Grant Faulkner

Author’s Note: The Art of Brevity

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The Art of Brevity

So many things in life happen randomly.

One night in 2010, my friend Jake posted a link on Facebook to nine 100-word stories his father, Paul Strohm, had published with the literary journal Eleven Eleven. It was late, my eyes were blurry, but I clicked on the link and became intrigued by the series of tiny tales that were part of his memoir, Sportin’ Jack, which consisted of 100 one-hundred-word stories.

I liked the stories because they were little snapshots that allowed Paul to tell his life story through key pivotal moments instead of a larger memoir with a big narrative arc centered around major events.

Our lives are about small moments—or small moments that are actually big moments. It was as if Paul’s stories were photos in a Kodak carousel, flashing from one life moment to the next. In fact, he told me he modeled the form as if writing with a fixed-lens camera, with the idea that an arbitrary limit inspired compositional creativity.

I’d been working off and on for 10 years on what I now call my “doomed novel,” which had not only begun to weigh down my creativity but weigh down my life as well, so I decided to take a break from it and try my hand at writing these tiny stories.

I also just wanted to shake up my creative process. I’d been writing towards “the more” all of my life, after all. “More” is a key word in learning to write. We level up as writers, writing longer papers and using bigger words and longer sentence constructions at each academic stage because we’re taught that serious, sophisticated thoughts need more of everything to be conveyed.

Most of my writing life had been a training ground of “more,” in fact, so I rarely conceived of writing less. Even when I got my MFA, I frequently heard the comment, “I want to know more about _____” in many of the creative-writing workshops I took. More characterization, more backstory, more details—more of everything.

Rarely did anyone advise places to cut or condense or write less. None of us stopped to ask if this “more” added to the story or if it was just a passing curiosity of the reader’s, a need to have the story spelled out instead of imagined. I wrote longer and longer short stories, and then I wrote longer and longer novels, trying to fill in gaps, not open them.

So I began writing 100-word stories—I began writing less—and I learned that the short form is beguiling. Since it’s so short, it would seem to be easier, but in my initial forays I couldn’t come anywhere close to the one-hundred-word mark. At best, I could chisel a story down to 150 words, and I was so frustrated by the gobs of material I’d left out that I didn’t see a way to go further.

I told Paul that I’d written several stories as short as 150 words, and I told him I was pleased with that level of brevity, but he chided me to keep going farther, to trust that my story would actually get better as I cut it down. I didn’t quite trust that, but I kept going. The one-hundred-word form had become a riddle to solve.

I began to think of how the chants of “more, more, more” I’d heard in my writing workshops were often the single least helpful bit of feedback, impinging upon the vaporous whorls of suspense and necessary reserve that are integral to good storytelling, no matter the form.

I’d trained myself to write through backstories, layers of details, and thickets of connections, but the more I pared my prose to reach 100 words, a different kind of storytelling presented itself. The art of brevity. The art of excision. The art of compression. The art of omission. The art of spaces and gaps and breaths. The art of less.

Such an art finds itself at the center of flash fiction, which is defined as a story under a thousand words and goes by many names, including “short-shorts,” “miniatures,” “sudden fiction,” “hint fiction,” “postcard fiction,” and “post-it fiction,” among others.

Flash communicates via caesuras and crevices. There is no asking more, no premise of comprehensiveness, because flash fiction is a form that privileges excision over agglomeration, adhering more than any other narrative form to Ernest Hemingway’s famous iceberg dictum: only show the top one-eighth of your story and leave the rest below water to be conjured. A one-hundred-word story might only show the top 1 percent of your story.

Flash is a type of border crossing into a different land of storytelling, especially the “short-shorts” of the world of microfiction (stories less than four hundred words).

For one, flash is a form that naturally holds transience. Julio Ortega says in the flash series he calls Diario imaginario that he prefers to write them with cheap hotel pens because of the feeling of “provisional, momentary writing.” The writer Leesa Cross-Smith says flash stories “are here and they are gone . . . we’re talking not much room for backstory, we’re talking drive-thru stories and quickies and pit stops and sneaky, stolen kisses and breathless sprints and gotta go.” In his fifty-two-word story “Lint,” Richard Brautigan ponders the events of his childhood and compares them to lint, “pieces of a distant life that have no form or meaning.”

Except that by capturing these small, intense moments we’re elevating the lint-like stories of our lives into something much more. The flash form speaks to the singularity of such stray moments by calling attention to the spectral blank spaces around them. Flash allows stories to capture the running water of the everyday. Suddenly, the strain of music heard faintly from the next apartment becomes the reason for a story itself.

Brevity allows us to get close to the unsayable, to know something that is beyond words or the wordless moments words bring us to. The aesthetic of brevity helps return us to direct sensation. It heightens attention, recasting life with vividness. We realize the contradictory significance of things. Or the harmonious significance of things. Or both.

It’s a little like falling in love. It’s a little like noticing the first slant of the autumn sun. It’s a little like that moment of waking from a powerful dream and finding yourself in real life.

But … back to the magic of happenstance.

One thing led to the next. I developed a passion for 100-word stories and started 100 Word Story with my friends Lynn Mundell and Beret Olsen. I became addicted to writing 100-word stories, so I wrote Fissures, a collection of 100-word stories. And now I’ve written The Art of Brevity, which I hope you’ll enjoy.

A Creative Manifesto

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Picasso famously said, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” How can we be creative every day? It’s an important question, right?

