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Fuck You, Pay Me #17: How to Write a Short Story

November 15, 2024  /  Susannah Breslin

This is part 17 of “Fuck You, Pay Me,” an ongoing series of posts on writing, editing, and publishing.

Recently, I wrote a short story. I’ve written short stories before; I even published a collection of short stories. Last year, I had a terrible time working with a big publisher on my memoir. In the wake of that negative experience—a bad editor, incompetent PR and marketing, the inability to control the outcome—I set out to reclaim my relationship to writing. When I wrote under contract with a big publisher, I lost my identity as a writer. What I wanted to do was reclaim who I was as a writer. I decided to start with a short story.

The Idea. Back in June, I visited the set of an adult movie for a story I was writing for Forbes.com. As I drove east to the location, I wondered how this time would be different from the last time. The first time I was on an adult movie set was 1997. Now it was 2024. I was a different person and exactly the same. As I stood on the porn set in a building where one would not expect to find an adult movie being filmed, I thought about how much older I was than I had been nearly 30 years ago on that first porn movie set I’d visited. In a way, I felt self-conscious about that; after all, porn is a business built on surfaces, how things look, the appearances of things. At the same time, I felt like with maturity, I could see what was in front of me more clearly: the players, the scene, the spoken and unspoken dynamics at play.

Sometime after that porn set visit this summer, I got an idea for a short story I wanted to write. While I’ve written a wide range of fiction, I thought this time I would try writing a short story that was about a subject of interest to me (the adult movie industry) and was stylistically something more traditional than, say, some of my other fiction writing. In other words, it would be a short story of the sort you might see published in The New Yorker—that just so happened to be concerned with the porn business.

My short story would about a man who was older, whose back hurt, and who discovered one day that an adult movie was being shot in the house behind his. (In the real San Fernando Valley, houses are occasionally rented for adult movie shoots.) And with that, I was off and running.

Stewart by Meta AI

The Details. The story would be called “Topical Matters.” Or “The Scopophiliac.” Or “Van Nuys.” Ultimately, I settled on “Topical Matters.” It would be around 5,000 words long, which was around how long some of the short stories published in The New Yorker in recent years were (although some were quite a bit longer). It would be inspired in part by “The Swimmer,” John Cheever’s 1964 short story classic in which a seemingly ordinary man attempts to swim home through backyard swimming pools in a seemingly ordinary suburb. The main character would be named Stewart, and his wife would be named Maureen. He would be retired, and he would be very interested in controlling his environment. The style of the story would be realism with a twist. The entire course of events would take place in a single day.

I estimated it would take me approximately two weeks to write this story. A week, maybe. Of course, it ended up taking longer than that (life got in the way, so it took about two months from start to finish to write). In a manner of speaking, the story itself would be irrelevant. The only thing that mattered when I was writing it was: Am I having fun? If I wasn’t, I wouldn’t do it. I hadn’t enjoyed writing a memoir under contract, working with a big five editor who did not seem to know how to edit, to attempt to tell the story of my life according to someone else’s idea of what that looked like. This story would be mine.

The Execution. Since I’d had such a shit time writing my memoir, I wasn’t sure if I could do the relatively simple task I’d assigned myself. I mean, it wouldn’t be easy, but I wasn’t even sure I could enjoy writing again. That said, I identified what I could do. I could write a 100-word paragraph. Couldn’t I? And what was a 5,000-word short story if not a series of, say, 100-word paragraphs? I would write one paragraph, and then I would write another paragraph, and that was how I would get there. The entire story would be comprised of five sections, each section some 1,000-words. That was doable, wasn’t it? Surely, it was.

And so it went. Some days I wrote a single 100-word paragraph. Some days I wrote several. At one point, I didn’t work on the story for several weeks. Eventually, though, I got back to it. I started falling in love with my main character, who I thought was hilarious. The premise amused me to no end, what this guy living this relatively normal life would do when he found himself encountering something rather remarkable. I envisioned the house. The yard. The wife. Her departure. How he came to discover that a porn movie was being shot in the house behind his. What his personal history in relationship to porn was. How he justified his curiosity, and what he found when he got there. I was Stewart, and Stewart was me.

The Shift. Somewhere along the way, things began to change. I started to feel more confident about my writing. I began to experience writing as play again (as opposed to work). I transformed into someone who wanted to write rather than someone who regretted what she had written. I was writing well, how I wanted to write, about what I wanted to write. Which seemed pretty ideal. The words kept coming, and when I didn’t get something, I waited for the insight to come. I talked to my shrink about the story. I woke up in the middle of the night and thought about my story. I wrote more and more, and as the end approached, I realized that writing for myself was where it’s at, not writing for someone else.

