Writers Festival: The Kim Chinquee Challenge

Taking Kim Chinquee’s challenge, I wrote the same plot four different times. Each entry is exactly five hundred words:

A man walked into a corner bar with nine dollars and thirty cents in his worn pocket and a phone number written on a frail piece of receipt paper. Earlier that day, Alan Weaver gazed in the foggy mirror of his one – bedroom apartment. He noticed the grey hairs that had recently settled in throughout his scalp, his face wrinkled with loneliness. Focusing in on his hallow eyes, now such a duller grey, he finally admitted to himself what needed to be done. Alan was a structured man, only allotting himself exactly what he needed. Before he left, he counted out exactly nine dollars and thirty cents to purchase a roast beef sandwich and a dark Belgian draft, leaving a precise ten percent tip to the chubby blond waitress who always served him at the Ugly Dog. As he walked out his door, he felt the number burning in his pocket. He knew that he needed that draft to muster up the strength required in dialing that number. He planned on using his left over thirty – five cents when he crept into side phone booth of the bar, one of the only left around town, to make an anonymous call.

A young man walked into a bar down the street from his building, he had said he was going out for a walk to clear his mind. As an undergraduate he had every intention of becoming a writer. He sighed and ordered a Bud Light, knowing that he had the drive to succeed, and maybe even the talent. My life isn’t concussive to the needs of a writer, he thought. In high school, he considered himself awkward, tall and thin with thick Buddy Holly glasses. But in college, he came around to humor and suddenly everyone took his corky nature as a hip alternative style. He dated a beautiful blond sorority member and had four years of fun. It wasn’t until the two moved in together after graduation that he realized what had become his life. Initially, he looked at his page position at an editing firm as a step in the right direction. But when he really listened to his own dinner conversation, consisting of Sydney’s views celebrity gossip discussed like prayers, he saw his future embodied. Fearing that he was too late to save his mind, he looked forward to becoming quite accustomed to walks of that sort.

A man walked into a smoky bar to meet her, an old friend. She was the kind of sleek that gets men into trouble, the flow of her dark chocolate hair brushing her plump chest, the way she sipped her beer out of its skinny neck. Her eyes became so small, Asian like, when she was drunk, and her smile barely fit her teeth. He did not love her, but the energy refreshed his leather skin. They knew each other well, but never really knew the other’s life. He had devoted to another woman, his children, two girls. Years ago, his wife had past, taken by ailment of the heart. He remarried, for the girl’s sake, into misery. When they were grown, they wished he would find joy in life, they did not know that he did at the smoky bar. The man never slept with his joy, he only admired. She laughed and touched his arm and made him feel full, and if he had the desire, no morality would stop him from his pursuits. He paid for her drinks and laughed as they walked to their cars. His daughters worried and worried about his happiness, without any need.

A man walked into a bar which he had never been in, but always indented to visit. Henry spent his time in coffee shops more often, picking the skin on his hands and reading from science text books. Sometimes people sat around him and he listened to their conversations, how to wrap a ball of yarn, how to make love while pregnant. When he ordered a bagel with cream cheese and tomato, he imagined that he was deaf to hearing his order called. He entered the bar, intimated as hell, alone. A slender man with long blond hair approached only after he had just placed himself on the tall stool, “Never seen you here before.” Henry shuddered and sipped from his round cup of vodka and ice cubes. “No,” he looked down, “never.” Henry was short with dark eyes, he was always said to look mad. He wore all black and allowed his hair to shag in his face. The man smiled and looked down, “That’s okay, my name is Scott.” Henry shook his projected hand and sipped his drink again, it burned going down, worse than he remembered. “Can I invite you back?” the man asked. Henry, relieved, followed.

Perhaps Ambiguity is Positive

I was reading a book by a man I was assigned to interview, I’m told he is shy. In his story, a character finds a lone newspaper flipped open to the crossword section. He creeps to it and writes, “Could everybody please be a little less specific? Starting right now?”

