Jim Stallings

Philosophy

Storytelling Philosophy & Practice

Tales for Commuters & Other Time Travelers was meant to be the first in a series of storybooks for adults built up from spontaneous, Zen-like fictions. The brevity of these stories is also meant to appeal to today’s busy readers who have little time for a ten or fifteen hour stint with a novel; maybe those readers ride trains or subways, or hitch shuttles from one city to another or maybe suffer an hour or more of car commuting (plans are in the works for an audio book); also these tales might appeal to vacationers at the beach or mountains, summer break reading, or good old bedtime reading. My short short fictions generally range from a minute up to fifteen or twenty minutes on the far side.

In writing these over the years I’ve found they are somewhat whimsical, somewhat blue, somewhat comical and in some cases the tales take a truly Greek tragic turn. With the inherent need for immediate conflict in a short narrative, many of the stories scope out the war between the sexes, an endless battlefield of erotica and cleverness. Because of their brevity, the success of the stories depends in part on seeing the character in depth; that’s why I sometimes refer to them as karmic tales or biographies or sometimes as karmic portraits, whether slice-of-life moments or whole life summaries.

Truth is I don’t have a hard and fast philosophy for writing stories. Partly I think this is because storytelling is an almost instinctual way of seeing the world unfold. As my mother reminded me more than once, I was “smoking sticks and making up tall tales” long before I knew how to write. Writing stories is a literary exercise that requires technique and patience and maturity. My stories, especially these short short stories, are unplanned. They are “seen” spontaneously in first draft form. I’m good for about 500 to 1000 words or less in story composition at one sitting. So, in some sense, these short fictions are the result of story meditations of an hour or two. My longer works are more complex strands of these shorter writing sessions. Novels have longer “karmic waves”; these impromptus depend on a minimalist core of actions and reactions. That puts them in the more traditional category of tales, or folk tales, fairy tales, legends, myths or fables.

In a more postmodernist sense, some readers call these Transcendental or Zen or Buddhist stories. Others call them spontaneous or sudden or micro fictions. One common reader response compares them to Vonnegut’s style, a “Zen Vonnegut” style. That’s highly complimentary, as Kurt Vonnegut is one of my favorite authors, along with John Updike and Joyce Carol Oates; the brevity and clarity of language, along with the ironical tone strike me as common resonance’s I like in this modern tradition, as in Nathaniel West’s work.

Call these tales what you will, the fun is the jazz-like improvisation of the story. Typically, I might have an image or idea or feeling that’s front burner and off we go exploring that experience. More often than not, I like to clear my mind and have a kind of “emptiness” present before I start a story. Then I just follow whatever comes down the storybook road. Granted what appears is sometimes a feature of what I’m feeling and thinking that day, but still there’s plenty of room for the story to be about totally different things than what I consciously recognize as the writer.

I’m clearly influenced by Buddhist writings on emptiness and form and their dialectics; I'm also influenced by the exotic, New Age anthropology writings of Carlos Castenada, the depth insights of archetypal psychology from Carl Jung, the brilliant riffs of the Delta blues, modern jazz, as well as rock ’n’ rollers like Jerry Garcia and The Dead; add to that the freedoms of abstract expressionism in the visual arts; Taoism and American Transcendentalists like Hawthorne or other big name writers like James Joyce, Miguel Cervantes, Laurence Sterne, George Eliot, Homer, Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner (among many others)-stir well-and you’ve got a mirror of inspiration without limits. Emptiness is not “empty” in a nihilistic Western sense of a depressed exhaustion of forms; emptiness is actually effulgent with a clear light of infinite inspiration, beauty and freedom. When I’m composing, I’m happy to be in that state of aesthetic grace. That’s my drive behind being an artist-that breaking on through to the “other side.” That freedom, that joy.

After the first draft, I put the story away. I write stories left-handed in notebooks that people bring me in their travels; I’m naturally a righty. I just got in the habit of drawing from the other side of the brain, visually and physically; so there’s a certain joy in using my left hand to inscribe the first draft and “tickle” the right brain for holistic views of character and narrative. Later on I’ll take the story and type it into the computer. I’ve written hundreds of sketches, but very few are born whole without need of thorough revision. So after typing up, then begins the wonderful work of re-vision and re-voicing.

It’s my hunch that dedicated writers love to re-write sentences, whatever the length of the genre, from lyrical poem to multi-volume novel. A standard novel may have 10,000 sentences, a short story 100, but each sentence needs to be massaged and voiced until it works in the ensemble of other sentences. That’s sometimes a long process. In fact, what I’m saying is that most career writers are just re-writing and re-voicing most of the time. A first draft doesn’t take that long generally, but a final draft with ten complete revisions (my average) may take years. James Joyce worked a thousand hours on one 50-page section of Ulysses (the “Nausicaa” episode, beach, Bloom and Gerty MacDowell). Maybe that’s one reason I like short fiction. I can finish a ten-layered revision in a week or two, rather than a year or two with a novel.

Regardless, the fun of writing and rewriting is the allowing of improvisational action by the characters in their narratives. There’s a fine balance between the control of the storyteller and the freedoms of the characters in experiencing their actions inside the storybook of their destinies. It’s possible to think of the author as a “god” who invents these worlds; I think of my role as more of a modest mirror to the fateful choices these characters bring to the stages of human choice.

Jim Stallings, spring 2002, Boston