A Very Serious Man: My Journey in Writing Fiction, Part One

I used to see myself as an all-too-serious writer when it came to writing fiction. I always tried to write what in the past would have been considered the Great American Novel or those very serious stories that people would read in The New Yorker or The American Mercury. Apparently, I thought of myself as a modernist 1920s-1950s writer telling stories about characters in the vein of Gertrude Stein or J.D. Salinger, exploring the foibles of normal people. I slowly realized that my writing style is close to this vision but not in the way I thought. I am improving my process by writing earthy stories full of humor and straightforward storylines, covering the daily adventures of normal people. I really have no ambitions to write the Great American Novel anymore because I would rather write for myself and the average fiction reader. I am becoming more comfortable in my skin as a writer. 

The narrative structures I was creating in more fiction were far different; in fact, I was dabbling in genre fiction such as horror and crime and attempting to write narratives that were more in line with postmodernists and transgressives like Kathy Acker and Thomas Pynchon. My last novel attempt included narratives within narratives, stream-of-conscious ramblings, and liminal characters that would travel between the novel's stories. I lost my way in this novel and am now in the process of a technique akin to Raymond Chandler's "cannibalizing" in which he turned his short stories into novels. 

My process is more pedestrian and standard as I am turning sections of the novel into short stories. This process is actually easy because of my technique of developing narratives within the narrative. Thus, I can remove these stories wholesale from the novel with less editing than I thought. Several characters in my story are orally "writing" a story together. They take turns telling the story and recording it to later rework it into a novel. They are consciously trying to create a work that draws from oral storytelling as well as literary fiction. I have been concerned with creating metanarratives like this for a long time. I love folklore and fiction and thought it would be cool to meld them in some way. 

I discovered an interesting thing about myself as a writer during this process; I love to write humor and have a knack for it. The stories I have been removing from the novel are humorous in content and dialogue. Unburdened from the supernatural crime plots and bildungsroman that make up the overarching story, they feel authentic and fresh. While I am somewhat facetious in this analysis because I know how self-important I can sound, I am excited by this discovery. I am now working on shorter fiction that will help me develop my voice while hopefully allowing me to instill my stories with a humorous realism.