How to fill the space between books
Hello, friends!
What do you do when you’re between books? Yesterday I finished reading a mystery (I won’t name it, as it may be my least favorite book by an author whose work I usually enjoy), and on Tuesday, Emily St. John Mandel’s newest book, Sea of Tranquility is due to arrive.
Which leaves me with two whole days during which I can’t start something new, but I need something to fill those moments when I reach for a book.
My study is where I keep all of my books. Not my books, but books for reading. This is an imperfect solution, as the room is not particularly large, and it’s practically lined wall-to-wall with books. They’ve spilled into the hallway outside, which is where I stack all the books I’ve prioritized. The books I intend to read next. (Except that’s also no longer true; there are just a lot of books out there, and about half of them are books I’ll get around to when I get around to them.)
I reserve space, however, in the bedroom, for one particular kind of book: The short story collection. Easy to pick up for a quick bedtime read. Easy to access when, like now, I’ve found myself in a ditch between reads. Here I’ve got Michael Chabon’s Werewolves in Their Youth, or Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes, or Lauren Groff’s Delicate Edible Birds, or Danielle Evans’s Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self. There are old Stephen King collections (despite my not having read them in many years now) and there are a handful of anthologies, like the Best American Short Stories series.
I love a good short story. But I so rarely prioritize reading them. Even the best of them are over too soon. This morning I chose one of those Best American books, the 2014 edition, edited by Heidi Pitlor and Jennifer Egan. I don’t remember how I came by this book, but I know I hadn’t read it. It’s interesting to pick up one of the older editions of these books and see what authors you didn’t recognize before but you do now; the circumstances of your encounters with their work has changed. For example, this collection includes a short story by Lauren Groff, who I hadn’t been aware of until 2015, when her novel Fates and Furies commanded attention. It also includes one by Nell Freudenberger, who I didn’t encounter otherwise until her novel Lost and Wanted. When I read these stories now, I do so with a different perspective.
The first short story I remember writing was early. I was a child, obsessed enough with the Hardy Boys mysteries that I wrote my own, a ghost story that took place in Aunt Gertrude’s basement. (One page, front and back, as I recall, with an illustration.) But it was in high school that I dug in and experimented. A creative writing teacher, Mrs. Gruhn, opted me out of the class’s syllabus, and gave me a single task: Just sit at your desk and write stories. I produced an obscene number of stories that year. I remember a few: One in which a terrible storm forces strangers to gather in a hotel lobby, then kills the power. (I’m sure there was a murder involved, but that’s as far as my memory stretches.) In another, a robber hid himself in the walls of a bank, then cleaned it out after hours. (A full decade before a similar movie appeared! Where are my royalties?) Another, an obvious knockoff of Stephen King’s “Word Processor of the Gods,” as I recall, in which characters discover they live in someone else’s story; there are page numbers flickering beneath their feet.
About fifteen years later, I turned my attention to short stories again, and wrote several between book projects. One of those, “Quiet Town,” appears in an anthology called Loosed Upon the World, alongside stories by some of my heroes, like Margaret Atwood and Kim Stanley Robinson; that same story is included in CommonLit, an educational nonprofit that makes a wide range of literature as resources for developing reading, writing, communication, and problem-solving skills. And of course “The Dark Age” (also free to read in Lightspeed) is the source material of one of my current novel projects.
Over the years so many short stories have stuck with me, and I’ve read them again and again. Here’s a few:
- The title story of The Office of Historical Corrections, by Danielle Evans, tells the story of two women who work for an agency whose job is to set right misinformation in American culture, and the historical tragedy whose truth eludes easy understanding.
- Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles is, after all, a collection of stories and fragments; “Night Meeting,” about two characters who bump into each other one night, is perhaps my favorite.
- The title story of Ken Liu’s The Paper Menagerie illustrates a Chinese-American child’s struggles to relate to his non-English-speaking Chinese mother, who leaves her legacy in the origami animals he once loved.
- “The Star,” in which a priest returns from the stars, his faith shaken by what he’s learned about a particular supernova, is a classic Arthur C. Clarke story (which can be read in The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke).
I’m writing this newsletter through a headache I’ve won from staring too long, perhaps, at my computer screen this weekend. It’s April now, and I’m back at work on two novels: My ghostwriting project, whose first draft I’m retyping/revising currently, and The Dark Age, which came sharply into focus two weeks ago, during a vacation week’s worth of scene-writing and outline-shaping. This past week I’ve been waking earlier than usual (but not going to bed early enough, naturally), and spending a few hours before work each day on both projects. To hit a self-imposed deadline of May 1, I’ve got to finish twelve pages of the ghost project each day. When that’s done, I try to write a few hundred words of The Dark Age—a small goal, but one that keeps the novel from stagnating. Happily, both projects are moving forward, something I didn’t think I knew how to do.
(If you’re interested in my work on The Dark Age—the occasional excerpt, some behind-the-scenes stories about my research and writing process—consider signing up for my letters about just that! Here’s how to sign up to receive them; they come every other week, so each week you’ll have one newsletter or the other from me.)
With that, I’ve got to get back to work. I’ve pushed through sixty-five pages of line-by-line rewrites of the ghost project this weekend, and a couple thousand words of The Dark Age; today I’m writing the final scene of the ending. (Which doesn’t mean I’m nearly finished; I’m just writing the islands!)
I wish you all a happy week, and maybe a great short story or two.
✏️Until next time,
Jg
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