The summer 2009 100 Days project is complete. The participants have been:

Carianne Mack, watercolor paintings
Jessica Somers, photography
Susan Ersinghaus, photography
John Timmons, sound composition and photos
Susan Gibb, hypertext fictions
Maggie Ducharme, meals
Neha Bawa, poetry
Mindy Bray, photography
Denna Hintze-Yates, verbal image
Mary Ellen Molski, character and story
Steve Klema, sketches conained in a flash interface, with Facebook work by Robert Wren and his Boracho Station reports, and with beginnings by James Revillini and David Pender.

And me,
Steve Ersinghaus, story

I want to express my thanks to everyone for their amazing efforts and their fantastic constructions. I think it’s going to take quite a bit of time to digest the totality, from Carianne’s infinite stuffings of things that should not be lost, to Susan Ersinghaus’s … at the moment I don’t understand the nature of honesty… to John Timmons’s 090810, to Susan Gibb’s Have You Heard the One About.

On my end, the project was about 100 stories in 100 consecutive days; it was about the physical act of writing every day with a specific goal. Every morning for 100 days I’d make coffee and sit down and write, and on the difficult days I banged and put up what came. When nothing comes, the trick is to extend and grab and go with the craziest idea you can imagine. I ended with The Receiver and began with The Backups, which seems a very long time ago. Out of the hundred, the types are many: mainstream fictions, stories about monsters and time travel; science fictions, horror fictions, and even some dabbling into mystery and thriller; and there were the parodies and the dips into surrealistic play. There were some formal and voice experiments. Withal, things got written that wouldn’t have been written without the project frame, which was to force the issue for 100 Days.

I wanted to write interesting pieces that were by definition “stories,” meaning that they introduced a problem and then resolved (not solved) the problem, developed character, and had an act or arc structure. But, best of all, I wanted to push my ideas, go places I hadn’t imagined the day before, and engage people who are interesting, strange, and dangerous.

Many of the characters recurred: Computer Leon, for example, Cruz and Maricela, and Pelgram. Many settings recurred: the desert, the city. Many of the themes: flight, technology, and fear.

There are some conclusions to make. I have no one method for developing a story, as each story will be different. Sometimes, as in Computer Leon, the premise drove the story. In my town, we have these lawn signs that advertise a certain computer person. How the story would resolve was a mystery, but when it did resolve, the resolution was tied to the premise. In another case, an image drove the story and the resolution of the story was tied to the image, thus came The Image, which was a story driven by an interpretation of an image I saw in a book my wife happened to be reading. Other times, as in The Night, I had the impulse to write something treating fear, and the outcome haunts me, as in this story nothing can be done to save the child, as the conditions of the story prevent this. The Night is surreal and horror.

And so, what the writer should do to write a story depends on the story being written. However, there are certain technical similarities. Typically, the stories that did not get posted faded to abstraction or I lost interest in the plot or the character. However, most of the successful stories were written quickly, without a lot of interruption, and the images, dialogue, and plots held firm. Brief, compact images are what I like to write, even though the story may be long or short, poetic images that rely on a compressed phrasing and grammar, not long descriptions of things or events, which is a technique I’ve acquired over time, heavily influenced by poetry and writers like Borges and Alice Munro.

Now, and over the course of the Fall, I’ll be using Tinderbox to study the output, to link commonalities, and to hunt down hidden elements.

Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666 is immediately interesting and powerful. One element that stands out in the novel is Bolaño’s love and devotion to his characters and his method of letting them be and letting them go where their natures take them. That’s a pretty sweeping way of talking about Pelletier, Morini, Amalfitano and Faith (as if they were out of Bolaño’s control, that’s not really what I mean). After the first few parts, beyond the devotion to Pelletier’s and Faith’s obsessions or drives or world views, there’s also an important devotion to geographic and linguistic spaces. Europe, for example, as a place that Pelletier, Morini, Espinoza, and Norton move across as they attend conferences or visit each other, is treated as a collection of points. London is mentioned, as are other cities, but without Norton in London, or Pelletier in Paris, London and Paris mean nothing. Norton, in 2666, in a sense, is London, for without her, London would be meaningless to Pelletier. This spatial element in the novel makes Pelletier relative to London as Norton is relative to Paris. This spatial relationship makes their love stories that much more powerful.

This is a significant idea in the novel, especially in The Part About the Crimes, where, in Santa Teresa, a fictional city in the state of Sonora, which borders Arizona, numerous women are being murdered, which immediately calls to mind the feminicidios in Ciudad Juarez, just across the border from my home town of El Paso. For Bolaño it’s the women that matter and Santa Teresa just happens to be the place where the murders are occurring, and Santa Teresa just happens to be a common point where all the characters must converge. Which brings me back to the first point: because place becomes a backdrop, the characters, and this means every character, from criminals, college professors, and prostitutes, are all given human respect in the novel and, at least in my mind, just the right amount of detail, as if the narratives inside 2666 develop from explosive, nuanced, elegant, and almost distinct parts. This doesn’t mean Paris means nothing or that places are placeless, it means that the people of The Part About the Critics, which is a fabulous love story, are given every ounce of energy and attention.

Examples coming. Because they’re fun.

The last two stories in the 100 Days project, currently at number 88, had interesting development. The New Geometry and The Voice happened in different ways.

The New Geometry was a late story and somewhat of a struggle. I woke up Sunday morning after a late reading at New London’s Hygienic at about 8:30 or 9, which is late for me. The dog was somewhat troubled, slashing his tail at the bottom of the stairs, and the cats were already chasing after each other. The New Geometry, which began with “The Scratch” as its title, started with an impulse image just to get things going. A man finds a scratch on his car. At first I thought the shape of the scratch would be an unnamed geometric shape (so in the back of my head I had an echo of geometry as a theme or a persistent image) and that this shape would be repeated on various other cars or places.

When I hit on the father, a suggestion came from the mother in the story, that the father would somehow return, hence the conflict and the new title. When this occurred to me, it called for fairly extensive revision, and the last item was the building facade with the chess board.

The Voice was influenced by Bolaño’s character Amalfitano, who (where I am in the novel at the moment) is hearing voices. Last night when I went to bed, I figured I’d write a story about a man hearing a voice, too. I knew how it would start but didn’t know what would happen after the line: “The man heard a voice that told him sensible things.” The next question is obvious: what are the sensible things? Next idea: if a man hears a voice telling him to do sensible things, this wouldn’t necessarily be pleasant. In the end, it seems to me that after killing the voice, the man is left in a pretty odd state, which may be entirely normal, but, then again, maybe not.

Anyway, Bolaño’s 2666 is definitely getting under my skin. Amalfitano’s tale is an extended lesson in uncomfortable landscapes, like being suspended over sharp rocks with just a few and maybe frayed strings holding you up.