Where Do Stories Come From?: Best American Short Stories, 2014; O. Henry Prize Stories, 2014

One of the most frequently asked questions at short story readings is: "Where did that story come from?" or "How did you get the idea for that story?" It's a perfectly legitimate question.  Indeed, what other question can readers ask a writer about a story?  Questions such as, "What does that story mean" or "What is that story about? "can only be answered, however tentatively, by readers, not writers. The question usually derives from the reader's sense that a story comes from "real life," which is usually more respected than "fiction."  It often means, "O.K. I have heard your 'made-up' story; now tell me about the 'real' thing.

Because this is such an inevitable reader question, the O. Henry Prize Stories' appendix, "Writers on Their Work" and the Best American Short Stories' section "Contributor's Notes" usually focus primarily on writers talking about the source of their story. The following are the four most frequently-cited sources of the stories in both volumes.  I will talk more about the stories in the next few weeks.

Beginning with Personal Experience

Sometimes, but certainly not always, stories come from personal experience.  Louise Erdrich says that her story "Nero" (O. Henry)  was based on the fact that her grandparents really did have a dog named Nero who was always escaping from the backyard. She also says the python experience in the story was based on actual experience, as was the fact that her grandfather wrestled for prize money in small farm towns in Iowa. But personal experience does not mean anything until it is made into a story. Erdrich says she did not know what to make of Nero until one morning when she was writing this story. Erdrich suggests that in the process of writing this story, she discovered it was about "existence, inevitability, and time."

Joyce Carol Oates, the consummate "profession" writer, seems to create stories out of everything she comes across, says her story "Mastiff" (BASS)  derived from an actual experience when she and her husband went hiking in a canyon near Berkeley, California. She says the experience was so vivid and her emotions so intense, it was not difficult to write the story; she insists, however, that the story is fiction, "whatever its wellsprings in actual life."

One of the most common bits of advice often given to MFA candidates is, "Write about what you know."  But that perhaps does not always work best.  David Bradley ("You Remember the Pin Mill," O. Henry) says he started out wanting to write about what he knew—the experience of black Americans," but changed his focus when his agent suggested, "Why not write about white people." When he wrote about a couple of white guys in a rural area of Western Pennsylvania both in love with the same woman drinking beer in a pickup, a magazine ran the story with an illustration depicting both men as black.  Bradley notes, "Stereotypes and expectations apply to writers too."

Maura Stanton says her story "Oh, Shenandoah" (O. Henry)  began with a personal experience of breaking a toilet seat in the apartment she was renting in Venice. When she tried to find a replacement, she realized what an absurd quest it was to try to find a toilet seat in a city full of glass and lace and masks and marbled paper. She thought this "unromantic side" of Venice might be interesting to write about.  But this was just an anecdote, not a story.  It was only when she came up with Marie's need to make a decision about Hugo and her recollection of hearing a chorus of college students singing "Shenandoah" once in Venice that she knew what to do with Hugo. Stanton says "once my invented world got untethered from the real world and started obeying its own laws," she was able to find the toilet seat; that is, she was able to discover what the story was about.

O.A. Lindsey, whose story "Evie M" (BASS) derives from his combat experience during Operation Desert Storm, says the gist of the story is a nontraditional soldier facing "postwar pinpricks and the anxiety related to each."

Will Mackin's story "Kattekoppen" (BASS) also stems from military (Navy) experience, this time in Afghanistan, in which he felt he never quite got his bearings and that every day was an exercise in crisis management.

Beginning with a Concept

It has always been my opinion that good short stories are usually about universal mysteries of human experience.  Although this means that a short story is more often focused on theme than merely on plot or character, it does not necessarily mean that a short story writer begins with a theme or idea and then develops plot and character to embody that theme. Indeed, such a tactic is apt to create a static "illustration"—at its most extreme an exemplum or a story with a moral.

However, sometimes a story does begin with a concept.  For example in BASS, Charles Baxter's story "Charity" is one of a series of stories Baxter conceived on virtues and vices. Baxter had a story in last year's BASS entitled "Bravery." Both stories will appear with others in a new book due out in February 2015 entitled There's Something I Want You To Do. The interrelated stories, featuring characters that appear and reappear, are in two sections--one devoted to virtues (“Bravery,” “Loyalty,” “Chastity,” “Charity,” and “Forbearance”) and the other to vices (“Lust,” “Sloth,” “Avarice,” “Gluttony,” and “Vanity”).

