the Scott Stein

When I was working on my M.F.A. degree at the University of Miami, I remember my mentor, author Lester Goran (Tales from the Irish Club, The Bright Streets of Surfside, others) asking me whether, for my thesis project, I would be writing a collection of short stories or a novel. A "book-length work of literary value and publishable quality" was required for graduation (a statement that deserves a blog entry of its own at some point). Choosing the short stories was considered a cop-out. Having time to write a novel is part of why people go for the M.F.A., but some students are intimidated by the prospect and opt to throw together the stories they've been writing for the past couple of years in workshops and call it a collection.

I wanted to write a novel and told Goran so, but also said, "I've never written a novel before. I don't know how to."

He said, "Everyone who's ever written a first novel has never written one before. And when you write your second novel, it'll be the first time you've ever written that one, too."

Writing novels is hard work, and each novel is like the first novel we've ever written. Writing my first novel Lost for my M.F.A. degree taught me how to write that novel. It didn't teach me how to write the second one, as I discovered while writing Mean Martin Manning. The books posed different problems that required their own solutions. The only thing that maybe made writing the second one a bit less frightening was that I'd finished writing a novel once before, so at least I knew (or suspected) it was possible to do it, sort of how meeting impossible deadlines consistently in any field gives you some confidence that you'll meet the next impossible deadline, even though you don't know how you're going to do it at the time. This is how I view writing the second novel now, with it written already. My perspective was probably not the same back when I didn't know if I would be able to write the second novel. Maybe approaching the second novel was more frightening than the first. What if I don't have anything left to say? What if I only have one novel in me? All that.

I wrote the bulk of Lost in 1997 and published it in 2000. I wrote the bulk of Mean Martin Manning in 2004 and it will be published late in 2006. Though I will spend the coming months promoting Mean Martin Manning, I know that it's time to begin thinking about writing a new novel. I don't have a hint of a premise yet. Every new novel brings with it the question, Where do these things come from?

Lost came from a single sentence: "It was the truth and there was no denying it." I wrote the sentence and liked it. What was the truth? Why was there no denying it? I had no idea. So I wrote lots of sentences, deleted them, and finally came up with: "Jeremy Keller was being followed." More questions. Why was he being followed? Who would follow him? The novel's first two paragraphs made it clear that the answer would not be conventional:

It was the truth and there was no denying it. Jeremy Keller was being followed. At first he didn't quite believe it. Who gets followed in real life?

In the movies and on TV and even in books people are followed all the time--usually private detectives, who manage to spot the blue sedan in the rearview mirror the instant it begins to tail them and who always escape after the requisite high-speed car chase. But this was life. Jeremy wasn't a private detective and had, to the best of his knowledge, never been followed before. It isn't as easy as it seems on TV. He didn't know if he should look at the man, or talk to him, or ignore him. As with everything else, there is a real if undefined etiquette to being followed.

These paragraphs and the first two chapters, totaling less than 10 manuscript pages, paralyzed me. In them, not only is Jeremy being followed by a mysterious man, but he receives a mysterious envelope. The only problem was that I didn't know why he was being followed or what was in the envelope, so I didn't write another word for five months. Only when I realized that it didn't matter what was in the envelope, that my novel wasn't about that, was I able to go forward, and then, as they say, Lost wrote itself (though I did all the work). The premise is that Jeremy is being followed, but unlike a normal person, who might be angry or frightened at discovering that he's being followed, Jeremy is delighted, because he has always believed that he was destined for something great and is sure that being followed is a sign of important revelations to come. The character and premise grew together, but clearly the premise came first. I asked, Why would a person be happy to be followed? A character with this peculiar take on things, wandering around Manhattan trying to discover why he's being followed, provided plenty of satirical opportunities.

Mean Martin Manning started as a paragraph:

His mother would sing to her baby in his crib with the voice of an angel. But when the angel sang Martin wept, because Martin was a mean baby. Some might say that babies are neither mean nor nice, that babies simply are--like moldable clay or blank slates. But Martin was mean all right. A mean baby. Later, he was a mean boy, still later, a mean adult, and his meanness, like a garden well-tended, grew with age. He was, at 83 years, meaner than in his youth, not the result of a hard childhood or bitterness at old age, but the predictable culmination of a life steeped in cruelty and uncaring.

