Today the stack is one year old.
When I turned one, I was in a home movie, seated before a cake. Just me and the cake. My skin is gold from the lights on tripods set up all around with god knows how many watts. The cake is made of whipped cream, and there are flowers across the top, and everyone knows what’s going to happen when the lab rat meets the cake.
I stick my hand in the whipped cream and grab a hunk of cake, and I bring it to my mouth, and I’m happy. I’m so happy, and a moment later my arm is in the cake, up to my elbow. There is whipped cream and bits of the flowers along my arm, and no one stops me. No one cares. “It’s her cake,” I can hear my mother saying, “let her do what she wants with it.”
A few minutes ago ago, a friend on Facebook was remembering her mother, who had recently died, and she listed her mother’s pleasures and virtues. I couldn’t see her mother because no one is visible in a list of attributes. Anyway, she said her mother had taught her to be kind, and I thought that sounded wonderful, and then I thought about my mother, and I missed her in the type of flash where she’s saying to the world, “It’s her cake. What’s it your business?” I was thinking about what Toby taught me, and I thought, she taught me to be impossible, and she was funny.
Because of you the stack has grown.
Because of you, it’s entering year two. Thanks for reading and, I hope, enjoying it. Thanks for mentioning it to friends. Thanks for upgrading to PAID subscriptions. There are presently 5,300 subscribers and 370 PAID subscribers. The PAID subscriptions in stackland mean you believe writers should be paid for their work. You simply believe it.
Looking back at the posts, maybe the stack is a report from where we are, day to day, on the animal of a life.
Richard and I are at the hind quarters, I guess, nearing the tail. Most of the time it feels we’re everywhere on the animal all at once. Everyone is always also the face—looking out, hearing, feeling, tasting, and smelling life.
When I think about an annual report for the stack, two sentences come to mind:
The past is always still happening.
And.
Each day I wake up and invent what I have to live for.
I’m writing at the top of my game. I alternate between fiction stories, memoir pieces about a specific experience, art criticism, feminist commentary, and hybrid experiments that combine genres. I'm interested in what an individual sentence can prompt in the reader, as if it’s a baby story. My wish is to keep the reader reading. By any means necessary. My goal is to provide pleasure and stir feeling.
So far. I have posted 100 pieces everyone is free to read. At a point, when some of the work goes to print as a book, the archive will be placed behind a paywall. That isn’t happening now. I remain committed to offering the posts for free without restrictions.
As your PAID subscriptions run their course, PLEASE RENEW THEM.
This is crucial for sustaining the stack. If you have been reading with pleasure and interest, please upgrade to a PAID SUBSCRIPTION. Right now, the discount price of 25% off remains in effect, so a one-moth subscription is $3.75 and an annual subscription is $37.50. Not bupkis, not peanuts, I know. Your PAID subscriptions are saying to me: Keep going. They are also saying to hell with the old models of publishing with an Oliver hand extended as you bleat, “Where’s my payment?” and “Where are my royalties?”
PAID subscribers are invited to attend ZOOM conversations about the craft of creative writing. We’ve had two so far, and they have been joyous. We really are becoming a community. The next ZOOM conversation is on MEMOIR, and it will take place on SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 23 from 3-4 EST (extra time for continued conversations is optional). To RSVP, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com. Anyone with a PAID subscription of even one month is welcome to sign up, and I will send you a ZOOM link as we near the event.
Some things we’ll cover in the upcoming Zoom conversation on MEMOIR (September 23, 3-4pm EST)
How to write memoir that is NOT a continuous narrative and has no lessons to teach or moral uplift to supply.
How to focus on dramatic moments and ditch the rest. (Most writing in any genre is about taking words out.)
How to gauge whether you are writing something to relive a memory that makes you feel something, and how to tell if you are writing something to show the reader a world that prompts them to feel something.
How to use jump cuts between time periods, between moods, between narrative episodes. How to teach the reader how to read your one and only voice. How NOT to supply meaning, purpose, moral lessons, things you've learned.
How to use your experience but NOT to think anyone thinks it's important because it happened to you or to a real person. How to layer narrative in several time frames as you write about anything. How to LOSE the idea of chronological order being important or necessary. No back story. The back story has to be in the way you tell the front story.
