“…though we often soliloquize about writing being a solitary existence with coveted ideas held closer to the chest than Bluebeard’s key to his chamber of torture and death, writing should never be a purely individual undertaking.”
While wrapping up a perfectly productive Friday, I led my students through a discussion of Charlie Fish’s fabulously wicked short story, “Death by Scrabble.” We were exploring conflict, its relation to tight plot development and the vicious need for stake raising in fiction of all kinds, not just those stories teeming with vampires. I was just about to close the conversation when one of my students raised his hand and pointed out a connection in the story that I, after four years and twenty four class periods of teaching it, had never recognized. It was subtle, it was pivotal, it was brilliant, and I had become too familiar with the overall story, and the story’s punch line, to see it.
It is entirely possible to get too close to things: the novel you’ve been writing for ten years, the short story that you’ve rewritten over and over a thousand times that still just doesn’t seem quite right, a lion at the zoo…
