Ben White

On a Narrow Windowsill

12.17.10 // Miscellany, Writing

As time marches on, the number of Twitter-based books continues to increase. There’s the crowd-sourced book of clever tweets in Twitter Wit: Brilliance in 140 Characters or Less; there are the celebrity cash-in’s, like Dennis Leary’s new twitter-feed on paper, Suck On This Year: LYFAO @ 140 Characters or Less; not to mention the countless (and useless) books about Twitter itself (social media, networking, style guides, how to make “friends”, etc etc etc). There is no irony when using paper to talk about the internet in the publishing industry.

However—

There is only one carefully curated Twitter-based creative writing anthology. And that book is On a Narrow Windowsill (Kindle version), out in the time for the holiday season from Folded Word. From that link, preview it on Google Books, read the press release, and see my name several times. That’s because this book contains stories from 43 writers including myself, Mel Bosworth, Ethel Rohan, and xTx, (+39). AND it’s on SALE.

Interviews and Songs

12.05.10 // Writing

First, Zine-Scene (a blog, lit-mag, lit-mag highlighter, etc) features a profile of Nanoism and interview with me. The overview is here, with links to both. Good times were had by all.

Second, you may remember my very short story “When We Are Old” from its publication in Dogzplot. You then might remember it as a audio piece when Mel Bowsworth read it outloud at Mel Bosworth Reads Things. Now, it’s also a song:

“When We Are Old” is track 4 out of 7 on First Snow, a free, folksy Lo-Fi album by Archbishop, which you can grab right here for nothing (because it’s free).

Hint Fiction: An Anthology of Stories Including One of Mine

11.17.10 // Writing

With November comes the release of your #1 bestselling anthology on Amazon: Norton’s Hint Fiction: An Anthology of Stories in 25 Words or Fewer, edited by Robert Swartwood. It contains a blurb from Jodi Picoult and stories from me (“Before Perseus”), Joyce Carol Oates, and James Frey (among many others), so go read it. Everyone else obviously is!

No, but really. This is a fun book. It’s a great concept (nanofiction with punchlines!), and there’s plenty of variety littered throughout to guarantee some will resonate with every reader.

A collaboration, a reprint, and a unicorn

06.12.10 // Writing

1. David Backer (from FictionDaily) and I have a new fiction collaboration. It’s called whtsgngon.

It’s very short fiction based on/reflecting current news stories, and words throughout link to interesting resources and articles from around the web. It’s a quick read, but the links also provide a chance for some interesting directed reading.

2. Roxane Gay is the first writer in residence over at Necessary Fiction, and she’s just reprinted my story “The Woman on the Sidewalk,” which was originally published in SUB-LIT, which has since died. Now it’s online again forever! Go read it! There is also a bonus post that tells you how this story came about and provides an awesome musical accompaniment! After, read this story by Paula Bomer! Then read this story by Roxane Gay!

3. My story “The Unicorn” appears in Ink Monkey 3. It’s a print magazine that you can buy here. It is not about actual unicorns. Perhaps that is a failure on my part.

Studying for the NBME Pathology Shelf

05.24.10 // Medicine

Because Pathology is a cumulative all-encompassing subject, it makes sense that preparing for the Step 1—reading the First Aid—would be good preparation for Pathology Shelf. And while that would work, I don’t think that’s the best use of your time if you only have a few days to try to cram it all in. Pathology is cumulative, but the types of questions the National Board tends to ask demand a specific subset of knowledge: histology, gene mutations, responsible enzymes—these are the core of the pathology. Furthermore, reading a book (be it the First Aid, Goljan’s Rapid Review, or Robbins) is also a dangerous plan if you’re pressed for time. A) You probably can’t get through it. B) Knowing facts and applying them toward answering a question are separate steps. It’s not uncommon to need to see a question about a concept in order to the “bind” that knowledge appropriately.

