The decisive moment

Photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson is known for capturing "the decisive moment." He told The Washington Post in 1957: "There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative. Oop! The moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever."

Minute particulars: the infinite possibility in a single moment

William Blake wrote that "he who wishes to see a Vision, a perfect Whole / Must see it in its Minute Particulars." The big, lasting things that happen in our lives – no matter how long we’ve waited or dreaded or hoped or worked – tend to happen in a moment. Moments are what we remember. The same is true in literature. A single charged moment can be almost infinitely resonant. In each of these stories, the action occurs within a small, contained unit of time – no longer than it takes to receive a gift or fold laundry or shop for dinner. Yet whole lives are revealed.

No One’s a Mystery

by Elizabeth Tallent

For my eighteenth birthday Jack gave me a five-year diary with a latch and a little key, light as a dime. I was sitting beside him scratching at the lock, which didn’t seem to want to work, when he thought he saw his wife’s Cadillac in the distance, coming toward us. He pushed me down onto the dirty floor of the pickup and kept one hand on my head while I inhaled the musk of his cigarettes in the dashboard ashtray and sang along with Rosanne Cash on the tape deck. We’d been drinking tequila and the bottle was between his legs, resting up against his crotch, where the seam of his Levi’s was bleached linen-white, though the Levi’s were nearly new. I don’t know why his Levi’s always bleached like that, along the seams and at the knees. In a curve of cloth his zipper glinted, gold.

            “It’s her,” he said. “She keeps the lights on in the daytime. I can’t think of a single habit in a woman that irritates me more than that.” When he saw that I was going to stay still he took his hand from my head and ran it through his own dark hair.

            “Why does she?” I said.

            “She thinks it’s safer. Why does she need to be safer? She’s driving exactly fifty-five miles an hour. She believes in those signs: ‘Speed Monitored by Aircraft.’ It doesn’t matter that you can look up and see that the sky is empty.”

            “She’ll see your lips move, Jack. She’ll know you’re talking to someone.”

            “She’ll think I’m singing along with the radio.”

            He didn’t lift his hand, just raised the fingers in salute while the pressure of his palm steadied the wheel, and I heard the Cadillac honk twice, musically; he was driving easily eighty miles an hour. I studied his boots. The elk heads stitched into the leather were bearded with frayed thread, the toes were scuffed, and there was a compact wedge of muddy manure between the heel and the sole—the same boots he’d been wearing for the two years I’d known him. On the tape deck Rosanne Cash sang, “Nobody’s into me, no one’s a mystery.”

            “Do you think she’s getting famous because of who her daddy is or for herself?” Jack said.

            “There are about a hundred pop tops on the floor, did you know that? Some little kid could cut a bare foot on one of these, Jack.”

            “No little kids get into this truck except for you.”

            “How come you let it get so dirty?”

            “‘How come,’ he mocked. “You even sound like a kid. You can get back into the seat now, if you want. She’s not going to look over her shoulder and see you.”

            “How do you know?”

            “I just know,” he said. “Like I know I’m going to get meat loaf for supper. It’s in the air. Like I know what you’ll be writing in that diary.”

            “What will I be writing?” I knelt on my side of the seat and craned around to look at the butterfly of dust printed on my jeans. Outside the window Wyoming was dazzling in the heat. The wheat was fawn and yellow and parted smoothly by the thin dirt road. I could smell the water in the irrigation ditches hidden in the wheat.

            “Tonight you’ll write, ‘I love Jack. This is my birthday present from

him. I can’t imagine anybody loving anybody more than I love Jack.’”

            “I can’t.”

            “In a year you’ll write, ‘I wonder what I ever really saw in Jack. I wonder why I spent so many days just riding around in his pickup. It’s true he taught me something about sex. It’s true there wasn’t ever much else to do in Cheyenne.’”

            “I won’t write that.”

            “In two years you’ll write, ‘I wonder what that old guy’s name was, the one with the curly hair and the filthy dirty pickup truck and time on his hands.’”

            “I won’t write that.”

            “No?”

            “Tonight I’ll write, ‘I love Jack. This is my birthday present from him. I can’t imagine anybody loving anybody more than I love Jack.’”

