The Next Step: Shuffling the Deck
Our First Rough Cut!
We’ve Got a Critical Mass
It’s time to shuffle the elements of our proposed story, About Our Contributors. Again, we’re looking to create a “list” of short elements that occur in series, similar to Amy Hempel’s The Harvest and Ron Hansen’s Wickedness. For a longer version of this form, check out Sandra Bernhardt’s Confessions of a Pretty Lady, a memoir broken into bite-sized-but-memorable chunks.
We’ve established our convention — the Contributors Section of a fictional story collection — and we’ve peopled it with writer Bios. Now let’s experiment with how we juxtapose one Bio with another. A great thing about all of you1 adding Bios is that the whole is less likely to sound as if it were written by one person. Each Bio will sing in a different way, and that will create more contrast between them. In effect, we’re cutting the story as if we were editing a film.
NOTE: Most of the film Fight Club was shot in the summer of 1998, but they had to go back for reshoots in December. At one point the studio, Fox, rolled a large cake onto the movie set. Inscribed in icing were the words “Congratulations on Shooting 500,000 feet of film.” Give or take. Even to novice me that seemed like a lot of film. As they cut into the cake and handed pieces around, David Fincher whispered to me, “They don’t know about the extra 250,000 feet we shot for B roll.”