Suspension
Living in all the moments of in-betweenness.
You're at the bottom and you won't climb back up, she said, but this isn't the bottom. If it were the bottom you wouldn't cry when you cross bridges because suspension makes you sad; you wouldn't cry because the woman sitting across from you in the temp agency wears green plastic clogs, the ugliest clogs you've ever seen, and ugly shoes make you sad.
Suspension makes us sad. At least I said so in my story “Everything Makes You Sad These Days” (a/k/a “December 1999”), about millennial angst and living in a Schrödinger’s cat situation, not quite in one century and not quite in another, wanting to go forward but also yearning to go back, waiting for something to happen but stuck in the middle, with ugly shoes.
But suspension, and suspense, and uncertainty, in general, are so much a part of the writing life. There’s starting a story and not knowing how it’s going to turn out, finishing a story and not knowing if it’s any good, revising a story and wondering how to know when it’s ready to send out. And the submissions process, which is so much about waiting: for an editorial decision, for contest results, sometimes drawn out in stages, waiting for the longlist to come out, the shortlist, the winners. And if fortune favors you and your story is accepted, then there’s waiting for it to come out, maybe working on final revisions with an editor, and finally the release day, a little social flurry of sharing and excitement, and then … moving on.
With flash fiction, this process is accelerated. I’m usually working on two or three stories at once, and waiting to hear on five or six more. Sometimes, inconveniently, they all get published on the same day. Sometimes there’s a dry spell, where I may not write at all for several weeks. And sometimes, there are distractions. I think I’ve gotten better about understanding that imagination, like a field, has to lie fallow sometimes.
Recently I had the chance to go away for a week to be a Writer in Residence at Queset House, a historic house maintained by the Ames Free Library. A week with nothing to do but write sounds like a dream, and I might have had dreams of writing for 168 hours straight, coming back with seven new stories and a novella or two, but of course that didn’t happen, because of distractions like sleep, and teaching an online class one night, and teaching an in-person one another, and putting together a reading, and laundry, and finding out where the best coffee was (The Beanery on Washington, hands down), and a side quest to find my great-great grandfather’s grave. Which I did. And also, possibly, another scandal involving my great-grandmother Jessie (she of the three husbands) who has been the inspiration for several stories. And also, the site of a dark Satanic mill owned by a wizard—but that’s a story for another day.
In terms of actual writing, I wrote one completely new story, which came as a surprise (and later got long-listed for the Smokelong Quarterly Flash Fiction Award, another surprise); revised and added to an existing flash novella, did some research, jotted down random notes for possible future work, and revised and submitted several flash pieces. That’s it. I resolved not to beat myself up for not being 100% ‘productive’ every minute, and I’m happy to say I didn’t, because I think a lot of writing happens in those in-between moments when you’re not actually putting words on paper, but just walking around exploring, or reading, or daydreaming, vaguely mulling over images and ideas that could make it into stories somewhere down the road. The unregulated, unscheduled, offline time some of us were fortunate enough to have when we were kids, and that’s so hard to find now. I’m incredibly grateful I got that time, and I’m sure stories inspired by it will be percolating in my head for months to come.
-Listen to a recording of me reading a new story, “Little Bee,” at Queset House. You can also read the story in Trash Cat Lit.
-You can read another new story, “When You Rode with Dillinger,” in the special contest issue of Gooseberry Pie.
A stark window in the day-to-day of writing. No glitz or glamor. Just passion and the obstacles that keep us from it in just the right number of words. Quiet enjoyed this. Thank you Kathryn. Looking forward to more :)
Thank you so much, Kathryn. I like the way you articulated the suspense of the submission process. I guess the bit that is hidden in plain sight is the requirement to surrender when you submit. It can, however, stop the writing. The act of surrender means taking life on life's terms and, mostly, that approach helps me move through the unknowing and endure the waiting.