Category: Writing

Autumn, Basketball, & Writing

~ plainswriter ~ Leave a comment

When some people think of autumn, they think of vibrant leaves, football, pumpkins, hot apple cider. I think of these things, too, but I also think of how I spent many of those September, October, and early November evenings in my small Minnesota town: shooting baskets by myself at South Park, three blocks from my house.

My evening chore of drying dishes completed, and clad in a hooded sweatshirt, I rode my ten-speed–basketball tucked under one arm–past the baseball diamond, the hockey rink, the swimming pool, and one more block, until I reached the park. The heat of summer was a distant memory, and the soft chill was in the air.

The court (at that time), was a tennis court converted to a basketball court (the posts for the tennis nets having been removed), with the white lines remaining on that tennis-court green surface. Two baskets were set up, one on the south end, one on the north. I always shot at the north hoop.

As the sun finished its decent, the beams found their way through the leaves of the massive oak trees in the park and to me as I shot jump shot after jump shot, the court to myself. Eventually, I had to switch on the park lights, the unlocked box a privilege of living in a small town.

As much as I loved basketball season itself (the practices, the games, the stay against the madness of Minnesota winters), I think I loved those fall evenings by myself even more. I was in control. If I wanted to launch twenty-footer after twenty-footer, I could.

I also am convinced that my love for basketball, and my willingness to practice hour after hour by myself, was preparing me for the work of being a writer. If you write (any thing of any length), you must be willing to spend hour after hour by yourself working on the piece. (I realize this last statement isn’t shocking or newsworthy.) But I’m perfectly fine spending hour after hour by myself working on a story or essay draft or even a poem, before returning to the world of human beings.

When I consider how I spent those evenings during my upper elementary, junior high, and high school years, I think about how much daydreaming I did. Some of it was reliving previous games I’d played in, some of it was anticipating future games I would play in, some of it was longing for the attention of a particular girl (of course), but there was also the freedom to let my mind wander while actively doing something I enjoyed.

So while deep in the heart of Texas in a (warmer autumn) and there’s obsession with (and devotion to) football, I’ll be applying the lessons I learned on those beautiful autumn nights at a rinky-dink park in Minnesota.

Note: This post is also appearing on my basketball blog: thehoopsdoc.wordpress.com

On Short Stories

~ plainswriter ~ Leave a comment

As I usually do each summer, I go on a “reading rampage” (i.e., read as many books as possible before the school year begins). This summer, I  read 19 books, which might not sound like much, but I read a couple of short-story collections that were pretty hefty (one at nearly 900 pages, another at 500). By my calculations, I read well over 200 short stories this summer. I’d have to say that’s my favorite form, at present, to both read and write. The challenge(s) for the writer, the reward(s) for the reader(s)–all are so wonderful.

I savored Ray Bradbury’s Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrate Tales, Donald Barthelme’s Forty Stories, Raymond Carver’s Where I’m Calling From: New and Selected Stories, Phil Klay’s Redployment, and Larry Woiwode’s The Neumiller Stories. There were also the weekly stories from The New Yorker.

When the school year began four weeks ago, I set a goal of reading one short story a day. So far I’ve read War Dances by Sherman Alexie, and in addition to more New Yorker stories I’ve been finding great pieces in my two favorite literary journals: South Dakota Review and Mid-American Review.

Now that I’m entering my fifth year as a full-time English professor, the rhythms of the semester are less conducive for entering the world of novels, especially if I don’t read one for a few days and then attempt to return to that highly developed world. Short stories, by contrast, allow me to spend ten, fifteen, thirty minutes in a fictional world and then leave it.

A short story is a 5k or maybe a 10k, while a novel is a marathon, and having run a few of the former, and three of the later, the commitment of time (and mental concentration) is drastically different. (To be clear, I do love all of the lengths of both things I’m comparing.)

And as a writer, I’ve drafted three different novels (#1 was one draft, #2 was four drafts, and #3 was one draft), but so many more stories. As a way to tap into the scope available to the novelist, I create stories that feature recurring characters and settings. (See my earlier posts–#1 and #2–about my summer writing project.) That interconnectedness provides a seemingly endless opportunity of future stories.

Who are my favorite short-story writers? Here’s a non-alphabetized and non-ordered list to conclude the post:

  • Richard Ford
  • Raymond Carver
  • Ron Carlson
  • Donald Barthelme
  • Flannery O’Connor
  • Ann Beattie
  • Sherman Alexie
  • Rick Bass
  • Tobias Wolff
  • Ernest Heminway
  • Ray Bradbury
  • T. C. Boyle
  • Tim O’Brien

Summer Writing Project Wrap-Up

~ plainswriter ~ Leave a comment

At the end of June, I shared how I was working on substantially revising my short-story cycle that is set in Western Minnesota and Eastern South Dakota. It has been so much fun spending a part of the day working on the project. A couple mornings a week, I was at the nearest Starbucks, other mornings I was at home in the quiet of the bedroom while my wife and kids were out on playdates, and some afternoons I was in my university office, enjoying the quiet of the building.

The idea of fun hadn’t been something I’d associated with my writing life in the last few years. I enjoyed my writing life, yes, and I was satisfied with my hard work, but just the experience of feeling free to pursue the stories wherever they went, building up more of this imaginary world I’ve spent time in for over a decade was childlike fun. I had the benefit of all my years of writing and of so many more books read.

When I was a beginning writer (as an undergrad and even as an MFA student), I was often troubled by a not-uncommon concern: what if run out of things to write about? In a perverse way, that irrational fear often prevented me from writing. Or to state it more with my active will involved, at times I avoided writing because I thought I would somehow exhaust every single idea.

My work this summer reinforced the ridiculousness of that fear, and I now have ideas for several more stories (beyond those ideas I have yet to draft). The nature of the interconnected storyworld offers me as a writer a realm that I can continually return to, a place to dig for more drama.

So what’s next? Sending out several of the individual stories, and, I hope, seeing them in print form in a great journal. After that? Sending out the entire collection.

And all the while I’ll be writing more stories, trying to make more progress on a list of ideas that grows faster than I can keep up with.