What:
The form I keep coming back to, the longest on-again-off-again relationship of my life, is the short story. I’ve written longer works, certainly – a novel, graphic novel, novellas, a couple dozen feature screenplays – and will again, but the short form to me is the most free, allows the most experimentation, and carries with it a weight of immediacy that can get lost in the pages of a novel.
While I’ve accepted “horror adjacent” as a tidy enough bin to sort a lot of my fiction, I’m really just interested in telling stories about humans doing their best in moments of crisis. The short form allows me to suspend my own disbelief enough – and hopefully the reader’s – to start to draw outside the lines of reality, to twist the world and bend the rules a bit. So while there might not be an actual physical monster present (though sometimes there is!), you’re more likely to encounter a sinister presence in the woods that represents a childhood trauma; the supernatural may exist as background radiation in a story that’s really about the haunting specter of grief.
I’m also not terribly interested in conventional storytelling these days. I like to play with tense, perspective, structure. A story that begins with an observation in second person present tense, for instance, draws a reader like me immediately into the world far faster and deeper than the most elegant exposition ever could, in my opinion. Short stories allow an author to play with a reader’s expectations and invite them to take the ride with you without the worry of form or structure feeling obnoxious and gimmicky after 50 or 100 pages.
Fiction, after all, at its best speaks to larger truths; whether it’s a Ray Carver story or a religion or Lovecraft’s eldritch abominations from beyond the stars (often too bizarre for human eyes and minds to comprehend), I believe it’s often more powerful to leave a reader/audience wanting more, let them imagine the vastness of the world beyond the handful of words you’ve used to describe it.
See, this is why I had to quit Star Wars and never saw the spinoffs or prequels.
Why:
In second grade, I wrote a story about a Thanksgiving turkey who turns the tables on the farmer who raised him, evading slaughter and embarking on a long, bloody campaign of violent vengeance across the countryside. It won the district writing award, and I was given a ribbon at a little ceremony in the gymnasium. I’d bring Stephen King hardcovers to school in a zip-lock bag, dust covers left safely at home, to read at recess. Or I’d ask to use the computer lab to work on my stories while the other kids played sports with balls.
It’s quite simply (and pretentiously) the way my mind copes with the existential crisis of being: I compartmentalize and structure everything into narrative. Does it sometimes feel like this alienates me from the social experience of being a human being for the brief blink of a cosmic eye we are present on the planet? Yes. And my therapist is well aware.
But what fiction does, what stories do, is bridge that gap and bring people together across oceans of time and space. That’s the special magic, and that’s what producers’ script notes and rewrites-by-committee and corporate franchising by spreadsheet and “reimagining for modern audiences” and the fanciest A.I. can never do: connect people through a shared and unadulterated truth, one speaking and one listening. Hearing. Before the commoditization and capitalism of it all, that’s the seed. That’s the source of the river. People forget that. I live in Los Angeles, and it’s safe to say many of the wildly blessed folks here making millions of dollars using algorithms to sell us stories never knew it.
For years, I ended my bio with “He makes films. He tells stories. He has to.” Because I do.
How:
I work in entertainment, so it can be tough to reserve enough juice for my own projects when I’m using up an awful lot of it to pay the rent. Years ago I became one of those weirdos with notebooks scattered about, always jotting down ideas as they come, catching them before they get away. In recent years, that’s expanded to notes in my phone, multiple running documents always open on my computer, an ever present bank into which I can toss ideas to get to later. I write best when I have the dedicated time to sink into the world and explore it. That usually means locking myself away for a few days or a weekend, or taking a week off and staycationing with the notebook that I know will unlock the thing.
This July I’ll be in residence in Vermont by the grace of an MFA mentor from many years ago, Joan Connor. I’ll walk through the country and talk to bears in the woods and read a dozen books and spend a month sequestered in a barn in the mountains with no obligations other than to the stories I have banked to work on and the stories that may come to me while I’m there. I’m endlessly grateful for the opportunity; it’s as close to a full-time writing gig as I’ve ever been, and I don’t plan to waste a minute.
Bio:
Jacob Strunk has been short-listed for both a Student Academy Award and the Pushcart Prize in fiction, as well as the Glimmer Train short story award and a New Rivers Press book prize. His films have screened in competition and by invitation across the world. He earned his MFA in creative writing from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast program and teaches film and media in Los Angeles, where he lives with a few framed movie posters and the ghost of his cat, Stephen.
Links
Screaming in Tongues
Website
Social media links
Thank you for visiting!
Linda K. Sienkiewicz is a writer, poet, and artist.
Learn more about her multi-award winning novel, In the Context of Love.
Learn more about her picture book, Gordy and the Ghost Crab.
Learn more about her latest poetry chapbook, Sleepwalker
See LinkTree for Linda’s social media links
