The Shape of Fiction

I have been struggling with a novel project that…didn’t quite collapse but certainly hit some hard times in the fall. So…in case you were wondering what happened there, there’s that. While I try to find my way forward with that project, I have been writing some short stories. I don’t necessarily find short fiction easier than a novel, but there is satisfaction—dopamine—in getting to the end, concretely and firmly. And I guess it is easier to keep a 10-page story fully in my mind as I revise and rework, so I don’t lose track of any of the pieces or forget what I wanted to say if revising only takes a week or two. That’s nice. It’s just so fast. And I guess I feel like since the main definition of a short story is that it be short—10-20 pages or so, a little less, a little more—there’s more room to do whatever else I feel like. Write it in dialogue, write it in monologue, start in the middle, end in the middle, not explain what I don’t want to explain. Whereas with a novel, I’m asking readers to invest so much time and energy and emotion, I do feel—well, I’m feeling I should feel—a more structured journey that gets you from A to B in a nice resolving way. That’s not actually true of ALL novels of course—even beyond experimental work, some fairly mainstream novels have odd structures.

When I’m editing, I often say that work has a “specific gravity”—like there’s nothing wrong with a 10 000 word short story or a 40 000 word novel if that’s the precise length the work needs to be. And you can feel it in the pace if it’s off—if there should be more or less to it, if the work isn’t the right length of the content. And that’s true of shape too, I guess. I don’t think there’s a type of story that needs to be exactly on the story arc they taught us in grade 7, but there are stories that do need that. And then there are stories that are more an ocean on a gently choppy day, and others that are a precipitous drop. Because, of course, the novel is supposed to be mimetic of life, and life can be anything. Allegedly. Writing teachers are always telling us, “Real life is no excuse for fiction,” but…if it takes a brilliant writer to convince readers of something you’d believe unequivocally half-looking up from your phone on the bus, it can still be believed in fiction, and that can and should be striven for. More half-glimpsed bus stories should be in novels, is my opinion.

But sometimes I’m not quite ready to strive. Sometimes all my brilliant ideas are flashes and bolts, rather than sustained illumination. Sometimes I want the dopamine hits. So I’m working on short stories right now, hoping to power myself back up to the longer work, and the more extensive revision, sometimes soon.

I succumbed to the internet trend of asking ChatGPT to transform photos of my cats into images of people. I haven’t really gotten too into experimenting with AI software even though everyone says playing around with is how you learn whether your fears are justified or not. The only thing I have figured out that ChatGPT can do for me that is useful is take an email that I have written that is too long, and “Make this shorter but keep all the information and maintain the same tone.” This is something I’m a bit bad at—I can eventually make things shorter but it takes me a long time because I have a very ornate sense of friendliness. Mark can fix things for me faster but Mark has other things to do and is sometimes unavailable to save me from sending endless emails. ChatGPT does a rather good job of this although it sometimes a) puts info into the wrong order, which is an easy fix and b) makes the email slightly rude, which is a slightly less easy fix.

Anyway, that was the only thing I had done prior to today, when I did try to make Chat GPT do renderings of what my cats would look like as humans. It offered me both a “human” with cat ears growing out of her skull and a human neck and shoulders with a cat head stuck on top, so I really hope no one is attempting serious research on this tool, but with some fiddling I was able to get a reasonable guess at what could have been Alice as a young girl. I started on Evan, but ran out of photos for the evening, which I didn’t realize could happen. It is not a terribly useful tool, but I have to admit, it was a lot of fun.

We got a new duvet cover and pillow sham covers)

RR (takes old pillow sham covers off)
MS (takes old duvet cover off) (tearing noise)
RR: Uh-oh, what was that?
MS: I may have torn it. It may have torn.
RR: A lot?
MS: This much. (holds up a three-inch stretch of seam)
RR: That’s not that much.
MS: It doesn’t matter, it’s going in the trash anyhow, right?
RR: No! What? I just wanted something new and nicer. That one is still pretty nice! Just zip it back up and put it in the laundry.
MS: Oh. Ok. (begins struggling with zipper)
RR (takes old pillow shams to laundry hamper) Is that inside out?
MS: Um, I don’t know.
RR: …Is the zipper on the inside or the outside?
MS: The inside.
RR: So it’s inside out, then.
MS: Ok.
RR: It’s a lot harder if you try to zip it inside out.
MS (still struggling) It really is!
RR: (takes duvet cover away, begins trying to turn it rightside out, somehow it is twisted over several times) How did this go so wrong?
MS: I don’t know. Did I really screw it up?
RR: A little bit, somehow.
Cats (screaming)
MS: I’ll go break up a cat fight.

<3

RR