The Image, a story I wrote a few days ago for the 100 Days Project, is a breakthrough story.  It’s hard to express why.  After I finished the story, it became somewhat of a struggle to generate ideas for the following days as Part two and The Wisdomgivers have somewhat weak concepts, and weak concepts are hard to write through.  You’d think that after a breakthrough, things would fly, but that hasn’t been the case, as after The Image I suddenly became too serious, thinking, “Hey, The Image is a breakthrough.  This must mean something profound.”  Not necessarily.

It’s difficult to express why The Image got me excited.  The explanation probably won’t make a lot of sense.  But it has to do with voice.  Voice in writing is one of those sloppy ideas, too ofen promoted.  It can point to any number of meanings: the distinct tone of a piece of writing; a sense of authorial style which distinguishes one author from another; the presence of a speaker in a reader’s head; semantic or dictive uniqueness.  I mean it in another sense, that is, the voice the author hears as her or she lays material out on paper.  In The Image I heard a voice I’d never heard expressed in my own process.

In my ear, the voice appears somewhere here (just one example):

But it also promotes a likelihood of futures. Because the image may want the viewer to consider what the woman will do as a response to “I eat raw animal intestine” or “I never want to see you again” or “I just don’t like cats and never will” or “I hate Italian food” or “I have an untreatable disease.”

It begins with “But it also promotes” and ends with “disease,” and draws from the paragraph prior as lead in. The voice has a certain beat or cadence and served to listen for required edits. In going back, I could listen for the beat and remove phrasings that either didn’t matter or supplied useless information.

However, the voice didn’t serve me in The Robbers, which was an experiment in developing two references from The Image.

So, here are a series of questions: does every successful story develop its own sense of voice sensed by the author? How much does authorial voice influence character growth/nurture? Is voice too heavy of a concept to bother with much? Can a particular story voice or character flavor influence other unrelated stories? If voice is tied to one particular work, is it unnecessary thereafter for others, or simply untappable? Does this make short short stories or flash fictions less durable as a form than the longer, more sustained sounds in longer narrative works? Does this notion of voice disrupt lexia development in hypertext, heighten the importance of rhythmic and sound qualities in hypertext, or assist in developing narrative from links and link or semantic relationships?

100 Days is progressing. We have 86 more days to go. On my I end, I wonder what I’m learning after fourteen consecutive pieces of work, some of which have floated to the surface out of a swirl of ideas. Each has been different and with each I’ve tried to introduce something new.

There are a few rules. Each has to be a “story.” Each should be constructed in a day, which is somewhat of a task. Last year, I wrote a poem following Carianne’s work, and we’d talked about flipping the scenario as a follow-up project. Now that the scenario has been flipped I’ve been able to consider the differences between the poems and following Carianne and writing stories as a kick off to the day and then, throughout the day, considering how John’s, Jessica’s and other artists work influence my thinking.

Writing a story a day is not “the” task. Last year I was able to write several poems a day. When Carianne posted her work, I was ready to write something unique. But writing stories takes different muscles. While I write several ideas a day, and maybe even a few stories, I find myself moving into the next day sooner because I can’t let the ideas sit.

The first consideration is time before, time during, and time after. Warm up, work out, and cool down are pretty much usable metaphors. These periods are different for every story. Let’s say we need to get Hank onto the beach where he finds a body washed onto the sand (maybe it’s someone he knew, maybe someone who’d threatened him.) It may be that Hank isn’t at the beach. He’s at Harold’s place. Or he is at the beach and the “maybes” take center stage. (It me just a few moments to write this–time spent).

. . . and there you have it. Each thought breeds another and the writer is stuck with Hank until his issue has been dealt with. In my case, image drives the poetry, but character demands different questions, as do the other works being created by John and Co.

Both White Dwarf and The Rabbit, Part 2, the latest stories in the 100 Days Project, at least on the story side of things, are narrative experiments.

