Pamela Weis

Art by El Anatsui, Brooklyn Museum of Art

One Short Story per Week

by Pamela Weis / August 11, 2020

Someone in the Slack group I belong to posted a Ray Bradbury quote awhile back:

“The best hygiene for beginning writers or intermediate writers is to write a hell of a lot of short stories. If you can write one short story a week—it doesn’t matter what the quality is to start, but at least you’re practicing, and at the end of the year you have 52 short stories, and I defy you to write 52 bad ones. Can’t be done. At the end of 30 weeks or 40 weeks or at the end of the year, all of a sudden a story will come that’s just wonderful.”
Per LitHub, this is from “Telling the Truth,” the keynote address of The Sixth Annual Writer’s Symposium by the Sea, sponsored by Point Loma Nazarene University, 2001.

I love this idea, and on a semi-conscious level began doing just that about four or five weeks ago—writing one short story per week. So far, so good. I have managed to more or less complete the task each week. I might be a day late now and then, but I have done it.

This week, I am on vacation. Or “staycation” I guess since I am not going anywhere—partly because of COVID, partly because I want to be home. I am pretending for this week that I am a full time professional writer. Or at least I am trying. It’s hard to be super disciplined about it when all I really want to do is lie down on the bed with an ice pack and fall asleep. Our A/C is on the fritz and it is HOT in here.

But for the most part, I am doing alright with this plan. And since I am pretending to be a full time writer for the week, I am also upping my weekly short story goal. Just for this one week, I will write two of them. I will also spend time editing and submitting to literary journals. (Did I mention I received my first rejection letter recently? I think that means I’m a “real” writer now. It feels like a rite of passage. I suspect I will have many many more.)

This also happens to be the week of the second, shorter, #1000wordsofsummer for 2020. Good timing, totally unplanned. So that challenge is definitely helping me with the inspiration and discipline as well.

As for the quality of the stories I’m writing, I hope Bradbury was right. That it’s impossible to write 52 (or 53) bad short stories. I actually think some of mine are pretty good. I’ll find out soon enough if anyone else agrees.

Writing About Writing

Time of the Cats

by Pamela Weis / June 30, 2020

I started writing this post when it had been just over four weeks of doing my day job from home. That was in March. Obviously, I did not finish that post and now what I have to say has completely mutated into something else.

Working from home is great. The cats have certainly enjoyed my constant presence. Contrary to popular notions of cats wanting their humans to get the hell out, our cats spend much of our new quality time together goading me to play with them, sleeping on my desk (or work laptop), and crawling all over me while I attempt to work. Yeah, they like having me home. I know I am not alone in this, and I have mixed feelings about their attentions. I love our cats as if they were human children and relish the extra time with them, but sometimes I do wish our apartment had another room…with a door.

Photo by Pamela Weis – Shuri insists on being the center of attention

Amidst all of this upheaval, I have struggled to maintain a regular writing schedule. I actually have more time – about 45 minutes more each day. Yet somehow, I am writing less during my morning writing sessions. Not because I sit there and type less or because I am struggling to get the words out, but because I either sleep too late or spend more of that extra time on social media. It’s probably not healthy.

Nevertheless, I have written a fair amount of new stuff since March. I finished another novel (another first draft, that is). And I submitted a short story to a journal. This was a huge leap for me. I fully expect it to be rejected, but we all have to start putting our work out there at some point. I will keep doing that no matter how scary it is.

I’ve also been editing the first novel I finished. Editing is satisfying. It doesn’t provide the same creative outlet as writing something completely new, but it appeals to that part of my brain that likes digging into messy details and making them neat and tidy.

The funny thing about all this stay-at-home-ness is that I feel much less stressed and anxious. I am more content in general. I like being home. I like not seeing other people. Of course I miss friends and family and even my work colleagues, but it would take much longer than 3 1/2 months for me to miss them so much that I would go out of my way to make contact. And I am really hoping I can talk my boss into letting me work from home indefinitely. That doesn’t make me a bad person. It makes me an introvert. It also makes our cats very happy.

