Mining Reality

Despite an earlier post claiming a lack of obligation to explain the links between my fiction and my real life, I’m willing to cop to certain overlaps between the two. They involve physical settings.

Much of "At the Laundromat" (Motel Girl) takes place in and above this Lau derette

The house around which "American Hoverfly" (Motel Girl) takes place

My photo of a man walking a bear in Moscow (1997), the impetus for "Choco" (Motel Girl)

The sort of East Village tenement that gave rise to "The Suffering of Lesser Mammals" (The Warwick Review, VII/3) and "Grey" (Motel Girl)

My thoughts on using actual settings isn’t so much that the imagination can’t take the place of reality (I believe it can), but that using settings personally familiar to a writer creates an obligation to create a “morally” responsible narrative. “Writing what you know” makes sense not only because you’ll have a handle on the details, but because you’ll have an emotional anchor for the entire scene or story.

The old Mercedes from "Neutral" (3AM: London, New York, Paris)

If I use my local laundromat, which I’ve been patronizing for more than a decade, as a central point for a story, I know I’ll treat the story with respect because I don’t want to trivialize a place with which I have an emotional, not to mention domestic, bond. Call it exploiting those places and objects by letting your feelings for them bleed into the narrative you’re building around them. It’s safer and easier to do this with places and things than with friends and lovers.

Warwick Review II/#3

3AM: London, New York, Paris

Author’s site

Motel Girl

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The Many Faces of Fiction

I enjoy experimenting with fictional modes. Why must stories/novels take the form of narratives-on-the-page, essentially transcripts of what might be oral formulaic tales? Why not parasitize other modes of visual communication? In the last year or so I’ve tried to create stories based on Venn diagrams (all links at the end of this post) and have written a configuration guide for a non-existent robot, or “teleautomaton.” I’ve also drafted a learning aid–a quick start guide–that I’ve submitted to a magazine as a piece of flash fiction. In my story, “PS2 Mouse Adapter,” from Motel Girl,  I insert screenshots of a fake software application.

A Venn diagram story

Sometimes the idea is to create a credible artifact, or prop, from a fictional world. For example, the teleautomaton guide is a tie-in to a novel I’m working on; it’s “authored” by my narrator. But other modes of expression (Venn diagram stories) might be an end unto themselves, an attempt to express an abbreviated narrative in non-linear form, to visualize, simultaneously, themes, characters, conflicts, etc. You also hope that a new form will add a dimension to a narrative that can’t be captured by a straight on-the-page story.

In my story, “The Jew of Starbucks,” in The Los Angeles Review #5, the narrator, Jake, recalls his time as a sort of artist-in-residence at his local coffee shop, where he’s set up in a corner, snapping the keys on an old manual typewriter, banging out page after page of stream-of-consciousness prose all day long. He catches the attention of his hip East Village community and becomes something of a folksy star until upstaged by other developments. I wrote the story itself–more than 10 drafts of it–on the same make, model and color typewriter my narrator uses, an aqua-colored Smith-Corona Super-G.

The Smith-Corona Super-G used to write, and starring in, "The Jew of Starbucks"

And, thanks to the ingeniousness and patience of Mark Cull, the story was published in that form as well–essentially scanned versions of the type-written pages. So the mode of this story is also its artifact. The point in playing this kind of game is to stick a finger from the real world into the fictional one. Then smell it.

teleautomaton guide

Venn diagram stories

Los Angeles Review #5

Motel Girl

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Why I Don’t Blog

Two reasons: (1) Though I have had some non-fiction published, I’ve always preferred to hide behind the mantle of fiction when making my writing public. (2) There are countless billions of blog words out there already, proliferating daily, so why add to the mess? If you’ve got an infinite number of real estate plots, isn’t each one worth zilch? (I.e., 1/N –> zero as N –> infinity.)

So when Red Hen Press asked if I’d like to take on a week as guest blogger, I was definitely flattered, but also saw it as a chance to get over my blogophobia and write in a voice that is, as much as possible, me. Terrifying. As to adding to the ever-diminishing worth of each webword–fine, I’ll flick my two drops into the ocean. Who is this snapthekeys dude, anyway? you might ask. I’m Greg Sanders, the author or Motel Girl, a collection of 21 stories that Red Hen Press published in the fall of 2008. Though the stories are not interrelated in the strictest, most literal sense, they are thematically related, dealing with the strange foibles and dysfunctions of human beings and the way we relate (and don’t relate) to each other.

For me, the thrill of writing short stories involves limning a character drawn from the imagination–a bear-owning Muscovite woman, a peep-show addict, a vengeful motel clerk are just a sampling of those in my book–then stepping into his or her soul and walking his or her beat. At no point am I required to reveal how much this character’s fictive world parallels my own. If things go well, the sense of excitement, wonder and playfulness I get to experience when writing the story is transferred to the reader, who enjoys the tale, whose heart rate maybe increases a bit. So far I’ve been lucky–Motel Girl has received good reviews. (Reason (3): isn’t it slightly untoward to promote one’s own book in such a blatant fashion? Where have our manners gone these days?)

I’ll keep this first post short so as to acclimatize myself to being mantle-less. If you’d like find out more about Motel Girl, see the links below. In the meantime, stay tuned for more…

author site

Motel Girl on RHP site

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