Envy and Imitation

"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at
the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide;
that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion;
that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel or
nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed
on that plot of ground which is given to him to till."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance"

It's okay. Every writer does it. I do it. You do it. The best-sellers do it. The indie savants do it. 

We tend to ape -- sometimes unintentionally, sometimes on purpose -- our favorite writers and pick up on the traits we enjoy about their work. 

When I started writing, I was determined to be the next C.S. Lewis. Not the Narnia Lewis but the Space Trilogy and the Till We Have Faces Lewis. Because of that, my writing was overblown and way too wordy. And I also sounded British--using British turns of phrase and UK slang. Don't take my word for it. You can trust the fine folks at The New Yorker and The Missouri Review, who both told me the same thing. I still have both rejection letters in a binder with other memories from my writer's journey. 

When I started my Bachelor's classes in Literature, I found out how much I loved the novels and short stories of a certain boisterous and burly man-baby named Hemingway. So I moved on from the verbose intelligence and heavy vocabulary of C.S. Lewis for the clean, crisp, succinct prose of Papa Hemingway. 

The trouble was that I was still playing the imitation game. 

Only something was changing, something I wasn't even aware of.

Every Man's Education

After Hemingway, I went down the 20th Century American Literature rabbit hole. There was Raymond Carver, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes (yes, stories not just poetry), and Shirley Jackson. As their ideas and styles added to what I had learned to apply from Papa, I noticed my way of writing changed significantly. I retained my love for simple sentences and direct nouns and verbs without lots of adverbs and adjectives, but I turned away from trying to be so "Literary" and embraced the "Southern" of my youth. 

And so began my phase of "Southern Literary" where I found the themes of Welty, O'Connor, Hurton, etc. weaving into my fiction. However, the voice was always changing from the Lewis/Hemingway copycat to something new that blended bits and bobs from lots of influences. 

It was during this time that I wrote for the award-winning Cyber Age Adventures. Being a literary writer, you can imagine the fun I had crafting superhero stories with my lens of literary impact and import. Somehow, it worked. Between Frank Fradella's RPG-inspired adventure yarn set in real-world physics and repercussions, Tom Waltz's quasi-military approach, and my focus of American Literature, we created something unique and engaging in the world of superhero fiction. 

But my inspiration still had some growth to come. 

Imagine the confusion and prosaic mush created when I started exploring for work of the great pulp and pulp-adjacent writers as I tried my hand at some New Pulp Fiction stories thanks to some introductions by friends like Bobby Nash. To do my homework at writing pulpy tales, I dug into the stories (both novels and short stories) of folks like Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler, among others. 

With these new influences, my style took another shift. The simple prose of Hemingway was still similar to the simple, direct prose of Chandler, but the types of stories were suddenly allowed to become a lot more, well, more exciting physically and emotionally rather than just the intellectual excitement of my Literary focus.

This began a new phase of what Derrick Ferguson and I often called Literary Pulp. For us, that meant deeper than mere surface characterization, dialogue that does more than just advance the plot, and looking for real-world interactions that didn't sugarcoat the time periods we were writing about. For me, it was just a continuation of what I had been doing since discovering Lewis and Hemingway. Lewis made me want to deal with spiritual and philosophical topics in genre fiction. Hemingway made me want to create characters who, when they spoke about a topic or when they avoided a topic, revealed a lot about who they were. Same uniform, just a different ballfield.

Nourishing Corn on My Own Plot of Ground

Okay. So what did I learn through that journey toward becoming Sean Taylor, the writer? Are there lessons that can help other writers push through their own journeys from imitation to what Emerson called "self-reliance"?

Sure. If you know me at all, you already know I love both tutorials and lists, and when I get to put them together in a single article, I'm suddenly the happiest little clam in the world. 

So here goes...

1. Embrace your idols. 

It's okay to be inspired to imitate. We learn by copying the works of those we enjoy reading. Their stories teach us about story structure, how to write dialog, when to break grammar rules -- all those wonderful techniques that ultimately fill up our writing toolkit and become what we call a personal style and voice. 

Take those inspirations. Work with them. Play with them. Turn them upside down and inside out. Put your own spin on them. Play with all your favorite toys. 

2. There can't only be one. 

Now, here's the trick, isn't it? This is your journey to discovering who you are as a writer, not a rehash of the movie Highlander. 

