Cat Person and the Dormant Power of the Short Story

I am not writing about the meaning of the short story Cat Person by Kristen Roupenian published in The New Yorker. Nor will I discuss its quality of story or writing.

Why?

I haven't read it yet. I will tonight and then probably write something tomorrow.

So, why write something now?

Because for the first time in a long while a short story has demonstrated what for too long has been the dormant power of the short story. Go to just about any writers retreat or conference and invariably some grizzled elder or a young, soon-to-be-something writer will attempt to answer the question: Is the novel dead?

Rarely, does anyone seem to want to ask about the short story.

This is why I call its power dormant. There are many good short stories out there. And some great ones, too. But the power to spark debate, thought, conversation, argument as well as to touch on the truth of what it means to be alive at this time is often missed. There is a problem of relevancy, not always, but often, and so the chance that a story can affect the world beyond the smallish subset of short story readers is diminished.

And by relevancy, I mean that the writer is not able to authentically hit the nail on the head. Too much MFA influence. Too much floating, not enough struggling to reach the surface for air in the life of the writer.

And so, the power of short stories to move people and create a reflection of their lives--fears to joys--that helps all of us understand not just ourselves, but each other, remains dormant.

So, we now have the Cat Person moment, which comes to us during a reckoning of male elites and their abuse of power and leverage for sex (or dominance) of one form or another. It is a reckoning that is long overdue, and into it comes this story that hits a nerve because through the experience of two characters, the protagonist in particular, there is something to learn. And with that, to dislike or appreciate.

No matter what your opinion of this story, it is relevant and because of that it has a life in the culture, well beyond the pages of The New Yorker.

Literary journal editors should take note.

Last, I do note a bit of incongruity in the above. After reading a brief interview of Roupenian and a bit of her bio, she is someone who I'm sure has worked hard, but has lived a life without much struggling to reach the surface for air. However, she has written a hotly relevant story and it's touched a serious nerve, because she writes about a personal experience (the story is based on that experience) that many women can relate to as well as many men.

Resuscitating The Short Story

In a continuation of the last post...

At the end of Laura Miller's piece in Slate she argues that Helen Oyeyemi's stories escape:

"...the chorelike quality that has come to be associated with the average contemporary short story collection. Too often, the short story is left to writers’ writers, but Oyeyemi is a reader’s writer. It makes all the difference in the world."

In the post before this one I argued that short stories, like Jazz have been co-opted by academia--the MFA world--and made to be sterile, pompous and lacking in story or any demonstration the writer has lived beyond there own small world. They are written for the art of the sentence and elegance of narrative arc rather than to tell a good story that shows unknown or uncommon truths.

They are chore-like, according to Miller, because they are so fucking slow to start and once you push through an ungenerous opening there is often little there. In short, it is MFA enthusiasts writing for MFA enthusiasts. They didn't literally--or maybe they did--but figuratively have left the reader out in the cold.

This is absolutely not always the case, but it happens too much.

So, how to fix the problem. First: Go out and live. Work hard without hope of ever getting out of the drudgery of that life. Take care of people at the end of their lives. Be a journalist and see how the world works for everybody else. Give up the trust fund or savings for a year and live on your own grit. Let yourself be moved, affected, and beaten down by life.

As to writing better stories, Chris Offutt said that all short story writers should remove the first third of their story because most beginnings are pointless and slow. I agree. One way to avoid wasting that time, as I've noted before, is ruminate on an idea for a story for a while, days, weeks, and when you sit down to write, say to yourself You won't fucking believe this but... and write whatever comes into your mind without self editing.

I call this harvesting your blinks.

After you find the opening that brings the reader immediately into the story and gives them a sense of place, time and character, write one true sentence. Follow that one true sentence with another, and then another and another...

