Last Chance...

To Chime In for Act II

Speak Now or Forever Hold Your Peace

This is your last chance to click here and add a bio for our next draft of About Our Contributors.

This past week a few of Tom Spanbauer’s original students from 1990 got together to read aloud from his first novel, Faraway Places. Tom always told us, “The longer you can be with the incomplete thing, the better it will eventually become.” Bear this in mind when you want to rush anything to completion. Or when you’re irked about not finishing a project.

The longer you can be with the incomplete thing, the better it will eventually become.

This project — to create a short story modeled after a typical Contributors page from a short-story anthology — is to demonstrate how a story can “crystalize” from several different points. It need not be written from beginning to ending. I’ve found that my best work begins as what seem like several unrelated ideas. Usually several short stories. The more of these self-contained “stories” I write, the more a pattern begins to emerge.

In my book Diary the narrator paints individual paintings, with no idea that each is a fragment of a vast mural and that, once assembled, that mural will destroy people. It’s only once the fragments are put together that the narrator sees what she’s done. For me, that’s how we can fool ourselves into going to a normally daunting place. And fool the reader to do the same. By creating each fragment as perfectly as possible, and trusting that eventually those bits will reveal their own pattern — much as the film editor takes the rough footage and assembles it.

Also, note how this fragmentary structure suggests one of my favorite short stories by Amy Hempel, In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried.

As of last week we had five or six “centers” for the story. Those are the original Bios. Since then we’ve been adding new Bios, each related in some way to the first-round of Bios. Tomorrow, I’ll choose another batch of Bios from those recently posted. For now, here’s your last chance to add a second-round Bio. As before, it should be formatted as per the first-round of Bios (name, name of story, then misc.). I’ll be looking to vary the length of the Bios, so don’t write long. Think long, write short.

Soon enough, the story will materialize like the patterns of frost on a window: From many centers reaching toward each other.