Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer, #17: Flash Fiction and Jergen Kohaut's Blues

The story, "Jergen Kohaut's Blues," begins with a break-up. That's typical for blues, of course—"Since my baby left me." This story, however, broke some new ground for me. First off, it was a long story, finishing at a little over 27,000 words—a novelette, I guess. These days, longer stories are more difficult to market. The combination of short attention spans and employment of sound-bite theory to everything from news reporting to politics has reinforced this tendency toward shortness. One of the things it has spawned is flash fiction.

I don't write flash fiction and I don't like it either. Just as an experiment and to see if I could do it, I've written and published a couple of flash stories, stories under 1000 words. Now, though, I see calls for stories under 500 words and even under 100 words. And I see word count restrictions creeping downward.

It seems impossible to me to write a story in that short a space. Stories are made up of plot, character, narrative, setting, symbol and theme (the formalist set of elements). I don't see how one could construct a plot, engage in character development, describe a setting so it creates a proper psychological environment, develop incisive narration, possibly include symbolism, and develop a theme using so few words. There is a technique to it, and I can see the challenge there. But it seems to me that such writing is more a verbal construct than a story.

Verbal construct is a term I have come up with for a lot of what I see now, especially in journals that print literary fiction. The old notion of a story with a beginning, middle and end; a plot that has conflict, rising action, climax, falling action, and denouement has been replaced in part with the idea that a work of literature is a creation using language—a sharp, brilliant creation that startles us and perhaps gets our attention but is not a story in the traditional sense.

In The Paris Review a while back I came across a story called "Imperatives." The whole thing consisted of imperative sentences:  "Keep off the grass. Do what I say. Obey the rules and don't drive over 55. Use the rear door for deliveries." This went on for ten pages! There was no story, only a collection of sentences in the imperative mood, the mood of command. I marveled that someone could write something like this, coming up with so many imperative sentences; so did the editor of The Paris Review, I guess, because he or she published it. But it was not a story, really, it was a verbal construct. Many of the things I encounter in journals are like this, though they are not often as extreme as "Imperatives." But they usually focus on a character with an obsession, a quirk, impulsive tendencies, or some weirdness. Nothing much happens in the story. They are well-written and the language dazzles. But the elements of story, listed above, are absent.

"Jergen Kohaut's Blues," is long, which means it has the time to develop the elements of a story. The plot unfolds with a conflict and then complications. Jergen's relationship with his live-in girlfriend is on the rocks. Hannah is using drugs, thinking he doesn't know. She has become clingy and obnoxious. Jergen loves her and they have been thinking about marriage, but her behavior is complicating things. 

 In the midst of this, Jergen has a chance to back up Sossity

Chander, whose marriage has broken up, and who is on the make to psychologically retaliate against her unfaithful husband. She and Jergen end up having a short affair. Hannah's behavior enables Jergen to justify his affair and the two of them split. He becomes Sossity's boyfriend, though, he soon finds out, boy-toy would be the more accurate description. Still, there are perks. She pays him for backing her up. He stands in with her band a couple of times and ends up playing for her, first as a back-up musician, then as a full-fledged member. As time goes along, he starts to realize that his relationship with Sossity will not last and begins to remember Hannah. A chance meeting with her, however, convinces him that their relationship cannot be salvaged.

This is the plot of "Jergen Kohaut's Blues." The conflict is between Jergen and Hannah, but also between Jergen's love for her and his ambition to be a rock star. When Sossity Chandler hires him, the door to success opens, but he must do it without Hannah, whom he really loves. He must turn his back on her in order to achieve success as a musician. He also soon realizes that Sossity's love will be short-lived and that she is only interested in him because she is angry at her ex-husband and is having affairs because of this. He will eventually be dropped. Still, he wants to make it big in the musical world so he allows himself to play the role of willing lover.

You could never develop a plot like this in 1000, 500, or 100 words. The difference would be between a painting and an artist's preliminary sketches—the difference between a full-length drama and a two-minute skit.

I admire people who can write flash. And a lot of people seem to enjoy it. Still, it is sui generis, one of a kind, unique, a thing unto itself. Flash fiction is not a story in the traditional sense of the word. There is plenty of room in the literary world for variety. My concern, however, is that the tendency flash fiction represents—the tendency toward brevity—will restrict stories that take time and 

space to develop.