I know you feel story ideas beckoning you to give them voice. You’ve felt the wondrous, magical rushes of creativity. You know how being creative can change the way you wake up, how you approach your work, how you connect with other people. Approaching the world with a creative mindset is wildly transforming—because suddenly you’re not accepting the world as it’s delivered to you, but living through your vision of life.

That’s the gift I see each November during National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). I witness thousands of people break down the barricades that prevent them from writing the novel of their dreams and take on the Herculean task of writing a novel of 50,000 words in just 30 days. Writing suddenly leaps up from the cluttered basement of their daily tasks to stand tall on the pedestal of life for an entire month. An audacious goal and deadline serve as creative midwives (and an occasional bullwhip), and writers are propelled by the scintillating rushes of their imagination and the galvanizing force of the huzzahs coming from what can seem like the entire world writing with them.

It seems like such a rollicking novel-writing party is never going to end, but then on December 1, the roars of rapacious novelists start to quiet. Suddenly, people are doing things like shopping for Christmas presents, studying for finals, or cleaning the mayhem their house has become. (Creativity gives the world many things, but it rarely provides a tidy house.)
The thing I hear most often after National Novel Writing Month is “I loved writing during NaNoWriMo, but I have trouble writing the rest of the year.”

It’s challenging to muster such energy each day. The galloping pace of NaNoWriMo is over, and it can be difficult to get up on the proverbial writing horse again. Urgent items on your to-do lists clamor for attention, and tackling those items is important, necessary work—buying groceries, washing dishes, fixing that squeaky door that has bugged you the last three years—so, really, how could you keep doing something so trivial as write? Suddenly, you start to feel creativity falling down on your to-do list. You know the joy it gives you, the life meaning, yet those slithering, pernicious beasts called “the demands of life” loudly yell what you should be doing (and I won’t even mention the siren calls of social media).

No one assigns us to be creative. And, what’s more, society usually doesn’t reward creativity, at least not unless your work makes it to the shelves of a bookstore, the walls of a gallery, or the stage of a theater. You might not think you’re a creative type, but to be human is to be a creative type, so one of the shoulds in your life should be to make sure creativity is not only at the top of your to-do list, but that you put your creativity into action every day. If you put off your dreams today, you create the momentum to put them off all the way to your deathbed.

We yearn to touch life’s mysteries, to step out into the world looking for new solutions to old problems, if not new worlds altogether. We need to tap into our vulnerabilities, seek to understand our fears, look at life through others’ eyes, ask questions, and open up our awareness of the wonders of the universe. Each story is a gift, a door that opens a new way to see and relate with others in this crazy, crazy world. Stories are the oxygen our souls breathe, a way to bring the unsayable, the unseeable, the unspeakable to life. Our creative lives shouldn’t be a hall pass from the stiff and forbidding demands of our lives. Writing our stories takes us beyond the grueling grind that life can unfortunately become, beyond the constraints of the roles we find ourselves in each day, to make the world a bigger place.

Stories remind us that we’re alive, and what being alive means. “Only art penetrates . . . the seeming realities of this world,” said Saul Bellow in his Nobel Prize speech. Leslie Marmon Silko says that stories are “all we have to fight off illness and death.” Jacqueline Woodson says writers are “the ones who are bearing witness to what’s going on in the world.”

For a writer, life hasn’t really been lived until one’s stories find their way onto the page. We exist in the flickers of a rift with the world, searching for words that will sew the fissure, heal it. A rupture, a wound, finds the salve of a story. If you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself. If you don’t create, you hurt yourself. The signature of your self is formed by the work you put into your story. Making art tells you who you are. Making art in turn makes you.

So it’s your duty as a writer, as a person, to build a world through your words and believe in your story as a beautiful work of incarnation, to see it as a gift to yourself and others, as something that elevates life with new meaning—your meaning. Writing a story is many things: a quest, a prayer, a hunger, a tantrum, a flight of the imagination, a revolt, a daring escape that ironically leads you back to yourself. As long as we’re creating, we’re cultivating meaning. Our stories are the candles that light up the darkness that life can become, so we must live in the warm hues of our imaginative life.

It’s not easy, though. The efforts of creativity carry angst and psychological obstacles that must be overcome. The important thing is to keep your creative life at the forefront of your thoughts and actions.

We become the things we do, and I can promise you, if you excavate your life to make room for your imagination, if you open up time to keep writing, you won’t just finish your novel, pen the poem in your head, or submit a short story you’ve worked so hard on, you’ll change, because once you realize yourself as a creator, you create worlds on and off the page.

If you hear the whispers of a novel coming from the other room, or ideas for other stories caterwauling for their day in the sun, dive in. “The days are long, but the years are short,” some wise person once said. Your story can’t wait. It needs you.

The Ides of March: The Most Dangerous Time for New Year’s Resolutions

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The dangers of the ides of March

March has carried a dramatic aura since a seer warned Caesar in 44 B.C. to “beware the Ides of March,” and sure enough, Caesar was assassinated.

It’s a time on the Roman Calendar notable for the settling of debts, on the eve of the end of winter and the beginning of spring. On my calendar, it’s a time to reckon with the goals I’ve set for myself for the year, and as with most people, it’s unfortunately a time when I begin to smell the stench of my New Year’s resolutions rotting.