The problem with such an approach, as Peter Cameron ("After the Flood," BASS), observes, is, what might called, the exemplum effect. Cameron says that since he does not write short stories very much anymore, he has to give himself some assignment or problem to solve in order to "jump-start" a story, hoping that such a "forced inception" won't weaken the story, that the story will "transcend its deliberateness."

Molly McNett says her story "La Pulchra Nota" (BASS)  began as a contemporary story about a high school choir director falling in love with his student's beautiful voice, but then she found a text on singing that mentioned the theory of la pulchra nota, about teaching from the perfect note by Medieval music theorist Jerome of Moravia. Her story  began to come together when she decided to put the story in that era. Then she came across a story of a man who lost his whole family in a month and still maintained his faith and trust in God.  She says she wanted her voice teacher to have that kind of faith though she can't claim to share or fully understand it.

Nell Freudenberger's story "Hover" (BASS) began with the notion of a mother who could fly---not like superwoman, but rather  sort of  a gentle lift off the ground to hover in an awkward, unplanned, useless sort of way.

Chinelo Okparanta says her story "Fairness" (O. Henry) began with wanting to explore an issue she observed in women in East and Southeast Asia of women of a certain class wanting to keep their skin color light.  The issue she explored, she says, however, was about loyalty and betrayal across social strata, not about skin bleaching. 

Beginning with an Obsession

Some stories begin with an obsession, either a general obsessive focus of the writer or a particular event or observation that haunts the writer.

Allison Alsup ("Old Houses," O. Henry) tells about learning of an unsolved double murder of a wife and daughter in her neighborhood when she was a child. She was friends with a girl who lived in the house of the suspected murderer, a teenage boy. She and the girl thought the house was haunted. She says she was never able to reconcile that violence with the peacefulness of her street and felt compelled to write the story "in order to discover its potential significance."  "Writers are negotiators," says Alsup, "hashing out ideas until seemingly opposite camps can sit at the same table and come to some sort of understanding."

Craig Davidson ("Medium Tough," BASS) says he is always interested in characters who are physically and emotionally broken; he says he likes characters who keep on trucking despite what life throws at them. He says he is not sure why he is drawn to such characters, although he thinks perhaps a therapist could.

Kristen Iskandrian  says "The Inheritors," (O. Henry) revolves around some of her pet obsessions, the most fundamental of which is the "multilayered entity of the female friends, and wanted the "fumbling bloom of a relationship" be the story's "pulse." She chose a consignment store as the primary setting because she likes the "sentimental mess of things disowned and things reclaimed, an orphanage for objects."  In such a place, she says her characters reveal their disparate desires and "inscribe one another."

Beginning with an Image

Often stories begin with an image. Olivia Clare ("Petur," O. Henry) says that when she lived in Iceland in 2010 for a short time, she saw the land covered with ash from the eruption of a volcano and imagined "a preternatural mother venturing out into an eerie scrim of ash"; almost before realizing what had happened, she imagined the woman meeting someone.

David Gates says his story "A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me" (BASS) began with an image--not one he remembered, but rather one a friend remembered of seeing Gates playing mandolin in a coffeehouse in New Haven when he was a high school kid. He says he recalls a fellow student at Bard College with a TR-6, and the death of the mandolin play in the story shares some details of the death of his father. He once kept chickens and he is a student of nineteenth-century British novels.  Thus the story is a patchwork of many different things that seem to "come together" meaningfully.

Dylan Landis ("Trust," O. Henry)  says it was an image of a teenager sneaking though her father's filing cabinet that sparked the story of Rainey Royal digging around and spotting her hated middle name on her birth certificate—a "fishhook that snags everything she finds unlovable in herself. The second image—which Landis says surprised her--was a gun tucked between file folders. Landis says she believes if you "root in the basement of the mind and grasp and object in the muck, your subconscious put it there for a reason." Landis says that as she wrote the story she had no idea how it would end, noting, "With every story I write, I like finding my endings in the muck of the basement too." 

Mark Haddon  ("The Gun," O. Henry) says "Good stories seem to come from some weird zone it's impossible to access in retrospect. "After all," he says, "if we knew how they came into being they'd be a damn sight easier to write."  He says he only knows he had been "haunted" for a long time by the image of two boys pushing a pram containing a dead deer across the highway several miles from where he lives. He says he has no idea where the image came from, only that it had a particular charge and stuck with him. Haddon says the story contains several elements that keep cropping up in his writing, including a locale that might be described as "grubby, liminal, unloved places that are neither town nor country, whose ownership is dubious and that are never en route to anywhere," but, he adds, that might "just be portals to somewhere else altogether."

