Being a new writer, I was also intrigued with the craft, the art of the short story. I joined a writers’ workshop. That is where, I think, I ceased being a typical reader. I started looking at the parts and not just the whole of the story, which is a terrible habit, in a way. It’s like being Dr. Frankenstein, seeing how life was created out of previously inanimate parts. The Dr. Frankenstein in me would sometimes act as cosmetic surgeon, determining where the excess fat of the story was, how a little lift here, a tuck there could improve the result. But what did I really know? What seemed “essential” to me was “garrulous” to another writer.
As a beginning writer, I was still trying to figure out what qualified as a proper short story versus a prose poem, an anecdote, a character piece, a novella. I actually thought there were agreed-upon answers to questions like these: What is voice? What is story? Does voice determine story, or vice versa? How should characters develop? What are the elements of a good ending? What are the virtues of short stories in general?
Along with these big abstract questions, I had pragmatic worries over craft: Why do so many writers these days use the present tense? Is it supposed to sound like dispassionate stage directions? What are the pros and cons of using first person, third person, or for that matter, second person? Should the narrative follow a chronological sequence? Or is it more admired (that is, more intelligent-looking) to jump around, fracture things a bit to resemble more realistically the way our poor memories work?
Then there was this: What is the existential meaning of the big white space between paragraphs? What is being said by not being said?
I actually believed that someone else’s answers to those questions would help me become a better writer. I remember thinking that if someone could help me deconstruct the stories, and figure out what works, I could then take these principles, tried and true and judged the best, to methodically write my own stories.
So I read piles and piles of short stories in those early years of learning to write. I confess that with some stories I would arrive at the end with that same sense of epistemological wonder: “Huh?” In other words, I just didn’t get it. And this led me to believe that my former professor was right: I was missing some finer aesthetic sense. Perhaps I was too much of a realist and did not understand abstractions and fragments. Or perhaps the problem was that I was a romanticist, certainly not a postmodernist, or whatever it was or was not that also made me unable to appreciate, say, a dollop of paint on a white canvas in a modern art museum. Maybe I didn’t get the stories because I was trying too hard to understand them. I was trying to analyze them rather than just read them, experience them for all the many ways art can appeal.
Of course, I did understand some stories right away, too soon, too handily, with a fanfare of French horns and a boink on the head. They were weighted with epiphany, beginnings and endings that resonated too neatly, or were boldfaced with the import of hindsight.
And with other stories, I noticed a trend: as in those bedtime stories of my childhood, nothing much changed between the first page and the last. The stories concerned ordinary people doing ordinary things with just a bit of inner unease, and featured an omniscient narrator who provided the precise details that proved their lives were moving at glacial speed. These were Chekhovian tales, except that they took place in more ordinary places and were about more mundane moments. Or perhaps they weren’t Chekhovian after all, since a Chekhov ending always included some observed detail that made the whole story transcendent. Whereas these stories petered out, as if they had run out of energy—like life itself, or The Sun Also Rises, with its realism of ennui. Maybe that was the effect the writers were going for. Either that, or I just didn’t get them.
Nevertheless, ennui was the arty way I ended one of the first short stories I wrote. I sent it off for admission to my first writers’ workshop at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. When my manuscript came up for critique, Elizabeth Tallent, my assigned leader, asked me in front of eleven other writers why my story ended with a bank of fog rolling over the coastal mountains as the narrator is headed for the airport. Naturally, I could not say to a New Yorker writer that the deadline for submission had been upon me, and I had run out of time and ideas, as well as interest. So I said the fog was a metaphor for confusion, which it was, mine.
I experienced more fog in my reading and writing. By continuing to read and write, though, I gradually changed. But it was not through deconstruction. It was through an awareness that each writer has a distinct consciousness, attentiveness, inventiveness, and relationship to the world, both real and fictional. I discovered that the short story is a distillation of all that. The way the individual writer chooses to experience, edit, and express that is a matter of taste. And what I liked to read was not necessarily what I wanted to write. My reasons for writing had to do with what wasn’t yet there.
I became a much better reader and, I think, as a consequence, a better short story writer, or so I thought. In 1988, I completed my first book of fiction, The Joy Luck Club, which I wrote as a collection of short stories. When the galleys went out for early comments, however, most reviewers called it a novel.
Last October, I was having an awful time writing my fourth book when the first batch of forty stories for this volume, photocopies of tear sheets, arrived in the mail for my consideration. Naturally, I worried that my bad writing might affect my reading. Conversely, I worried that reading excellent stories would depress me and further undermine my writing. I worried that my fluctuating estrogen levels would impair the consistency of my judgment. I worried that I would overlook a masterpiece and that everyone, including my former professor, would rage: “Who is this writer to ignore our country’s greatest writer?” I am still the worrier I was as a child. I still try to sort out my worries, categorize them, organize them, find possible solutions to contain them or make them go away. And they still sit in my brain like a blood clot waiting to dissipate or explode.
