Daily Shorty

Worked on this one a few times during the day, then saved the heavy hitting for late, when I knew I’d be sitting in an airport for a few hours, waiting for the husband’s always delayed plane. Might as well make being stuck in limbo work for me, right? A disappointing shorty, as it happens, but an efficient Claire. Next!

Working Title: Breast Duty
1st Sentence: “You don’t need to tell me what to do.”
Favorite Sentence: She draped the thing around her shoulders, snapped it at the top, and sat there like a depressed superhero with a very bad costume designer.
Word Length: 1,042

Photo by National Cancer Institute.

Um… wow. This shorty includes the two most unlikable characters I’ve ever created. And I’ve created quite a few. But these two ladies are just…awful without being interesting. Nothing whatsoever to recommend them. Why? Why would I do that? Who wants to read about people like this? One very interesting thing about this challenge—I’ve written a lot of stories that are so different from my norm that I actually feel incapable of judging them. That’s never happened to me before. For now I trust it’s just the labor and intensity of the challenge and my Inner Critic will be just as full of herself as ever when it comes time for revision. No, Inner Critic, that was not an invitation, go back to your seat.

Working Title: Ladies Who Lunch
1st Sentence: What makes a waiter in his twenties think it’s okay—and actually not just okay but somehow flattering—to refer to two women in their forties as “girls”?
Favorite Sentence: More lime more lime, Romeo, more lime!
Word Length: 1,353

Photo here.

Ahh, a lovely pecan nougat roll to reward a tough week. I have felt that my stories lack vitality this week but I just looked back at them all and actually I really like a couple of them. And two others have a lot of potential. So a typical week, I guess. On to the next!

Working Title: Dear Congresswoman Brugge
1st Sentence: I write to explain why I am declining your request for a contribution to your campaign for the Senate.
Favorite Sentence: You looked right at Grace, put your hands on your hips, and cranked up your I’m-too-smart-for-your-mother voice.
Word Length: 1,256

I bought this treat at a candy shop in Ogunquit’s Perkins Cove. I remember it with love and gratitude.

Again, had to work hard to get the story on the page and then I had to press like crazy to finish it. Really liked the vision for this one but had to settle for a mediocre delivery. Hope it comes together in revision. I really miss the days of this challenge when I had time to look at older stories and re-work them. Maybe soon I will find a better rhythm and add revision to my days again. Not until the Olympics are over, that’s for sure.

Working Title: Me, Too
1st Sentence: Juror #3 complained about the bottled water.
Favorite Sentence: They were arguing about the war, about the last thirty years of trickle-down economics, about gun control and racism and gay marriage, and whether public school students should be forced to observe a moment of silence before lunch because some Baptist kid had been taught to believe the whole world should stand still while he thanks Jesus for a bologna sandwich and a bag of Fritos.
Word Length: 1,071

Photo here.

Too many things to do and I can’t seem to just set my feet, scowl, and knock down each pin. I think it might be time to admit that having to complete a story every day is extremely mentally taxing. What to do? I can’t stop.

Working Title: Tango Tangle
1st Sentence: Sure, they could learn a couple of others, too, but it was the Tango she wanted in her feet.
Favorite Sentence: In the end she sank to the ground in a kind of slow motion twirl, landing in a bunched up slump with Cliff leaning over her, his face red as a split tomato.
Word Length: 1,959

Photo by Jenny Mealing, October 2005.

Slow in coming this morning. But then it came to me all at once and I trusted it so completely that I spent the entire day working on other things, coming back to the shorty for a more complete drafting only just before bed. So far this challenge has given me faith that I will always have another good story in me—maybe not today or tomorrow but soon. I decided to commit to a year because I really want to know if such a rigorous and disciplined practice will ultimately deplete or feed me. I suspect and hope that each story seeds another. That we can never run out in any case but that we are most full when we spend. Spoken like a woman high on a great writing session. Time will tell.

