Every hipster/twitteratitwat is a novelist.
"I am a novelist."
"I'm writing a novel."
"I wrote a novel last weekend."
"I'm trying to get my novel published."
Then you actually read some of this self-proclaimed novelist's writing and after 3 sentences your brain retreats from your eyes and your thoughts turn to wondering if the clothes on the line are dry yet.
Me, I write shitty satirical news stories and post them on the internet. I don't have a novel or a short story or basically any semblance of a laid-out, planned, fictional narrative plotline in me. Not one. That shit is WAY too fucken hard. Some people make it look easy. And when I say "some", I mean virtually fucking nobody.
I read some of Katherine Mansfield's short stories yesterday. Written in the 1910's. She was from Niew Zllnd. I can relate.
"The equal of Chekhov" they say. Them's some big boots.
KM's stories;
- No $20 words.
- No sparkling dialogue.
- No witty, engaging characters.
- No impenetrably-prolix theoretical gymnastics duplicitously presented under the guise of a goddamn fucking "story" ffs.
You get a bit about how the area looked, bits about what unfolded, a couple of characters and their thoughts, then the end.
10 pages or so and it's done.
So what's the big deal?
I'm sure a lot of ink has been chundered out in regards to that over the last 110 years. Books, etc. Wordy word analysis books. Who cares. It's not like you can teach it. Such a finely-parsed gift that it exists in its own ether. You finish one of Mansfield's short stories and then sit back and think, holy shitballs, that was utterly goddamn masterly. Zero fat. The languid, poignant, evocative naturally-sanded craft of it. Fucking impossible to do well. All the "no's" listed above, and yet the sweet short thing is now seared into my brain, possibly indelibly.
The unreplicable secret of it, to me, is the barebones description of the scene. An utterly spartan economy of words yet it's so brilliantly, brilliantly illustrative that you just have to step back from it, take pause, marvel at it, wonder how the fuck did she just do that, then reread the thing again. That sets the table.
I'm sorry, twitter.