A good Qbank (like USMLE World) works, but I think the very best way to review pathology is the Robbins and Cotran Review of Pathology, the question-book-companion of the big Robbins that many/most schools use. Benefits of this book:

  • Complete, system-organized review of pathology that covers all the important topics and factoids
  • Shelf-style questions and focus
  • Contains clear and concise but complete explanations—which is key. You’ll get a lot of questions wrong, but this review teaches you the salient distinctions quickly without being cryptic when you do.
  • Because it’s organized by system, you can tease apart related conditions and presentations. If you just do a blanket review, it’s hard to do this. Even if you use a Qbank instead, I would still recommend you do a run-through of the pathology questions by system first.

The link above is to the 3rd edition. I used a copy of the 2nd edition I bought at a local Half Price Books, and it certainly didn’t feel out of date. It’s also cheaper online. I think either one would work fine, though I’m sure there have been improvements made in the intervening five years. It’s a high quality resource; I only found two typos/mis-keyed answers in the entire book.

The point is this: there is so much material on Shelf and Step exams that literally anything you learn could be useful. Time and brain space are the limiting factors, so what you need is an efficient study aid. For the NBME Pathology Shelf, I had four days off to study. The Robbins question book is roughly 400 pages. I was able to do 100 pages a day and then follow it up with a few tables in the First Aid (important cytokines, for example), and that was 100% sufficient for Shelf purposes.

Sometimes when you do questions without having read a text first, the whole experience is just frustrating. Studying for the shelf is inherently painful, but this book really does it right.

Experiments in Literary Charity

05.13.10 // Miscellany, Writing

During the month of April, I used Nanoism to run a little experiment in subsidized charity, the 2010 Nanofiction Contest (For Haiti). Perhaps “subsidized” isn’t quite correct—as not all donors received compensation—but I think it sounds better than raffle-backed charity or contest charity. Oh, how about incentivized. Yes, perfect.

Either way, writing contests, as a money-making scheme, are as common as companies that only care about profit and hurting the environment. I’m kidding; contests help fund some really great publications. But a quick look at the number of new “genres” Narrative Magazine has “invented” (iStory, iPoem, Six Word Story) to pull in the dough is enough to make me ill. Actually, so is the name iStory. Clearly one of their interns graduated from the “cheap plastic crap from 2004” school of advertising. Incidentally, the term iStory was actually created in 2004 during the first iCan’tThinkofaBetterNameforThis product wave, so someone should have Googled it and read the Wikipedia article. Ahem.

Anyway, how is an honest writer to know what contests to enter? More importantly, why bother paying for them in the first place? The odds of winning might be better than the lotto, but unless you’re getting a subscription or something good out of the deal automatically, it’s still a terrible financial decision for most writers, and probably a dubious one for many publications as well. But for the purpose of raising money for an excellent charity…well you get a platform, and then you leverage it.

So, instead of taking contest fees to raise money for Nanoism itself (which I fully believe wouldn’t have even covered the cost of the prize money), the money went straight to a great organization. As a function of this set-up, people also made a tax-deductible donations by entering. So the money is not simply flushed down the drain, so to speak.

And, as an added lure, donating entrants also received “raffle” tickets which gave them a chance to randomly win prizes from the independent publishing community. I went around soliciting publications I like and/or respect, and to their collective credit, most provided materials for the giveaway. People are good people.

Interestingly, the number of non-donating entries was lower than I would have expected based on our previous contests and Nanoism’s growth over the past year. My explanation is two-fold: 1) A lingering sense of guilt about not-donating that caused some people to feel uncomfortable entering. 2) The decreased odds of winning with only 1 story entry (versus the 6, 11 or more that some writers submitted). I thought that might happen, but I was surprised nonetheless.

The end result is that a lot of writers were excited to enter the contest, felt strongly about the cause (which is good), and felt inspired by it. Because in the end, they weren’t really entering a contest. I gave them an excuse to support Partners in Health, and so they did. We raised $650, which is 6.5x what my wife and I would have given if we’d just sent the prize money directly to PIH, and over 30 people are getting literature in their mailboxes as we speak. A small experimental success.