I had this paragraph for more than a year, ended up writing another two pages or so, and then at least another year (maybe three) went by. I didn't spend all of the time staring at a computer monitor--there were reasons (or excuses) for not making progress on the novel. Little things, like getting married, having a son, buying a house, building a teaching career, running an online magazine. But the truth is that if I knew how to write the second novel, I would have been writing it no matter what else was going on in my life. I didn't know how to write it. I had no plot, no other characters, not much of a premise beyond what the first paragraph suggested, though the two-page chapter did mention that Martin hadn't left his apartment in more than 20 years. When I tried to write it, it was all wrong. So mostly I didn't try to write it.

Then I decided to throw out what I'd written--which was too stiff--and write the novel in first person, from Martin's point of view. I wrote the below, originally the novel's preface. It is not going to be in the published book, but does appear on Mean Martin Manning's home page:

All I wanted was to be left alone. It wasn’t that much to ask. I didn’t want sympathy or help or your free cheese. Just to be left alone. If you had let me be, none of it would have happened. Don’t blame the sleeping dog if you go and poke it with a stick. Dogs are dogs. They don’t appreciate being poked. If you get your ass bit off, good for the dog.

Dogs are dogs. You can’t change them. Sure, the young ones can be trained. Throw a bone and watch them roll over. Big deal. They’ll also hump a chair leg, geniuses. The young ones don’t know the difference. But don’t try it with the old ones. There’s nothing like a true cliché. It isn’t that the old ones aren’t smart enough to learn anything new. It’s just that they know a chair leg when they see one.

If I had been a dog you can bet I wouldn’t be fetching anyone’s shoes, either. If some prick tried getting me to fetch his shoes, I might piss in them. No, I’d definitely piss in them. Actually, now that it’s come up, I don’t think shoe-pissing ought to be the exclusive province of canines. There are some people whose shoes I’d like to piss in right now.

Not that I’ve actually done such a thing. For the record--because posterity deserves a full, accurate account of my experience, and outlandish accusations are probably already being thrown about--I never pissed in anyone’s shoes. There’s no need for exaggeration--I stick to the facts. I’m a little ashamed to admit that this is the first time pissing in a shoe occurred to me. There were some very deserving people, and all of them owned equally deserving footwear of one kind or another.

The novel's premise grew out of the tone of this preface. What would happen if Martin Manning, who hasn't left his apartment in 30 years, were confronted by the outside world? This led to the question, Who would confront him and why? Exploring the question led to lots of satirical possibilities.

I haven't yet hit the I'll-never-have-an-idea-for-another-novel-again morass, but I expect it will come soon enough, in the spring as the academic year winds down and I realize that summer will soon be here, with time to write. It'll be depressing. There will be anxiety. I'll be unpleasant to live with. Which is all good, because for me that's part of writing novels, too, a necessary step that means I'm on the way to pushing myself toward novel number three. When the struggles come and I don't know what to do next, I will try not to panic. After all, I'll tell myself, it's the first time I've ever written my third novel.


Scott Stein is the author of the novels Mean Martin Manning and Lost.

I wrote “The Stacker” when I was 23. It’s the first real story I ever wrote. (It’s also the first story I had accepted for publication, though not the first to be published, but I’ll talk about that later.) I’d written other stuff as an undergraduate at the University of Miami, where I majored in creative writing, but nothing I would call a story. As an undergrad fiction writer, mainly I flopped around, like a fish on a boat.

When I graduated I took a job with a small advertising agency in New York City. I answered phones when I started there, but pretty soon was writing copy for ads and brochures for toys and dog toys and wine--including Louis Jadot and Taittinger Champagne.

I was going to New York University at night, after writing the dog toy copy all day. In my final term at NYU, I was working on my master’s thesis on Kafka. For a couple of months I think I thought I was Kafka.

That same semester I decided to apply for M.F.A. programs. I hadn’t written a word of fiction since getting my B.A., nearly two years earlier. But M.F.A. applications required creative writing submissions. Besides, if I was going to be a fiction writer, at some point it figured that I’d have to write some fiction.

I wrote “The Stacker” over a couple of nights. With some distance now from its creation, I see three influences on this story.

One was my job, where I didn’t love what I was doing, but where I worked with people who did, who, viewed through my generic idealism at the time, took dog toys, and writing about dog toys, and photographing dog toys, a bit too seriously. The angry, perpetually hungover graphic designer I worked for talked about his work--which wasn't particularly impressive--the way writers and artists talk about their craft. I was thinking about what art is and how people delude themselves about the importance of what they're doing.

One was Kafka.

One were the questions I had about my own skill as a writer, the value of what I was doing, why I was doing it, whether I was fooling myself, you know, little things, like the meaning of life.

