I’m amazed by writers who produce long novels, trilogies, series. I wish I were a better faster reader. I am in awe of the way they can find a theme and develop it, introduce characters who demand our attention, how they take us someplace we didn’t expect and leave us changed, enriched in our own lives. Some writers have the ability to seemingly go on forever and leave us waiting for and wanting more.

And then there are writers, sometimes the same ones, who write short. More and more magazines publish and sometimes are entirely devoted to short short stories, flash fiction, sudden fiction. Those writers underwrite or stop when they’ve said just enough. That I understand well. I went through it at UCR when the professors would say things like “this is good but you need to develop . . .” or “flesh it out,” or “give us something to hold on to. . . .”

I would respond with something like “why should I belabor what’s been done already?” or “why go beyond where the reader gets the point?” I don’t think I actually voiced those defenses, but sometimes in a research paper or a literary analysis when they demanded footnotes and quoted references, I knew that they were training me in the system, trying to make me fit. But I might say “I know the critical canon is there, and I can invoke it, but must I replay it? Do we need “experts” or “scholars” to tell us what’s there in the literature when the literature tells us directly?” Not that I was contentious, certainly not disrespectful, not intentionally arrogant, but some of the stuff, “criticism,” “analysis” was often trying way too hard to disguise the fact that it was written to fill a quota. I deal with this issue in several articles including one I’m finishing and hope to find a home for, discussing Richard Eberhardt’s travails over “The Groundhog.” Interesting reading. I hope to finish it soon.

My struggles with the system, why write more when you don’t need to, are in another article almost ready about “Why I Never.” I should probably include my ambivalence about my undergraduate thesis. I was that smart ass kid who, when given the choice of comprehensive exams or a thesis, said I’ll do both. It wasn’t just ego, I felt I owed it to UCR, which I loved, and to myself to make up for those classes that I botched, to convince myself that I could do it after all. We all had a thesis advisor, and mine nudged me toward a topic I didn’t really choose, but accepted by default. I felt a fondness for the Elizabethan and post Elizabethan writers, and wound up writing about the Somerset Epithalamiums during the time of the Court of James I, just after Queen Elizabeth had died. The authors of that earlier Golden Age were still around and writing, I liked them, and I said why not? But I didn’t have a clear idea in my own mind of what I wanted to discover. I could do the research, and did, and wrote with the kind of assurance I can fall into entirely too easily. You may have noticed that. We presented our projects to our senior class of fellow borderline graduates, and mine was longer, almost too long, and I was uneasy because I kept asking myself Why did I write it? I felt it needed a better focus, a reason. If I had more time I think I could have found one satisfactory, or if not I could have scrapped the whole thing and found something else. When I read it to the professors and my fellow students, I came to the brief passage in French which I read with sufficient fluency so that the students gasped in amazement and exclaimed: “He speaks French, too!” I thought, “Well, aren’t we supposed to. . . ?” Not that I spoke French, because I didn’t, but I thought my fellow students should be better prepared not to be surprised. And then one of the professors, it may have been my advisor, wrote that the thesis would certainly qualify for the Master’s Degree, even for a Ph.D.

That really annoyed me, and I thought “Hey, wait a minute! What kind of game are we playing here? I don’t think it’s quite ready for the Bachelor’s Degree. So if this is the game, I don’t want to play it.” And that’s why I never.

But I’m getting off track here, I was rambling, even venting. Sorry. We were talking about writing short. I did take a class in creative writing. I liked it, actually learned a lot, wrote a bunch of stuff. I take some satisfaction in reminding myself that some of the stories that received heavy-handed criticism have since appeared in print. So there! Take that!

And I am able to be critical of myself, and of some of the current trends toward brevity when the story disappears. Like the contest which calls for stories of five words or less. Whaaaat? Huh? Ouch!

So now I have to look at some of my own stuff, those early efforts, and decide if there’s enough there. Do I just present the bare bones and expect the reader to flesh them out? Maybe. Or have I begun that chain of speculation, the way we read a poem, to trigger the felt meaning beyond the words? Perhaps. As an example, I offer one of those brief stories from that undergraduate creative writing class. I was young and emotional and didn’t want to have to think about things I didn’t want to think about.

 That story did see the light of day and appeared in the magazine Nitty Gritty, 12/1/77, the “Death Issue.”

The Flowers

There were flowers growing through the fence. She watched them every morning as she waited for the bus. They were wild, weeds really, just a few in a crack in the block-long fence. Only once had she seen flowers anywhere else in this part of the city: she had walked all her lunch hour and finally found them in front of a house that was being torn down. The flowers at the bus stop were special; they were always there. She chose this bus stop because of them. She watched them when she waited for the bus.

At work she did her job without caring very much. She did what was expected of her, was neat, never ambitious. She didn’t mind that she was considered an average worker. Many days she didn’t want to go to work at all. That was why she watched the flowers.

They thought she was odd at work. She didn’t care about them. She ate by herself and took walks or read. They called her names, she frustrated them. She didn’t care about them.

She was called into personnel where an empty woman told her there had been complaints, she wasn’t regular enough, and from now on would she please eat with her fellow workers and socialize on her coffee breaks. There had been complaints.

She had already begun to give in. Gradually she stopped bringing a book to work with her. She was pulled into the rush of office gossip and told what to repeat. She began to make office friends and office enemies.

When she joined someone else at coffee break, they started grouping factions about her. Each side would send representatives to ask who was she going on coffee break with? She didn’t care.

In the morning at the bus stop she was alone with the flowers. Sometimes she was desperate. The flowers always made things seem better than they were. The greatest German painter made himself better looking than he was; he looked better and better as his technique improved. Albrecht Dürer, she thought, 1471-1528. And how is my technique?

Once in the city library she overheard two librarians talking. One was asking the other if she had gone on coffee break yet. No, she said, and the other asked her if she knew who she was going with.

She thought of picking the flowers, of taking them to work with her. Then they would all see, she thought. If she took the flowers to work, they would see.

One morning she heard sounds behind the fence. There were machines digging up the ground. She was afraid for the flowers; she picked them and took them to work.

All morning long she watched the flowers carefully. No one else seemed to notice or to care, and after lunch they withered.

The next day at the bus stop the flowers were gone. She looked around helplessly. When the bus came, she stepped in front of it. It rolled quite over her.

They talked about it at work. And they bought flowers for her.

If you or someone you love is thinking about suicide, please dial 988 and talk to someone who cares, and who will listen to what you are going through.