In fact, most people’s resolutions die by February 4. There’s data to back that up. Foursquare and Swarm, two location-based apps, analyzed check-ins at fast food restaurants and gyms over an entire year. They found a 36 percent increase in gym visits during the weeks following New Year’s Day, along with a 13 percent decline in visits to fast food restaurants. But by February 4, the trends had reversed. Gym visits declined, while fast food check-ins started to rise.

when resolutions lapse

I’m assuming this applies to all types of resolutions, whether they concern fitness, creativity, or spirituality. The Ides of March are even more dangerous than the early days of February because I think most people continue to think about their resolutions in February and have at least a faint notion that they’ll re-engage and bring them to life. But by March most have sunk into their recliners and essentially decided that a handful of potato chips or a few hours of social media is more important than their dreams and desires.

We begin to relinquish the notion that we can shape ourselves into the people we want to be. We wait for another time to make changes—such as next year, when our “future self” will surely have the discipline and resolve to change things around (not!).

I made very do-able resolutions this year. I wanted to simply read one mediation a day from my book 365 Tao: Daily Meditations—a book I have owned for 20 years but failed to read on anything close to a daily basis—and then meditate for five minutes each day with my new Headspace app. This requires all of 10 or so minutes a day, and there’s no sweating, no showering, no expenditures—and I can eat whatever I want—yet I’ve only read 38 meditations (I should be at 70) and used Headspace 8 times.

Patterns of behavior are difficult to change. Since I live in a world of time scarcity, since my to-do list expands with alarming promiscuousness, I often rationalize that I need to do “more important things” to accomplish all of the shoulds in this crazy business of life instead of tending to the nourishment of my soul.

Here’s the thing, though: The days I spend 10 minutes reading a meditation and using Headspace are infinitely better than when I don’t. Here’s one more thing: I like to believe that I’m a creature who can shape myself into a better self. I don’t want to wallow in past behavior. I want to be an actor in life, a creator. I want to change.

So … instead of letting March’s maggots feast on the rot of my neglected resolutions, this is the time to actually double down and commit. The most dangerous moment is always pregnant with opportunity. In fact, there’s research that shows that starting—or re-starting—a goal is most effective when you do it on a “milestone day”—the first day of a new year, a new month, a new week. So this Monday, I’m going to start again. And I’ll start again next Monday if my efforts flag. And I’ll start on the Monday after that and after that, etc., if need be. The main thing is to keep starting, keep going.

I discussed overcoming lapses in Pep Talks for Writers:

After a lapse, it’s important to forgive yourself, readjust your goals, and give yourself a fresh start so that a bad week of writing doesn’t lead to a bad month of writing, which then turns into a bad year. It’s all about designing your life around the things you rationally want to achieve instead of sinking into the powerful claws of more impulsive needs.

Life goes by too quickly to wait for next year. We must claim our dreams and create a system to realize them. I don’t want to die with a list of all of the things I wish I would have accomplished. I don’t want to be a person unable to change, unable to improve myself.

Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo

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Picasso famously said, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” How can we be creative every day? That’s the question Pep Talks for Writers sets out to answer. And it’s an important one, right? I know you feel story ideas beckoning you to give them voice. You’ve felt the wondrous, magical rushes of creativity. You know how being creative can change the way you wake up, how you approach your work, how you connect with other people. Approaching the world with a creative mindset is wildly transforming—because suddenly you’re not accepting the world as it’s delivered to you, but living through your vision of life.

That’s the gift I see each November during National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). I witness thousands of people break down the barricades that prevent them from writing the novel of their dreams and take on the Herculean task of writing a novel of 50,000 words in just 30 days. Writing suddenly leaps up from the cluttered basement of their daily tasks to stand tall on the pedestal of life for an entire month. An audacious goal and deadline serve as creative midwives (and an occasional bullwhip), and writers are propelled by the scintillating rushes of their imagination and the galvanizing force of the huzzahs coming from what can seem like the entire world writing with them.

It seems like such a rollicking novel-writing party is never going to end, but then on December 1, the roars of rapacious novelists start to quiet. Suddenly, people are doing things like shopping for Christmas presents, studying for finals, or cleaning the mayhem their house has become. (Creativity gives the world many things, but it rarely provides a tidy house.)

The thing I hear most often after National Novel Writing Month is “I loved writing during NaNoWriMo, but I have trouble writing the rest of the year.”

It’s challenging to muster such energy each day. The galloping pace of NaNoWriMo is over, and it can be difficult to get up on the proverbial writing horse again. Urgent items on your to-do lists clamor for attention, and tackling those items is important, necessary work—buying groceries, washing dishes, fixing that squeaky door that has bugged you the last three years—so, really, how could you keep doing something so trivial as write? Suddenly, you start to feel creativity falling down on your to-do list. You know the joy it gives you, the life meaning, yet those slithering, pernicious beasts called “the demands of life” loudly yell what you should be doing (and I won’t even mention the siren calls of social media).

No one assigns us to be creative. And, what’s more, society usually doesn’t reward creativity, at least not unless your work makes it to the shelves of a bookstore, the walls of a gallery, or the stage of a theater. You might not think you’re a creative type, but to be human is to be a creative type, so one of the shoulds in your life should be to make sure creativity is not only at the top of your to-do list, but that you put your creativity into action every day. If you put off your dreams today, you create the momentum to put them off all the way to your deathbed.

We yearn to touch life’s mysteries, to step out into the world looking for new solutions to old problems, if not new worlds altogether. We need to tap into our vulnerabilities, seek to understand our fears, look at life through others’ eyes, ask questions, and open up our awareness of the wonders of the universe.