 More on "Jergen Kohaut's Blues" in my next blog.

If you like reading about blues, you'll love my novella, Strange Brew. 

A new anthology, Arthur: King of Ages, about the many incarnations of Arthur, features my story, "Arturia," which takes place in the future, Arthur is female and leading an alliance of twelve planets against a powerful intergalactic army. If you like high fantasy with a twist, this text is for you.

For more titles, check out my Writer's Page.  

Comments welcome!

Dave's Anatomy: My History As A Writer #16: The Old Man Sang the Blues

After a brief spell out, I began to write stories about Sossity Chandler again. "The Old Man Sang the Blues" plugged into my love of blues. I play the blues. I've studied them, lived them, and listened to them for years. I think I do it pretty well. A couple of times I played them in a hookah lounge and coffee bar where the audience was primarily African-American. After three pieces by Buddy Guy, Robert Johnson, and Son House, more than one African-American came up and expressed appreciation; one guy said, "Hey, man, I really like the way you play the blues." Blues is an American art form with a beauty and subtlety I think is unrivaled in popular musical forms.

Sossity, my character, does the same. One night in her struggling years, she plays a rough bar in a small town in central Indiana. At intermission, a man invites her to his table and buys her a drink. She is astonished and thrilled to find out he is River Coleman, a bluesman she venerates and whose style has influenced how she plays guitar. She does a couple of his songs during the second half of the show and talks with him. He comments, "Girlie, if I was your age again, I’d be using all my charms to win you over." Her reply:  "If you were my age, you wouldn’t have to try very hard." This exchanged becomes significant later in the story.

Sossity writes Coleman, who is old, not very well off, 
and dependent on relatives. She visits him

when she can. After she makes it big, she supports him and, when he falls ill, arranges for medical attention. He dies and, in appreciation for her care and love, leaves the rights to all his songs to her in his will. Sossity publishes them, studies them, and records an album of her doing his songs. She lectures on his guitar style and mode of songwriting. She does a presentation on him at a blues seminar at Oxford University. This is where the trouble starts.

An attractive young couple related to Coleman appears and tell Sossity they have a legal claim to his music. They own a song he wrote that is not included in the catalog Sossity has. Their legal claim is that Coleman gave her rights to his "complete works" and she does not have the complete works. Therefore, the will is nullified and the rights will revert to them. She asks her lawyer if this is true. He tells her that in the real world such a claim would be preposterous, but in the world of the legal they have a strong case. Crestfallen, she contemplates what to do, remembering how she cared for Coleman because his relatives would not, showed him love and respect in his older days, and championed his music. Now she faces the threat that the music she promoted will be torn from her by a legal technicality.

At night she sleeps. In her dream, she is young, in a club in Harlem, sitting at the table of a young,handsome River Coleman. But she is also there as her present self. The modern Sossity is present within the 1950s Sossity and both are aware of each other. She is able to have an exchange with herself:

            “You coming to my place after the show?” [Coleman asks}

            “Sure I am.”

            “That’ll put some spark into what I play tonight.”

            “What you play tonight will put some spark into me.”

            Good answer, Sossity thought. My fifties self can get her game on pretty well—comes from playing in bars and getting hit on so much.

            Comes from being a lady, her other self answered, which is something you are not.

            Sossity withdrew more in order to observe and experience.

            “How are the gigs coming along?” she asked.

            “Good. I’m booked pretty much for the rest of the year and with some high-class shows. And Bluesville Records is thinking about giving me a recording contract.”  

            “That’s sweet.”

            “I’m doing a new song for you, Sossity. I just wrote it tonight.”

            “What is it? What’s it called?”

            “You’ll find out.” He squeezed her thigh.

            The jazz band played a half hour. River excused himself and went backstage to tune up.

            He’s quite a man, Sossity told herself.

            At least we can agree on that, her other self answered, puffing her cigarette.

Sossity's 1950s Self

Jorge Luis Borges’s fabulous story, "The Garden of the Forking Paths," tells us there are infinite possibilities to life. Sossity sees a way her life could have gone and, in another world, did go. One of my friends, who helps me edit, says this confused him. Maybe, but the concept of talking to another you from another life that exists in another realm of possibility seemed cool. We can, and perhaps do, live multiple lives. Sossity, in her dream, stumbles into one where she realizes what she said to River Coleman the first time she met him.