Unhappy Relationships and Death

04.27.10 // Writing

Here is my thesis:

Death is an event, not a story.

Here is my second thesis:

A description of one or more (unhappy) people is a character sketch, not a story.

A story implies motion. It’s not just description. Something needs to change.

With regards to the twitter-sized fiction that I read on a daily basis, this means that the reader should be able to at least infer some change taking place, either before, during, or after the actual words of the piece itself. After all, this isn’t a summary or a synopsis. We’re talking about an iceberg here: the tip is showing above the water, but we know the vast majority of all that ice is underneath the surface.

Now, what about twitter-fiction for twitter-fiction’s sake—who cares? Plenty of my Midnight Stories are not actual stories. They’re character sketches, scenarios, premises, scenes, moments, etc. You could think of it as a writing journal that I share on the internet. Some pieces are finished; many are not. Fine fine. In fact, not all good pieces (of any length) are stories. That’s fine too.

But for Nanoism (including the great contest we’re running through the end of the week), I’m looking for characters I’m interested in and a plot that’s at least mildly discernible. The problem with unhappy relationships and death (especially murder, argh!) is that I don’t care. As Hint Fiction guru Robert Swartwood says in this post (that I completely agree with), you don’t want to write “a story that many other writers would probably come up with at some point.”

And if your story involves someone thinking pithy thoughts during a plane crash, a wife getting revenge on a cheating husband, a husband going ballistic because of an annoying wife, a murderer just plain murdering someone for no particular reason—then you probably have.

The Nano Title

04.20.10 // Writing

Robert Swartwood is hosting a big contest to celebrate Hint Fiction’s birthday and keep us excited for Hint Fiction: An Anthology of Stories in 25 Words or Fewer, which comes out in November from Norton. Incidentally, Amazon has a good price right now for preorder, so you might want to jump in on that deal. But in honor of Hint Fiction—a form in which the title is the linchpin on which the success of an entire piece can rely—let’s discuss the nano title.

The angle for a title (for fiction of any size) is usually a summary or some key/noteworthy words. Perhaps a rephrasing. Moby Dick is about, surprise surprise, Moby Dick (more or less). Most, perhaps even the “good” ones, don”t bring anything new to the table. Fine—but when you write a story that is only 140 characters or 25 words or less, that’s actually pretty inexcusable. You worked hard to cram as much story as you can into a sentence or two, and you’re telling me you couldn’t think of anything else to add? That title could’ve been a whole new element, supported a completely different layer of interpretation. It can do something.

With a novel, titles are often placeholders or descriptors (i.e. The Magician, or something else equally mundane and logical). With micro- and flash-fiction, the usual maxim is that every word counts. That’s actually a lie. There’s plenty of relative fluff even in really compelling stuff. Maybe it counts, but it’s not necessary. But if a title makes up 10-30% of the total word count, it’d better be necessary.

My rule of thumb for a nano title: if the story reads the same way with or without the title, then the title isn’t carrying its weight.

In the best case scenario, the reader feels drawn to come back to the title as a means of tying the experience together. In good Hint Fiction, the twist—if there is one—isn’t at the end: It’s in the title. It’s that last puzzle piece, the one that fell under the couch that you couldn’t find for hours. If the title isn’t conveying some new information (more characterization, plot, setting, location, punchline, backstory, something), then try again. After all, you only had 25 words to tell a complete story (and it could always be a little more complete).  I’ll leave you with a playful example from PicFic’s recent anniversary series.

Except NASA
As the asteroid hits, no one says, “I wish I had spent more time at work.”

Notice that the title (whether you like the story or not) draws the reader’s attention to a completely different aspect of this story. Without the title, it’s a very macro, globalized, everyone-is-the-same story. But the title narrows our focus down to a small group with a very different experience. It asks us to go back and think on it those extra seconds. In other words, the title matters.