The short story I read this week was written by Lorrie
Moore, which I found in Penguin Academics’ Fiction:
A Pocket Anthology, but was originally published in her short-story
collection Self-Help. The story’s
title is “How to Become a Writer”. It was interesting. Most things are, in some
way. People tend to often use “interesting” to describe something they don’t
know what else to do with, which has always struck me as the wrong usage.
Everything has some aspect of
interest within it; even if it’s unpleasant or mainly irrelevant to your life
in terms of enjoyment or study.
Why did I enjoy it? First off, because of the subject
matter. You enjoy reading about other people enjoying or doing the same types
of things you do. It’s part of human nature, somehow. And it kind of seems like
there’s no set destination for writers; the journey is long and never-ending at
times, but it’s necessary. And people either understand that, or they don’t.
The people who get it are rare. Secondly, this story is written in second
person. That’s unusual, and so it stood out. Also, the second-person tone
really draws the audience in, because it’s a conversation with the reader.
Another thing that stuck out to me was that it’s really
written in the style of a recipe. I read cookbooks for fun, so it was neat to
see that style used in fiction. It felt very autobiographical, so you admire
the honesty and intensity Moore put into the story, however true(or not) the
events were.
She did a very good job of capturing the essence of college
life in a short space; though the setting wasn’t mentioned much, you felt how
important it was to the story. (After all, it’s because of Francie’s school
projects that her failures of stories are being written.) And the glass
breaking while loading the dishwasher was a brilliant touch. It’s the common
moments like that which make great writing stand out. Most of Francie’s stories
sound atrocious; but I wanted to read them for their bizarre happenings, if
nothing else. And they sound hilarious.
It didn’t exactly have much of a plot, more like a letter of
an older Francie writing a letter to her younger self describing what her life
will be like, but covered from her high school days to sometime after college.
Maybe it’s more of a character study than focused on plot. Anyway, most of
anyone’s writing will be far worse than what the writer thinks it is. But this
writing journey is kind of like digging for gold; most days you throw out a lot
of unneeded rocks, but every once in a while you find a nugget. Those strikes
keep us going, keep us panning through the dirt of failed stories that didn’t
quite work.
I hope to be able to play with second-person narration at
some point on a later project, perhaps called No, THIS Is the Way You Do That; a humorous collection of
play-by-play instructions for everything from making peanut-butter sandwiches
to braking on ice skates to doing homework. That project has simmered for a
while, with a ways to go before it’s ready to get itself written, but reading this
story reinforced the way I’ve planned to write that project.
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