When she wakes up she finds a copy of the missing song, written in longhand, beside her bed. Coleman's relatives no longer have a case as Sossity does indeed have his complete works. As she plays that night at Oxford, she senses he is near. Love, she often told herself, is stronger than death.

"The Old Man Sang the Blues" is available in a print book you can get on the internet, an anthology titled Dreamspell Goddess. Lots of good stories contained therein.

For more information on books and goodreads, check out my Writer's Page. As I've said elsewhere, a lot of my stories are about music. The story Strange Brew is about a rock star in the 1970s who likes the blues, gets to open for the Rolling Stones a couple of time but happens to meet a mentally unbalanced witch who falls in love with him and transports him back to the time of Robert Johnson and Kokomo Arnold. Now there is another blues singer named Kokomo Dave. Here's some footage of him (of me) playing blues at the a local farmer's market:  Kokomo Dave Landrum. (I don't really play under that name, but for this it just seems like a good handle.) Listen to him play. He's pretty good.

I would love to hear your comments. Blues? Does anyone play? Who is your favorite figure from the blues world?

Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer, #15: Mother Earth and Pretentious Seminarians, or "The Gaia Contract"

 

Gaia

I began to run dry on story ideas for my ongoing character and started to write tales without her benevolent presence—without the subject of music, a thing I know a lot about;  without the struggles and ironies of being a musician;  without the conflicts one runs into when playing gigs.  But there are other things going in the world, and the past always generously supplies. I came up with the idea for a story called "The Gaia Contract."  The past supplied again.

I attended a college that had a seminary attached to it. Seminarians, training for ministry, can be good, kind, thoughtful people; but they can also be pretentious prigs. And the pretentious ones are the ones you remember. What struck me as annoying is that the seminarians I knew were so—well, Shakespeare would have called them "precise." To be a "precisian" in his day was to be someone who had an extremely narrow theological approach and would not vary from it at all. A precisian's beliefs were set in stone and any slight variance, any open-minded interpretation, any deviation from what they considered the orthodox norm was off-limits to their thinking.

I knew one guy who wouldn't let his kids watch cartoons because cartoons presented a false picture of God's creation:  animals can't talk. Another told me he never read Shakespeare because Shakespeare was a moral relativist. A line in Hamlet said, "There is nothing neither good nor bad, but thinking makes it so."  It was pointless to try to say that cartoons were harmless entertainment, like fairy tales, or that something Shakespeare has a character say does not necessarily reflect his personal views on a matter. But arguing with these pastors-in-training proved a pointless endeavor. They were impervious to other viewpoints.

One friend was so pious he would 

never call a stretch of winding

road outside of town "the Devil's backbone." Everyone around there used the nickname, but he probably thought using the Devil's name to characterize landscape constituted something evil. He did not celebrate Christmas, Halloween, or Easter, saying there were holidays with pagan roots.

As I thought on this, a story formed. What if someone ran up against a pagan god or goddess and got obnoxious with them? In my story, the character of Bob becomes hypercritical of an organic farm called Gaia Farms. And the people there, neopagans, worship the ancient goddess of earth and soil. Bob tells the narrator they sacrifice animals. He replies they are vegans. Bob insists that in ancient times, Gaia's followers spilled human or animal blood on the furrows of fields to ensure good crops. Bob eventually becomes pastor of a small church near the farm.

The narrator gets a call that Bob has been killed. An automobile accident severs an artery in his leg. Leaving a trail of blood, he crawls across the fields of—you guessed it—Gaia Farms while a worship of the goddess is going on. The people try to help him, but it's too late. When the wife in the couple that owns the farm starts to make a disclaimer, the narrator holds up his hand and says she doesn't need to say anything. It was an accident. But, at the same time, it's not good to bad-mouth Mother Nature.

The story was an ironic take on closed-mindedness and pretense. It got published in decomP magazine. I read, a week later, that a site on the internet rated decomP as one of the ten best literary sites on the web, which encouraged me (and boosted my ego, I will admit).

So I was not writing songs about music or about Sossity Chandler, my ongoing character. Maybe I had become too dependent on her. What followed was a series of stories that went off in new directions. More on this to come.

Here is a link to read "The Gaia Contract."