After I wrote “The Stacker,” I felt pretty good about it and for the first time chose to submit a story to literary journals. I was totally naïve about the whole process, did all the wrong things--I sent it out blind, without having read any of the journals I was submitting it to. I didn't read literary journals. Still don't. I just looked through a guidebook and picked the most prestigious literary journals I could find that allowed simultaneous submissions.

A couple of months later I got a letter from The Quarterly. Inside was my ten-page manuscript. The first six pages had giant X’s covering the entire pages. On the seventh page it said, “Start here.”

There was a handwritten note on a card clipped to the manuscript. I no longer have the note, but it said something like, “If you’ll make these changes, we’ll publish this.”

It was signed G. Lish.

At the time, I didn’t know who Gordon Lish was. I didn’t know that he’d been the fiction editor at Esquire. I didn’t know that some people thought he deserved as much credit as Carver for Raymond Carver’s early stories. I didn’t know that The Quarterly was a big deal.

Anyway, I cut the first six pages and awaited my first publication, in a national literary journal edited by Gordon Lish. When I started the M.F.A. program at Miami, a fellow student who had heard that I had a story coming out in an upcoming issue of The Quarterly, told me he’d push his own grandmother down a flight of stairs to get published there (which he stole from someone, Faulkner maybe?). Obviously, I avoided this kid as much as possible, but it was apparent that this publication was a big deal.

Soon enough I saw the galleys, my name in print for the first time. I was to be in the next issue. It was a magical day. Then I waited. And waited. And waited some more. Weeks turned to months. Finally a letter came, explaining that The Quarterly had run out of money. The issue might have been printed already, if I remember correctly, but there was no money left to distribute the copies. The Quarterly went out of business.

I mourned for a day, then out the story went, this time with a cover letter explaining that Gordon Lish had edited it, and within a couple of weeks The G.W. Review accepted it, and “The Stacker” was finally published, about two years after I first wrote it. It turned out to be the second story I published even though it was the first I’d had accepted for publication.

The most important thing is what I learned from my one encounter with Gordon Lish, when he cut 60% of my story. It was a great lesson. I think it’s saved me 60% of the work of being a fiction writer. Ever since then I cut out 60% of the story before I start writing it.

Below is the final, published version of “The Stacker.”
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The Stacker
by Scott Stein

The stack was developing as a sort of snowflake, with a symmetry as unconventional as it was unconditional. The columns at the snowflake’s outer tips consisted of the rectangular crates, which grew larger as they neared the ceiling, and the crates with still more sides also grew progressively larger throughout the stack. The stack was sorted by code in a diagonal pattern, both alphabetically and numerically, and a chessboard arrangement had also emerged, with the alternation of light and dark wood crates throughout.

Had the Stacker intended all of it? Any of it? He didn’t understand how it had worked out to such perfection. The pieces had just fallen into place. He couldn’t believe the beauty he had brought into the world, and stood for a moment, still and silent and wondering how it had all happened. Finally, he had a stack that he wanted people to see, that people were capable of seeing. The other stackers would never tell him they liked it, he knew that. They would resent his accomplishment; their blind jealousy wouldn’t allow them to acknowledge the greatness of his art. He didn’t need them anyway. A stack as important as this one could not be long ignored.

With a synthesized chime and a flashing red light, the freight elevator’s doors parted. For a full minute, the automated treadmill churned loudly as it steadily spewed more crates into the room. The Stacker laughed for a second. This was clearly a joke. There was never more than one delivery per day. Someone was having fun at his expense. Who could be playing games like this? No one. It was no joke. He had no friends, no one who would trouble with such childishness. And tampering with crates was a serious offense. No, this was a real shipment, and he would have to assimilate it into the rest of the stack. How could they do this to him? He looked at the perfection of the stack he had constructed, marveled at its purity, and was afraid to disturb it, to introduce new crates that might upset the harmony it embodied.

But looking upon it made him know that he had nothing to fear. He was now one of the Masters. The finest stack in history stood before him, fashioned by his own hands, and this new challenge could only result in further greatness. He strapped a crate and maneuvered it into position, and another, and another. The stack reached nearly to the ceiling. He worked even more frantically than he had the first time, and the stack grew in size and beauty. The symmetry continued, and the top half of the stack mirrored the lower, with the new crates now getting smaller as they approached more glorious heights. Certainly it would be the subject of numerous papers and articles. Probably the University would offer research grants to study it at length. The Stacker was sure to be made a supervisor. He would likely tour the country, speak to panels, and help with important decisions and policies.

