Right, sorry, no story this month.

Or rather, that should be “Hooray! you don’t have to read the pile of bilge I was preparing this month!”

I read about minimalism this morning. The essay began:

When you study minimalism in Tom Spanbauer’s workshop, the first story you read is Amy Hempel’s “The Harvest.” Next you read Mark Richard’s story “Strays”. After that, you’re ruined.

Chuck Palahniuk, the author, goes on to explain that the sentences crafted by Hempel are so concentrated in richness that after reading Hempel you will hate just about anything else you read. It goes on to explain some of the tenets of minimalism, which I’m not going to attempt to apply fastidiously, but the essay did inspire me to pare down my sentences.

Reading the essay had the same effect on me as Hempel had on Palahniuk. Suddenly I saw one of the (presumably many) major flaws in my writing. It was bloated. For example, here’s a partial rework of a couple of paragraphs from the start of my unfinished story:

Before:

She huddled in the shelter of the doorway as the wind whipped the caps off the waves and lashed her with salt spray. She glanced up at the rest of the flock, idiotically wheeling and darting at the window in the side of the lighthouse high above. As she watched them, she marvelled at their stupidity: the speed of the wind; the number of sharp beaks flying around in all directions in close proximity to the softer body parts; the way that only a small error in wing trim in those conditions could quite easily result in a gull careening head first into the unforgiving stone wall, followed by a plummet to the ground and almost certain death, from the fall itself or from being washed from the rocks into the sucking grey turbulence below. How much wiser to remain on the ground where the forces, and hence the potential for calamity, were much smaller.

Still, she thought. I wonder what they have up there. Probably some fish from the lighthouse keeper’s kitchen.

After:

She huddled in the shelter of the doorway, as the flock wheeled and darted at the windowsill high above. She could smell the scraps the lighthouse keeper had put out and an emptiness opened in her gut. She could wait. She had grown good at waiting.

Cold. Hungry.

The trouble is conveying the sucking greyness of the ocean, the cold spray lashing faces, and the crushing pain of seeing your brother die at the promising start of his life while at the same time keeping your adjective count down. Describing the world indirectly through the physical reactions of the characters in that world rather than through the clumsy application of more language, repeating and layering themes.

Every sentence is highly distilled. You end up with a short story because you took a lot of stuff and boiled away all the padding, not because you just didn’t write very much.

Damn.

The next idea needs to be a simple one to keep the story length down.

And one that isn’t crap.