Stephen O'Connor says "Next to Noting" (BASS) would not have been written if it were not for Hurricane Irene. However, he says the "real inspiration" for the story was an image that just popped into his head of two sisters with black pageboy haircuts and eyes pale blue like the moon. When he started developing the image, he realized that wo sisters were entirely lacking in "fellow feeling," and consummately rational. When he realized that this seemed parallel with nature, he knew he would have the two women face Hurricane Irene—all of which became a means by which he could explore his longtime notion that although he is an atheist there are certain things he wants to believe that cannot be sustained by rational interpretation.

All of the Above

Of course, most stories combine all four of these "sources," as the writer engages in a dynamic process of discovery "about" something mysteriously human. The story's relationship to "real life" is usually more complex than the question  about where the story comes from assumes and can only be discovered by the reader's engaging in a close reading of the fictional life of the story.

Best American Short Stories: 2014 and O. Henry Prize Stories: 2014--Some Preliminary Remarks

Heidi Pitlor, editor of Best American Short Stories, who reads hundreds of short stories each year to pick the 120 she considers the "Best," says she has moments when it seems there are more people in the U.S. who want to write stories than there who want to read them. She acknowledges what I have noted in this blog before—that many of the people who buy the annual Best American Short Stories (and the same is true for The O. Henry Prize Stories) are "writers in training," figuring that if they read the best fiction in the country, they will learn how to write better fiction. But Pitlor ponders "What happens when writing becomes more attractive than reading?  Will we become—or are we already—a nation of performers with no audience?"

Pitlor urges that editors, writers, teachers, publishers do whatever possible to enliven readers, to create communities for them, and by this, I don't think she means "book clubs." I share Pitlor's concern. But quite frankly I don't know what to do about it. Good short stories are not always "easy" to read; you certainly can't skim them or read them only for plot. The fact of the matter is, short stories are more appreciated by other writers than they are by non-writers. My experience last month when the Wall Street Journal made Alice Munro's The Love of a Good Woman their book club selection reminded me that most readers have no patience with, and therefore little appreciation for, short stories, even those by Nobel Laureate Alice Munro.

The reason that writers are the most appreciative readers of short stories can be seen in Francine Prose's 2006 book, Reading Like A Writer. Prose says, "I read closely, word by word, sentence by sentence, pondering each deceptively minor decision that the writer had made."  She says her high school English teacher had recently graduated from a college where his own English professors taught the New Criticism, adding, "Luckily for me, that approach to literature was still in fashion when I graduated and went on to college."

However when she went to graduate school, Prose says she realized that her love of books was not shared by her classmates and professors; in fact, she found it hard to understand what they did love, for the warring camps of deconstructionists, Marxists, feminism, etc. were all teaching students they were reading "texts" in which ideas and politics, not the work itself, were what was important. Prose believes that a close-reading course should be a companion, if not an alternative, to the writing workshop., I suspect that most writers agree with her. However, most readers are just not the close readers that writers are; and in my opinion, to appreciate good short stories, you must be a close reader..

I attended undergraduate school from 1960 to 1963 and graduate school from 1963 to 1966, so I too was schooled in the "New Criticism" that valued "close reading." After I began teaching in 1966, I schooled myself on structuralism and deconstruction during the 1970's and 1980's.  Indeed, I created the first theory of literature course in my department, but I never relinquished close reading.  In the 1990's, when "theory" became associated with cultural criticism, postcolonial criticism, and political correctness, moving even further away from attending to the work of fiction itself, I was glad I was near retirement. In the last year I taught, my graduate students actually resented my insistence that they pay close attention to the work they were reading; they preferred to talk about social issues and politics. The only students who paid any attention to style, language, metaphor, structure, and craft were those interested in becoming fiction writers themselves.

I have just finished reading this year's O. Henry Award Stories and am now reading the 2014 Best American Short Story volume. Over the years the two books have adopted two quite different selection conventions. After Heidi Pitlor, editor of Best, has chosen 120 stories she thinks best, she sends them to a guest author/editor to pick the top 20 that will appear in the book. However, Lucy Furman, editor of the O. Henry volume is solely responsible for choosing the 20 stories that appear in that book.  She then sends those 20 (with no identification of author or place of publication) to three guest author/readers, who pick their single favorite story and then write a brief essay on their choice.  This year the three "jurors" are:

Tash Aw, a Malaysian author whose first novel The Harmony Silk Factory won the Whitbread and the Commonwealth Writers prizes for best first novel. He had a short story in last year's O. Henry Prize Stories.