He swung and hooked and strapped until his hands burned and his back ached. He ran and leapt and nearly danced as he became one with the stack, until he understood each crate as if he had built it himself, until his clothes were wet and his arms were heavy. Then, still sweating and panting, he realized that it was done. The stack was complete. Its giant shadow drowned out the light, and he stood, shivering in awe. He wished it weren’t so dark. He couldn’t get a good look at the stack, and turned toward the wall to brighten the light, but bumped into a crate instead. He was inside the stack, in the center of the immense snowflake, which was everywhere flush with the ceiling. The Stacker had walled himself in. He couldn’t get out and couldn’t see the stack from the outside, as it was meant to be seen. He had to find a way out. The collators would be by soon, there would be transfer requests, and he couldn’t be found in this ridiculous position, trapped by his own creation. The greatness of his stack would be lost if it got out that he had imprisoned himself. The first thing one learned as a stacker was to leave a way out. The fundamentals had eluded him.

Just then there was a knocking from the hall. He didn’t answer. A banging. He held his breath and was motionless. More banging, and the Stacker heard a sheet of paper being slipped under the door and then withdrawing footfalls. He was saved. He had bolted the door, and no one would be able to enter until he unlocked it himself.

The Stacker grabbed a crate and slowly began shimmying it loose. He had designed the stack so that he could remove crates when called upon without disturbing the integrity of the overall structure. True, he had intended to remove them only from the outside (after he’d shown the stack to the proper persons and had it photographed), but that shouldn’t make any difference. He slid the crate from side to side before finally pulling it through.

There was a distant creak and a rumble, and the giant shadow wavered. The columns swayed slightly, and the Stacker ran to one and tried to hold it in place. There was a perfectly square hole where he’d pulled the crate loose, large enough for him to escape from the deteriorating stack, but he made no move toward it. He ran from one column to another, but the rumble grew louder and the wavering more severe. As the crates toppled from their height, he made no effort to evade them but struggled to brace the stack, still pitifully leaning into a trembling column when the first crate came down on his head. The entire stack followed. A deafening crash of wood sprayed throughout the room as the Stacker was crushed to death and buried beneath tons of plain, ordinary crates. On the floor next to the steel door, half-covered with dust and shards of wood, was a sheet of paper. It read: Crates sent in error. Do not stack.

----

Scott Stein is the author of the novels Mean Martin Manning and Lost.

Novelist Graham Greene obliterates the distinction between “literary fiction” and “entertainment.” Some serious, literary authors trade in obscurity and pretension that almost no one wants to read and few enjoy. Some popular authors get readers to buy books and turn pages, providing a diversion, but have nothing to say and leave no impression. Ignore these literary bores and popular formula factories and read something by Graham Greene, who wrote page-turner after page-turner, creating intensely dramatic situations and memorable characters and shining light on human nature and society as only he could. No writer builds such tension in his quiet way, in so little space, the narrative always seeming to take the reader by surprise with its power. His short stories are strong, but the novels are what make Greene a major author. My readers can make their own suggestions, but I’ll recommend A Burnt-Out Case, Brighton Rock, and The Quiet American.


Note: From time to time I'll be highlighting a "featured author," to introduce students, and anyone else interested, to a variety of writers. I hope to have some balance between fiction and nonfiction, political and nonpolitical, living and deceased, famous and somewhat less well-known (but deserving of attention). You can find past featured authors here. Of course, many of my readers will be familar with these authors, and are welcome to comment or recommend different works.

It was a good week for links. It was so hot on Wednesday, we had to do something indoors with our son, so we visited Barnes & Noble (because there is a Thomas train table and we had a couple of gift cards left over from birthdays). While browsing, I found an anthology called This Is Not Chick Lit. I blogged about it here. Since then, it has prompted links by Reason magazine's Hit and Run blog; Frank Wilson's Books, Inq.; the Grumpy Old Bookman (the link's under "Deconstructing glorious Gloria," down the page); Karin Gillespie (a chick lit writer?); and an aspiring novelist named Julia Buckley. The editor of Per Contra, my colleague Miriam N. Kotzin, e-mailed me to tell me that one of the authors in the anthology (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) writes for them and is a former Drexel student. A couple of successful novelists (women) I'm friends with e-mailed me with their views, though I'm not at liberty to discuss the details. It was a busy couple of blog days. I'm glad people found the post interesting. Now scroll down and read "The Last Peanut," (which Frank Wilson was gracious enough to link to here). I won't keep mentioning every single person who ever links to me (unless it's a big one), but I've been blogging for a couple of months now without much traffic, so it's nice to be finding readers.