Imitating a single writer makes you a copycat. Imitation several at once makes you a dedicated learner of the craft. The more you learn from multiple writers, the more you integrate seemingly disparate voices into your own work, and that makes you become unique. Even if you use all the same ingredients, you bake your pie from a different recipe. 

3. Start purging. 

There will be lots of tidbits and style doodads that you find no longer work for you the more comfortable you become in your own writer "skin." That's all part of learning. What doesn't work anymore, excise it. Purge it like last month's leftovers. Eventually, you are left with the style stuff that makes you happy and makes you, well, you. 

Just like I left behind the British-isms of Lewis, you may need to cull the standard adventure motif of Tolkein or Donaldson's ten pages of how brown the mountains and tunnels were. You may need to cull the reliance on the internal monologue you copied from Faulkner. You may need to ditch the sudden shifts in verb tense and -person you picked up from Ed McBain. They may have gotten you to where you are, but they no longer suit you.

4. Good writers borrow. Great writers steal. 

This quote is usually attributed to the poet T.S. Eliot and it is often quoted along with a variation on it by Aaron Sorkin: “Good writers borrow from other writers. Great writers steal from them outright.” Regardless of who said it when and how, it's absolutely true. 

Beginning writers obsess about how much their work may remind them of the folks they admire. Great and practiced writers stop caring after a while. In fact, it's safe to say that all those things you think you will be called out for copying won't even register with most readers. Sure, there will always be reviewers who are paid to make both fair and unfair comparisons, but those are your typical readers. 

Steal proudly. Steal broadly. Steal without any discrimination. Do you like the way Eudora Welty writes winter scenes? Fine. Take it and shove it in your toolkit. Really dig the way Chandler can chop dialogue into snappy fragments? Chisel it right out of his book and hang onto it for your next story. 

New in Nature

Now, before you look at that list above and start to craft a plan, stop. Those aren't steps in a printout from Mapquest in 2006. You don't aim for step one and then turn off Highway 20 onto step two like it's some kind of organized plan. 

What is it then?

It's a synopsis of what happens to us as writers. It's a description of the process more than an outline to follow. It's something organic, not ordained. Something passive, not planned. 

It's one thing to be aware of it and acknowledge it and not let it consume you with imposter syndrome. But it's another thing entirely to see it as a roadmap for your writing goals. That shift in thinking is both subtle and crucial. 

The next line in the Emerson quote that started this essay is this: 

The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.

Ultimately it comes down to this: TRY.

Enjoy what you enjoy and let it shape you as a writer. Read, consume, mulch it in your mind, turn it into brain food, rinse and repeat. It's really as simple and as complicated as that. 

Wrote Rage

"Every writer I know

Hates other writers. Not all others, but most.

The ones who are better or different he has to hate

because they are better or different. And those who are worse

he despises because that is his earned right."

--Virgil, "Ecoglues: Palaemon"

Warning. This is not an inspirational quote. Most writer quotes are. They are here to make you think pretty thoughts and keep your exhausted butt glued to your chair and writing your masterpiece. 

But this quote, this is not one of those. This is some serious business about the way writers think... Maybe. Or it's not. 

If anything, maybe this is a lying liar telling blatant lies. If not, then maybe it's a sad little representative of writers living in a hurtful, petty world. 

Or, bear with me here, perhaps it's a brilliant little writer from antiquity summing up a lot of the feelings that exist in the world of publishing and using satire with a sharp bite and finely tuned edge to make his point and show us writers the motes in our own eyes. 

I prefer to think it's the latter. (I'm a nice guy like that, I guess.)

Let's analyze his words, shall we...

"Not All Others, But Most"

It's way too common in the world of publishing -- though maybe not in the small indie pools in which I swim -- for writers to see each other as the competition. If you are pinning your hopes and dreams on a dwindling number of major contracts with the "Big Boys" or "Big 5" or "Big Whatever the Hell You Want To Call Them," then it's almost inevitable to think of other writers as the person liable to get in there first and take the contract that fate has ordained for you. 

If your goal as a writer is to be on the payroll of an A-list big pubber with money to throw into advertising and New York Times reviewers lining up to get a review copy of your latest chart-topper, then sure, everybody who gets a bigger ad, a more nationally widespread campaign, a better review, and bigger sales is taking away press, attention, or, god forbid, money from you. They are your competition, and therefore even if you don't outright hate them, you still feel hurt by them at best, jealous toward them typically, or downright angry at their success at worst. 

