What, Why, How: Thaddeus Rutkowski

What:

I write short fiction: short stories and flash fiction. The cut-off between flash fiction and short stories, it seems, is one thousand words, according to literary journals, and my pieces are usually on the thousand-word border. The main thing is, I want to tell stories: about people and what they do, or about myself and what I do, and I want to comment on those stories in obvious or less obvious ways.

The manner in which these stories are told is also important. I go for the loaded line, the sentence that suggests a meaning beyond what is immediately apparent. I want the reader to question what is given. There is the story, and there is a perhaps unspoken angle on the story, a layer I want people to look at, though it might be hard to look at.

Why:

I write to express myself. My inspiration usually comes from within myself, not from outside sources. I make notes of my thoughts, dreams and experiences, and I go back to the notes to see if anything interesting is there. Someone once told me that waste is important. If you don’t produce some trash, you might not produce anything good.

However, I’ll sometimes write to fit a theme, as I did with a couple of essays for the New York Times Opinionator–on the themes of “anxiety” and “menagerie.” I wrote about my fear of leaving an appliance on, caring for our family’s pet turtle, and an encounter with monkeys in Asia.

The medium of writing is somewhat accidental. I majored in fine arts (painting) when I was in school, and I added English literature as a course of study. I went on to focus on fiction writing. I found it was possible to express more nuance, or more aspects of experience, with words. This was my personal discovery. Some artists might find that the opposite is true. Your medium matches your talent, whether it’s music, dance, acting, etc. Most people have talent, I believe. The trick is to find it.

How:

I stay motivated by giving myself a schedule: I write regularly and submit my work to editors regularly. I also read my work aloud often. When I give a reading, I have to look at what I’ll read. It’s an exercise in organization, in seeing what’s done and what needs work, in determining what fits a theme.

I’m also motivated by my students. If I give prompt for a writing exercise, I often write from that prompt myself. The prompts are often small in scale and result in “flash” fictions. One of my books, Violent Outbursts, contains one-page pieces that I wrote with my students in workshops.

Spending time at an art colony is also a great motivator. At a colony, even if it is an urban colony like the Writers’ Room in Manhattan, there is nothing to do but your work. Unless, of course, you spend your time reading The New York Times on your screen.

Bio:

Thaddeus Rutkowski is the author of six books, most recently Border Crossings, a poetry collection. His novel Haywire won the Asian American Writers Workshop’s members’ choice award, and his memoir Guess and Check won the Electronic Literature bronze award for multicultural fiction. He received a fiction writing fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

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