To begin, I set up a process so I would be as fair as possible. With one hundred twenty stories to read over four months, that worked out to a story a day, quite doable and also the correct way to go about this, I thought. If I read too many stories at once, I might be comparing them, and for the wrong reasons. So I decided to read one story each evening, while sitting in bed. To ensure that I was not susceptible to distractions, such as the ringing phone or my dogs barking at ghosts, I would wear headphones and listen to an environmental tape of rainfall. On the series editor’s recommendation, I would read the stories blind, that is, with the names of the writers and magazines blacked out. This way, I would keep an open mind. I would not be swayed by whether the writer was male or female, new or well established, or of a racial background that one could check on a marketing survey. Not that I would have such specious biases, but why worry that they might creep up unconsciously?
After a week, I worried about other biases. That by listening to rain, I was apt to choose stories set in stormy weather and overlook those with more sun-baked settings. That on days when my mind was cluttered with crisis, I would judge the stories I read as either better or worse than they really were. That with some stories I was annoyed from the start because they had been printed in six-point type with clever graphics that made them impossible to read without squinting and cursing. (Don’t the art directors of America realize that a huge percentage of magazine readers are baby boomers, newly presbyopic, and not pleased to be reminded of the fact?)
At times I also found myself trying to scratch beneath the surface and guess who the writer might be. I was a kid before Christmas, shaking the gifts to see if I could tell what was inside. I believed that certain writers’ voices were as distinctive as fingerprints, and I thought I had detected six of them (I was wrong in half the cases). If I couldn’t guess the names, at least I could figure out the gender. But when I looked back at a pile of stories I had read, and tried to discern what traits might be marked male or female, I saw that my hunches were in most cases based
only on whether the narrator was a man or a woman (and half the time this proved to be a flawed way to guess).
So I broke nearly all the rules, or tried to. My proposed schedule to read a story a day? That lasted one day. Sometimes I could not stop from reading five or six. It was like eating a box of truffles. Sometimes, caught up in my own work, I went days without reading a single story. But one rule I did abide by, and it was one I did not set out to follow initially. I read each story from start to finish without interruption, so that I could sense its rhythm. For me, the rhythm is set in the first sentence; it continues in the pacing of the rest of the story, the way it breathes and exhales at the end. The rhythm is like a meditation. Its essence would be lost if I were to read a story in isolated chunks. The short story is more akin to a poem in how it should be read: the effect depends on my breathing along with it in one continuous stream.
I kept this principle while reading in bed, on a plane, in doctors’ waiting rooms, on long car rides—in all those places where people might take time to read a short story in a magazine. If I fell asleep in bed before finishing a story, the next morning I started that story again from the beginning. If the nurse said the doctor was ready to see me before I was ready, I started the story again after my appointment. And in January, like fifty million other Americans suffering from holiday bloat, I joined a gym and took these stories along. This, I discovered, is where much of America’s magazine reading takes place in concentrated blocks of time. If I did not finish a story within the twenty-five minutes I was programmed to be on the undulating machine, I kept pumping and sweating until I read the last word. Between reading the first story and the last, I discovered also that good fiction can change you in quite beneficial ways. I lost five pounds.
I also found that reading short stories helped my writing. It sprang me out of the doldrums, and I regained the fervor and compulsion toward writing that I had when I started reading massive amounts of fiction back in 1985. By reading so many stories, so many voices, I unleashed what had propelled me to write fiction in the first place: the need to find my own voice and tell my own story. As with conversation, one story begets another.
But what a curious experience to read so many stories in a concentrated period of time, grabbing them in no particular order, for randomness in fiction can generate its own cosmic connections. A story about a dying parent would be followed by another about a dying parent, one about a difficult mother by another about a difficult mother. Pizza Huts and Domino’s popped up in clusters like mushrooms after rain, as did references to the color cranberry and barking dogs, tourists in India and people falling under ice, reunions after sexual indiscretions, and alcohol-addled sons; and there were many, many thoughts before dying. Bound together, they might be a codex on the collective unconscious. Or is that just a result of the kind of person I am? I do tend to connect the dots and find patterns, yet the patterns could be meaningless. In any case, in reading them together, I was conscious that certain stories had similar images and situations and that some appealed to me much more than others.
In many of the hundred twenty stories, I found elements of fairy tales, the grotesque. Here is where an actual bias does come in. I was delighted to find them, stunned that so many of the stories had these qualities—not so much in structure, but in imagery: underground worlds, a woman’s stumbling upon a much darker version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, a secret place that no one else knows exists, ghosts in the attic, tractors that talk. I saw a similar fairy-tale quality in how characters formed: the narrator discovers that others are not who they appear to be. The change occurs not through the wave of a wand, but through death or danger or despair.