Each story is a gift, a door that opens a new way to see and relate with others in this crazy, crazy world. Stories are the oxygen our souls breathe, a way to bring the unsayable, the unseeable, the unspeakable to life. Our creative lives shouldn’t be a hall pass from the stiff and forbidding demands of our lives. Writing our stories takes us beyond the grueling grind that life can unfortunately become, beyond the constraints of the roles we find ourselves in each day, to make the world a bigger place.

Stories remind us that we’re alive, and what being alive means. “Only art penetrates . . . the seeming realities of this world,” said Saul Bellow in his Nobel Prize speech. Leslie Marmon Silko says that stories are “all we have to fight off illness and death.” Jacqueline Woodson says writers are “the ones who are bearing witness to what’s going on in the world.”

For a writer, life hasn’t really been lived until one’s stories find their way onto the page. We exist in the flickers of a rift with the world, searching for words that will sew the fissure, heal it. A rupture, a wound, finds the salve of a story. If you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself. If you don’t create, you hurt yourself. The signature of your self is formed by the work you put into your story. Making art tells you who you are. Making art in turn makes you.

So it’s your duty as a writer, as a person, to build a world through your words and believe in your story as a beautiful work of incarnation, to see it as a gift to yourself and others, as something that elevates life with new meaning—your meaning. Writing a story is many things: a quest, a prayer, a hunger, a tantrum, a flight of the imagination, a revolt, a daring escape that ironically leads you back to yourself. As long as we’re creating, we’re cultivating meaning. Our stories are the candles that light up the darkness that life can become, so we must live in the warm hues of our imaginative life.

It’s not easy, though. The efforts of creativity carry angst and psychological obstacles that must be overcome. In this book, we’ll explore 52 different approaches to being creative every day. Each pep talk will include ways for you to explore your creative notions and angles, because life and writing are really ongoing creative experiments. Some pep talks may sing out to where you are now, while others might become relevant later in your writing process. The important thing is to keep your creative life at the forefront of your thoughts and actions.

We become the things we do, and I can promise you, if you excavate your life to make room for your imagination, if you open up time to keep writing, you won’t just finish your novel, pen the poem in your head, or submit a short story you’ve worked so hard on, you’ll change, because once you realize yourself as a creator, you create worlds on and off the page.

If you hear the whispers of a novel coming from the other room, or ideas for other stories caterwauling for their day in the sun, dive in. “The days are long, but the years are short,” some wise person once said. Your story can’t wait. It needs you.

Buy Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo.

On Failing Better, Failing Bigger, Failing Magnificently

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No one knows quite how to fail like a writer. Each day brings with it wrong turns, doubts, swaths of deletions, endless rejiggerings, and even the thought of giving up entirely.

“Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars,” Flaubert said.

There’s an inherent chasm between the book in your mind and the one you manage to get onto paper. It’s difficult not to measure your words against an ideal of your vision, not to mention the works of your favorite authors, so your words inevitably resist singing in the way you want them to.

You might actually say writing is a special training ground of failure. “Writing is frustration—it’s daily frustration, not to mention humiliation. It’s just like baseball: you fail two-thirds of the time,” said Philip Roth, who won such awards as the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for his “failures”.

Perhaps “fail” isn’t quite the right word, though. The word “fail” is fraught with negativity, catastrophe, and downright shame, but failure, especially in writing, isn’t necessarily any of those things. In fact, failure can be the breeding ground of innovation.

How so, you say?

Consider Thomas Edison’s approach to failure: “I have not failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

Edison viewed failure as just another part of the scientific process, and the scientific process isn’t all that different from writing a novel. At the heart of both is the question, “What if?” Both include theories followed by tests. For example, a scientist might ask what would happen if a person fell into a black hole (a good science question that is also a good novel question), whereas a novelist might ask what will happen if my main character decides to call the married man she’s in love with? Or, to ask a question of narrative technique, what if I interrupt the chronology of the story with a flashback to tell the character’s back story? Or you might experiment with perspective. What if I write this story in the second person, or from different characters’ point of view?

That’s one of the beauties of National Novel Writing Month: it encourages such risk taking. Its credo is that if you trust in your intuition, immerse yourself in your story, focus on moving your story forward, and banish the notion of making mistakes, you’ll experiment in ways that you might not have.

Samuel Beckett famously wrote, “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.” The quote has been wrested from his oblique and gloomy experimental work Worstward Ho, and Beckett didn’t have any intention for it to become the inspirational mantra it’s become, but this notion to “fail better” is interesting to ponder. It’s a Zen koan of sorts that demands individual interpretation.

For me, to “fail better” is an invitation to experiment, to pause and truly scrutinize your story. Are you holding back from what’s truly at stake in the story? Are you being too nice to your characters? Have you allowed yourself to truly push your language? Or perhaps you’re suffering from the dreaded notion of the “right way to do things,” which has plagued many a writer. With all the how-to-write books available, it’s easy to think that you need to write your story correctly, according to others’ rules. But in the end this is your story. You have to write it your way.

Failing better is also a matter of ridding oneself of the fear of failure. That fear fences one in and doesn’t allow for creative risks. Imagine if Virginia Woolf feared writing with the lyrical stream of consciousness that opened windows into her characters’ interior lives? Or if Vincent van Gogh feared that people would see his paintings as smudges of color instead of vibrant representations of his fiery spiritual state? Woolf and Van Gogh each had to go through Edison’s 10,000 experiments to master their groundbreaking approaches.

