(I wrote this earlier and then got side-tracked eating dinner, tutoring, hoping a friend would show up on Skype, and so forth. I’m too lazy to change the way the text refers to time.)

My thoughts today have been jumping around, maybe as a result of coffee when I was already somewhat off, and so I went for a run just now. The weather’s pretty good for Miami August: maybe mid-80s, humid but not suffocatingly so. After the run I found my chest and back covered in little black bugs, which I’ll admit isn’t the most pleasant feeling; a shower will get rid of them, once I’ve finished cooling down and listening to this Animal Collective album.

While I was running, I reflected a bit on a correspondence I was engaging in earlier, wherein a friend and I were talking about Freytag’s pyramid, dramatic structure, and linear/nonlinear narrative. I was trying to explain why, despite his distaste for it, I find stories that don’t conform to that structure to be often frustrating. Somehow, I felt particularly inarticulate, and finally ended with an analogy, rather than a pure conclusion. I’ll begin by elaborating on that story:

When I was in the latter years of high school, I wrote a lot of poetry. I probably wrote my first poem that I cared about that year as well, and then my friend Michael organized a series of open mic events, and I would regularly write poems to read at them. Obviously, some were better than others. Eventually, someone more knowledgeable than I explained to me that, while free verse was a lot of fun, sometimes a poetic structure makes the ideas stand out more, because the mind no longer needs to focus on the line length or meter (this is a paraphrase; I don’t actually think he was so specific). (I sort of mentioned this concept when I wrote about writing poetry a while back.) Essentially, when a strict form is [mostly] observed, and observed well, it lets you do something stronger. I don’t necessarily mean that every poem should be able to be measured in metric feet, or that free verse is unwise; I often write in free verse, and so do poets who are much better than I. But these rules exist because they make sense, and when they’re broken we take note, even unconsciously.

Obviously, sometimes form is used for another reason—Dr. Seuss is Dr. Seuss for his anapestic tetrameter as much as for the narrative of his poems.

To bring this back to stories: I was planning on presenting case studies, but I don’t particularly feel like doing the Freytag version of sentence diagramming, and besides I’d hate to spoil any short stories for you, o dear reader. The essential question is this: What makes a good story? Does it need, or benefit from, a linear structure: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, dénouement? Is plot necessary to a good story?

When I’m talking about linearity here, I don’t mean the more concrete idea of linear time. A story can carefully follow that dramatic structure while jumping about in time. What does it really mean to break this structure? What is a short story that doesn’t conform to it? Clearly, a story without plot can’t follow this structure, or not well. But the thing is, a super-short story (e.g., John Cheever’s awesome “Reunion”) can still tell a full story, have a complete plot. (That story very decidedly also applies the Hemingway/iceberg theory of not giving any details that aren’t strictly necessary.) But even such a short story still has a clear exposition, a clear rising action, a series of small climaxes, a falling action. The dénouement is a bit more vague, but it always is.

I can certainly think of [post]modern stories that don’t follow traditional dramatic structure. Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse.” Gertrude Stein’s “Miss Furr & Miss Skeene.” Stein’s story is almost absurdist; Barth actually talks about dramatic structure straight-out, but that story is kind of the poster child of metafiction.

It’s funny, though. When you get down to it, most narratives have that driving force, somewhere in there. A beginning, middle, end. Which should be clear. Otherwise, it’s not really a story. The brilliance in a good short story is watching the author play with the structure—use it to her advantage, mold it. Make it new.

(a little exercise in writing—I guess imagine that they’re all different, connected voices? which means some are more mine than others. some of them I’d like to expand, but it’s been too long since I wrote much.)

1. I wish you would write me back, he says.

2. When we were younger, I felt convinced of my innocence. Never omniscient, not even as a freshman*, but fully blameless. Not responsible. O self of the past, put up your sword: you know not what you do. Yet who am I to blame myself?

3. Once, I met a friend I’d never met before, and it was the most mundane excitement I’ve had in years.

4. I am afraid that you might misunderstand.

5. In my second year out of high school, I learned to stop interpreting and overdetermining. This is a lie: I will never learn. I find it impossible to not secretly believe that everything is directed at me. It can be wearying, you know.

6. A young girl I had a crush on, at summer camp in North Carolina, sitting with the fan whirring in the background: I think I’m a solipsist†, she tells me. How can I believe you’re truly there? Later, the other boy in the room will make a movie about two solipsists who meet each other. It will be silly and wondrous.

7. I write long letters to my imaginary fiancé, each one meticulously penned. It gives me some solace.

8. I lit the small pieces of grass afire, and soon the entire fire-pit was ablaze, the evergreen wood crackling as its sap ran.

9. We are skipping through the open meadow. She curtsies deep in the wild grass. This is no untruth: we do erect a gibbet of woven vine, and on its solemn rigidity we hang the skinned rabbit, and watch the flies buzz pass.

10. I spent the summer after I finished college doing two things: dreaming, and wasting time‡.

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* ah, verve pipe
† i do not exist
‡ nothing is truly a waste of time

Tonight, my mother and I went to see Karen Russell read at a great café and bookshop in Coral Gables (Miami) called Books & Books. I saw her in the end of 2008, at the Kelly Writer’s House at Penn, which was in some ways a very different experience. Russell wrote St. Lucy’s Home For Girls Raised By Wolves, this ridiculously imaginative book of short stories that I loved, and which garnered some good press—the title story was in The New Yorker, and selected for that year’s Best American Short Fiction. Now, just this month, Russell’s released a novel, Swamplandia!, which has received excellent reviews from places such as the New York Times book review.

