeks, I'll land on Mars.' Five years later I'm still going in circles.  When I reach the shore in spitting distance of where I started, it's a colossal triumph."

The T. S. Eliot citation is from a letter to critic Cleanth Brooks, T.S. Eliot observed: "Reading your essay made me feel, for instance, that I had been much more ingenious than I had been aware of, because the conscious problems with which one is concerned in the actual writing are more those of a quasi-musical nature, in the arrangement of metric and pattern, than of a conscious exposition of ideas."

Lauren Goff says that a story arrives for her either as a flash or as a slow "underground confluence of separate fixations. She says "At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners"(BASS) is of the latter type.  She says that fiction writers should read poetry as often as they read fiction and that this story springs from reading John Donne's "Holy Sonnet 7" every morning. The first line of the poem gave her the title of her story.

Gimmicks

Although Karen Russell has not been at the writing business as long as T. C. Boyle has, she also is unashamed about creating stories out of "what if" ideas ripped from her reading.  She says she sometimes thinks it is liberating to commit to a premise that seems "too goofy to work." "Madame Bovary's Greyhound" (BASS), a story about falling out of love, uses the point of view of the dog belonging Flaubert's fictional character.  It is a gimmick, a bit of fun, that allows Russell to pay homage to Flaubert by echoing some of his meticulous language and to upend the usual assumption about a dog's complete devotion by having this dog abandon his famous fictional owner.

Joshua Ferris says he wrote his story "The Breeze" (BASS) entirely on his iPhone.  He says he is not sure why, that maybe he just finds the pain of this laborious process fitting. "But the real answer is this," he says, "I wish I could tell you why I write at all."

Sometimes stories are experiments with technique.  Stephen Dixon ("Talk," O. Henry) says his story came to him when he was sitting on a bench in front of the Episcopal church across the street from his house with a copy of Gilgamesh he was planning to read. He came up with the first line of "Talk," and wrote it as an experiment in shifting point of view from first person to third person.

Beginning with a Genre

Some stories begin with a genre.  Chanelle Benz ("West of the Known," O. Henry) says she originally wanted to write a "literary western," but after introducing some of the characters, she knew she had "blood on the page," a saying she says nobody likes but her, but which best describes when she knows "a story's come alive" and she has characters who "can hurt me with their failings, longings, and loss."

Michael Parker sees his story "Deep Eddy" (O. Henry) as a "flash fiction" or "short story."  Thus genre initiated the story, but because short shorts are often like prose poems, it is the music of the words "Deep Eddy," that he says "spawned the story."  He creates a brackish backwoods river tainted by legend and sacred to teenagers because it is off-limits, said to be haunted or cursed.  He says he dropped the boy and girl into the bottomless swirl of the water and then found other images (and this is indeed a story of images) to "convey what every story I know worth reading is, on some level, about: the sweet, desperate, and inevitable currents of desire.

A Note on Desire

Parker's comment about "desire" being the source of stories may come from Robert Olen Butler's frequently cited suggestion, in his book From Where You Dream. Butler says that yearning seems to be at the very center of fiction as an art form, citing Buddhist thought that human beings cannot exist for even thirty seconds without desiring something. He says yearning is reflected in one of the most fundamental craft points in fiction: plot. "Because plot is simply yearning challenged and thwarted." Butler says, "if there is a unified field theory of yearning in fiction it is: I yearn for self, I yearn for an identity, I yearn for a place in the universe."

In the Nov. 2, 2014, issue of the Los Angeles Times book critic David Ulin reviewed Denis Johnson's new novel The Laughing Monsters. He also cited some of the email conversation he had with Johnson. Ulin says Johnson sees literature as a way of framing or reckoning with the chaos of a universe we can never understand. 

Johnson: "I can't remember very many situations where I had even the tiniest idea of what the heck was going on." Johnson says from time to time he seizes on a philosophy or perspective that helps him hide his bewilderment for a tie before it falls apart and leaves him baffled again. He is now reading Zen Buddhism:  According to Buddhism, he says, "Unsatisfied desire is life's bedrock experience."

Parts of Novels

Some stories are parts of novels or beginnings of novels. Halina Duraj says "Fatherland" (O. Henry) actually resulted from his being asked to give a reading, and wanting to read from a novel he was working on, he could not find a section that would stand alone.  Consequently, he chose a few short sections and then others that would provide context, which then seemed to call for still other sections.  Thus, the story is a "distillation" from the novel Duraj was working on.

Although it clearly stated in the book that  the O. Henry Prize Stories will not consider stories that are sections of novels, Tessa Hadley says right up front that "Valentine" is an excerpt from her novel Cover Girl, although, she says the novel was written "very deliberately" as a series of episodes that could stand alone like short stories. Hadley says this corresponds to something she feels about experience in time. "We like to think of our experiences as having the overarching shape and drive of a novel, but actually life more usually happens in fragments and stretches—when change comes it's often as if we start off on a completely new narrative track, forgetting our former selves."

Dylan Landis' "Trust" is a section from her novel, Rainey Royal, which was published by Soho Press in September, 2014. The book description on Amazon promotes the book by noting that Landis won a 2014 O. Henry Prize for "a section of this novel." So, what's the answer?  Does the O. Henry Prize editor "consider" sections of novels or does it not?