Failing better is a creative mindset that must be nurtured. In psychologist Carol Dweck’s book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, she explores the difference between “fixed” and “growth” mindsets. “In a fixed mindset, people believe their basic qualities, like their intelligence or talent, are simply fixed traits,” writes Dweck. One is born a great athlete or a great author or a great mathematician. In a “growth mindset,” however, “people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work,” says Dweck.

If you establish a growth mindset, in other words, you view failure as just another part of the creative journey, not as a roadblock, not as a damnation of your talents or you as a person. As C.S. Lewis said, “Failures are the finger posts on the road to achievement.”

So what is failing better? Maybe it’s just openness, the desire to see, and in seeing to learn, to begin again, always. That is where the joy of life and creativity reside—in the constant testing, the constant searching. Failing better is an attitude of always moving forward, of looking around the next corner. It’s a mindset of not looking for rules, but of following one’s curiosity. It’s a mentality of fun, of self-reflection, of privileging the integrity and unique personality of your story.

Failing better is also doing what you’re afraid of. For many writers, this might be making your work public, whether that means giving it to others for feedback, submitting it for publication, or reading in public.

For years—no, for decades—I wouldn’t read my work in public. I told myself it was because I wrote my stories to be read, not performed. That was true, but the larger truth was that I was afraid to read in public. Finally, I was forced to read, and in doing so, I learned what stories resonated most with people. I learned what they listened to and when they tuned out. I also met other writers and developed a writing community, which helps me fail and succeed better every day.

“Failing better” is the exact opposite of “failing worse”. Failing worse is failing from a lack of effort or a lack of imagination or a lack of verve. Failing worse is comparing yourself to other people’s talent or accomplishments and deeming yourself on the short side of things. Failing worse is not testing the limits of what’s possible.

Failure, the failure of constant experimentation, is the thrust of a writer’s life. “Failure is easy,” said Anne Enright. “I do it every day, I have been doing it for years. I have thrown out more sentences than I ever kept, I have dumped months of work, I have wasted whole years writing the wrong things for the wrong people. Even when I am pointed the right way and productive and finally published, I am not satisfied by the results. This is not an affectation, failure is what writers do.”

John McPhee once famously tied himself to his chair to to force himself to face such failures. One must be obstinate, intrepid, and maybe even a bit reckless, for if we aren’t, we’ll reside in a “safe place” that doesn’t yield the results we desire or dream of. As Einstein was said to have remarked, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

Risking mistakes offers us the opportunity to do things differently, to explore beyond where we thought we were going, to include the spicy element of chance into our work. You can’t create anything good without mistakes. Mistakes are a foundation of art and creativity, so you should search them out.

“Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody’s ever made before,” Neil Gaiman counseled writers.

Writing through failure in the search of beauty is what makes writers such a rare breed. We’ve chosen to practice an art that is so challenging that it practically damns us (or it can feel that way). We’re so often alone with our words, and write without much approbation, or never enough of it, but even as our words fizzle, even as our plots falter, we show up to fix things, and fix them again and again. We know that with enough tinkering, with enough alchemy, with enough moving things around and shaking things up, we can capture the elusive beauty of the story at hand. We can fail better.

Inspiration is a rare sighting (like Bigfoot)

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Inspiration is a funny thing. It’s powerful enough to move mountains. When it strikes, it carries an author forward like the rushing torrents of a flooded river. And yet, if you wait for it, nothing happens.

The irony is that so much is actually created—mountains moved, sagas written, grand murals painted—by those who might not even describe themselves as particularly inspired. Instead, they show up every day and put their hands on the keyboard, their pen to paper, and they move their stories forward, bit by bit, word by word, perhaps not even recognizing that inspiration is striking in hundreds of tiny, microscopic ways as they push through another sentence, another page, another chapter, of their novel.

This is the principle way writers finish 50,000 words of a novel each year during National Novel Writing Month, and it applies to being creative the rest of the year as well.

Inspiration is often characterized as a thunderbolt—a brilliant flash that strikes from the heavens—and that metaphor certainly holds truth because inspiration can be a sudden igniting force, random and illuminating and otherworldly (and even a bit dangerous). Yet I sometimes think of inspiration, at least the big, gobsmacking moments of inspiration, as more like Bigfoot. Sightings of Bigfoot are rare, and he’s so elusive that he can’t be captured, physically or even truly on film, so his very existence is in question. It’s wonderful to believe he exists, because it’s nice to think of the world as strange and beautiful enough to spawn such a creature, but if you go out into the woods and look for Bigfoot, you’re not likely to find him, just as you can’t force sweeping gusts of inspiration to appear on any given day.

“And the muse? I have no idea who has one, but if anyone does, I’d like to know so I can stage a kidnapping,” said author Kami Garcia in a NaNoWriMo pep talk.

The fantastical “muse” Garcia speaks of is the source of inspiration in Greek and Roman mythology. Ancient authors invoked muses near the beginning of their work, asking the muse to sing directly through them. As Homer puts it in Book I of the Odyssey:

Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns

driven time and again off course, once he had plundered

the hallowed heights of Troy.

