I really am so delighted at how much you all are writing about your stories. Thank you! I know life gets busy and we won’t always be able to keep it up, but I’m thoroughly enjoying it for now. Very thoughtful, insightful commentary.
I'm in on the Challenge. I'll do one story a month.
Fantastic! Welcome.
It's an impressive amount of plot and characterization to pack into one short story, which suggests that the writing might be too dense or that the pacing might be rushed, but I found neither of those to be the case. Arguably it violates the "show, don't tell" rule at times, but I was never bothered by that - the prose was always engaging enough that it never felt like a synopsis. I would even say that this story is a good example of why "show, don't tell" is a guideline rather than an absolute law of writing.
This is great. I love densely-packed writing - not dense in the sense of thick or hard to read, but dense in the sense of heavy with meaning. You are definitely making me want to read these stories.
Okay, my turn. I have stumbled into a pile of short stories lately. First, the edition of
A Room of One’s Own that I was reading turned out to have a handful of short stories at the end of it. The first of them I will not count - I would call it a poem rather than a story, as it has no narrative - it is a collection of disjoint and fragmentary images, and I couldn’t make a lick of sense out of any of it. But then there were three that better fit the bill.
6. “A Haunted House,” Virginia Woolf.
This has a lot in common stylistically with the poem that I’m not counting here (entitled “Monday or Tuesday”), in that is also structured rather loosely, but at least the images are related and something of a narrative emerges - it appears to be the story of a couple examining their new home while the past residents of it swirl around them with their own memories and impressions. Your interpretations may differ, however.
7. “Kew Gardens,” Virginia Woolf.
This one is more in the
Mrs Dalloway style, as the focus hops from person to person (and, briefly, to the POV of a snail) crossing a particular footpath in Kew. A slice of ordinary middle-class life, as a man tries to rein in his father’s dementia-fueled ravings, two old women reminisce and gossip, a young couple try and figure out what being a young couple is all about. And maybe I should have compared it to
To the Lighthouse, rather than Mrs Dalloway, because at the end they all converge on a pavilion to take their tea.
8. “The New Dress,” Virginia Woolf.
This one compares to
The Voyage Out in style. (I haven’t, but I ought to, look up when these were written and see if they line up with the novels they remind me most of.) It is a tense internal monologue by a woman with terrible anxiety and depression, that’s the only way I can describe it. The protagonist is at a party (at Clarissa Dalloway’s house; I love the way she makes cameos all over Woolf’s work), absolutely sure that her dress is awful and all the other guests are laughing at her. It goes on in that vein. It’s a better story than this makes it sound.
The other thing that happened to me, short-story-wise, is that I finished a novel I was reading on my kindle and next in the queue was a collection of Edgar Allen Poe stories. I started them and they are so enjoyable that I’m sure I will tear through the rest and they will all end up on this thread before another week is out. First up was:
9. “William Wilson,” Edgar Allen Poe, in
Tales of Mystery and Imagination.
A man - one of Poe’s pioneering unreliable narrators - recounts the story of his life beset by a doppelgänger, a schoolmate with the same name, same general physical description, and so on. As the story progresses, it becomes quite clear that this other William Wilson is his conscience, projected outward and incarnated. The narrator grows up a kind of Dorian-Gray-like debaucher, except that every time his worst schemes are about to come to fruition, in bursts this other William Wilson and ruins everything. The story ends, because it’s Poe, with Wilson stabbing his alter ego to death.
Phew! That’s all for now. I’m halfway through the second Poe story so I’m sure I’ll be back to report on it later. I’m leaping ahead of my pace! And I shall have to be intentional about working in more modern stories.
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1. “Children Are Bored on Sunday,” Jean Stafford. From The New Yorker, 1948 (reprinted in the December 3, 2018 issue).
2. “Pierre Menard, Author of The Quixote,” Jorge Luis Borges (in a Borges collection called Labyrinths)
3. “My First Fee,” Isaac Babel, in The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel
4. “Wants,” Grace Paley, in Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, 1970
5. “I Like to Give Twenty Percent,” Rebecca Schiff, in Columbia Journal, 2018
6. “A Haunted House,” Virginia Woolf
7. “Kew Gardens,” Virginia Woolf
8. “The New Dress,” Virginia Woolf
9. “William Wilson,” Edgar Allen Poe, in Tales of Mystery and Imagination
Goal for now: 52 in 2019