Why rabbits don’t write novels

So, I’m at the AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) in Chicago. I’m here for work – my low-res MFA program has a table, we’re hosting a dinner, etc. Each day I try to attend one session for my own creative inspiration, one for the MFA program, and one that addresses the business of writing. Since I just spent the last two weeks at a residency at Ragdale (my first-ever, and damn, it was awesome!) transforming a draft collection of interconnected short stories into the outline of a novel, I was interested in what other writers might have to say about navigating the transitions between writing novels and short stories.

Happily, there was a panel on that very topic. The panelists were variously funny, enlightening, and helpful, although I must confess I always hope for a deeper discussion of the writing process at this sort of event —with five speakers, everybody seems to have just enough time to introduce their topic and then pass the mic. There was much discussion of the early draft writing process, and how to decide whether what you are working on is a novel or a short story. A writer named Erin McGraw was most incisive, saying (and I paraphrase, as my shorthand isn’t great): “The tale we are telling dictates its scope and length.”

This makes sense. Knowing what the tale is would be the first step. That has taken me several years of labor and nearly a decade of carrying around story fragments from a previous career as a bartender— which, incidentally, generates a lot more material than any job in the academy could hope to offer. Nobody has to behave themselves or be articulate in a barroom.

God, I love bars. Being articulate and well behaved is exhausting.

Anyway.  While Ms. McGraw was reading from her very well prepared and engaging talk, the woman in front of me took the Home & Garden section of the local paper out of her handbag, and began to read it. The woman sitting next to me sent a text on her phone. And it struck me that what my blissful two weeks of doing nothing but writing reminded me of is how to concentrate. I hadn’t realized how fractured my thoughts  were, bouncing from one topic to another on my  chronic to-do list, which includes goals as lofty as publishing a book and as mundane as buying new socks, and not necessarily in that order.

This fracturing of my thoughts, of my concentration, made me able to work in a form which, in some hands, can be artfully associative: interconnected short stories. But instead of going deeper into my character’s lives, I felt I was skating along the surface, and in some way, not doing justice to my material. McGraw described her experience of working on short stories as one of nervous hyper-vigilance. This resonated with me, since nervous hyper vigilance is my natural state. Like a rabbit.

The Home & Garden lady folds up her newspaper and leaves. Texty sitting next to me is either writing one of those nano novels or she is a very popular person. I wonder about the level of quiet I will need to make that outline, and all those disparate parts, into a whole, breathing thing. How I will achieve it in my daily life.

I don’t know. McGraw made a comment about that sometimes terrifying question writers ask each other: “So, what are you working on?” She joked that “I don’t know” felt either totally lame or annoyingly Zen.  Maybe we should start asking each other how we are working instead. In a state of split screen, multi-tasking madness? Or quietly, steadily.

I think there might be a fable on this very subject…