How I Got These Burn Scars

My Fiction, Excerpted and Critiqued

So I won’t lie to you. I took a long weekend and went up to a little house by a lake. I kept the wood stove burning for almost 72 hours straight. I stared at the water. An intrepid soul sailed a boat through a snowstorm. Free-roaming dogs played in the backyard. Hundreds of crows congregated on the power lines.

It was a good weekend, but it presaged my return to my tiny studio and that familiar sense of doom. I try not to give in to that feeling, but I need to face up to the facts: I’m not up to doing the piece about Ulysses I had planned. It’s hard to do justice to Joyce at the best of times, and I’m facing down a lot of work that I should’ve been doing while I was watching the crows huddle together against the snow.

I do have something I think you might enjoy if you’ve been having fun with this newsletter. I talk a lot about my fiction, but not much of it has made it out into the world. Mostly that’s because for nearly five years I’ve focused on writing novels, and I haven’t sold one yet. In the spirit of getting more things out there, and because I thought you might get something out of it, and because I was watching the crows all weekend, I’ve decided to excerpt my most recent short story. It’s not that great, but I have the excuse that it’s an early draft. Afterwards, I’ll analyze my own work a bit. Here’s the opening of the short story Burn Scars, exactly as it was submitted to my workshop a couple of weeks ago:

The horizon pinkens with smoke.

“Pask,” I say, without turning, just in case he’s nearby, “come look at this. I promise you it’s worth your while.”

No answer.

A raven takes flight from the big dead Douglas fir. Silence otherwise, aside from distant crackling.

The last time the horizon was this pink, there was snow over everything. I spent a winter babbling against the quartzite boulder by the pond. I had begun to believe that I could freeze to—well, if not to death, then to oblivion. So I sat there and let the ice crystals lattice my skin, etching moose and foxes into the white grids of my own flesh. Sometimes a coyote would try to bite me and find that it was like mouthing air.

One evening, the sun caught the clouds at just the right altitude, and the western horizon went bright pink. I stared at it for a long time, believing it might mean something, might signify more than reflected light. Yet it was only beauty. How I’ve come to hate beauty. It wasn’t long after that I gave up on oblivion and joined Pask in the cabin. We made our ethereal fires that never scorched the gray logs.

The flames coming over the horizon might scorch something.

Might scorch everything.

“Pascal!” I yell, turning. “Fire!” Pause. “Real fire!”

Still no answer. There are only a few places he could have gone. We can’t go very far. When we go too far beyond this meadow, we feel faint, like we’re finally fading out. This feeling is always a relief. But if we push on, deeper into the trees, we black out. Then we awaken with the morning light. Propped up against the walls of the cabin like forgotten dolls.

My first decision is whether to try to find Pask. I already know that I will, but agency left me long ago. It feels good to have a choice. I want to savor the sensation, even as the meadow air goes acrid and sluicing smoke scrims the sun.

I haven’t seen Pask in days. This is not unusual, especially over the past decade or so. We were sick of each other as soon as the shock wore off, and it’s been so long since then. Nearly sixty years, judging by the clues we try to pick up from passing warm bodies. It’s easy to lose our grasp on time in this meadow. We track the changing of the seasons and the wandering animals. We try not to cause one another too much pain, though pain often feels like the only thing we can give.

“I would rather not have to save you,” I say softly, expecting no one to hear. I don’t know whether I’m talking to myself, or to Pask, or to the meadow itself. “But I will, if that’s what it takes to leave this place.”

I run down the path toward the cabin. My boots are as uncomfortably tight as they were the first time I met wildfire. Over the years, I’ve shredded my boots with Pask’s knife, burned them in our warmth-fires, thrown them into the lake. I even persuaded a lynx to prod them with her paw, to try to bite the leather. She found nothing but air. The problem is my boots are not leather. They just feel that way to me, and look that way to warm-bodied beings who know how to watch. Every morning, I awake with them shiny and tight on my feet, mocking me with their beauty.

OK so, after pasting that in and rereading it a couple of times, I already see things I want to change. That’s good for a work-in-progress, which needs to actually progress. Still, short fiction drives me insane, especially when it’s written by me. It’s supposed to be perfect! Mine is never perfect.

As we say in workshop, what’s working here? To give myself way too much credit, I’ll note that this piece, which is narrated by a ghost named Leila, has some respectable evocations of the spectral narrator’s physical reality. I’ll go so far as to say Burn Scars flashes some solid thisness. Leila etching drawings of moose and foxes onto her own skin or letting coyotes mouth her ethereal flesh—pat yourself on the back, Connor. You’re on your way to grounding us in a ghost’s reality.

Mostly what I dislike about this passage is the way it trips over itself. It can’t seem to decide in what order it wants to say things, or how much it wants to say at any given moment. Why do we need to know about that “babbling” winter right after we’ve opened in media res? Could that paragraph that begins with “Still no answer” perhaps end with “We can’t go very far,” rather than rambling on? Also smoke can’t “sluice” and “scrim” in the same metaphor—and the entire paragraph in which that phrase appears could probably be cut.

If you’ve ever heard me talk on my podcast—or in a classroom, or anywhere—you know that I like to undercut myself. I like to swerve in and out of points mid-sentence, the oral equivalent of an em dash. I can probably get away with a bit of this in fiction, especially in the first-person. But I find myself wanting to smooth down this passage. I want more etching of foxes into ice-latticed skin and less existential reflection.

I once saw a story draft that had been marked up by Ann Beattie. The living master of the American short story form kept writing in the margins of my friend’s draft, over and over again, “Tell us what’s happening.” The next draft of Burn Scars needs to do a better job simply telling us what’s happening. If the story is good enough, it will be enough just to tell it.

Have any thoughts of your own? Share them in the comments!

Calvin and Hobbes Corner

An angel only at night:

Sometimes Calvin and Hobbes is simply touching. Here we have the happy ending—the recovery of Hobbes. All is well, after Calvin’s secession from his family almost separated him from his best (only?) friend. Mom is overjoyed in a way that’s rare for either of Calvin’s parents. Dad is a hero.

Of course, there has to be a punchline. On rare occasions, Calvin and Hobbes goes for a pure tearjerker, but the melodrama is sparsely distributed enough that it largely feels like a way to add further dynamism to the pure comedy and fleet-footed existential whimsy. So we can acknowledge that Calvin is adorable while asleep, but only if we undercut it with a father’s tired wryness.

Did you see the helmet though? Hobbes has the helmet! It’s so cute.

A poem

Elizabeth Bishop does an exercise