Flexing my reading muscle.
Posted on | May 30, 2009 | 8 Comments
In college I had a writing teacher who made me type out stories I thought were good. Every sentence. Every slender comma, ellipses, period, paragraph, dialogue, description. She said it would help me to get inside the craft of the story. That I would begin to hear in my head the author’s internal dialogue; that I’d understand the choices better: the words, the edits, the way one sentence followed the next.
I did it. At first skeptically, then diligently. She was right, of course.
Now it’s not so much matter of writing the story out. I write enough, and regularly enough, to feel like I understand how to construct sentences. But there is still something that can be learned from reading a story daily, richly, and then putting it on the operating table, putting your finger on it’s pulse, examining what makes it beat.
So maybe for a little while I’ll try to read a short story every day. Read it, and try to write about it. Try to put words around what makes it work (or not), until I get to the meat of it. Sort of flexing my reading muscle a bit.
***
This morning’s read: “An Old Virgin” From DON’T CRY by Mary Gaitskill.
It is a story that asks again and again: what does it mean to be alive inside a body? Reading it, you become the voyeur. There, touching the frail skin of a father, dying; fingering the charts of a 43 year old virgin at the doctor’s office for a physical, who whispers, “just let me catch my breath” during the exam; at a stoplight next to a Hispanic boy pumping with bravado and “so much light that it burned him up inside and made him dark.”
Gaitskill’s gaze sinks into people. She captures them on the page as both entirely physical and also almost painfully ethereal, their spirits bright and sharp at the edges of the story, tangling with it, becoming for brief moments almost mythical.
“As soon as Laura looked at her father, she knew he was going to die. His body was shrunken and dried, already half-abandoned; his spirit stared from his eyes as if stunned and straining to see more of what had stunned it.”
Inside the narrators head, we go into the secret, morbid, sexual places of her mind and come up against our own humanity: which we learn is something exquisitely fragile and riddled with holes leaking spirit and curiosity and abject sorrow.
“When he answered her, his voice was like a thin sack holding something live. He was about to lose that live thing, but right now he held it, amazed by it, as if he had never known it before.”
“An Old Virgin” is a story about regret and forgiveness, maybe; and about the way these two things are always smashed together inside us, never quite reconciled in the bright, messy, and perverse rooms in our hearts.
***
What if you flexed your reading muscles too? I’d love to know what you think of the short stories you read. What did you read today? How did it move you, make you think?
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8 Responses to “Flexing my reading muscle.”
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I am Christina Rosalie
Hello. I'm so happy you've stopped by!
I am a multimedia storyteller, digital strategist, idea starter, stalker of wonder, finder of four leaf clovers, MFA graduate student, and mama of boys. My first book,
will be published by SKIRT! Books in September, 2012.
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May 30th, 2009 @ 10:26 am
For the month of May, I’ve been reading one poetry book a day to do exactly the same thing. It’s exhausting, but I’m so glad I’ve been doing it. I also made a summer reading list for myself, mainly because we ended the school year with thesis defense week, and I realized how many gaps I have. This project is so good, and I look forward to coming back here to see what you have to say about craft, etc. I took a prose course this past semester and had forgotten how much I loved it–the pages and pages of storytelling. I wonder how genre finds a person sometimes. And how one can commit to just a single one when there are so many ways to tell a story.
May 30th, 2009 @ 10:48 am
oh, that was lovely. Do you know I don’t think I’ve read any of her stuff. Am putting it on my list to check out. I’ve been in the middle of Le Guin’s trilogy: Gifts/Voices/Powers. I love her stuff, have ever since A Wizard of Earthsea fired my imagination when I was 12.
May 30th, 2009 @ 1:52 pm
I just read “The Middle Place” by Kelly Corrigan. It is a memoir that explores the space in time when you are both a daughter and a mother. How these roles overlap, and how it forces you to grow up. She was diagnosed with breast cancer when her kids were very young and her father’s cancer came back when she was undergoing the end of her treatment. It made me think a lot about my life, being in “the middle place” right now. She used flash back of past life experience to complete her story. I loved the back and forth and how each flashback contributed to her ways of coping with cancer.
I would love to join you on this journey, but I think I need to write the rest of my thesis now so I can finish my master’s. I look forward to your posts. I love looking at author’s craft and how writing works.
May 31st, 2009 @ 9:14 am
I love the idea of taking the sentences apart, and figuring them out. I tend to read very quickly and sometimes don’t take the time I should to read, deeply. Definitely an exercise I might try soon, when I have a few hours ALL TO MYSELF.
I think Jhumpa Lahiri writes the most perfect short stories. I am always left wanting more…
May 31st, 2009 @ 7:44 pm
Sam–I love Jhumpa Lahiri’s short stories too. Here’s my question: what makes them good? For you? What makes a good short story? That you want more?
May 31st, 2009 @ 8:04 pm
My absolute favorite short story of all times is A Temporary Matter from Interpreter of Maladies (though I’m reading her new collection and loving as as much as ever). She so perfectly captures the tension between a couple struggling to make it after a stillborn child. I think what makes her writing so beautiful to me is the way she focuses on subtle body language to depict the characters emotions. It’s like watching an independent movie without all the music to tell us how we’re supposed to feel. She just shows us everything. And the tension is beautiful. God, I love that story. The first time I read it I tore it out of the New Yorker and said “I have to read more of her work.”
May 31st, 2009 @ 9:30 pm
That’s how I feel about her writing too, Barb. She gets the subtlety down just right…
The story I wanted to post about was from this week’s New Yorker. Have to still get the post on the page. Sometimes I love the stories there and have that experience of wanting to rip them out and keep them and other times I get the feeling that they are almost too clever. Like they’re too cool for the average reader… Am I the only one that reacts this way?
More on this tomorrow! Too late to start tonight.
June 1st, 2009 @ 2:01 pm
Christina, I am not sure what makes them good. I try not to overthink what I like, yet off the top of my head: she doesn’t overwrite, it’s simple language and not too complicated of a story. You’re not sitting there and wondering, what in the HELL are they talking about? Plus, I love reading about Indian (or in her case, mostly Bengali, I’m not sure if they’re synonymous) culture. I love reading about the dishes and the cooking and I’m just weird that way.
And I do think what makes a short story good is that it’s a world of its own – that you do want more, but that it’s also enough on its own.
As for feeling that stories are too clever, sometimes, yes. I always feel that I am not cool enough to get things, and that’s one reason I’ve never picked up Dave Eggers or Jonathan Safer whatever his name is. I am totally intimidated!