Working Title: In Tune
1st Sentence: She’d always loved to watch him tune his violin just before a performance.
Favorite Sentence: But she told him she had a feeling, a ripe, purple feeling, like the glistening center of a split plum torn from the pit.
Word Length: 1,040

Photo by Frinck51, May 2004

First things first: A pecan cinnamon roll for me as a congrats for completing Week 11! Yahoo! And now a word to friends who have been asking how I manage my daily writing practice: It’s ideal if I can hit my story 3 times each day. When I first wake up (I write while I’m still in bed), after lunch, and before I go to sleep (again, writing in bed). Often I get only two of those and if I can only have two, I want first thing in the morning and then just before I go to bed. I get ideas best when I first wake up, and I need the distance of a good 14 or 15 hours, if I can have it, to find the entire story. Of course my daily practice would look different if I didn’t have to complete a story each day. But should it? I couldn’t establish a consistent practice before, so how would I know what works?

Working Title: Mr. & Mrs. Potato Head, Innkeepers
1st Sentence: When she was nine, Nita married Mr. and Miss Potato Head, then made them a house.
Favorite Sentence: The Potato Heads met occasionally in the kitchen, by accident—Mr. standing over the sink as he shoveled a bowl of shredded wheat into his mouth, staring out the kitchen window; Mrs. pushing eggs around in a pan, letting them get hard and crumbly while she slipped into a couple of minutes of relative peace that felt something like sleep.
Word Length: 1,578

Photo by Flickr user Lara, March 2009.

Working Title: Wishcraft
1st Sentence: Just like in all the stories, I wasted the first wish.
Favorite Sentence: Weeks and weeks of that best-boy shit, plus all the extra hours I can take and old Hank couldn’t hump it right now if it crawled right up under him and wrapped its legs around his waist.
Word Length: 1,285

Photo by Vicki Nunn, November 2010.

I can’t believe I forgot to congratulate myself for completing week 10 yesterday! No wonder I was cranky today. No virtual treat. So a luscious brownie for me now. Anyway, today I drafted three-quarters of something that didn’t interest me but I put it aside in hopes of getting something better. I kept coming back to the page after taking care of other life-things, but nothing would budge. Then I went searching through unfinished stories (the kind you know you’ll almost certainly never finish) and found a sentence that had good spark. Two one-hour sessions (mostly consisting of staring but eventually producing a couple of paragraphs) and one two-hour session of heavy-duty writing late tonight and I have a new shorty that, again, probably only a mother can love. Actually I’m beginning to think I’m losing my ability to judge whether my stories work. And I can’t decide if that’s good or bad. Likely both.

Working Title: Menu Math
1st Sentence: If you love tuna sandwiches, you’re high-strung and needy.
Favorite Sentence: It’s not that they genuinely expect the world to spasm and then re-shape itself into their image every time they let out one of these farts, it’s just that they’re shameless and cheap.
Word Length: 1,046

Photo by Neumüller Ferdinand.

Again, I wrote this one line by line with no idea what would happen nor how the story would end. It’s a quirky piece that I actually like a lot but I have a feeling it’s a shorty only a mother could love….

Working Title: Bucket List
1st Sentence: They were at a dinner party last night when the conversation turned to bucket lists.
Favorite Sentence: The piglet suited for Wimbledon has one of those old-style wooden racquets, and he’s wearing tennis shorts that are so long on his chubby little legs, they look like Capri pants.
Word Length: 1,271

Photo by 4028mdk09, October 2009.

I almost always realize the ending to a story right away (but then I have to figure out how to get there by writing the story). Very rarely I have absolutely no idea how the story will end, and in that case I just figure it out on the page line by line. Today I wrote my shorty like that and I really enjoyed both the process and the result.

Working Title: In the Cookie Jar of Life
1st Sentence: In the margins Melissa wrote things like, “I sense that you know your characters well”—the narrator had told us that the wife would develop diverticulitis in twenty years and the husband had a flare of freckles on the back of each upper thigh, details that had no bearing on the story, and “That you loved your grandmother very much comes across clearly”—the young man had written four times, “I loved my grandma a lot.”
Favorite Sentence: What if it’s a really bad metaphor, like ‘his mousey bellow’ or ‘her runny lips’?
Word Length: 1,135

Photo by Matt Turner, December 2006.

Where did this one come from? In October, when I should be thinking “Halloween,” maybe I’ll write a story about strawberry picking. Anyway, when I needed a title for a story about a cursed house, I remembered the old movie The Amityville Horror. Such horrendous punning shouldn’t be allowed, I know, but I can’t help myself.

