Composed

Rosanne Cash is a brilliant singer/songwriter. I say that even though I'm not really a fan of country music.

Her album The Wheel is one of my all-time favorites, in any genre, so I picked up her memoir, Composed, to learn more.

It's a good book and well-written, but it seems to skim along the surface much of the time. Unlike her songs. Her songs take you so deep you think you might drown.

The Precarious Writing Process

For the most part, the writing process remains a mystery to me, even though I've been doing this for a long time now. My first story was published when I was 10 years old. On a mimeograph machine. By my fourth-grade teacher. (Everyone in the class got a copy, and I signed each one.) I've written a lot of stories since then, including the fifteen in Precarious, but the process is never the same.

That first story was in response to an assignment: Write a story about anything you like. I wrote about a baseball game with an unlikely ending. (I had cast my two best friends as the captains of opposing teams and couldn't decide which should win, so I had an escaped elephant interrupt the proceedings.)

Much later, when I started to get serious about writing, stories came to me in different ways. I didn't have to write them, and yet I did. Looking back, it seems almost as if I had no choice. The ideas never came easily to me. Well, never and always. I couldn't turn out a story at will. I couldn't just decide to write one. But then a story, or the beginnings of a story, would suddenly take shape in my mind. It was easy if I wasn't trying. The story might be inspired by a photograph in a magazine, a song on the radio, a snippet of conversation overhead at lunch. Or it could come, seemingly out of nowhere, in the form of a first sentence.

I almost never know where I’m going with a story. In fact, most of the time, I’m not even conscious of why I’m writing it, unless it's simply to find out what will happen. Invariably I get stuck and don't know. Have no clue. Can't figure it out. The remedy is usually a long walk, a hot bath, or a good night's sleep. In extreme cases I've been forced to leave a story half finished for years, as was the case with both "Taken," which was inspired by a photograph, and "Dance Naked," which was inspired by a true story.

The phrase “inspired by a true story” should always be regarded with suspicion because you never know how much is true. Very little, in this case. But years ago, as a newspaper reporter, I had the chance to cover a murder trial and that’s where I got the idea for “Dance Naked” — two guys fighting over one woman and how ugly that can get. But it’s a much different story than the one I covered. I made up 99.9% of it. And it doesn’t end the way I thought it would.

In some ways, I think, my process is probably similar to what an actor goes through to get into character, drawing upon his own memories and emotions in order to empathize with the person he's portraying—only I get to play all the parts: The hero, the villain, the man, the woman, the faithful friend. On the page, I get to act out lives unlike my own. Not that I consciously think of it as acting. My process is largely unconscious, and a lot of my best stuff comes to me as I'm waking up in the morning, as if from a dream. It's just there and I don't know where it came from.

Originally posted on TSP.

Our Time in the Mediteranean

Here's what I liked best ...

• Spaghetti with clams at Ristorante da Donato, around the corner from our hotel in Rome.
• Seeing Trevi Fountain again, the Spanish Steps, and a bit of the Borghese Gardens.
• The rooftop bar of the Albergo del Senato, where we stayed, on the same square as the Pantheon.
• Being able to walk everywhere from there—the Coliseum, the Forum, St. Peter's.
• Ordering iced tea and being asked if I want peach tea, because, yes, in fact, I do.
• Dark chocolate gelato from Giolitti.
• Death by Chocolate at Tre Scalini on the Piazza Navona.
• Coming into Genoa by ship and seeing the city from the water.
• Lying flat on our backs on the ship's helipad late at night, seeing the true brightness of the stars, and understanding how the Milky Way got its name.
• Gnocchi with pesto at Ristorante il Pozzo in Monterosso on the Cinque Terre (part of the coastal region known as Liguria, where pesto was invented).
• Anchoring offshore in Villafranche and taking the little ferry into town.
• The turquoise water in nearby Nice.
• Listening to two Spaniards, probably brothers, play Pachelbel's Canon, with feeling, on violin and bass, in Barcelona.
• Wandering around Palma de Mallorca and buying stamps for post cards we wrote and failed to mail.
• Sa Tuerredda beach on Sardinia after the rain stopped and the sun came out.
• The fact that we could be in Rome one day and Sunnyvale the next.

Far Away

For a number of years now, I've been following the progress of Eye Talk as it has evolved from rock band to something harder to define.

In its current form the group has pared down to its two core members, brothers Alan and Bob Clark. Older brother Alan has always been the driving force behind Eye Talk, writing nearly all of the songs, singing and playing lead guitar, but lately he's been encouraging his bass-playing brother to write more.

As a result, their latest release, Far Away, features five songs from each brother — and represents their most accomplished and compelling work to date.

Here are a few short samples, with each singing lead on his own songs:

• Where do we go from here? (Alan Clark)

• One more chance (Bob Clark)

• Until now (Bob Clark)

• Whole lives before us (Alan Clark)

That last one always get to me.

What Does the Word "Story" Mean to You?

I did an interview recently in The Short Review (which also featured A.J. Kirby's insightful review of my story collection, Precarious).

I tried to keep my answers short because that's my strategy to avoid boring people. It's been my strategy since I was in the first grade, but that's another story.

No, that's not fair. I'll tell you.

A classmate asked me what I got for Christmas and I started with the mundane stuff like new pajamas and socks. The kid turned away before I got to the really cool thing, a slot-car set, probably the best present a boy could get back then.

So, lesson learned.

Back here in the future I was asked, “What does the word 'story' mean to you?”

Good question. I had never been asked that before. Never really thought about, either.

I said, “I guess a story is what we tell ourselves to make sense of our lives. The stories may not be factual but they are as true as we can make them … or as true as we can stand to make them.”

I left it at that because shorter is always better and because I couldn't remember all the stuff I'd heard about memory not being reliable so we fill in the blanks with whatever makes the most sense and over time that becomes part of our so-called memory.

I also meant to imply that we sometimes make up stories to fool ourselves, but you got that, right?

At a party once, someone asked me, "How many of your stories are based on your own life?"

"Three," I said.

I wouldn't say which three.

The truth is I would have a hard time separating fact from fiction in those stories. Did that happen to me or did I make it up? I'm not sure.

“But,” as Ken Kesey wrote, “it's the truth even if it didn't happen."

Behind the Story: "Just Admit It"

"Just Admit It" is another one of my earliest stories. The first draft was written for a creative writing class when I was in college.

To this day, more than 30 years later, I remember the instructor telling me where the story picked up interest for him, which was about a third of the way into what was then called "The Sinner and the Would-Be Savior."

It was a painful but important lesson that helped to shape everything I've written since then.

In the years that followed, I rewrote the story several times, in the first person, third person, first person, third person. I could never seem to make up my mind which would be better.

As I began to gather my stories into a collection, "Just Admit It" was in, then out, then in again after one final round of changes.

In Precarious, the final version of "Just Admit It" is in the first person, but I suppose I could change it in a future edition. I could even go back to the original title, which I still like, even if it is a bit long.

Then again ...

It's a wonder I finished any of these stories.

Behind the Story: "What She Said"

This was my breakthrough. That's what I thought when I wrote it. But it didn't become my breakthrough for another decade.

When I wrote "What She Said," I was working for a city magazine in San Francisco and the executive editor wanted to publish it. Her boss, as it turned out, did not.

Aaargh!

So I sent the story around to eight or nine other places. They all said no.

I gave up.

A decade later (give or take a couple years) I took another look at the story. It was lean and sharp and fast. I liked it. With a few small changes I sent it to the Beloit Fiction Journal. The editor at the time, Shawn Gillen, said yes.

Soon I had a work of fiction in print for the first time.