Given the material that’s developed, my intention has changed to some extent. Over the last couple of years, I’ve focused on examining images by way of “compressed language,” which is an attempt to pack as much concrete detail or energy into as few rhetorical parts as possible. But what about plot? How much suggestion or narrative net can be gained with the application of compressed language.

In The Rabbit, Part 2, for example, the woman protagonist follows Pelgram.

He leaned to a cab at a line. She had to time this one well, better than she’d had to other days. “Can you follow that one?” she asked the cabbie, who said, “Yup.”

Here lots of things happen. Pelgram goes to a line of cabs and is driven away. The woman goes to the line, too, enters a cab, asks the driver if he can follow Pelgram’s, and he agrees. But it’s a small part of the narrative, which would include circumstance, reasoning, sequencing, and, most critically, closure. Several points of player action are excluded from the above, because “timing,” “speed,” and “tension” are keys.

Likewise, in White Dwarf, conflict is “suggested” or “restricted” by dialogue, the source of which the reader can infer.

“Look how the water explodes from the sole’s of his sneakers after he walks through puddles on stormy days. They needed four grown men to pull him from the concrete he stepped into. The ferry rides low, you know the work day’s done.”

In this section, I was trying to get a large amount of data to the reader with as little narrative insulation as possible, using dialogue as the sole device of carrier of conflict, character, and time.

Almost every paragraph in White Dwarf expresses closure or attempts to. This is not, however, true of The Rabbit series, which I can already see as developing into a sequence of linked stories. In White Dwarf “setting” is conveyed through dialogue and through response to environment. I don’t know how many paragraphs I had to write to find the first paragraph, but I went back to it a lot.

They said he was a strange volume, scariest in flight. “My god, you’re torturing this boarding ramp,” a large woman in a business suit said.

I remember the first go, which I wrote after the plane was already over Chicago. It was

They said he was a strange volume.

I added the boarding ramp object and business woman because I wanted to suggest the protagonist’s problem “in action,” not as a narrative description, with something like: “On the boarding ramp, a woman looked at him and said . . . ” The story did not want to “show” the protagonist as a described agent, as this would have revealed “too little.” Revealing “too little” has become one technique to explore further in future stories, but not in all of them. The concept driving this I think has to do with the look and feel of short Chinese and Japanese poetic forms or landscape design, where curve or color may be drawn by interrelations and not necessarily by a single object in space, much as in hypertext.

In this, I’m also learning from sound and image being produced by other members of the project, as I’ve coming back to the stories via different senses and different focal points.

100 Days is proceeding. I already have the opportunity to reflect on the lists I’ve had in Tinderbox. Over the semester it was difficult to consider narrative in depth. Already the flood gates have opened and story notes won’t stop. It’s difficult to sit down and NOT write a story until early morning.

At the soccer field the other day during a conversation with a friend a particular subject sent me to my moleskin and I jotted down an idea, an idea that I’ll develop in the morning, but structure will be in mind, built around the two story requirements–conflict and complication. For example, in Tinkerton, I had the ands and ors in my head for the past month, but did not know about squirrels or pigeons or war. But I do know that in The Rabbit, there’s a rabbit, but why, and to whom is this rabbit connected?

Furthermore, I can already see the seeds of character relationships inside certain ideas. There are lots of narratives on the back burner, but I can already sense which stories will extend through multiple POVs.

100 Days has been kicked off with a story called The Backups. We’ve had a few hard drive failures over the last few months. First my wife’s MacBook went, then Maggie’s, then one of John’s G Drives. Then I got paranoid and started up a Time Machine routine.

The question became: when do you back up the backup.

The larger question, of course, is generating a story about the issue and making sure everything required is covered. Middles are the key. And their study through the medium.

In Tinderbox, I have notes filled with titles and brief idea sketches, soon to be developed daily into stories, not much more that flash or sudden fiction length.

Anyway, we’ve begun.