            “No, you can’t,” he said. “You can’t imagine it.”

            “In a year I’ll write, ‘Jack should be home any minute now. The table’s set—my grandmother’s linen and her old silver and the yellow candles left over from the wedding—but I don’t know if I can wait until after the trout a la Navarra to make love to him.’”

            “It must have been a fast divorce.”

            “In two years I’ll write, ‘Jack should be home by now. Little Jack is   hungry for his supper. He said his first word today besides “Mama” and “Papa.” He said “kaka.”’”

            Jack laughed. “He was probably trying to finger-paint with kaka on the bathroom wall when you heard him say it.”

            “In three years I’ll write, ‘My nipples are a little sore from nursing Eliza Rosamund.’”

            “Rosamund. Every little girl should have a middle name she hates.”

            “‘Her breath smells like vanilla and her eyes are just Jack’s color of

blue.’”

            “That’s nice.” Jack said.

            “So, which one do you like?”

            “I like yours,” he said. “But I believe mine.”

            “It doesn’t matter. I believe mine.”

            “Not in your heart of hearts, you don’t.”

            “You’re wrong.”

            “I’m not wrong,” he said. “And her breath would smell like your milk, and it’s kind of a bittersweet smell, if you want to know the truth.”

Toasters

by Pamela Painter

The neighbors are at it again is what Joey says, just what his father would say if he were here. And just like his father, Joey shuts off all the lights, peels back the curtains over the sink, and settles in to watch the show.

            The kitchen table is piled high with hot, dry laundry. I can fold it in the dark so I sit here listening to Joey describe what is flying out the Angelos’ windows. So far it’s plates, clothes, poker chips, and a fishing rod.

            “Jesus, Mom, you’re missing it. Mr. Angelo threw out the toaster. Wait’ll Dad hears that.” His excited sneakers thump the stove as he turns to ask if I remember when Mrs. Angelo flattened a whole row of my tomato plants with a bowling ball.

            I tell him it’s way past bedtime but he just gets his nose closer to the window to identify the next object and assess the damage. They keep lists—Joey and his father. Things thrown, sound effects made, and grievances screamed to the heavens as if to bring down a pre-apocalyptic condemnation.

            Tonight it started with Mrs. Angelo’s mother’s weekend visits and moved on to Mr. Angelo’s unfinished basement projects and early exits from his weekly poker game to parts and/or parties unknown. It is the same game my Harry has been losing too much money in for years and getting worse. The threadbare towels I’m folding are thin as silk and fold as flat.

            “Wow,” Joey says as Mrs. Angelo yowls one of her favorite four-letter words and the names of two forgiving saints. On purpose, I’m mismatching Harry’s socks and thinking the exact same thing as Mrs. Angelo.

            “Mom,” Joey says, getting tire of the Angelos’ show. “Where’s Dad? Why isn’t he home?”

            Tonight I’ll have to tell him. Because me and Harry. We’re at it again too.

            The streetlight from Joey’s window glints on our toaster, plugged in and safe, and I think: me and Harry should take lessons from the Angelos. I admire the way they fight—everything flying out the windows and doors except the two of them.

Bouncing

by Keith Loren Carter

Standing at his kitchen sink, blinking away sleep, he hears his wife’s scream “Oh God!” followed by terrible thumping and crashing, which he knows as sure as he’s standing there in his boxers is his baby son bouncing down the stairs, just as he’s always feared, and he drops the coffee pot and runs to the foot of the staircase in time to catch the startled body as it tumbles off the last carpeted stair, a plastic toddler gate crashing behind and hitting—Thock!—the wall, leaving a big hole that could have easily been his son’s perfect head, but instead he’s holding that head in one hand, cradling the rest of his tense pooh-clad body, staring at the tiny face, contorted in a frozen, soundless scream of fear and wonder, smooth skin turning crimson, breath held for an eternity as he hears his wife’s “Please God” echo his own prayers along with his voiced pleading “Breathe, Lorne,” when the logjam breaks at last, tears flow and cries like someone is sticking him with a sewing needle erupt out of the suddenly heaving body, threatening to rupture his membranes, and then just as suddenly the cat strolls by, blissfully unconcerned with the drama before her, and the tortured expression of his son clears as sunny as a solstice morning, leaving only a mother and a father, their lives no longer their own.