This mythological muse was often illustrated as a creature in a beautiful flowing gown, playing a harp and singing a song from the heavens, but I’d like to recast this muse because maybe, just maybe, the “kidnapping” Garcia mentions is possible (or at least a type of kidnapping). I see the muse as invisible sprights that sleep in the whispery spaces between each word. This sprights are enlivened only by the breaths of a churning imagination, by the stirrings of a story moving forward. Such a muse is ineffable, so miniature that she often goes unnoticed, yet an author must trust that the responsibility for bringing those story sprights to life resides in the spool of words spinning onto the page. The muse doesn’t sing the words of a story; the muse is conjured in the telling.

“No one looks forward to those lulls in the writing process, but they are natural, and they can be overcome,” Marisa Meyer wrote in a NaNoWriMo pep talk. “These are the times when we must proceed on willpower and caffeine and the unflappable confidence that each word we write is one word closer to a finished novel.”

When willpower isn’t enough

True words, but such tough moments can certainly feel like they’re killing inspiration more than they’re nurturing it. Your thoughts dull. All of the synapses that used to fire with such eager alacrity have either gone into a deep hibernation or abandoned you all together. Perhaps your initial bolt of inspiration carried you through the first hour, the first day, the first week, or even the first month of your novel, but it’s becoming a faint memory, a cruel con, because without its strong winds, you feel adrift, your journey stalled.

This is a dangerous moment because when inspiration stops carrying you, the doldrums of self-doubt creep into your thoughts (perhaps in between sips of your favorite caffeinated beverage and your diligent intentions). You tell yourself no one wants to read your story. You tell yourself your characters are clichés, your plot unremarkable. And you—you!—are not a writer. You are a person with silly dreams who should know better, and you should just return to a life where you sit and simply be entertained by other people’s imaginative creations. A life of binge watching Netflix isn’t all bad, is it?

Here’s what you must know: Every single creator throughout history has experienced such moments. The question is how to deal with such deadening humdrummery.

“Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time,” said Leonard Bernstein.

The unromantic and unheralded “rest of the time” is actually a yeasty opportunity. It’s an invitation to fertilize your imagination. If a dulling lull is smothering your willpower and caffeine’s power to propel you through another paragraph has dissipated, then pull away from the page for a spell: Pick up your favorite book to be reminded of the fantastic places words can take you, take a walk and marvel at butterflies twirling about in dapples of sun, or go to a museum and stare at paintings and people—anything that it takes to stir and heighten your senses, to let your mind dash back onto the playground of the imagination and caper with your new ideas.

Every writer needs a strategy to deal with those dulling lulls. Joan Didion describes her method of retrieving her imaginative oomph in her essay “On Keeping a Notebook”: “When the world seems drained of wonder … when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do, which is write … I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest … dialogue overheard in hotels and elevators and at the hat-check counter in Pavilion (one middle-aged man shows his hat check to another and says, ‘That’s my old football number’).”

“It all comes back,” Didion writes.

Yes, it all comes back. If you revere and remember the natural, irrepressible gambols of your imagination, writing won’t be all about a ponderous and painful plodding forward. And it’s necessary to make sure you don’t write with too much of the “no pain, no gain” approach (those tiny story sprights can only handle so much discomfort). “If you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun,” Ray Bradbury posits in Zen in the Art of Writing, “you are only half a writer.”

So step away from your writing if need be and find a source of inspiration that will put air beneath your wings. But don’t step away for too long. Many a writer has made a lifestyle out of stepping away. You must return after an hour or an afternoon and concoct inspiration on the blank page. Let the blank page be a spigot for all of the dramatic, ornery, lyrical, and shocking thoughts in your head that are eager to come out.

“The blank page is yours,” wrote Chuck Wendig in a NaNoWriMo pep talk. “Cast aside worries over art and criticism. Imagine a land without rules. Imagine that nobody has ever told you that you cannot or should not do this thing. Those people were wrong. Forget those voices. Because, for real?

It’s an empty field and you’ve got the keys to a freaking Ferrari.

It’s a white tablecloth and you’ve got ketchup, mustard, and relish.

It’s a blank page and you’ve got all the letters and words you need.

Rev the engine and take the ride. Paint with all the colors the condiments at your table allow. Create whatever robot-human monstrosities your mind cares to conjure. Crack open your chest and plop your heart onto the page.”

When you plop your heart onto the page, you’ll realized that the words you create every day are each fruit-bearing kernels of inspiration. Each word wants more and more words to follow. And you are the God that sends those words—those story-igniting lightning bolts—into a world that’s coming to life before your own eyes. You are your own muse.

Here’s an inspiration exercise to fuel your inspiration engine:

Exercise

Write a page or two about what inspires you to write—whether it’s the desire to create lyrical prose, escape this world, or explore your inner world. After you’ve written this short piece, focus on the things that inspire you as your guide to sit down and write on even the worst days. Your big “I” inspiration can open a pathway back to writing.

The Art of the Mini Writing Retreat

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For years I’ve dreamed of going on one of those perfect, luxurious writing retreats where one can wake early in the morning, take a reflective walk through the woods, write in the meditative peace of a well-furnished cabin, and then dine in the evening with inspiring artists. Day after day, facing down the challenges of my novel, refining its shape like a sculptor, my thoughts deepening to the point where the lines between the real world and my fictional world blur.

I’ve applied to a few writing residencies over the years, and, in fact, I wrote an article about different residencies: everything from a cabin in the Denali wilderness to a retreat in Jack Kerouac’s house to prestigious fellowships at places like Yaddo. Beyond the difficulty of getting accepted for one of these residencies, I realized I didn’t have the time to go to them. Most are for a month, and my life as a working parent just doesn’t allow for that.