This process also enabled me to think more and in different ways about some of what I have experienced on adult movie sets over the years as a journalist. What was it like for the male porn star? How did the pornographer relate to his work? Why did the starlet say the things she said? Most centrally, I sought to capture what it was like to be on a porn set: curious, magical, dark, strange, disorienting, hilarious, perverse. As I neared the end, I felt I had captured that experience as best I could, not by nonfiction but by fiction.

The Product. A few weeks ago, on a Sunday, I finished editing my short story. Almost immediately, to my surprise, I was sad. Stewart wasn’t the most likable guy—he is stiff, uncompromising, judgemental—but I had liked him. For nearly two months, I had shared the intimacy of his inner-workings. I didn’t want to let that go. It would be the end of our relationship. I had my 5,000 words, give or take, but being done with the story meant letting it go, letting Stewart go, letting a world in which I was god go. But this wasn’t my first time at the short story rodeo, and I knew what I had to do next.

That day, I submitted my short story to about a dozen publications, The New Yorker among them. So far, I’ve heard from one publication, which declined it. In January, if no one has expressed interest in publishing it, I’ll publish it myself and sell it online. Right now, “Topical Matters” is a story looking for a home, some place that will embrace its main character and not reject it for its prurient leanings.

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tags / FUCK YOU PAY ME, FICTION, SHORT STORIES, PORN, SEX, WEIRD, WRITING, EDITING, PUBLISHING

Things in New Orleans That I Should Be Writing About Since I've Been Living Here for Six Weeks But Haven't Done So Yet

October 18, 2024  /  Susannah Breslin

This story was written by me when I was living in New Orleans and published on Pindeldyboz in March 2004.

1. The Cat Riding on the Back of the Dog. Actually, I did not see this. A man I know who I talked to before I moved here saw this. I want to see it. I want to see a cat riding on the back of a dog, for no reason.

2. The Cab Driver Who Crossed Herself Every Time We Drove by a Church. What the hell? I grew up in Berkeley. I was born and raised to be an atheist. Who is this woman driving my cab and what is she doing? It is sort of romantic, I suppose. What it is designed to prevent or conjure, I have no idea whatsoever. There are churches everywhere in this city. Doesn't her hand ever get tired? I want to know this.

3. The Person Sleeping on My Doorstep. I felt no sympathy for this person, at the time of our encounter. I was drunk. I assumed the Sleeper was, too. I stepped angrily over the Sleeper's head to get in my door. I was not very careful. Every day, I try to find the time to feel bad about what happened. I have not been able to make the time yet.

4. The Mississippi River. This seems a necessary subject. Today, I may ride my bike out towards it. Maybe then, the muse will crawl up my ass as I bounce along the pavement running next to it. Or, I might get hit by a train on the way there. I can't make any promises. Last weekend, some anarchists with no deodorant gave me a sticker for my bike. It reads, "This Bike is a Pipe Bomb." Ol' Miss is not a pipe bomb.

5. The Things Men Call Me. Baby. Darling. Doll. Sweetie. Honey. Precious. Other names. Sometimes all these words in the course of one or two or three sentences. My favorite is Sweet Girl. I am, after all, not a Sweet Girl. I have a sour expression and a rotten attitude. They don't seem to care.

6. The Train. I love the fucking train. The wail of it. What do you call that? Its whistle. The sound is different here, I swear. More bleating, almost. The other day, I saw a big white bird with a giant wingspan and a long beak flying out across the train tracks. It hung out in the grass next to the train. I was on my bike. For a moment, I felt sad, looking at it.

7. The Mardi Gras Beads Hanging From the Trees. They are like a cliché wrapped inside the metaphor in which I now find myself living. They're like this city's answer to the outlying plantations' Spanish Moss. When I first moved to this place, I thought about living in what they call Slave Quarters. But, it didn't seem like a good idea. You know?

8. Ernie K-Doe Mother-in-Law Lounge. Writing about this bar would be pointless. No matter how many rocks I overturned in the corners of my head, I would never be able to find the right words. I could never come up with the correct number for all the paper stars hanging from the ceiling, or the proper adjective for the wooden figure of Poor Dead Ernie propped up in the corner, or the best phrase to guess at what the hell his widow is thinking when she hands me my fucking drink. To say it is an immortal shrine to a no-longer living legend would be like calling Bugs Bunny a rabbit. Or something.

9. The Paint. It's everywhere, chipping and flaking and peeling. If I were to become smaller, and eat some of it, maybe I would die. That has not happened at this time.

10. The Smell of Funk in My Bed in the Morning. God knows what the hell I dream about in this place. When I wake up, I feel so bad, I'm glad I don't remember. I get shitty coffee around the corner. When I come back, it reeks in my bedroom. My pillows are covered with whatever black primordial crap has oozed out of my ears while my brain was allowed to run off its leash. I don't know what it means. I don't want to.

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tags / FICTION, NEW ORLEANS, ESSAYS, LISTS, WEIRD, DEPRESSION