SHALLA CHATS with Elizabeth Kadetsky

“Writing Great Short Stories”

by Shalla DeGuzman

First of all, who’s Elizabeth?

Elizabeth Kadetsky has been a fellow to Camargo Foundation and MacDowell, a Fulbright to India and a Dodge Foundation grantee for writers affected by September 11, and has won a fellowship to the Wesleyan Writers Conference and scholarships to Sewanee and Breadloaf.

Aside from the upcoming Best New American Voices, her short stories have appeared in The Pushcart Prizes Anthology, Gettysburg Review, Santa Monica Review, Natural Bridge, Red Rock Review, Cream City Review, Greensboro Review and elsewhere. Her short-story manuscript was the top selection in the 2004 AWP Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction and has been a finalist in the Iowa Short Fiction Award and the Flannery O’Connor Award, while Chris Offut chose one of her stories as the top selection in the Iowa Prize; others have been honorable mentions or finalists in prizes from Atlantic Monthly Student Fiction, the Dana Award, New Millennium, Crazyhorse, the Lorian Hemingway Short Fiction Contest, Southeast Review Short-Shorts, the Dora Teitelboim Center for Yiddish Culture, the Center Press, and the Heekin Group/Tara Fellowship. She is working on a novel set in India and is also the author of memoir set in India, First There Is a Mountain, published by Little Brown in 2004.

She holds an MFA in fiction from UC Irvine and teaches in the creative writing program at Sarah Lawrence College and at Columbia University’s School of Journalism.

Shalla: Hello Elizabeth, thank you for joining us. Congratulations on receiving so many awards for your fiction.

Elizabeth: Thanks Shalla

Shalla: Are you working on a collection of short stories? Please tell us about it. Does it have a specific theme?

Elizabeth: I’ve had a manuscript in progress since I finished my MFA, in 1999, though it’s been through many incarnations and has changed titles several times. In its most respect aspect it is titled “What We Saw and Other Stories” and includes seven pieces that I feel all hold together though a certain sensibility and subject matter, though this is less rigidly defined than in past versions. I have about twenty completed stories, most of which have been published and/or cited for prizes.

In one previous version, the collection had the subtitle “Love and Loss in Distant Places,” which I felt encapsulated a running theme of the traveler-seeker who encounters trouble abroad. But now, the pieces are in a weird way more coherently interconnected, but that’s more through voice and thematic preoccupation than subject matter.

They’re urban, sometimes apocalyptic, and generally deal with a narrator’s attempts to reconcile an irrational belief in a kind of fated, even spiritual harmonic universe with a more existential and dark urban and transglobal reality, one challenged by cultural disconnects and a breakdown of idealism, or, perhaps better said, a clash of differing idealisms.

Shalla: What inspires you to write?

Elizabeth: I started doing it when I was twelve and it, along with other kinds of artistic expression, gave me an exalted and sometimes ebullient or even ecstatic feeling. An ability to access this feeling carried me through the difficult years of adolescence and the random other rough spots.

At some point I also came to a kind of understanding about what made certain writing great, and transcendent, and I wanted to emulate those writers who were producing that writing. I still do. Bernard Malamud comes to mind, to name just one, rather randomly.

Shalla: Where do you find your stories? And how do you generate ideas?

Elizabeth: I have too many ideas. It’s one reason that I like to teach nonfiction.

I can hand out story ideas and then cross those ideas off the endless lists in my notebook, and hopefully then move on to a clean notebook -- that is once everything in the old notebook has been taken care of or doled out.

I’m constantly taking down notes about odd things I notice, juxtapositions, images, funny bits of dialogue. For instance a guy talking on his cell phone as he races past the Gandhi statue in Union Square Park in NYC jabbering about he’s going to the gym every day this week so he can lose exactly five pounds before his trip to Australia. I’m never sure how or whether these bits will develop into stories. Once they get too old they become stale and can’t. I’m generally not aware of why something caught the attention of my subconscious, but I find that if I play with it while it’s still fresh the text that results ends up revealing the ways that it was connected to all kinds of deeper themes that were ruminating in my brain without my explicit knowledge. As you can imagine, my rough drafts are, as a result, very rough.

The story in Best New American Voices arose from an image, where I was bicycling on a rainy night with my then-boyfriend and a mutual friend, and I did indeed have my bicycle chain strapped around my waist. My boyfriend was wearing all black and looked invisible in the darkness, and the downpour was further engulfing him, and I thought ‘Oh my god, he’s going to die.’ I wondered if that feeling of protectiveness that I was experiencing was akin to a feeling of love.’ The story was originally about the chain, but also about the threesome, based on my boyfriend, my friend, and me. Then my boyfriend and I had to break up, thank goodness, and I realized the story was really about the grief of lost or disappointing love.

Shalla: You’re a very talented writer. How do you create characters who live and breathe on the page?