Then I came up with the idea of a “mini writing retreat”—to go someplace for just a few days and do some extreme writing, inject my novel with 10-12 hours of writing each day to propel it forward a month in time, in essence.

I just completed such a mini retreat last weekend, and I marvel that I haven’t been doing this at least once or twice a year. I wouldn’t say it was exactly fun, but it was gangbusters productive. In fact, I powered through a second draft of my novel.

Here’s what I found made it a successful writing retreat.

  1. I went to a town (Petaluma) an hour away. Too close, and it wouldn’t have felt like a retreat, and I would have been distracted by home matters. Too far, and I would have wasted precious time getting there.

  2. I found a nice-enough but not too-expensive hotel (the Metro Hotel) which had a room I was comfortable writing in, and a downstairs café with self-serve coffee (I started writing at 4 a.m., so sitting in the café with coffee was crucial). I’d thought about just getting a cheap hotel, but I feared becoming a version of Barton Fink, depressed by a dank room, distracted by hotel noises.

  3. The hotel was just a few blocks from downtown, so good restaurants and coffee shops were nearby (I tend to be a roaming writer, so it’s important to have other places to go to write).

  4. There was a movie theater downtown. When writing 12 hours a day, it’s important to take a break.

  5. There was also a brewpub nearby where I could have a beer at the end of the day to celebrate the day’s work (see the importance of taking a break in no. 4).

  6. The town was nice, but not full of diversions, so I wasn’t tempted to be a tourist.

  7. I had a goal driving me—I wanted to reach the end of my novel revision, no matter what. If I wouldn’t have set this goal, I probably would have settled for writing eight hours a day, or less. I easily could have made it a reading retreat, or a dawdling retreat.

  8. I made sure I was well equipped in all matters, whether it was books I needed for research, Moleskine notebooks, or my favorite writing foods (or a cigar for non-caffeinated stimulation).

  9. I was well rested to start. Extreme writing takes the kind of energy and endurance a challenging sporting activity does. I knew I couldn’t muscle my way through 12 hours of writing a day if I started at a deficit.

  10. I got buy-in from my significant other. It’s important to get support from your partner, and maybe even your friends and family. You want a clear head, not a guilty or distracted head.

My life probably only allows a couple such writing retreats each year, but it was nice to move a creative project forward not in dribs and drabs, but with speed and force and resolution. I’m going to consciously plan these retreats every year, and hopefully jumpstart several more creative projects.

The Key to Whole-Hearted Writing: Embrace Vulnerability

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What’s the key element of any good story?

If you peruse the how-to-write section of any bookstore, you might think good stories are all about craft: plot, suspense, dialogue, etc. Sure, such things matter, just as the ability to string together a good sentence or draw arresting characters matters.

But in the end, I think the thing that matters most is an author’s ability to be vulnerable on the page—to be open, daring, unabashed, unashamed—fearlessly willing to bow to any taboo, unwilling to heed any notions of embarrassment.

Writer's Digest - Creativity Issue - Grant FaulknerAs I put it in an article that just appeared in the Writer’s Digest Creativity issue, “a good story occurs when an author travels, or even plummets, into the depths of vulnerability and genuinely opens his or her soul in the search of truths that otherwise go untold.”

I’ve been interested in pursuing a more open and vulnerable writing style since I saw Brené Brown’s TED Talk on the power of vulnerability. To be vulnerable is not weakness, Brown says—rather, it’s “our most accurate measure of courage.”

The original definition of courage comes from the Latin word cor, meaning heart. Brown says that to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart takes courage. It’s only through such vulnerability that the connections that give purpose and meaning to our lives are formed.

“Vulnerability is essential to whole-hearted living,” says Brown. It’s also essential to whole-hearted writing. It’s the birthplace of creativity. Our stories won’t truly connect with readers unless we take the emotional risks that spark kindred feelings of authenticity.

The urge to be a writer is a generous act at its core, after all: We want to share our story with others, to give them a world that will open doors to insights and flights of the imagination.

I unfortunately can’t share the Writer’s Digest piece because it’s only available in print at the moment, but here are some outtakes.

On overcoming shame

I had to ask myself, Why did I become a writer in the first place? I made a list. And here’s what I discovered was on it: I wanted to put words to the shadowy corners of people’s souls, to understand the desperate lunges people take to give life meaning. I wanted to explore the enigmatic paradoxes of being, how desire can conflict with belief, how yearning can lead to danger. Life is so mysterious, nuanced, ineffable—equally disturbing as it is beautiful—so I decided it was my duty as a writer to be brave enough to risk ridicule in order to bring my truths to light. Why write a sanitized version of life?

On writing improv style—saying “Yes, and …”

Do I end up writing foolish things? Blessedly, yes. In literature the archetypal Fool babbles, acts like a child, and doesn’t understand social conventions (or at least pretends not to), so the Fool isn’t held culpable for breaching any rules. As a result, the Fool can speak the truth in ways others can’t. You might say the Fool is the ultimate storyteller: He takes the conniving risks necessary to tell the tale only he can see.

“Looking foolish is good for you. It nourishes the spirit,” wrote Twyla Tharp in The Creative Habit.

On boldly declaring yourself a writer

The life of the imagination can feel trivial or even forbidden in the adult world where life’s practicalities rule. I didn’t call myself a writer for years because I thought it was pretentious to do so until I’d published. I needed a badge of validation from the external world.