When I first got the gig writing Dominatrix for Gene Simmons (Look, Bobby, I name-dropped again!), I thought the sky was the limit. Then I noticed that didn't transition into new and bigger gigs for dream assignments with DC and Marvel. But it seemed the road to writer heaven opened up for my good friends Erik and Tom, and as much as I was thrilled for them, I was jealous as hell. After a while, I too started to feel a bit of resentment at their success. I even "got mad and took my toys back home" so to speak and pretty much stopped pursuing comics for a few years to just focus on short stories because I figured I could "outperform" them in that arena (and thus recover my lost pride). 

The ironic part is that while I was getting grumpy and jealous, there were many others who are jealous of me and my success. 

But for those lower-tier writers who aren't in any position to become your competition, you can afford to avoid wasting strong emotion on them, at least as long as they don't achieve what you have. 

"Those Who Are Better"

Here's the rub. The one thing we know better than anything else is our limitations as writers. We like to think we know what we're good at, but with those often our humility (or depression and anxiety) can tell me that maybe we're wrong about that. But the thing we know that we know that we know, like, for all the reals, is what we suck at. 

We think we know we're good at dialog, but we really know how bad we are at endings. We think we know we're masters of the art of setting, but we are most definitely certain how poorly we write characters of another gender/sexual identity. And we can name on our fingers and toes up to twenty writers who are our betters at that thing (fill in the blank) we totally massacre. 

So we maybe not hate them, but boy do we resent them. 

There's a scene in the BBC television comedy Coupling that illustrates this idea beautifully. Several women (all attractive and desirable on their own) see a woman across the bar they feel more perfectly embodies the very idea of being gorgeous than they do. They list a  litany of her attributes before declaring, "I hate her." And then, when she reveals that the price tag is still on the bottom of her shoe, they are suddenly elated at how she is brought low by such a faux pas. 

We do the same thing. 

We resent Stephen King because he somehow writes stories that tap into the human experience in a way that compels readers to buy his books, and then feel so much better when we can bag on him for his rushed endings. (Yes, I'm the chief of sinners in this.) 

We resent Sue Grafton because she can write book after book that tears up the best-seller list, and then feel perhaps more than a little vindicated when a reviewer calls her books "light beach reading" since that can't remotely compare to our loftier goals of literary perfection. 

And so it goes. (Thank you, Mr. Vonnegut.)

"Or Different"

As much as we love these folks, we equally are upset by them. Just how do they get the freedom to break the rules? Why are they allowed to be weird and offbeat and zany and out of the mainstream while we -- poor little rule followers we are since we have to play by them to even get our stuff looked at -- can't have the freedom to get a little weird too? 

You know the writers I'm talking about:

• Neil Gaiman and his success despite not writing series or true sequels and jumping genres like children jump puddles on their bikes. 
• Raymond Carver and his ignoring quotation marks for dialog. 
• William Faulkner and his free pass on ignoring damn near everything that gets covered in a creative writing class 101. 
• Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and his intentional misuse of tense and structure and authorial intrusion and using doodles as part of his stories (who also never wrote an epic or a sequel).
• The list goes on. 

The follow-up argument goes like this -- Damn them for setting the standard for their rule-breaking because now even if we did that creative thing we once thought about we'd only be viewed by those who matter as being derivative. Even though we thought of it first. Or at least simultaneously. 

Damned it we do and damned if we don't as the cliche goes. 

The follow-up to the follow-up is when we hit pure fantasy. It is this: They stole my idea. 

Don't go there. That way lies madness. There, there be dragons. 

"Those Who Are Worse... His Earned Right"

Ah, but thankfully, we have these folks to help balance out all that resentment and jealousy and pettiness and grumpiness -- 

-- These poor slobs who still struggle to understand how to use an em dash. 

-- These lost lambs who can't format an ellipse to save their lives. 

-- These freshman newbs who haven't yet learned not to run the faucet on that massive info dump in chapter 1 (or worse, a prologue!)

If it weren't for these literary saps, we'd have to relegate ourselves to the lowest rung on the talent ladder. We'd have to lump our own careers in with the "fail more than succeed" crowd. 

