Closing [55-word story] | 10
The restaurant was closing. It was time to go home. He was sitting at the bar, where he’d had his dinner, the television still playing out its scenes, silently. He’d been watching for hours. Closed caption: a line of words, transcribing whatever was said. He’d ignored the words, focusing on images. Half focusing. Half dazed.
posted by david raphael israel at 7:14 AM
2 Comments:
I'm impressed to see that you did so many of these stories in such a short time. You definitely come closer to John Cage's style than I do with my writing. Congratulations. I'm lucky if I can think up one story a day, and lately I haven't been that lucky at all.
But I'm skeptical about trying these myself. I dislike any rules regarding length. What do I do if I have a 55 word story and see that it needs one more word to make it what I think is perfect? Or I write a 50 word story to fill 100 words?
I've reposted your poem at Indeterminacies. Please let me know if there's anything you'd like fixed on the formatting.
Hey Indie,
thanks -- including about the poem; regarding which, yes in fact in the 1st stanza, for your page there are 2 line-breaks that can be dropped; these 2 lines (that is) can run without any break, thus:
> Green tho pool was in those days
and
> flowed the water wonderous ways
[The reason I'd introduced breaks in those lines, was to accommodate the photo-image in the space.]
Regarding my new efforts at short stories -- I guess I've had a longstanding interest in fiction writing that this form seems to help give me a "medium" for. The questions you raise about writing with a word-count stricture: well this is (in a way) not so unlike other strictures that (for instance) poets will accept, whenever writing in a form. In practice, one finds benefits from the (obvious) tradeoff. Or like haiku writing (with syllable-counts). In so many arts, indeed, in practice there's often the surprising discovery that by imposing a limitation or restriction, it helps free one up. The only way to test this is to try, of course, if so inclined. (If not, one needn't.) I'm sure different creative sensibilities are suited to very different approaches.
cheers, d.i.
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