There was one other worry I had as a reader. I looked at the stories I had placed in my pile of favorites. Many had an exotic flavor. Either the narrators were ethnic or the settings were outside America. I could imagine readers smugly nodding and saying, “Well, of course she would pick those, um-hm.” I then looked at the larger pile of those I had decided to eliminate, and within those were also a good many with exotic settings and ethnic narrators. I noticed that there were a fair number of stories in both piles about hunters and cowboys and gritty-teethed people living in remote parts of North America. So what was it about me that would account for that? I guess I am the kind of reader who has less fondness for the ordinary. Maybe I’m still that kid who wants to see things I’ve never seen before. I like being startled by images I never could have imagined myself.
By their nature, these were stories with distinctive voices, voices with interesting things to say. I imagine that contributed to why certain magazine editors had chosen them. Having read the hundred twenty, I know how quickly stories can blur into sameness and fall away from memory. The splendid ones are left standing. But in the end, only the vivid remain. Different does not always equal vivid, but the converse is certainly true.
For those hoping that I might make some observations on the demographics of this collection and its significance to literary trends or diversity in American culture or the year 1998, I am sorry to disappoint. I don’t think most writers of literary fiction deliberately set out to write stories that are topical or representational. Great stories resist generalizations and categories. For me even to try to guess at how the subconscious of twenty-one writers followed certain patterns would be presumptuous, and I would likely be wrong. And think how embarrassing it would be if I ran into any of these writers at a party.
I will leave it to the writers themselves to tell you what their intentions might have been, if they so choose to reveal them.
Why do I think these stories are the best? What do they say about my tastes? Will they find harmony with yours, with those of the woman in Seoul, with those of my friends with the movie recommendations?
I chose stories that have strong storytelling qualities. By this, I mean they have a narrative thread, pulled taut by interesting complications, and this leads to some thought or emotion or clear-eyed perception. In these stories, when I reached the last page, I felt a change; I did not say, “Huh?” Yet the stories did not present their endings with the clang of gongs. There is nothing preening or preachy about them. Rather, by the end, they quietly but perceptibly lifted themselves and me out of our skins. I’m not saying that each story was uplifting like a birthday balloon let go. The weightlessness was sometimes more akin to a bed of static, a sudden loss of gravity, a tiny aphid’s being tumbled upward by wind. Sometimes this did not occur until the last few paragraphs—sometimes not until the last sentence. But always, by the end, I found myself suspended just a moment longer by a sense of wonder over the story’s ability to make me feel what I felt. Every story in this collection did that for me.
I am also an ardent admirer of prose style. That does not, however, mean that I always want it to be as fancy as Humbert Humbert’s, though Lolita is a favorite of mine for language. Whether seemingly simple or fancy, the prose I like is such that everything is there for a reason—every word, every image, every bit of dialogue is needed; it adds, builds, and its dexterity is also transparent. And yet it has a generosity, there’s no skimpiness. That’s the craft part for me. While the prose may seem offhand and effortless, it is imbued with a particular sensibility and intelligence and purpose. That higher sense permeates the story, and only when you leave the story do you realize how palpable it still is. The stories here gave me that sensation, each in its own way.
What I look for most in a story, what I crave, and what I found in these twenty-one, is a distinctive voice that tells a story only that voice can tell. The voice is not merely the language, the prose style, the imagery. It is that ineffable combination of things that creates a triangulated relationship among narrator, reader, and fictional world. It may have an intimacy or a distance, a trustworthiness or an edginess. The voice is this hour’s guide to eternity and will immerse me in a unique consciousness that observes some nuances of human nature and overlooks others. It is the keeper of forgiveness and condemnat
ion. It will order perception and juxtapose events and rearrange time, then deliver me back to my own consciousness slightly askew.
By the end of the story, what I’ve witnessed and experienced as reader is so interesting, so intense, so transcendent that if someone were to ask me what the story was about, I would not be able to distill it into an easy answer. It would be a sacrilege for me to say it is about, say, survival or hope or the endlessness of love. For the whole story is what the story is about, and there is no shorthanding it. I can only say please read it yourself.
If this collection holds a common thread with regard to my tastes, it is what I think the best of fiction is by its nature and its virtues. It can enlarge us by helping us notice small details in life. It can remind us to distrust absolute truths, to dismiss clichés, to both desire and fear stillness, to see the world freshly from closer up or farther away, with a sense of mystery or acceptance, discontent or hope, all the while remembering that there are so many possibilities, and that this was only one.
The best stories do change us. They help us live interesting lives.
HOPE
Now help me light three sticks of incense. The smoke will take our wishes to heaven. Of course, it’s only superstition, just for fun. But see how fast the smoke rises—oh, even faster when we laugh, lifting our hopes, higher and higher.
• The Kitchen God’s Wife
• what i would remember •
When I was in my twenties, at a time when my mother and I were not getting along that well, she asked me, “If I die, what you remember?”
Here we go, I thought, the old Chinese-torture routine. I answered something like this: “Come on, you’re not going to die.”