Dear Edith Mirrielees:

I am delighted that your volume Story Writing is going into a paperback edition. It will reach a far larger audience, and that is a good thing. It may not teach the reader how to write a good story, but it will surely help him to recognize one when he reads it.

Although it must be a thousand years ago that I sat in your class in story writing at Stanford, I remember the experience very clearly. I was bright-eyed and bushy-brained and prepared to absorb from you the secret formula for writing good short stories, even great short stories.

You canceled this illusion very quickly. The only way to write a good short story, you said, was to write a good short story. Only after it is written can it be taken apart to see how it was done. It is a most difficult form, you told us, and the proof lies in how very few great short stories there are in the world.

The basic rule you gave us was simple and heartbreaking. A story to be effective had to convey something from writer to reader and the power of its offering was the measure of its excellence. Outside of that, you said, there were no rules. A story could be about anything and could use any means and technique at all—so long as it was effective.

As a subhead to this rule, you maintained that it seemed to be necessary for the writer to know what he wanted to say, in short, what he was talking about. As an exercise we were to try reducing the meat of a story to one sentence, for only then could we know it well enough to enlarge it to three or six or ten thousand words.

So there went the magic formula, the secret ingredient. With no more than that you set us on the desolate lonely path of the writer. And we must have turned in some abysmally bad stories. If I had expected to be discovered in a full bloom of excellence, the grades you gave my efforts quickly disillusioned me. And if I felt unjustly criticized, the judgments of editors for many years afterwards upheld your side, not mine.

It seemed unfair. I could read a fine story and could even know how it was done, thanks to your training. Why could I not do it myself? Well, I couldn't, and maybe it's because no two stories dare be alike. Over the years I have written a great many stories and I still don't know how to go about it except to write it and take my chances.

If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced that there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader. If the writer has that urge, he may sometimes but by no means always find the way to do it.

It is not so very hard to judge a story after it is written, but after many years, to start a story still scares me to death. I will go so far as to say that the writer who is not scared is happily unaware of the remote and tantalizing majesty of the medium.

I wonder whether you will remember one last piece of advice you gave me. It was during the exuberance of the rich and frantic twenties and I was going out into that world to try to be a writer.

You said, "It's going to take a long time, and you haven't any money. Maybe it would be better if you could go to Europe."

"Why?" I asked.

"Because in Europe poverty is a misfortune, but in America it is shameful. I wonder whether or not you can stand the shame of being poor."

It wasn't too long afterwards that the depression came down. Then everyone was poor and it was no shame any more. And so I will never know whether or not I could have stood it. But surely you were right about one thing, Edith. It took a long time—a very long time. And it is still going on and it has never got easier. You told me it wouldn't.

John Steinbeck

(Source: Story Writing, by Edith Ronald Mirrielees; via Letters of Note).

astonishing as a stranger's
trust. And again it seems

possible to live
differently, my mind

veined with green as a blackbird
chases his shadow

back and forth between
the walls. Simplicity,

intention wedded perfectly
to action, lines

of current, lines
of flight. The bird, the human

and what the human makes,
all hierarchies washed out

beneath the leaves. Until I
build them up again.

I have no choice:
I choose. All summer long,

I constellate the shadows
as the slur of pollen falls.

(i.) There is something in me that resembles a small, thrashing bird. It is very close to my heart; sometimes I even confuse it for such, but it is something else. It was put there. I often wish it weren't, but really I'm not sure whether it would be better or worse if it were gone. Probably it would be worse. Everybody needs something thrashing inside. It was put there and now it throngs.

(ii.) Chi va con lo zoppo impara a zoppicare.

"In 1936, in the midst of an unrelenting workload and the near-demise of his marriage of 50 years, legendary landscape photographer Ansel Adams suffered a nervous breakdown. After a stay in hospital, desperately in need of escape, Adams then returned with his family to the one place where he could find solace: Yosemite, California.

Some months later, as his health returned, he wrote the following beautiful letter to his best friend, Cedric Wright."

June 19, 1937

Dear Cedric,

A strange thing happened to me today. I saw a big thundercloud move down over Half Dome, and it was so big and clear and brilliant that it made me see many things that were drifting around inside of me; things that related to those who are loved and those who are real friends.

For the first time I know what love is; what friends are; and what art should be.