"It may not be Doubleday," we say with unbelieving pride, "but at least I'm published." Or "It may not be six figures, but at least I got upfront money when so many don't get an advance in this career." (Yes, we use the word career as if we don't still work as a teacher or caregiver or construction worker or server or stock clerk to actually pay the bills. ) "I may have been paid in contributor copies," we intone with huffy breaths, "but I at least I would never pay to have my fiction read by editors." Or, "I may only be published locally, but at least I know the difference between that and which."

As long as there is someone lower, we can subsist in our place. 

"Every Writer I Know"

Of course, I jest -- in part. 

But let's be honest, even the nicest writers among us can fall prey to pettiness where our writing reputations are at stake. Even the most welcoming authors can split hairs over what makes one person a professional and another person an amateur in the war of words. Even the humblest scribe (so humble as to never apply such a word as "scribe" to oneself) can get his, her, or their tail feathers ruffled at the intimation one is somehow a "less than" when compared to another -- even when the intimation was never intended. 

It's a defense mechanism. It's natural. (Call it original sin if you want to get religious about it.) 

I choose to believe Virgil knew all this as well. After all, we human beings (and in particular we writer human beings) haven't actually changed much in the past few thousand years. We may do spelling and grammar differently now, but we don't really think or create that differently. The imaginative muscles still flex the same way. 

So, I choose to believe our friend Virge stuffed his ancient tongue firmly in his ancient cheek and took his quill or chalk or whatever he wrote with (probably an IBM Selectric, I'd guess -- after all, those are pretty old) when he penned these words. 

I choose to believe he put them down as a mirror we could and should use to check ourselves in as members of the writing community lest we succumb to these characteristics. 

Or, maybe Virgil was just a dick who didn't have any writer friends. Your choice. 

Reading Short Stories for Beginners -- A Primer and List of Required Collections

by Sean Taylor

So, you're not really a short story reader. You've been reading your Summer novels for a while now, and you'd like to see why I'm so gung ho about short stories. That's cool. It's okay. I can help you with that.

Well, if you're a regular reader here on the blog, you'll know that I'm a huge fan of short stories and that they are, in fact, my favorite medium for writing and reading prose. I simply love the art required for short fiction.

How to read a short story collection

Step one -- open to the table of contents.
Step two -- read the list of titles.
Step three -- pick one that sounds interesting.

That's right. Totally ignore those 1s, 2s, and 3s in the "chapter" numbers. They don't matter anymore, not one bit.

That feeling you're getting giddy and euphoric on... that's called freedom. You're no longer bound to follow the order the sections appear between the covers. Read the end first. Read the beginning last. Read from the middle out. Jump around from story to story. Pop around like popcorn (the old Jiffy Pop stuff, not microwave). Read all the short ones first. Read all the long ones first. You do you. There are no rules.

Step four -- if you're not enjoying the stories you've read, close the book and pick up a different collection.

Whoa, now... Don't get crazy. Once you start reading you have to finish all the pages, right? Nope. That's the beauty of short stories.

Also, if you don't have time to read a novel per week or month or whatever timeframe you assign yourself, then just jump around with several collections of stories. You feel like you're cheating on your "main read" because there is no main read. Not this time.

See? That's true freedom, baby. Drink it deep. Breathe in it. Roll around and get it all over your jeans. It's okay.

Okay, so where do you start?

Well, here's my list of single-author short story collections to get you started. I mean, if you want to read, then you want to read the best. Right?

The Ways of White Folks is perhaps the finest volume of stories from the post-slavery United States. Each tale relates the culture shock when blacks and whites try to co-exist in a word that won't let them without shying away from the implications. But best of all, Hughes tells his stories with the ear of a poet, making each tale a feast for the ears and eyes.

This forgotten volume is the work of an older world, but the creepiness of these stories can't be denied. If you've ever wondered how horror without gore could still creep you the hell out, then you need to read this book. Modern horror writers would do well to rediscover this one and take its lessons on the art of horror to heart.

Most readers will know Ed McBain from his Matthew Hope and 87th Precinct novels, but even so, it would do you well to look up this collection of early stories from the master of the police procedural. These are the stories that made McBain the writer he became.

Eudora Welty is another of the masters of Southern Fiction. The people she writes about are as real as anyone you've ever met south of the Mason Dixon Line (or above it, for that matter). Welty has a sense of storytelling that comes across like a folk historian.