But by not calling myself a writer, I realized I was not only putting up a shield, I was unwittingly diminishing myself. A secret identity weakens one and brings on the urge to hide yourself in your words. To write with verve demands asserting yourself as a creator—to yourself and to others.

The worst thing about not allowing yourself to be vulnerable on the page is that your story will never be written with the force or vigor it deserves. It won’t truly exist in the world, and you’ll feel that lack as a writer.

“I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised and misunderstood,” wrote the poet Audre Lorde. “For it is not difference which immobilizes us most, but silence.”

“A work of art is a confession,” as Albert Camus said. Camus didn’t mean a personal confession, but a revelation of the raw truth of the soul. Everything I write must now measure up to such a standard.

On the Publication of Fissures

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Today marks the release of my collection of 100-word stories, Fissures, so I thought I’d share the book’s preface to introduce it.

Grant Faulkner FissuresCoincidentally, while preparing for a reading I’m giving at U.C. Davis later this week, I stumbled on this quote from Baudelaire that describes the whole enterprise of writing these short little ditties, which exist in the blurry boundaries between short-short fiction and prose poetry:

Who among us has not, in his ambitious moments, dreamed of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without meter or rhyme, supple enough and rugged enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations of the psyche, the jolts of consciousness?

I don’t know if I accomplished such a thing, but Baudelaire’s quote neatly sums up my attraction to the 100-word form. I like to say that writing 100-word stories allowed me to nurture my “inner failed poet.” The preface from Fissures, below, takes this idea a bit further. And, if you’d like to read some 100-word pieces, several stories are available online.

Preface to Fissures

I’ve always thought life is more about what is unsaid than what is said. We live in odd gaps of silence, irremediable interstices that sometimes last forever. A lingering glance averted. The lover who slams the door and runs away. Unsent letters. We all carry so many strange little moments within us. Memory shuffles through random snapshots. Sometimes they seem insignificant, yet they stay with us for some reason, weaving the fabrics of our beings. In the end, we don’t seize the day so much as it seizes us.

The idea of capturing such small but telling moments of life is what drew me to 100-word stories (or “drabbles” as they’re sometimes referred to). I’d previously written novels and longer short stories, forms that demanded an accumulation of words—to sew connections, to explain, to build an entire world with text. I wondered, what if I did the opposite? What if instead of relying on the words of a story, I relied on the spectral spaces around those words? What if I privileged excision over any notion of comprehensiveness, and formed narratives around caesuras and crevices?

We live as foragers in many ways, after all, sniffing at hints, interpreting the tones of a person’s voice, scrutinizing expressions, and then trying to put it all together into a collage of what we like to call truth. Whether it’s the gulf between a loved one, the natural world, or God, we exist in lacunae. I wanted to write with an aesthetic that captured these “fissures,” as I began to think about them.

Perhaps I could have accomplished such an aesthetic of writing in a longer form, but the hard borders of a 100-word story put a necessary pressure on each word, each sentence. In my initial forays into 100-word stories, my stories veered toward 150 words or more. I didn’t see ways to cut or compress. I didn’t see ways to make the nuances and gestures of language invite the reader in to create the story. But writing within the fixed lens of 100 words required me to discipline myself stringently. I had to question each word, to reckon with Flaubert’s mot juste in a way that even most flash fiction doesn’t. As result, I discovered those mysterious, telling gaps that words tend to cover up.

We all have a literal blind spot in our eyes, where the optic nerve connects to the retina and there are no light-detecting cells. None of us will ever know the whole story, in other words. We can only collect a bag full of shards and try to piece them together. This collection is my bag full of shards.

An Author Reads in Public

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Grant FaulknerIt was just about 16 months ago that I started reading my stories in public.

I scarcely read when I was younger. In fact, I strenuously avoided readings. A professor once told me that the notion of an author giving voice to his/her work by reading it is a recent idea. In the past, authors hired actors to read their work. This made complete sense to me. I wrote to be read by others, not to read.

But I didn’t read my stories for other reasons beyond this philosophical one. I didn’t read because I simply didn’t like to, because it made me uncomfortable. I felt awkward trying to intone an authorial voice, to infuse my work with a voice and personality. I didn’t want to read with a poet’s breathy cadence, yet I also didn’t want to read with the gustatory bravura of a performer. And I didn’t know what other options there were except to read with a flat, banal voice.

I was also scared, perhaps even fearful of shame. I was worried that I’d look up to see blank faces, that my stories would reveal their inadequacies in a lifeless air filled with my stilted voice.

A while back, though, I realized that I needed to face down my demons. I was putting up obstacles where there didn’t need to be any. Even if I was a mediocre reader, even if I was worse than mediocre, I needed to get out and read. Just to learn how to read. Just to participate.

I can’t evaluate the quality of my reading these days, but I’m now happy I’ve read—and that I read somewhat regularly. My initial fears have been quelled. With practice, I’ve even come to enjoy readings. I still write to be read, not to read, but there is something nice about hearing my stories, seeing people’s reactions to them.

I’ve met people and made friends as a result. Recently I read with Peter Coyote of all people at the Why Are There Words reading in Sauslito. No matter what happened at the reading, just doing the reading allowed me to spend an evening with him, talking about poetry and Buddhism. If I hadn’t been there, I would have been sitting at home alone, probably scrolling through Facebook.

And that’s the nub of it. Reading one’s story opens up communities to a writer. And communities are valuable when practicing such a solitary craft.

So I’m happy I’m reading after all of these years. Here’s my bit from Why Are There Words.