The short stories in this collection go back as far as 2013-2014. Over a span of eight years, I have written about thirty stories, all published and several of them having won fiction awards. A few years ago, I had thought of putting them together in a collection. That thought entertained me for a while and I left it there for my busy schedule of writing a novel. After the novel was completed, I revisited the idea of the short-story collection. I asked myself, what stories should I pick? I took time to review the stories and found a number of them sharing something in common—a motif. The mother-and-son love and its heartbreaking loss. I decided to use those stories as the mainstay of the collection for their common thread. Then I was faced with another question: What other stories should I bring in to round it up? In the end I chose four stories, namely, “A Bridge Behind,” “The Leper Colony,” “The Red Fox,” and “The General Is Sleeping.” In them you have the mother-and-daughter love and loss, the grandfather-and-granddaughter love and loss, the father-and-son love and loss, and even the boy-and-the red fox love and loss relationship. So, there is a common baseline for all the eleven stories and that’s the genesis of this collection.
The Great American Novel
Today I read a fellow author’s post on this subject. She wondered if the desire to write “The Great American Novel” has been superseded by the desire to write the next million-dollar bestseller. She asked, “Is Anyone Really Writing the Great American Novel?”
What makes a novel great? Frankly, a novel can be set in any locale, real, or imaginary like the Yoknapatawpha County from which William Faulkner created his fictional worlds. Even more frankly, to be great a novel has to be literary. I never know any great novels in the genre of Sci-Fi, Romance, YA, or that sort. Why literary? Because literary fiction deals with characterization more deeply, more intensely. Not to mention the power of its descriptions of moods, scenes, and human characterization. Don’t yawn! Read The Sound and The Fury, especially the first two chapters on Benjy and Quentin, where human minds verging on insanity were skillfully wrought to the point of surrealism. Read Paris Trout by Pete Dexter. I felt a tingling in my spine just following this Trout character around. If you are taken over by such a villain in a novel, like Trout, or Lester Ballard in Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God, then that novel must be literary.
But I don’t think any writer would intend to write ‘The Great American Novel” when he conceives the thought of writing. Any writer who says “I want to write the great such and such novel” is illusionary. A novel that can successfully examine human flaws and humiliation and racial bigotry usually transcends any locale it’s set in and becomes a global recognition in the literary world. It could be set in Pago-Pago as in Rain by W. Somerset Maugham, or in a small Cajun community in Louisiana as in A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest Gaines; but these works rise above their locales to become classics.
But don’t concern yourself with such a lofty ambition to write “he Great American Novel.”
Every day when you sit down to write, try to stay true to yourself.
And if you still obsess about writing a classic, be merciless on yourself as if you have just been told by a demon: “Most live writers do not exist. Their fame is created by critics who always need a genius of the season, someone they understand completely and feel safe in praising, but when these fabricated geniuses are dead, they will not exist.”—Ernest Hemingway
So, do I want to write “The Great American Novel?” No. Just write!
One Tip for Writers
What makes a story interesting?
It’s the scenes. Each scene must have drama. Or it must set up drama. But more importantly, you have to be excited about the scenes you write. If you don’t feel excited about them, do you expect your readers to get excited when they read them?
Scenes that don’t have much drama are filled with trivialities, tepid dialogue, which neither shows much about characterization nor advances the plot. Consequently, they don’t sustain the story line. What is the most frequently cited reason by agents and editors for their rejection of a manuscript? The pace or intensity flags in several places. In other words, the story fails to hold interest.
Whenever you start struggling with a scene, the next thing you do is try to get through such a scene. Then, unavoidably it will be there like a blank sheet in your manuscript. Many writers tend to write certain scenes for the sake of keeping the story alive rather than vitalizing it. They hope readers would read everything they wrote. Many writers spend so much time and efforts in researching the materials for their stories, and consequently they fall victim to these materials. When too much of researched information appears in a story, it’s non-fiction taking over fiction. The story bogs down. The readers start skipping pages. A skilled writer, on the other hand, uses his researched materials judiciously. He only uses tidbits of such information in places where they belong. He uses them where they can enhance his characterization, the pacing of his story line, the mood of his chosen scenes.
Next time when you don’t feel like getting up in the morning to face a lukewarm scene, ask yourself: does it really belong?
Thanks so much for hosting Khanh!
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