Running On and On

Hi, friends.

I opened up the socials this morning, never quite sure where they will lead on a day like today, and found people sorting through layers of life and memory, sharing the same pictures and profiles that get passed around each year under the cumbersome nature of grief and guilt, both personal and collective, and yet, there too, is the writer’s reminder of our very basic need for storytelling to make sense of this world and our place within it.

I’ve been thinking about it a lot these past few weeks as I go about teaching Early American lit for the fifteenth time. I often joke that I could stop and give a lecture on nearly anything from the Puritans to Walt Whitman at the drop of a hat. But there is always some new connection to be made to the world as it spins on. I try to impress upon my students the complexity of human nature. (Is this not the role of the writer in general?) Ideas and politics shift, but our wants and needs change only in the margins. As it was, so shall it be.

Story.

I mentioned, briefly, last week, the long run-on sentence in “We Didn’t” that mirror’s the narrator’s anticipation of finally having sex with his girlfriend. Today I want to expand on that idea by looking at these two single-sentence essays. Still by Casey Mulligan Walsh and The Last Few Years… by Aaron Burch.

Craft tidbits.

Sometimes I think we spend so much time worrying over plot and character development, and yes, perhaps beautiful sentences, at the expense of form. I know, I know. It’s tough to keep all these plates spinning, but the form for a piece can only enhance what’s there and make it sharper. The first time this really clicked for me—the intersection between story and form—was reading Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian back in the day:

A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblican or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uA legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.

The attack goes on in fevered fashion for three pages. And the fury and confusion of it is mirrored in the way McCarthy presents it in long, harried run-ons. (Is there a name for this technique? There must be, though I don’t know what it is.)

William Sanderson Harvest Moon

These two essays are both about loss. Walsh gives us that moment in the hospital where she learns her son has died; Burch catalogs the unraveling of a marriage and pre-covid life through a longer time frame—that of a few years. Even though they use a single run-on as their form, the effect is different in each.

Walsh is interested in the detail of memory. She includes snippets of conversation with the hospital staff. She remembers how the hospital smelled, the sounds, what she wore. It includes reflection:

I ask them to leave, they can’t understand, how could they, that I’ve known this would be the end of the story, the one I’ve dreaded, the only one that’s ever made sense, with life spinning wild until it blew us all apart and no end in sight…

The Burch piece creates a halting pace in the way that it catalogues events. This happened and then this and then this. Sometimes life feels this way. We don’t remember what we were wearing or what we said as life spills over us, tsunami style.

I read less and listened to fewer records and drank even more—probably too much, but also very possibly the just right amount; who can say, the world seemed to be ending—

Perhaps, shorter pieces lend themselves more easily to experimentation with form. You can easily switch gears if it doesn’t work. The novel I’m reading right now is told through the journals of two different characters. At times this style creates constraints upon the narration. There are times it feels contrived since these particular characters are doctor and patient. They could simply a conversation. A third person narrator could step in and make things less awkward. But it’s also a book about memory and secrets and what we chose to tell each other and the history of ourselves we don’t want to confront.

But you don’t have to commit to one form for the entirety of a novel. There’s the famous chapter in As I Lay Dying where methodical Cash lists out his reasons for building his mother’s casket on the bevel. There are record reviews interspersed in American Psycho. Claire Vaye Watkins includes a patient report, a found “book,” and a questionnaire within Gold Fame Citrus. There is more than one way to approach a story.

Sparks.

Try your hand at a one-sentence story. Perhaps you want to write about an overwhelming memory. (Or if you want to keep it fictional, a character’s memory.)

Or. Write two-sentence story with two different interpretations of a memory. (It can be from two different characters. Or it can be from two different times in one life. How might time change the way we look at something?)

Perhaps there is a spot in your manuscript where a nice run-on (or series of them) might work to mirror the interiority of the character or the exterior events that swirl around them. A list? Where could you fiddle with the current form to breathe new life into it?

Other tidbits.

If you’ve been wanting to read more books in translation, Rebecca Makkai is reading 84 of them to honor her late father. The first few titles are already picked.

Once you write your one-sentence story, submit it to Monkeybicycle or Complete Sentence.

Masters Review has a September Selects special call for Hermit Crab stories (ends tonight) and next weekend they’ll accept second person narratives (9/18).

Split Lip closes at the end of the month. As does Chautauqua (themed around chance encounters). AWP’s Writer’s Chronicle is seeking interviews and craft essays through 9/30.

That’s it from here scribblers. As always, it’s a beautiful day to try and lasso some words. Put those memories to paper. Pencils up~

Marsha