The Fish Tank

by Lydia Davis (from Almost No Memory, 1997)

I stare at four fish in a tank in the supermarket. They are swimming in parallel formation against a small current created by a jet of water, and they are opening and closing their mouths and staring off into the distance with the one eye, each, that I can see. As I watch them through the glass, thinking how fresh they would be to eat, still alive now, and calculating whether I might buy one to cook for dinner, I also see, as though behind or through them, a larger, shadowy form darkening their tank, what there is of me on the glass, their predator.

The Fish

by Lydia Davis (from Break It Down, 1986)

She stands over a fish, thinking about certain irrevocable mistakes she has made today. Now the fish has been cooked, and she is alone with it. The fish is for her—there is no one else in the house. But she has had a troubling day. How can she eat this fish, cooling on a slab of marble? And yet the fish, too, motionless as it is, and dismantled from its bones, and fleeced of its silver skin, has never been so completely alone as it is now, violated in a final manner and regarded with a weary eye by this woman who has made the latest mistake of her day and done this to it.

Cryptoquote

Form

"Each novel must invent its own form. No recipe can replace this continual reflection. The book makes its own rules for itself, and for itself alone. Indeed the movement of its style must often lead to jeopardizing them, breaking them, even exploding them. Far from respecting certain immutable forms, each new book tends to constitute the laws of its functioning at the same time that it produces their destruction."

-- Alain Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction, 1989; trans. Richard Howard

Work

"Routine work, that best of all anodynes which the twentieth century has tried its best to deprive itself of -- that is what I most want. I would not trade the daily trip it gives me for all the mind-expanders and mind-deadeners the young are hooked on."

-- Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose
 

Taking It Home to Jerome

In Baton Rouge, there was a DJ on the soul station who was
always urging his listeners to ‘‘take it on home to Jerome.’’

No one knew who Jerome was. And nobody cared. So it
didn’t matter. I was, what, ten, twelve? I didn’t have anything

to take home to anyone. Parents and teachers told us that all
we needed to do in this world were three things: be happy,

do good, and find work that fulfills you. But I also wanted
to learn that trick where you grab your left ankle in your

right hand and then jump through with your other leg.
Everything else was to come, everything about love:

the sadness of it, knowing it can’t last, that all lives must end,
all hearts are broken. Sometimes when I’m writing a poem,

I feel as though I’m operating that crusher that turns
a full-sized car into a metal cube the size of a suitcase.

At other times, I’m just a secretary: the world has so much
to say, and I’m writing it down. This great tenderness.

-- David Kirby

Eudora Welty on listening

From One Writer's Beginnings:

Ever since I was first read to, then started reading to myself, there has never been a line read that I didn't hear. As my eyes followed the sentence, a voice was saying it silently to me. It isn't my mother's voice, or the voice of any person I can identify, certainly not my own. It is human, but inward, and it is inwardly that I listen to it. It is to me the voice of the story or the poem itself. The cadence, whatever it is that asks you to believe, the feeling that resides in the printed word, reaches me through the reader-voice. I have supposed, but never found out, that this is the case with all readers -- to read as listeners -- and with all writers, to write as listeners. It may be part of the desire to write. The sound of what falls on the page begins the process of testing it for truth, for me. Whether I am right to trust so far I don't know. By now I don't know whether I could do either one, reading or writing, without the other.

My own words, when I am at work on a story, I hear too as they go, in the same voice that I hear when I read in books. When I write and the sound of it comes back to my ears, then I act to make my changes. I have always trusted this voice.

---

Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it's an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.

It was taken entirely for granted that there wasn't any lying in our family, and I was advanced in adolescence before I realized that in plenty of homes where I played with schoolmates and went to their parties, children lied to their parents and parents lied to their children and to each other. It took me a long time to realize that these very same everyday lies, and the stratagems and jokes and tricks and dares that went with them, were in fact the basis of the scenes I so well loved to hear about and hoped for and treasured in the conversation of adults.

