I had the pleasure of meeting Alexander Weinstein late last year when he came to read from his story collection, Children of the New World, which Picador published in September 2016. I enjoy it when authors come in and not only read, but maybe have detailed introductions for certain stories, make sure there is a Q&A session afterward even if they have to ask the first question or two to get the ball rolling. Alexander stuck around well after reading a couple of stories with his Q&A session which he did get the ball rolling on. His collection is fantastic and he's written a bit about the process here in a guest post (that also references a favorite author of mine to boot).
The Postcard: Rediscovering Play Within Short Stories
There came a point, about five years ago, when I became blocked as a writer. I’d been writing for over twenty years at that point, and had started having a good number of story publications—and I mention this only to note that success in writing doesn’t quiet self-doubt. The Inner Critic, that dark part of the psyche with which most writers are intimately familiar, had returned.
For the past decade I’ve been teaching my students how to tame the Inner Critic. Most young writers end up blocked because the voice of the Inner Critic is stifling their creativity before they’ve even started to draft a story. It asks them annoying, self-defeating questions like: Do you really think you have the talent to write? Can you see how much you suck? Why don’t you go out drinking instead? My advice to students has always been to kick the Inner Critic out of the room when sitting down to write. The Writer needs to be able to make a mess, write unpublishable nonsense, and have fun while exploring the page. It’s this state of exuberant creation which The Writer loves, and this is the feeling I hope students will tap into when they’re creating new work.
Meanwhile, here I was preaching the gospel of Play but finding I was losing sight of joy within my own writing. Ironically, my self-doubt arose from a worry about publication. Was the new story I was writing as good as the one which had just been published? Should I try something new or stick with a narrative formula which had proven successful? These questions were blocking my creativity, and though I was producing new work, I was no longer enjoying the process; I had to find a way to keep my stories alive and rediscover joy.
So, taking a note from Michael Martone, I began writing fictional postcards. The postcard proved to be a fantastic and highly experimental short form. Its brevity and expendability allowed the space to write flash fiction and prose poems rather quickly. As well, postcards allowed access to all genres. I could write a fantastical postcard: “Dear Mary, I’ve just arrived among the fairies. Tonight they light bonfires and sail acorns down the river.” Or a realist postcard, “Dear Mary, The winter has arrived and I’m still in upstate New York. I remember our days in the farmhouse—the way you loved me.” So I’d write these postcards (to and from fictional people) and send them to my friends without telling them I was doing so. I had a practice of writing 4-5 postcards a day, and I ended up producing hundreds of them over the next year. There was a great sense of play within this exercise, as well as freedom. A key to the practice was not to keep copies of the postcards I wrote. If I thought I’d written junk—off it went; and if I thought I’d written brilliance—off it went. This lack of attachment freed up both The Writer and The Inner Critic in me, and also revealed how prolific I could be when I allowed myself to play. Even better—the postcards brought surprise, joy, and mystery to the friends whose mailboxes they arrived in. Months later, I would hear from acquaintances about the strange and unexpected circumstances that the postcard precipitated. I’d serendipitously sent a Yellowstone postcard to a friend whose parents had just been visiting the National Park. The postcard was an odd one, telling the tale of an artist who had gone insane and was collecting snakes as his new art form. My friend had called his parents to ask if they’d met a crazy artist in the park, sharing the tale with them—and, in this way, the fiction had birthed a life of its own.
I’ve been bringing variations of this postcard practice into my teaching, and the students naturally take to these experiments in formalism. The central commonality to the exercises is to create work which is either destroyed or given away. The students write fictional love/break-up notes and leave them on park benches, they write treasure maps and leave them within the pages of borrowed library books, they fold prose poems into paper airplanes and send them off the balconies of apartment buildings. They’ve unlocked a practice wherein they can access their imagination without attachment or judgement, and this gives them the opportunity to write without their work being goal-oriented (a rare moment of freedom within the race for a diploma). Writing as process, writing as practice, writing as non-attachment. I sit and write my postcards with them in class, rediscovering my own sense of play. In the process, I find that we’re all tapping into the pleasure which brought us to writing in the first place—a sense of freedom upon the page, and the possibility that anything can happen once pen is put to paper.
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