Working Title: Comityville Terror
1st Sentence: Marlena believed the neighbors stopped liking her when she slaughtered the steer.
Favorite Sentence: She held a notebook to her chest and repeated, over and over, part history, part horror, part social criticism, part immersion memoir.
Word Length: 1,883

Image from Open Clip Art Library, by Netalloy.

Trying to find the balance between i. keeping expectations reasonable and encouraging, so letting go when meeting my Daily Shorty challenge is all that needs to happen in a day, and ii. raising expectations when pushing hard will take me to a new place in a story, transforming a trifle into a keeper. Today I was stubborn and it paid off. When the Inner Critic can keep her voice down, she is a welcome visitor. Today she kept whispering, here, right here, that’s where you need to introduce tension….

Working Title: Steering Leslie Right
1st Sentence: Elton was just driving her in circles.
Favorite Sentence: She pulled into a gas station and fiddled with the GPS, the way she fiddled with that old TV when she was a girl—in those days a good slap could get you back to an episode of T.J. Hooker in time for the stand-off.
Word Length: 1,728

Really enjoyed yesterday’s and today’s shorties. But this cold is awful and I’m hardly sleeping. Makes no sense.

Working Title: What’s a Little Water?
1st Sentence: Her mother is strapped to a chair suspended from the iron swing-arm that sticks out straight from the cement wall.
Favorite Sentence: The woman hovering in a puffy cloud of pastel knits, her white hair piled into an old-fashioned grandma bun, her stout legs bottoming out to sensible, thick-soled shoes, takes Jessica’s hand in both of hers, her palms warm and soft as dinner rolls.
Word Length: 1,554

The quality of my daily shorties seems to go up and down in small cycles—I’ll write 2 or 3 in a row that I really enjoy (even if they’re not destined to be publishable) then 2 or 3 that bore me and make me nervous about continuing this project. Then something good will pop up again. I spent a lot of time on today’s shorty, which emerged from a childhood memory, hoping to push it into something good. Didn’t happen. I think I need to keep faith that I will always write another story I love. Just maybe not today.

Working Title: Looking Sharp
1st Sentence: The sweater vest was the showpiece—four broad stripes of fuzzed yarn plush as a cat—pale blue, then orange, then yellow, then dark blue.
Favorite Sentence: Our teacher, a certified nutjob who sometimes liked to punish us by choosing to remain silent for an entire class period (yeah, that really hurts) and other times berated us nonstop for things our parents and grandparents had done—voting for Nixon, inventing plastic, bombing anyone small and dark—agreed, saying, “I know, so awful.”
Word Length: 1,517

Working Title: Made You Miss
1st Sentence: When they’d played tennis he couldn’t get it through his thick head that the point—the whole reason they were out there in the first place—was to get a good workout.
Favorite Sentence: The tennis ball bounced lightly to her right, slow and high, hanging in the air like a neon green face begging to be slapped.
Word Length: 1,674
Photo by nao2g June 2008.

Pushed hard to make something of the first lines and images that came to me. Getting stubborn about wanting something I like to happen on the page. This is good and bad. Bad if I forget how to let go when I need to, bad if I let the Inner Critic get too loud, again—she was overbearing before I started this project. Good because I should always push.

Working Title: Scrabble Night
1st Sentence: We were falling behind, Jane and I.
Favorite Sentence: The stuff looked like a big, fat urine sample on ice.
Word Length: 1,245

Photo: I will never admit to how long that took.

I didn’t reward myself with a virtual treat yesterday for completing Week 5 because I wanted to illustrate that post with a picture of Anne Boleyn. So delayed (virtual) gratification delayed no more: An ice cream cone for putting another week in the bag.

Working Title: To the Skeptics
1st Sentence: This is how I know Madame Talantua is for real: She never once told me what I wanted to hear.
Favorite Sentence: She gasped, kind of, and her eyes popped open to look at me so hard it felt like she was pinning something to my face, and I thought, goddamn, now she’s seeing right into me, like I’ll never be able to see myself, this is the best twenty bucks of my life.
Word Length: 1,246

Photo by ElinorD July 2007.