Within each of these true sentences, feel all that you have learned from your life's experiences. The joy of finding a twenty dollar bill on a Wednesday when you are broke and can't afford to eat or a pack of smokes and you have to work ten hours a day until payday when you'll get out of work too late to cash your check. The pain of realizing your children will never realize a better childhood than one of living paycheck to paycheck with you. Of feeling the anger that you have so much more to give the world and what it could do for your life if just one fucking thing would go your way, but knowing it never will. Of feeling the pain of a lover laughing at you after s/he screwed your best friend because all there is for him or her is the pain they can cause. The pain of seeing others for whom life has given so much and for whom luck and providence has shown brightly, knowing this will never happen for you and seeing these people disdain you as an outside to their good fortune. The pain of being told at age forty-five that society and government need to punish you because you are a taker for having had cancer. Of feeling so ashamed of yourself and how you look that you hide from the world wishing you were dad and hating yourself for lacking the courage to pull the trigger. Or knowing the person who hates you most and who abuses you out of cruelty and subtle mental illness will never stop and there is nothing you can do to get away.

With all of these pains, there can be joys, but there are also myriad truths that are not commonly known. Tell these stories and other stories so compelling that the reader cannot pull away from the first word.

In other words, write for readers. And do so with honesty.

Short Story is Dead, Long Live Short Story

I love short stories. My favorite, and it is a total cliche, is A Clean Well-Lighted Place by Hemingway. It is beautiful and succinct. It helped me understand why I want to be a writer. Then there is A&P by Updike, which I read at age fifteen and found in it a character I could eminently relate to.

And thus my love of short stories was born. They are sketches, portraits, paintings, or scenes of characters in situations that define them in a particular moment or place in time. The best do not try to aspire to be a mini-novel nor do they force the reader to press on through multiple boring bits (no piece of writing should) to get to the meat and heart of the story and its emotion.

Chris Offutt, an excellent essayist and short story writer, advised that all writers should simply cut the first third of any story they write because more than likely it is crap. It is the writing fumbling for the narrative or trying to show off.

In today's Slate there is a story by Laura Miller where she talks about a new collection by Helen Oyeyemi. At the beginning she declares:

"For a reader who wants most of all to get lost in a book, the difficulty of reading short story collections is that every several pages she and the author must dissolve the world they’ve summoned up together and start anew. Fictional beginnings are always an uphill climb, requiring a push from the reader until her imagination meshes with the words and then the words fall away and the reading coasts along on pure momentum. Even when a short story achieves that frictionless delight—and not many do—the glide doesn’t last long. Soon the end arrives, and then the climbing commences again."

My first thought is that Miller is reading way too many bad stories and that way too many bad stories are being published. I blame the MFA-ization of short story writing and literary journals for this sorry state because I couldn't agree more that an overwhelming majority of short stories are tedious and chore-like to get through the opening--sometimes paragraphs long--to find if there is anything there. Then comes the disappointment that in fact the writer hasn't given the reader anything other than sentences and paragraphs that score well in an MFA classroom. in short, they haven't lived the blues or much of anything else, so they can't sing the blues. Either that, or they are lost in a world of fabulous sentences without regard to story.

Something similar can be seen in Jazz. Jazz was created from the bottom up. It came from the black experience and found its voice in clubs and dives where the musicians were allowed to be musicians and express themselves as listeners danced, drank, fought, and lived. Within all of this came incredible musicians and melodies and improvisation that defied stodgy musical convention for decades. Then Jazz went into academia and it lost much of its heart. There are still great Jazz musicians out there, but it lost something when, like classical, it was co-opted by music schools. I imagine Rap will see a similar fate before too long.

The same for short stories. They were the Jazz of writing. They were improvisational, beautiful, gritty, challenging, transportative, they let us see ourselves in them or they told us an unknown or uncommon truth.

All short stories are not bad. You don't have to go back in time to find people who are writing good stories. And there is a place for the MFA world, but it should be diminished and put in its proper perspective. Otherwise, short stories (and the journals that publish them) will continue to die a slow death.