Writing About Writing

A Grimm Tale

by Pamela Weis / February 17, 2020

Sometime in the late ’90s, I had a delightful part-time job at Shakespeare & Co. booksellers in Manhattan. No relation to the famous Parisian left bank store, though I suspect the New York owners did not choose that name by coincidence. I loved working there. I started at the Upper East Side location, helping Hunter students find their semester course books, but soon moved to the Village location on Broadway across from NYU’s Tisch building. It paid okay for a retail gig. Plus, I got lots of free books and plenty of down time to read on the job. I even had time to write poems while sitting at bag check. It was fantastic and I learned so much more about contemporary literature than I’d known before. Authors I’d not heard of, like Ursula Hegi, Barbara Kingsolver, and Louise Erdrich, had their works prominently displayed on tables, inviting me to pick them up and discover their secrets.

My tenure at the bookstore lasted about a year and a half, but in that time I absorbed a great deal…and acquired a lot books. One of my favorites continues to be a complete collection of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. It is a trade paperback, and as you might imagine, quite hefty. The cover is a silvery gray and has an illustration on the cover of a prince and princess surrounded by a border of magical filigree. I was enchanted by this book, and having grown up with Disney versions of Grimm’s tales, I was eager to read it. I knew they were more violent than Disney would have us believe.

And read it, I did. The whole thing. But there was one tale that stood out – about a girl whose hands were chopped off by her own father. It was disturbing, but more than that, it was a story that did not completely make sense to me. Like reading the Bible, I felt there were too many holes, leaving the story open to interpretation. In retrospect, I realize that all of the tales are like that, but for whatever reason, the inconsistencies in this tale bothered me most.

At some point along the way, I discovered the reimagined tales of Gregory Maguire and fell in love with his creative visions. I long thought I would like to read more reimaginings of Grimm’s tales, and while some of them have been done to death, so to speak (Hansel and Gretel, Snow White), others have never been touched, including the one that haunted me.

Now that I am becoming more comfortable with my own fiction writing, I decided to try my hand at taking this particular Grimm’s tale and giving it new life. I gave the girl a name and a personality. She’s clever and just a wee bit sassy. The basic plot arc is the same as the original, but I changed a lot of details and filled in some of those bothersome gaps. I also took out a bunch of nonsense about purity, among other things. Initially, I thought…short story. But it turned into a somewhat longer short story than intended…maybe a novella.

The first draft is done. It’s not quite happily ever after, but we’ll see what the second draft brings. The experience of writing a story based on a story was exciting. Making changes to certain plot devices felt rebellious. Now and then, I would internally look to my left and right and think, is anyone looking? I’m about to do something radical. Teehee!

Fairy tales are meant to convey lessons. I suppose my version does this too, but it’s richer, more complex. The people have more layers than in a typical bedtime story. And it doesn’t end the same way. The girl has much more agency than in the original. Hey, I’m a feminist. I can’t write about a girl who just happens to live a happy life because she’s pure and kind and so nice things happen to her. No, she ultimately lives a good life because of the choices she makes. Besides, her life is not all that happy, I mean she does have her hands chopped off early on, but it has moments of happiness, and that’s all any of us can ask for, right?

In the late ’90s, I had no real ambition to write fiction. I loved it, and I kind of wished I could do it, but I was a musician and a poet. I was in my 20s and focused on my social life. I was not thinking about my career or what life would be like 5, 10, or 20 years down the road. I was not thinking, hey, it would be great to be a writer for a living; maybe I should try writing fiction! But that bookstore job expanded my literary horizons and provided me with a foundation that would affect me in unforeseen ways far into my future. So who knows, if I work very hard, and have a little bit of luck, maybe I will make my living as a writer. There is no shortage of fairy tales to reimagine.