Guitar Event
by William Walsh
I’d like to thank Steve Himmer for providing this Residency at Necessary Fiction this month. I had a great time, even though it was a scramble some nights putting together a postable fiction.
The Residency prompted me to open lots of old files and scan through many notebooks. I worked on stories that I’d abandoned years ago and I found near-complete stories hiding in odd places on my computer. I inched a few current works-in-progress to the finish line. And I made a few Frankenstein stories out of two (or three) incomplete shorts. I also cheated a few times, posting pieces that appeared in my recent Keyhole Press mini-book PATHOLOGIES.
The Residency made me think about an article I read years ago about David Bowie when he was working with Tin Machine. It was an “in studio” interview in either SPIN or ROLLING STONE. Bowie was working through a song with Reeves Grabrels, his guitarist, and he told Gabrels the song needed a “guitar event”. Not a solo, but a “guitar event”.
In terms of story structure, the guitar event is a nice little additional component. If Bowie’s song can be composed of a few verses, a repeated chorus, a bridge, a guitar solo, and a guitar event, then a short fiction can be made complete with a verbal guitar event (a short character riff, surprising detail about the setting, or a whack piece of dialogue).
Probably more to be said about this. But I’ve got a wedding to go to later on and a five-year-old to play with now.
Thanks to those who read along this month and sent me nice notes. And best of luck to Matt Briggs, August’s Writer in Residence at Necessary Fiction.
posted by William Walsh
William Walsh is our July 2010 Writer In Residence. He is the author of Pathologies, a new mini-book from Keyhole Press. He is also responsible for Questionstruck, Without Wax, and, forthcoming from Keyhole Press in February 2011, Ampersand, Mass. and Unknown Arts. His stories and derived texts have appeared in Annalemma, Artifice, Quick Fiction, New York Tyrant, Juked, No Colony, LIT, Rosebud, and other journals. He blogs weekly at The Kenyon Review.Our Writer In Residence is invited to spend a month onsite sharing fiction, interviews, reviews, ideas, or an ongoing project of some kind.
Past Residents:
Amber Sparks
Brian Kiteley
Ethel Rohan
First Footing
Gina Frangello
Origin Stories
Jess Stoner
Jeff Vande Zande
Kevin Fanning
Kathy Fish
Michelle Bailat-Jones
Matt Briggs
Peter Grandbois
Roxane Gay
Robert Kloss
Terri Griffith
Tim Horvath
William Walsh
On The Blog
Congratulations to contributor Chad Simpson, whose collection Tell Everyone I Said Hi has won the University of Iowa 2012 John Simmons Short Fiction Award.
In this week’s Research Notes, Ben Tanzer considers how being simultaneously true to an experience and true to a story can be more complicated than it first seems.
Unknown Arts, the new collection by William Walsh, is now available from Keyhole Press. William wrote about the book recently for our Research Notes series.
Read a roundtable conversation with the authors of the new anthology Shut Up/Look Pretty.
Jess Stoner’s book I Have Blinded Myself Writing This is now available for preorder from Short Flight/Long Drive books.
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