I haven’t read it, yet, but it was fun to see Russell in Miami. She’s young—not quite 30—and somewhat nervous in front of audiences, but I liked hearing her read (she gets into her stories, but then will jump out for an interjection). I wanted to ask, but didn’t, about how people in Miami interpret her Everglades-based stories differently from folk in the northeast, or in the pacific northwest. I just remember, seeing her at Penn, thinking that there was some element to her fiction that you missed out on by not being a Florida kid. Not too much; she does an excellent job of describing it. But you experience it differently, when it’s novel vs. when it’s comfortable.

Last Thursday, my friends Tom and Carlos joined me for a poetry reading at Legal Art Miami, this organization I don’t quite get who have an artist residency downtown. The poet was Sandra Beasley, who none of us have heard of. In general, we enjoyed her poetry—she has a knack for ending poems—and the space was very cool. I was glad I went. After, we went to the Biscayne Triangle Truck Roundup, where they got tacos and I got a bacon-and-bleu-cheese grilled cheese sandwich. Fun, actually. (We made it to an open mic, too.)

I shouldn’t knock Miami. We can do literary events. I don’t know if I ever talked about the Book Fair—I think I mentioned it briefly—but that was pretty wonderful. Aw, Miami. I could grow to like you if it weren’t for the weather that was coming.

I really liked a poem in The New Yorker from Dec. 20, “Homage to Mary Hamilton.” I’m not usually such a big fan of the poetry in said magazine, and this one is like many others in its impenetrability. I’m not sure if the difference is just that I’m getting the reference, or whether it’s actually a better poem. I lean toward the latter. It’s by a man named Tom Sleigh, and the reference I’m talking about is to a ballad generally called either Mary Hamilton or The Four Maries. You can look for it on youtube; the Joan Baez version is one of the most famous.

I think what I like about this poem, though, is the way the speaker mixes up his life with the ballad, both structurally and textually. He becomes Mary Hamilton; she becomes the woman in his car accident. I also think I kind of just like the sound of it, the words themselves.

The reason that I came across the poem was that I was reading the print edition of an article that is available online, a pretty cool piece on Nintendo and one of its main designers. I circled this passage:

The Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga, in his classic 1938 study “Homo Ludens” (“Man the Player”), argued that play was one of the essential components of culture—that it in fact predates culture, because even animals play. His definition of play is instructive. One, play is free—it must be voluntary. Prisoners of war forced to play Russian roulette are not at play. Two, it is separate; it takes place outside the realm of ordinary life and is unserious, in terms of its consequences. A game of chess has no bearing on your survival (unless the opponent is Death). Three, it is unproductive; nothing comes of it—nothing of material value, anyway. Plastic trophies, plush stuffed animals, and bragging rights cannot be monetized. Four, it follows an established set of parameters and rules, and requires some artificial boundary of time and space. Tennis requires lines and a net and the agreement of its participants to abide by the conceit that those boundaries matter. Five, it is uncertain; the outcome is unknown, and uncertainty can create opportunities for discretion and improvisation.

In any case, I recommend continuing with the article — read the whole of it.

One
In which the boat is set adrift.

The boat was sailing in the shallow waters off of Key Biscayne, dipping through the swells and riding cross the troughs. Occasionally, its bow plowed under the crest of a wave, soaking the sailor with its tender lappings. The water was warm, but it carried with it tidings of the deep sea, of far-aways and not-quite heres.

Perhaps you’ve never sailed a one-man boat, and perhaps you’d rather not. The nice thing about such boats is that you can set off in whatever direction you choose. As you will. The wind has its own opinion.

Two
In which a task is assigned.

After every end must come a beginning. It need not be a true beginning, or a beginning in kind. But nonetheless.

A pause is rather like an ending, is it not?

You call yourself lazy, you who looks to windward, you who spends the days dreaming. But it is not enough to sleep. Somewhere in the evening, a task was imparted. There are plans to be carried out.

Three
In which we learn to dance.

In some cultures, celebration is tantamount to dance; a child learns to move his or her feet with the a semblance of rhythm. For some women, and some men, the beating of a drum calls the heart to keep time.

Once, dancing was a rite of passage. Dancing meant learning dance-steps, and keeping time. It was heady, frustrating at times, sometimes awfully prudish. But it was normalized. Today, so many of us treat dancing as work. We have never learned to dance with ease, and even as our head nods the time, our feet lose track.

Four
In which water is useful.

He closes his eyes under water, eyelids squeezed tightly, the soft light not penetrating his thin, wrinkled skin.

Water washes clean. Skin feels elastic, pliable. His hair swims alongside him, his fingers prune, his nostrils let out bubbles of air.

Swimming below the surface is a different world from such actions above. The stroke is more fluid, and water eddies about your body more softly, more elegantly. The human body stretches and revels in its own fluidity, its own elegance. Skin is slippery, seamless. Liquid clears the mind.

His strokes are smooth and strong, until he breaches the surface.

Five
In which Justin rolls into a ball like a kitten.

Sometimes it’s easiest to stay in a fetal position.

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(Note: I’ve done this sort of post before. A while back (July 09, 2007). I did it better last time, I think.)