silent, her feet don’t
disturb thin layers of dust –
some past haunts his thoughts
No more deep thoughts, no more words hawked as wisdom or profundity or other silliness.
No more complexities and abstractions.
Just one goal, the goal I strove for when I began to write again after many years and when the walls began tumbling down:
Essence. Call it snapshots, vignettes, written cameos, haiku…
Shed the glume, the husk, the chaff. Take a picture, a short series of moments in time — poetic prose.
Wode. I must be mad….
When I first started writing again, I had an Idea. I knew (and know) that short fiction has fallen out of favor with popular readers. What is wanted is bigger and better and longer and uncut. This thinking pervades music CDs (which are increasingly filled with ever closer to 73 minutes), movies (director’s cuts which lengthen the story by as much as 30 minutes), and novels (which have become lengthy tomes), just to name a few ways in which our attitude has embraced “bigger is better”.
Back then, I thought that it might be nice to embrace an element of classic theatre in my writing — the idea that a tale should take place within a single day and at a single location. I’m not the first writer to contemplate brevity in his work — one of my favorite books is “Nine Stories” by J.D. Salinger, a book that is filled with snapshots and snippets of events that reflect the characters involved. “Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut” comes to mind, as does my perennial favorite, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”. Other writers appear to have the same philosophy and Mr. Salinger is not alone in that respect.
I have written one novel now and have completed the better part of two others.
Now, I think it is time to return to the simple, the brief, the moment…
Just thinking.
To paraphrase — “There is no whining in politics.”
That is my final word on the matter.