I write very fast. My collection of short stories is 15 pages, single-spaced, so far. Sure, I can go back and pick at it a bit, but the quality would not be improved if I wrote slower.
At the same time, everything I write is based on ideas that I have always had in my mind. The ideas have been accumulating for a very long time, and I have turned them over in my head repeatedly, over the course of several years, in some cases. Any sense of speed, then, occurs in the context of several decades.
I wrote several new stories in the past few days. I realized that in a story I could use ideas that I had that didn't fit into poems or academic essays. (Although some stories I stole from my poems and blog posts). Some of my stories are non-fictionl, in the sense that they really happened to me. What makes them stories is the form of presentation. I realized, then, that the important part of fiction is not its made-up quality, but its attitude toward its subject matter.
I wrote some other short stories. Some I wrote by converting parts of my dream diary, or some of my prose poems, into stories. Others occurred to me as I was compiling the collection. I am as surprised by this development as you are. It's true that as a lit prof I have read and taught many stories, that I have read taken much interest in Kafka and Borges, but I have rarely thought of myself in as a potential writer of short stories. I am not particularly interested in long form, like the novel, but I think my interest in the short form lead me to microfiction, which lead me then to stories that are longer than two or three lines. Some are short short-stories, and some are short short-short-stories. I haven't attempted yet a medium short-story or the oxymoronic long short-story.
Today I was trying to find my dream about Rollie Fingers, a baseball player I had dreamed about once. I couldn't find it, and it turned out that I had not dreamed a bout Fingers, but about Catfish Hunter. Fingers pitched for the Giants, and Hunter for the A's, in the same period of time, when I was young and reading about both of them in the sports pages of the Sacramento Bee.
UPDATE: Fingers actually pitched for the A's, not the Giants!
"Before the invention of time travel...."
This is not a dream, but a real event from waking life. We went to a hardware store to buy a grill for B. First she went to get spray paint, and I saw some empty spray bottles, of the type that can be filled with any liquid, and reminded her that she had recently mentioned wanting one. They were big ones, though, and she said she needed a small one. So we went over to the section with the grills, and looked some over, discussed the prices, etc... We called a guy over to help us, and he called over another guy who knew more about them.
At one point, as we were about to go to the register to buy the grill, I looked in my hand and saw that I had a small spray bottle in it. I asked B. if she had handed it to me, but she didn't remember picking one up or handing it to me. I don't remember either being handed the bottle or picking it up myself. Neither of us could reconstruct how the bottle ended up in my hand. She suggested that it might have been on the grill on display, and she had moved off and handed it to me. It seemed implausible to me that the exact item we wanted would have been already resting on another item we were also shopping for.
Identity is actually one of the most interesting things possible. The fundamental question is "who am I?, what am I doing here?" That is pretty much what all literature is about.
The problem is that identity politics takes that complex problem and empties it of its nuance. Identity become a monolithic block, to be seen in black and white terms (literally and figuratively). Intersectionality should help with this, but ends up not. It should help because it introduces nuance again. It doesn't help because it ends up being a way of keeping score or of scoring points. Now it seems as though there were only one way to think. For someone who learned a certain way of thinking about race from Henry Louis Gates, the popularity of Robin D'Angelo is deeply disturbing. The lack of historical depth and the anti-intellectualism is astounding.
We get all the social constructionism of postmodernism, but wedded to a puritanical essentialism. How is that supposed to work? Everything is constructed, nothing is in nature, but WE get to decide exactly what construction is valid, and what exact terminology is allowed.