I felt free when I realized I could write the way I thought life worked.
I mean without moral meaning, without a plot that resolved conflict, without a narrative that ended in a place that was planned from the beginning. I don’t believe in models of conversion, recovery, and survival. If I had to summarize a plot that feels true to me, it would be: I used to be, and I still am.
There is no subject matter that's intrinsically interesting or intrinsically uninteresting. The narrator has to seduce you into caring about the words on the page.
To me, narrative is about time. The narrator who talks to you in any genre is looking back at a moment that may have happened five minutes ago or 50 years ago. The narrator is telling you what the creature in the past was feeling back then, when it was going about its paces—the narrator dives into who the creature was in the context the creature lived in. And then the narrator tells you what this look-back is making the narrator feel NOW, in the moment of talking to you. That means the story is not about what happened. It’s about what the narrator makes of what happened. The moment of talking to you NOW is the story. Call me Ishmael.
That play of time is what (hopefully) hooks the reader. The reader always wants to know: Why are you telling me this? What’s it to you? What in life have you fallen in love with? Oh, I see (it’s hoped the reader comes to feel), and now I, too, remember things I love.
Without a plot that teaches you a lesson or clears up problems or solves mysteries, how do you build tension and drama in a piece of writing? You build tension and drama in moments of reflection that are layered into narrative. I call it thought-in-action. It’s what Shakespeare invented in the soliloquy and what I’ve described above. Minds change from moment to moment. They don’t stay fixed, and new thoughts add volume and amplitude without replacing the thoughts that have come before. The past is not a series of mistakes the present is here to update and fix.
This way of working produces pieces that leave questions. We aren’t ever going to know, really, why we behave the way we do or why anyone else behaves the way they do. There are no clues. There is no untangling. There is only more tangling. “Tangle better” might be the thing you can exchange for ending a piece of writing with a bow. This kind of writing can feel satisfying to the reader in the way a piece of music is satisfying as it plays with the variations of its themes and wanders through the questions you, the reader, find yourself asking.
Another important thing about the chunks you offer instead of a continuous narrative is: They have to be brilliant separately as pieces of writing, as well as in the series where you place them. They have to surprise the reader in the turns they take and in the ways they use language no one expects. The reader is guided through the circuit of “tangle better.” The arrangement isn’t haphazard. That’s one of the places where the artifice comes in.
You are welcomed to send in questions ahead, and you will be able to ask questions in real time.
In other news . . .
Richard reports the ground hog has left the building (he hopes), and now a skunk has dug up holes in our back garden. It's raining. I have become entranced by the whispery, deadpan delivery of Selena Gomez in Only Murders in the Building. (Hulu) And OMG watching the grand performance of Jayne Houdyshell as Bunny, the coop board president and fairly-chosen, embittered victim of murder, I almost miss the poisoned hearts and street rat volume of my former landlords.
And last, a poem by William Stafford
Things I Learned Last Week
Ants, when they meet each other,
usually pass on the right.
Sometimes you can open a sticky
door with your elbow.
A man in Boston has dedicated himself
to telling about injustice.
For three thousand dollars he will
come to your town and tell you about it.
Schopenhauer was a pessimist but
he played the flute.
Yeats, Pound, and Eliot saw art as
growing from other art. They studied that.
If I ever die, I’d like it to be
in the evening. That way, I’ll have
all the dark to go with me, and no one
will see how I begin to hobble along.
In The Pentagon one person’s job is to
take pins out of towns, hills, and fields,
and then save the pins for later.
Reminder! You must EMAIL me to RSVP to the Zoom conversation, not comment here or elsewhere. I need the EMAIL to send you the link: lauriestone@substack.com
" And then the narrator tells you what this look-back is making the narrator feel NOW, in the moment of talking to you. That means the story is not about what happened. It’s about what the narrator makes of what happened. The moment of talking to you NOW is the story."
This part right here. I'm staring out the window, just thinking about what this might look like on a page I'm working on now. A wonderful piece of advice.
Mazel tov on your continued success. You have always been an inspiration. Often in the past, too, especially to the creative writing majors at CCNY and to my Macaulay Honors students. As Edith Wharton noted: "There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it." You are the candle.