Sherry Chandler

Things Kept, Things Left Behind

Having taken a short Labor Day vacation, I have been savoring the stories in Jim Tomlinson’s prize-winning collection Things Kept, Things Left Behind (Univ Iowa, 2006). Tomlinson is definitely an artist of the first order. I find his stories lean and well-crafted with not a word out of place.

That being the case, I was pleased to have my attention drawn to Jim’s post at the Backstory blog. Says Jim, in part:

I learned something interesting while writing these stories. A single character, no matter how quirky, no matter how brilliant an observer of life, no matter how animated or driven or put upon by circumstance, did not hold up well on the page. The stories that did catch fire were those in which two characters, both somehow driven, inhabited the pages. Like flint and steel …

A sort of variation of what Lee Maynard said in his novels workshop at Hindman last year: your hero must have a villain worthy of him/her, some one who can take her/him through the crucible. Though short stories don’t tend to have heroes and villains in quite the same way novels do.

Still, it is this matter of character — among so very many things — that separates the story-tellers from the poets. Or at least, it is this that separates me as a putative poet from the storytellers: the ability to create at least two living characters and set them acting and re-acting dynamically.

Back in the day when I was trying to write short fiction, I was a pretty good prose stylist, pretty good with dialogue, pretty good with timing and narrative. And I could usually do a pretty good job with my protagonist — usually a somewhat bewildered but canny country girl of approximately my age — but I just never could do more than set up paper tigers for her to knock down. I could never find more than one character in myself.

I was smart enough to realize this. Or possibly it’s just that I began to bore myself. With hard work, I may have been able to overcome this flaw in my writing. But in the end, I was not interested enough to do the hard work. What I was interested in was the rhythm of the language, bringing the language and not the characters up off the page.

It’s still the language that interests me enough to do the hard work.

Jim Tomlinson has done both the hard work of the language and the hard work of finding character. Go and read his comments at Backstory. Better yet, buy a copy of Things Kept, Things Left Behind and read his stories.

Possibly related posts:

An Interview with Jim Tomlinson

Nothing Like an Ocean?

Gin and Jim

For those prose writers among you

Things Kept, Things Left Behind

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.