Vivid and Continuous: Essays and Exercises for Writing Fiction

Gestation

Gestation Iused to think that there was a logical way to write and revise a story. Why wouldn’t there be? You sit down and hammer out a story, and then you take it through several drafts. Eventually, the story comes together or it doesn’t. If it does, it’s finished. If it doesn’t, you discard it . . . or you send it to magazines anyway and hope no one notices that it doesn’t work. Sounds simple. What I’ve come to learn is that the final drafts of my short stories and novels are rarely the end result of a logical process. Oh, sure, occasionally a story will follow the pattern above, but more often than not it doesn’t. I tend to think that every piece of fiction has a gestation period during which the story or novel needs time to percolate in the writer’s head in order for it to make sense to her, but the problem is that the writer has no idea how long that gestation period is going to be. This is why some short stories have taken me as long as six years to write. (Most short stories don’t take six years, but a few have taken that long because I needed time to figure it all out, to connect the seemingly random dots, where plot and meaning finally merge together.) All of my novels, despite the actual time spent writing them, have had long gestation periods. My first novel, The Book of Ralph, was written mostly over a two-year period before the book’s publication, between 2001 and 2003, and if someone asks me how long it took to write, I tell them two years because that’s the easiest answer to give. In truth, the origins of the book can be traced back to the spring of 1993 when I wrote a short story titled “The Backyard.” It was a failure, so I completely reconfigured “The Backyard” later that summer, keeping only a dog named Tex and one particular image from the story. I created an entirely new cast of characters, gestation 133 all of whom eventually became the central cast of The Book of Ralph. The new story was titled “Smoke,” and it appeared in a small magazine a year after I wrote it. Over the next three years, from 1993 to 1996, I wrote two more “Ralph” short stories. All three of these eventually appeared in my story collection Troublemakers, published in 2000. I had toyed with writing a few more “Ralph” stories with the idea of including them in another future collection, but three things happened. The first was that the new “Ralph” stories were unwieldy, and I found myself dividing each story into two stories. Clearly, the material I was working with was too large for the container of an individual short story. The second thing was that Troublemakers had been published, and the reviews were almost unanimous in their support of the “Ralph” stories as the book’s strongest pieces, which, in turn, energized me to work harder on these new stories. The third thing was that I had written three unsuccessful novels by 2002, so the idea of writing a book constructed entirely out of short stories appealed to me. (I should note that the book, while technically a novel-in-stories, was eventually marketed as a novel.) Although I tell people it took two years to write The Book of Ralph, the more truthful, accurate answer is that it took closer to ten years. The evolution of my second novel, America’s Report Card, was stranger. America’s Report Card is a darkly comic novel about, among other things, the standardized testing industry. I have worked, off and on, in this industry , either writing tests or scoring them. I took my first scoring job in the late 1990s when I couldn’t find any other work. It was a truly miserable job, and what I witnessed on a daily basis convinced me that the entire industry was corrupt. I began taking notes with the idea that I would eventually write an essay that I might pitch to Harper’s, but when I told my then-agent that I had signed a confidentiality agreement, she told me I couldn’t write the essay, that I would open myself up to lawsuits. I tried writing three or four pages of fiction set in the world of standardized testing, but I couldn’t...