Elizabeth: Oh thanks! I’ve written some very bad things, and learned through trial and error. One thing that I was terrible at, at first, was dialogue, though it’s odd because I was a journalist and consummate eavesdropper. One day it seemed that something dropped down on me and I suddenly understood how to write good dialogue. Perhaps I’d already internalized that rule (I think it’s Jon Gardner’s) about dialogue -- that in kinetic speech people rarely answer each other directly -- but there was a way that it seemed I in particular had a good ear for speech, only I’d never figured out how to exploit that in my fiction. I have studied a lot of languages and speak a couple of them okay, for instance; and I had long trained my ear by memorizing pieces of speech while doing interviews as a journalist, ie when the speaker speaks too fast for you to write it all down in an efficient amount of time, and you have to develop mnemonics so you can write down their words a few seconds later, while the subject is talking about something else less relevant to your story.

As for writing, I study craft all the time, by watching movies and examining their screenplays, and reading novels and stories, and to a lesser extent going over the better craft books (Oakley Hall, Gardner, EM Forster).

Shalla: Do you outline your stories before you begin writing them? And if you do, do you have any tips on how to do this effectively?

Elizabeth: No. I am a very disorganized writer, and therefore a slow writer who needs many drafts before a story is done. I believe a novel needs tighter control in this sense, so I’ve been experimenting with outlines. For a story I think you need to know the kernel of the story before you move from the random idea-writing phase to giving it an actual shape. This applies, I think, less to the “meaning” part of it than to the “what happens” part. It’s easier to let the lyricism and significance of a story evolve organically when you’re not belaboring plot, so I like to give myself a fairly simple story to hang everything else on, and then more or less stick to that story, though perhaps without knowing the actual ending.

For instance, in the bicycle story, I knew that the central conflict was a narrative one—the narrator is locked in her chain and she must get out. This presented a natural dramatic structure with the traditional three acts: situation develops (she gets locked in her chain); conflict arises (she must get out of her chain); resolution is thwarted (she can’t get out of her chain); a plan B resolution is discovered, something unexpected (she finds an elegant way out of a problem differently defined). Of course the story’s not really “about” the chain, in the larger sense, so it didn’t seem fruitful or important to tinker with those broad outlines.

Shalla: How do you choose the setting of your stories?

Elizabeth: Setting is key in my pieces, so it’s usually decided beforehand, or is part of the actual impetus for writing the story. There was a time in the eighties when the media discovered the cliché “such and such is a character” in so and so’s work (Food is a character! Time is a character! Architecture is a character!). I slap myself on the wrist as I use that cliché, but place is very much a character in everything I write.

Shalla: How do you choose which POV (point of view) to use?

Elizabeth: That, weirdly, tends to be decided without my thinking about it too much either. I’ve been trying to wean myself off first person since I was a self-involved adolescent -- people would accuse you of the most horrible things when you used it, like trying to sound like Sylvia Plath. But it’s been hard, especially since Joan Didion remains so great as a writer in the first person. Anytime I can talk myself into it I use third, and I’ve still never successfully or wholeheartedly attempted third-person omniscient. My third is generally first person with “he” or “she” added on like frosting. I do think third-omniscient provides the most obvious opportunity for great literature, because it can be so complex and enables all kinds of fun and layers in playing with the identity and perspective of the invisible narrator. Someday I’ll try it.

Shalla: Finally, any writing tips and/or editing tips for writers? Books and reading materials you’d recommend? Conferences? Workshops?

Elizabeth: Reading is so important, and still undervalued. I recommend that writers read the classics, and/or the modern classics, and then talk about them with their friends so much that their friends either buckle from annoyance and exhaustion or give in and start reading too.

There’s a great reading revolution going on right now and anyone can tap into it and thus further their inspiration for reading even more books, for instance in this online “Friendster for Readers” site that someone recently invited me to, called Goodreads. Reading literature from the point of view of trying to understand what makes it “work” is a wonderful tool for learning, and also gives a writer a larger frame of reference for deciding what they want their own work to sound and be like.

A writer today needs to have an original voice and vision, and for some people it’s hard to imagine what such a thing would look like because all they’ve been exposed to is work by the “usual suspects”—that mafia of hip and contemporary celebrity authors writing according to a narrow and circumscribed stylistic set of rules developed in writing workshops or through the “common wisdom” and “accepted truths” about narrative landed upon, mostly, in the eighties. Exposing oneself to as many different styles – writing from alternate times and places – seems to be one way, paradoxically enough, of learning how to conceive of writing something fresh.

Shalla: Thanks Elizabeth, very helpful answers! For more on Elizabeth Kadetsky, please visit: elizabethkadetsky.com

Shalla DeGuzman's short stories have appeared in Poetic Diversity, the Mosaic Literary Journal, the Mad Hatters Review, etc.; her articles in The Scriptorium and L.A. Freepress; her skits at the Stella Adler Theatre. Her flash fiction The Fish In My Bed recently won the FISH AND PLANE Competition and is featured in Issue 6 of Mad Hatters Review. Shalla, a former writer and producer of a health and fitness cable show, is currently writing a novel. She is President of The ShallaDeGuzman Writers Group where she interviews literary agents, publishers, editors, etc. News! Shalla has been nominated for the prestigious Pushcart Prize. SHALLA Magazine, which features short stories and excerpts from top, award-winning writers, is here! For more on Shalla: www.shalladeguzman.com