This one is worth the price of the book for "Harrison Bergeron" alone, but don't be fooled -- Vonnegut's no one-trick pony. He's perhaps the master satirist of the 20th Century, and his characters will stick in your brain long after you put the book down. If you like your fiction with a touch of the absurd, Vonnegut's your writer, hands down.

While The Great Gatsby may be considered by many as the quintessential Great American Novel, Fitzgerald is also a craftsman of the highest caliber when it comes to short stories. Nobody captures the fun, craziness, and self-indulgence of the 1920s better. But unlike lots of period pieces, Fitzgerald's tales aren't stuck in the past. They still ring true for modern readers.

What can out-Lovecraft the great H.P. himself? Well, The King in Yellow can. Based on an unrevealed play of the same name that can cause madness when read or performed, the stories in this book will stick with you for a long, long time, particularly those from the opening pages. Chemicals that turn people to stone, ghastly stalkers, creepy painters -- it's all here.

Almost everybody knows "The Lottery," but few could name her other stories by name. And that's a shame. Jackson knows her craft, particularly as it relates to making a reader care about slightly odd and broken people who exist just off the edge or normal.

This is the first of Bradbury's collections on this list, and I'm not apologizing. This volume is a bit of a departure from the average short story collection because the stories weave in and out of the lives of a town experiencing the seasons. One of the first to combine the novel with the short story effectively, Dandelion Wine is a must-read for any serious reader of short stories.

Pinning down just one volume from Flannery O'Connor is a difficult thing to do for a list. She has a knack for creating some of the most memorable characters in 20th Century fiction, all pulled from the Southen Gothic way she saw the world and incorporated it into her fiction. Nobody else could have created such a "good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."

No list of short story collections is complete without Hemingway. He's the guy who defined the concept of literary short. All the classic stuff you either love or hate about Hemingway is here -- the talking around things, the "what the hell is actually going on here," and the to-the-point prose that sticks to the who, what, where, how, and why that he masters during his time as a newspaper writer. There's a reason Hemingway is considered the master of the form.

Nobody, and I mean nobody tells a short story like Ray Bradbury. He's the pinnacle of the artform, and this is his finest work, particularly the title story about a time traveler who faked it to change the world for the better.

Few contemporary writers can sell short stories like Neil Gaiman. Including some essays, this isn't only a short story collection, but it does contain some of his best fantasy shorts that have redefined the genre and pulled it away from the Tolkienesque.

In my opinion, Stephen King is an okay novelist but a damn fine short stories writer. Where he misfires on his novel endings, he has the luxury of not having them in his short stories. In medias res is the norm here. These quick bites of horror and terror are King at his best. (After this one, then read Just After Sunset, his second-best collection.)

One of the best sci-fi collections ever. Kilworth tinges his sci-fi with both horror (the title story) and satire (as well as anything by Vonnegut). This is an often neglected or forgotten work well worth looking for.

Raymond Chandler may be a novelist of the finest quality, but if you haven't read his pulpy shorts, you're missing the full picture. This is adventure writing at its finest. Nobody turns murder and theft into art like Chander. Period.

If Raymond Chandler wrote about relationships falling apart instead of murder, he'd write this book. Take the terse, straightforward style of the pulps and add a few literary techniques like characterization and talking around things instead of about them, and you have this book, one of the finest short story collections ever, and well worth your time.

Garcia Marquez is best known for being part of a literary style/genre called magical realism. Basically that means the mundanely normal and the weird and supernatural (but not too much) sit side by side. This is one of my favorite types of stories, and "Eva Is Inside Her Cat" and "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" (two of the best examples) are in this collection. Garcia Marquez is perhaps one of the biggest influences on my superhero fiction (and it's pretty evident in my story "The Other, As Just As Fair").

Your Turn

That's it for me. What are your favorite short story collections?

Nugget #107 -- Bob Dylan's Guide to Literature

Dylan told folk tales as well as Mark Twain ("The 

Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest" and "As I 

Went Out One Morning,") and literary short stories 

as well as Raymond Carver ("Sweetheart Like You" 

and "Like a Rolling Stone"). He has and will continue 

to confound and divide academics with songs are 

varied as "Ballad of a Thin Man," "Bob Dylan’s 

115th Dream," and "Maggie's Farm." And 

he captured the American cultural zeitgeist 

as well as Eliot's "The Wasteland" or anything 

by Ezra Pound with songs like "Desolation 

Row" and "Highway 61 Revisited."