Sunday, August 15, 2004

love bites

I’m worried I’m going to end up like this waiting, seething, blooming woman of Dave Eggers'. Still, I love his bite-size short-short stories which he wrote for the Guardian newspaper. “Short-short-stories” just sounds like vignettes to me. But it does seem like a good way to get rid of all those plotless shreds you've written, all those great opening lines, all that junk you keep in a suitcase in the hope it will spontaneously organise itself into the Great Australian Novel by the time you next look....yep, sounds like my kind of form. I always like that quote attributed, I think, to William Faulkner where he says in writing, you have to 'kill your darlings'. Maybe the short-short is your chance to resurrect them?
(Via Meredith.)