For more titles, check out my Writer's Page.

Summer reading:  What do the Brothers Grimm have to say for science fiction?  Read my novella, Mother Hulda.

I would love to hear your comments and observations. Have you ever run up against pretentious people?  Written about them? What did you say?

Dave's Anatomy: My History As A Writer, #14: Writing As Revenge and Healing

Everyone has heard the old joke, "Don't get on the wrong side of a writer or they'll write you in as a character." It's true. John Gardner did not like the philosophy of Jean Paul Sartre, so he makes a character in his novel, Grendel—the character is Grendel himself—spout off and espouse that philosophy. If you know anything about Grendel from Beowulf, which Gardner's novel is based on, you know he was not a particularly likeable creature. Neither is Gardener's character and he becomes, in effect, a surrogate Sartre. Other examples exist, and one existed for me. Now, a certain amount of gleeful ill-will enlivens making a crappy character out of a person who has done you wrong. But doing can also be a lesson in life. It comes from recognition of someone's stupidity or egotism, and yet is written, like all good satire, in order to correct.

My story, "InnerSpace," is about Sossity Chandler, my ongoing character. She comes to a lounge called InnerSpace to do a fundraising concert. Before becoming a rock superstar, Sossity had played in the lounge and had been irritated by the host who did the shows, named Dallas. One night he comes on to her, and she has decided she'll go along with him, until he asks her, "So, do you want to spend the night with a future rock star?" Sossity almost laughs at him and says she has to go. A few weeks later, she asks if he would like to play blues. He agrees but, both times, backs out at the last minute, saying his guitar is messed up and he can't get it in tune. She realizes he had no intention whatsoever of playing blues with her and decides he is not worth her time. Later, Sossity makes it as a rock star. Dallas doesn't get the big break and remains a local player.

Once I asked a musician twice if he wanted to do some blues. Both times he agreed, and both times he backed out at the last minute. A girl told me he had asked her if she "wanted to spend the night with a future rock star" after I told her my story of him backing out of a blues jam. The guy went on to pursue a career as a rock star but never made it. Out of annoyance and amusement, I decided to write him up as a character.

Sossity plays a gig with the same guy years later. When she does a blues number, he is not able to keep up with her, gets the rhythm all wrong, and can't do a lead break when the time comes. She realizes he is an inferior musician. His arrogance toward her was designed to cover up his incompetence as a musician. He miffs all the five blues numbers they do together. Sossity covers for him. She also has an epiphany, a moment of enlightenment.

I think it was Captain Kangaroo (that great philosopher) who said that misbehavior by a child is not a challenge but a cry for help. I've often wondered if the same is true about arrogance, bullying, egotism, and snarkiness. Maybe not all the time, but a lot of the time these things are a camouflage for inadequacies people feel; or cover-ups for what they know is true but don't want to admit. Dallas is not a good musician. He can't play blues. He can't keep rhythm. His façade of superiority has been built to hide the fact. His failure to succeed in the musical world is proof of this. Sossity realizes as much and sees it as a learning experience. Though chagrined by his past misbehavior, she tells her boyfriend as they settle down to bed that night, "'He's a real jerk-off but I feel bad for him.'"

Writing is said to be therapeutic. It's a way to get bad things out of you. For years, when I was learning the craft, I did "morning pages" as suggested Julia Cameron in her book The Artist's Way. When I wrote about certain phases of my past, I astonished myself at how the writing so easily turned angry, vulgar, and resentful.

It's not good to be angry. It's even worse to be angry and not know you're angry. 

Writing those pages, and writing stories, got the anger out of me. Remembering those mild insults from an ego-driven musical want-to-be who never made it big and never will supplied the material for the story, yet not in a gleeful, vindictive way. It's sad that people are like he was back then. The same thing can be said for people who displayed less-than-ideal attitudes in graduate school. A lot of them are detritus now as well. The stellar scholarly projects they thought they would do never materialized. Those in writer's group who arrogantly criticized my early work are still in writer's group and have published nothing. And so it goes. Writing can get these hurts out. At the same time, it creates healing rather than anger.

"InnerSpace" appeared in 34^th Parallel, which is a print magazine. That story marked the first time I got my name on the cover of a magazine. You can order a hard copy or get it online.

ShadowCity is a great summer read.

Other titles are available.