There I stood; drink in hand, stirring the contents of the Styrofoam cup with a bendy straw. What did they think of me, perched in the corner of the beat up house on the South Side Slopes? A short girl with messy brown hair tripped into me, her shirt so faded with use that one final tug could leave her before me, bare breasted and drunk. I let her pass, realizing that my hostility was wearing thin. Hostility is funny like that; it consumes until it becomes a baby, nursing out the life of me.

It was St. Patrick’s Day and the city was green and flooded. I felt like a burden to the world until I realized that the festivities kept everyone too occupied to notice. Earlier in the day some friends and I walked the streets of the Strip District and touched the small goods in each shop, touched everything. Our footsteps keeping meter, we constructed an orchestra among the immigrants making their sales of cheap alpaca scarves and sizzling beef fajitas. We walked and looked and smelled and felt. And I hardly noticed the clear puddle I walked through.

I napped after. Noises still buzzed from the Strip while I built my cocoon, but shut out when sleep set in. The fog of an afternoon nap sends my heart out of my chest, beating violently. I don’t know why. When the sun filtered into my friend’s nineteenth floor loft I hatched from my shell. The noises returned and they sounded sweeter; sleep brought me a strange feeling which I now attribute to a transition.

Sometimes I dress myself with the intention of making other females envious. It never works, but the intent is what I notice in retrospect. I dress in tight jeans and a casual gray t – shirt, so I don’t appear to be fulfilling my own purpose. The white Styrofoam cup is put into my hand, and the scene is set. But my day on the carnival – like street where everyone was too busy to notice my shortcomings rings in my mind. I leave my hostility for adoption, I don’t know why.
I thought of those words of ambiguity opening a new faucet. My presence and perception skewed, I wonder if I am bitter at constant or if the months stained with snow made me lose; no.

The ambiguity of brilliance in writing; an interview with short fiction writer, Gary Lutz

While I prepared to interview writer Gary Lutz, I found myself more intimidated than I expected to be. One page into his book Stories in the Worst Way and I was astonished by his use of language and the element of ambiguity included throughout his work. His writing is the kind that makes your mind spin, questioning every word in every sentence. That is what writer and Pitt – Greensburg professor of writing, Gary Lutz intends for his reader to experience. He is the writer of many pieces of short fiction including single stories and books which compile them.

Sitting in his cluttered office, decorated with stacks of paper, I feel captivated by his spoken word. Lutz is the kind of brilliant that doesn’t seem forced, but rather intended, quite like the way he writes. As I interviewed him, I attempted to understand his perception of writing and being a writer.

Kirstin: In your one story, “Slops,” a character finds a newspaper open to a blank cross – word puzzle and writes, “Could everybody please be a little less specific? Starting right now?” I find this to be a really wonderful image, but I wonder why do you choose to write in such an ambiguous tone?

Gary Lutz: I like ambiguity. I don’t like certainties. I don’t like things that are resolved or explainable. I prefer things that are uncanny and ultimately unknowable.

Kirstin: During your discussion at Columbia University, you call the sentence the loneliest place for the writer, in fact, that is the title of the lecture. Where do you get inspiration to compile the individual sentences?

Gary Lutz: I don’t really feel as if inspiration plays any role in the writing that I do, but I’m drawn to the sentence as a kind of self – contained utterance that can be almost a universe unto itself. I like sentences that can be detached from their context and be able to stand on their own as interesting artifacts of language with unusual acoustical properties and their own topography of shape. I am less concerned with the contextual surrounding of a sentence, or rather, I like to stack one sentence on top of another so that the relationship between the sentences are not necessarily a consecutive relationship but more of a relationship of mood or tonality.

Kirstin: So your writing is less about actual content, and more about the overall tone of the piece?