James Lasdun, a transplanted British writer now living in America, author of three collections of short stories, the most recent It's Beginning to Hurt.  I have posted blog essays on Lasdun's stories in the past.

Joan Silber, an American writer whose collection of story Ideas of Heaven was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Story Prize. She has had three stories in past O. Henry Prize Stories.

Although these three authors are called "jurors," as far as I can tell, they have nothing to do with choosing the 20 stories; they just pick out and write a short piece on their favorite one.

This year, the single guest judge who chose the final 20 in Best American, is Jennifer Egan, whose collection of linked stories, loosely parading as a novel, won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, and the Los Angeles Times Book prize.

In her brief introduction, Eagan argues that  Best American Short Stories "generates excitement around the practice of writing fiction, celebrates the short story form, and energizes the fragile ecosystem of magazines that sustain it."

In her longer and more detailed introduction, Lucy Furman says that the mission of the O. Henry Prize Stories since its beginning in 1919 has been to "encourage the art of the short story.  By calling attention to their gifts, we encourage short-story writers.  When we put a story between book covers, we give it a longer life and a wider readership." Furman talks a bit about what Eagan calls the "fragile ecosystem" of magazines that sustain the short story form, lamenting that those magazines funded by public and private academic intuitions are always in peril from shrinking budgets, for those in charge of  campus money doubt that a small magazine can be as much benefit to a university as a winning football team.

Eagan says one of the primary reasons she agreed to serve as guest editor this year is that she wanted to explore "systematically" what makes a short story great—"to identify my own aesthetic standards in a more rigorous way than I've done before."  Eagan says she wants to put her biases on the table at the outset, noting first of all that she does not care very much about "genre," either as a reader of a writer. She says he does not think about short stories any differently than she does about novels or novellas or even memoirs. However, she does admit that the distillation process, which she says must take place in any narrative, has to be more extreme than in a novel. "It also must be purer; there is almost no room for mistakes."

Eagan says she is biased toward writers who take risks—formally, structurally, even in terms of subject matter—over those who do the familiar thing even exquisitely. If there is a single factor that governed her choice of stories to include, she says, it was "the basic power to make me lose my bearings, to envelop me in a fictional world" by means of vivid specific language. After a compelling premise and distinctive language, she says the next factor is the story's pushing past obvious possibilities into something that felt "mysterious" or "extreme."

A few more general observations about the selections in the two books before focusing on specific stories in subsequent blog posts over the next few weeks:  If you follow the short story at all, you will see more familiar names on the table of contents of Best than the O. Henry: e.g. Charles Baxter, Ann Beattie, T.C. Boyle, Peter Cameron, Joshua Ferris, Nell Freudenberger, David Gates, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Joyce Carol Oates, and Karen Russell. It is no surprise then that more stories in the Best collection were originally published in the more successful periodicals: five from the New Yorker, ten from McSweeney's, Granta, Paris Review, Iowa Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Conjunctions, Zoetrope, and Glimmer Train. 

The O. Henry  collection has three New Yorker stories—by the three best-known writers in the collection: Louise Erdrich, William Trevor, and Tessa Hadley (who is always in the New Yorker). Most of the O. Henry stories are from such places as The American Reader, Ecotone, New Orleans Review, Cincinnati Review, Threepenny Review, Subtropics, Southwest Review, New England Review, and Southern Review—all prestigious places that any MFA student would love to appear in—even if the readership is less and the money negligible or nil.

Unless you read a great deal in small press periodicals, you may not know many of the writers in the O. Henry collection, e.g. Allison Alsup, Chanelle Benz, Olivia Clare, Halina Duraj, Rebecca Hirsch Garcia, Kristen Iskandrian, Dylan Landis, Colleen Morrissey, Robert Anthony Siegel, Kristen Valdez Quade, and Maura Stanton. No one story appears in both collections, although Laura van den Berg, a relative beginner, has stories in both.

I will finish reading all the stories—more than once--in both volumes before I begin posting essays on particular stories.  If you have not purchased your own copies of Best American Short Stories 2014 and O. Henry Prize Stories: 2014, you can pick up both either in paperback or eBook versions for around twenty bucks.  That's about 50 cents per story--the best bargain in publishing for those who love good fiction (And you have a much better chance of finding good writing in short stories than in novels; ask any writer.). 

It's too damn bad that practically nobody reviews these two books—just another example of the short shrift the short story gets from the publishing industry.