My instinct -- the dramatic instinct -- was to lead me, eventually, on the right track for a storyteller: the scene was full of hints, pointers, suggestions, and promises of things to find out and know about human beings. I had to grow up and learn to listen for the unspoken as well as the spoken -- and to know a truth, I also had to recognize a lie.

Lucy Barton learns to write

"Sarah Payne said, If there is a weakness in your story, address it head-on, take it in your teeth and address it, before the reader really knows. This is where you will get your authority, she said, during one of those classes when her face was filled with fatigue from teaching."

"Now I think of something else Sarah Payne said. 'You will have only one story,' she said. 'You’ll write your one story many ways. Don’t ever worry about story. You have only one.'”

-- Elizabeth Strout, My Name Is Lucy Barton

Elmore Leonard's 10 rules for writing fiction

1. Never open with weather.
2. Avoid prologues.
3. Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the word "said."
5. Keep your exclamation marks under control.
6. Never use the word "suddenly."
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly if at all.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9. Ditto, places and things.
10. Try to leave out the parts that readers tend to skip.

James Salter opening sentences

"Barcelona at dawn."

"This happened near Carbondale to a woman named Jane."

"It's hard now to think of all the places and nights, Nicola's like a railway car, deep and gleaming, the crowd at the Un, Deux, Trois, Billy's."

"Mrs. Pence and her white shoes were gone."

"At ten-thirty then, she arrived."

"All afternoon the cars, many with out-of-state plates, were coming along the road."

"It was late August."

"Mrs. Chandler stood alone near the window in a tailored suit, almost in front of the neon sign that said in small, red letters PRIME MEATS."

"There is a kind of minor writer who is found in a room of the library signing his novel."

"In the garden, standing alone, he found the young woman who was a friend of the writer William Hedges, then unknown but even Kafka had lived in obscurity, she said, and so moreover had Mendel, perhaps she meant Mendeleev."

"Billy was under the house."

Forgiveness

"Forgiveness. The ability to forgive oneself. Stop here for a few breaths and think about this because it is the key to making art, and very possibly the key to finding any semblance of happiness in life. Every time I have set out to translate the book … that exists in such brilliant detail on the big screen of my limbic system onto a piece of paper, … I grieve for my own lack of talent and intelligence. Every. Single. Time. Were I smarter, more gifted, I could pin down a closer facsimile of the wonders I see. I believe, more than anything, that this grief of constantly having to face down our own inadequacies is what keeps people from being writers. Forgiveness, therefore, is key. I can’t write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing. Again and again throughout the course of my life I will forgive myself."

-- Ann Patchett, “The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir about Writing and Life” in This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

"Everybody needs a little forgiveness." -- Patty Griffin, "Living with Ghosts"

A writer's library

Charles Baxter, Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction
Madison Smartt Bell, Narrative Design
Bernays & Painter, What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers
Dorothea Brande, Becoming a Writer
Renni Browne & Dave King, Self-Editing for Fiction Writers
Janet Burroway, Writing Fiction
Julia Cameron, Letters to a Young Artist
Raymond Carver, Fires
John Gardner, The Art of Fiction and On Becoming a Novelist
Philip Gerard, Creative Nonfiction
Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones, Wild Mind, and Old Friend from Far Away
Karen Elizabeth Gordon, The New Well-Tempered Sentence
Ariel Gore, How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead
Diana Hacker, Rules for Writers
Ted Kooser & Steve Cox, Writing Brave and Free
Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird
Mario Vargas Llosa, Letters to a Young Novelist
Ron Padgett, ed., Handbook of Poetic Forms
Ann Patchett, "The Getaway Car" in This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage
Nancy Peacock, A Broom of One’s Own: Words on Writing, Housecleaning and Life
George Singleton, Pep Talks, Warnings & Screeds
William Stafford, Writing the Australian Crawl
William Strunk Jr. & E.B. White, The Elements of Style
Abigail Thomas, Thinking about Memoir
Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write


Strunk & White: The Elements of Style, illus. by Maira Kalman