Gary Lutz: Yeah, I’m not drawn toward plot in any conventional sense, and I’m not concerned with causality the way a lot of fiction is. I think it’s because there are certain people who experience or apprehend the world in a series of flashes as opposed to a continuous stream of perception. I don’t think in terms of overall structures, I sort of zero in on the individual phrase, the individual word, the individual sentence and certain forms just arise as a consequence of placing one phrase next to another or one word next to another. So, I think very carefully about each individual word.

Kirstin: Is that difficult to expand into larger compositions because, typically, you hear of poets describing the writing process with such scrutiny and less with novelists or short story writers?

Gary Lutz: Yeah, it takes me a very long time. To write a twenty story it might take me four or five months. I will write it one sentence at a time. One afternoon I might be working on two sentences and I really won’t know exactly where those sentences will fit into the story until I’ve generated maybe a hundred or so sentences. So, it’s a very laborious, very time consuming process. I often spend hours on a single sentence; I’ll write multiple versions, I’ll keep substituting different words in particular slots in the sentence. So, some people have said to me that essentially I am writing poetry; it’s just that I’m formatting it as prose. I think poetry is defined as the most compressed, condensed form of utterance, and I think my work shares those qualities, but I never really think of it as prose – poetry or poetry. But, I don’t really think of it as stories either, so when I was using the term stories in this interview, I think simply fiction might be more accurate.

Kirstin: So then, how do you develop a character?

Gary Lutz: I don’t really develop characters in the conventional sense. The characters emerge from the language itself, so I don’t start off with a preconceived sense of who the narrator is going to be or who the other people in the story are going to be, but they essentially form themselves out of combinations of words. A lot of writers start with an apiary notion of what a story is going to be about and I try to do this the opposite. I never want to know in advance what the sentences will add up to, and often, I’ll rearrange sentences individually into shapes or configurations that I would not have been about to come up with if I were writing in some kind of sequential, logical fashion.

Kirstin: I was going to ask if you saw yourself in any of the stories or found any of your writing autobiographical, but I see that your writing is not so much based on the creation of plot, but rather finding the story created in what you write.

Gary Lutz: I would not call my work autobiographical at all, but the emotional states, the moods in the stories are certainly ones that coincide with some of my own moods. There really isn’t much in my work that is drawn from my first – hand experiences, but nor is it drawn from imagination. It is something that materializes through the shapes of the language.

Kirstin: What attracts you to the genre of flash fiction?

Gary Lutz: I’m not sure I would really call my stuff flash fiction because flash fiction is generally stories that are one or two pages long. Some of my very first pieces were that short, but they gradually grew longer. So, the things I have been working on recently are usually maybe twenty pages or so. But my initial work, I wasn’t even aware at the time that it could be called flash fiction, I was just looking for something that was very compressed, very condensed, that presented the most crucial moments or instances without any kind of surrounding explanation of exposition. In other words, I was trying to excise every irrelevancy and just concentrate the language as much as possible and make it as potent in terms of its concentrated force.

Kirstin: Have your publications affected your relationships with other people in any way?

Gary Lutz: It definitely brought about good things in my life. I have met a lot of people, interesting people, through my writing that I never would have encountered in any other context. I can’t think of any really negative consequences of my writing.

Kirstin: As a rather ambiguous question, fitting your format, why are you a writer?

Gary Lutz: That is a difficult question. I think primarily because I find some kind of fulfillment in construction combinations of words that have not previously existed, that may evoke strong emotions in a reader. The aim of my writing is to have an emotional affect on a reader, whether it’s a reaction of disgust or a sense of identification. Some people have told me that my fiction makes them feel less lonely, that they feel as if they are not the only person in the world who feels a certain way, that they feel some kind of kinship with the characters that I write about, who tend to be outcasts and unconventional people in the way in which they peruse their lives. So I think ultimately a writer wants to be read and a writer wants to reach a particular audience that needs to hear certain things so that they feel more at ease with themselves in their own unusual circumstances or their own unusual interiority.