Love is a seeking for a way of life; the way that cannot be followed alone; the resonance of all spiritual and physical things. Children are not only of flesh and blood — children may be ideas, thoughts, emotions. The person of the one who is loved is a form composed of a myriad mirrors reflecting and illuminating the powers and thoughts and the emotions that are within you, and flashing another kind of light from within. No words or deeds may encompass it.

Friendship is another form of love — more passive perhaps, but full of the transmitting and acceptance of things like thunderclouds and grass and the clean granite of reality.

Art is both love and friendship, and understanding; the desire to give. It is not charity, which is the giving of Things, it is more than kindness which is the giving of self. It is both the taking and giving of beauty, the turning out to the light the inner folds of the awareness of the spirit. It is the recreation on another plane of the realities of the world; the tragic and wonderful realities of earth and men, and of all the inter-relations of these.

I wish the thundercloud had moved up over Tahoe and let loose on you; I could wish you nothing finer.

Ansel

(Source: Letters of a Nation; Image: Ansel Adams in Yosemite, California, c.1942, courtesy of ck/ck.)

(2) "If you would have a serene old age never woo a girl who keeps a diary." (1905, 'The Cynic's Rules of Conduct', Chester Field Jr).

(3) "Never have flowers floating — not even orchids. Flowers drown as quickly as people and look desolate like so many Ophelias." (1937, 'Can I Help You?', Viola Tree).

(4) "Women who smoke must drink something stronger than tea." (1855, 'The London Journal').

(5) "It is unwise to invite your psychiatrist to your parties and other social events." (1967, 'Etiquette Etceteras', Sheila Ostrach).

(6) "No young man or young woman can afford to read fiction before they are twenty-five years of age." (1904, 'What a Young Man Ought to Know', Sylvanus Stall).

(7) "Money is never talked of in polite society; it is taken for granted." (1901, 'The Book of Good Manners', Mrs. Burton Kingsland).

This are the best bits of 'Wicked Eitquette', by Sarah Kortum. I found them in the back of a notebook... which I'm writing in again. So, poem-posts soon, unless I break down and update this site instead. What do you think? Needs a lick of paint, perhaps...

I'm sorry, we thought you were gone
and pain-blind stole from your house
the coffee cup you measure sugar with
a lozenge tin of paper clips
your trowel, a cut handful
of thread left beside the silent
singer, and two more coffee cups
with which you rose full
and thanked the sun each day.
A stone from your garden,
a line from beside each eye.
We thought you were gone and
tried to take you away in things that
you swarmed from suddenly free
as a kicked hive of bees, as vastly
alive as you ever will be.

*Morse, Samuel French. "Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate -- Harold Bloom's Vast Accumulation". The Wallace Stevens Journal. Volume 1, Numbers 3 & 4 (Fall/Winter 1977) pp. 99.

the particular tilted
floodplain of being

each a little lonely
watching our lives

subside along the faultlines
of incomplete dreams, passions

prospects of the mere body
measured through the lens

of the proud eye
and written in sweat

as an epigram
onto the wind

Young and working
for the wild west, he was
hired for his dark skin,
in another's for a while.

This was his break.
Spurred by the moment,
he trod among Saturday strollers.
Shoppers stared at the Indian boy.

How they became him,
his skins, fringes and feathers
like foreign letters for the sacred
or absurd. Magic was bound

to him, however cheaply.
He had no time to lose. He strode
through, easily now, then danced
a conjurer's dance away, smiling.

hi, pretty lady,
you say, and I'm too awestruck
to interrogate

for irony, since
you were beautiful straddling
my upside-down bike

that day, smudged by grease
as you built the blue-gleam frame
I could ride and ride

or the stormy night
we came in rain-wet by chance
to the same hotel

but especially
the day we met and I did
not see you at all

my old teacher told me

I was young once, hitched
all the way to New York City
as a boy from West Virginia

heart leaning lump-like
rough white clay toward truth
he felt uncolored, unexplored

my old teacher told me

I travelled east with a guitar
to New York City's zen center
and on the steps I met a monk

and a green lotus-posed statue
of the buddha burning green green
so neon searing that he asked, Why?

It turned green when the bomb hit
Nagasaki, and has been so ever since
said he, then laughed and laughed

and I've never learned another lesson since.