Stories I like so much, they made me sad: The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God by Etgar Keret

I don't like most of the flash fiction I read. A lot of writers out there swear they love it, but I mostly find that what I've seen feels like one frame of a story board. There's often some interesting and evocative scene-setting, but overall, there's an incompleteness. There's no reason flash fiction has to be this way. The first flash I ever read in my life was probably the short stories of Borges, which never, ever feel incomplete. Rather, those are always miraculous in the way they seem to cram a whole novel of emotion into three pages. 

Borges didn't waste much time in his short stories with descriptions of scenes. There aren't elaborate metaphors for what things look like, no picking out of significant details of all the main characters and the surroundings. There are a few words to set the scene, then a few things happen, the story comes to a quick head and then it's done. There's a plot and a theme, and both can be summarized.

I once defined literary fiction as "fiction in which plot is not a central concern." Much of the literary fiction world almost mistrusts plot, considers it more a part of genre fiction, dismisses it as nothing more than "a what and a what and a what," in Margaret Atwood's phrase.

Rather than strip away all but the barest essentials of a story in order to get through a beginning, middle, and end in a few words, most flash I read instead ONLY focuses on the elements other than plot. It often reads more like confessional poetry, except that the words go all the way to the end of the lines. There's much more focus on metaphor, voice, imagery and the like than on what happens. That's a shame, because I really like the effect that a condensed, no-nonsense story gives you. It's more like the way people naturally tell stories when they're talking about a thing that happened to them. In Vonnegut novels, I almost like the mini-stories, told as summaries of novels by Kilgore Trout, more than the novel itself. 

To be honest, before I got serious about reading literary fiction about ten years ago, I was the kind of reader who'd tend to skip over a two-page description of scene. "They're in a desert. Got it. That's all I need to know."  

It's strange, then, that it's become so natural to me to read work that focuses so much on something other than plot. The kind of reading I've been doing, though, is all about taking what I used to think of as the filler and making it most of what's there. If you try to write a synopsis of a literary fiction story, you often find yourself struggling. There's a spectrum, of course, with some writers leaning more toward a discernible plot, but none of them is going to write a story that's exactly full of details in its plot. 

Enter Etgar Keret's The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God

Keret is undoubtedly considered part of the literary fiction world. He's been published in The New Yorker a few times. All the people who would have to call you a genius if you're going to be thought of as a serious fiction writer have called him a genius. When I finally shamed myself into reading something of his lately, though, I was shocked to find that his stories don't sound anything like what I've become used to. They're short, but still things happen in them. I could summarize any story in the collection with a synopsis of events, rather than having to describe the language or the narrative approach. There's hardly any art to the narrative, and that's the whole art of it. 

I think whole stories sometimes went by in which not a single character's appearance was described, nor a scene set. I could probably count the metaphors in the whole book on both hands. These are all fireside stories told the way an entertaining friend would tell, even if they're weirder than your friend's stories probably are. 

I enjoyed the stories very much, but I also found myself getting upset, wondering how he gets away with it. I'd like to write stories like that, too, but I haven't seen anyone else doing it. I didn't think if I wrote stuff like that, anyone would ever read it. I still don't believe they would. I doubt I could publish a single story writing like him. Yet it was undeniably a breath of fresh air to read. 

It's not just the style where he's getting away with things I didn't think you could get away with. His stories involve people getting high or trying to score with girls. There are a lot of stories of bros doing bro things. There are also plainly parabolic stories. The best story is the novella that closes the book, about a half-dead after life for people who've died by suicide. None of these are things I see in literary magazines. Hell, some magazines outright tell you not to do these things. 

Every story is a simple read, but every story can also leave you thinking for a long time afterward, trying to unravel what kinds of themes were lurking in the simple story structure. 

Have I talked myself into writing what I don't like?

I recently submitted a story to the Coolest American Stories anthology. Their feedback kind of took me back: 

We found ((the story)) solidly written and polished well. We're saying no because: 1) its overall premise is too murky for our readership (a wide audience from all walks of life); 2) it probably has too many characters for a COOLEST story--i.e., it allows characters to arrive and go (particularly in its 2nd half) as a memoir would, and our readers have let us know they've read enough autobiographical (and thus sometimes meandering) fiction pieces in university-affiliated lit mags (they want *story*).  

I was taken aback because my initial reaction was that hey, I like stories where things happen, too, unlike those stuffy lit mags. But I've been reading stuffy lit mags for so long, now, I'm starting to write like them. (I was also taken aback because the fiction wasn't in any way autobiographical, but that's a side point.) The worst kind of lecture is the lecture about something you thought you already were doing. If anything, I feel like one of the reasons I have a hard time getting published in literary magazines is because I focus too much on plot and not enough on poetics. But apparently, I'm starting to sound like an art house writer.  

This isn't the first time I've had this concern. I don't actually hate literary fiction's focus on language. I've developed a style by reading this kind of fiction that's sort of a hybrid literary-popular story-telling mash-up. I think I'm better for it, but I also think I've sort of lost my way in terms of knowing what it is I really love about writing. Maybe because I've also gotten a little lost knowing what it is I love about reading. I've been reading things I think I should read for so long, and getting used to not really loving it but forcing myself to "get something out of it," as they say, that when I naturally and instinctively do love something, I forget how to even react to it. 

I don't even know what to do about this. I've kind of developed myself as a writer of a certain sort, and if I tried to change now, it would probably sound like pop artists who suddenly decide the real money's in country music. I also don't even know what I'd change to. I just know that I feel like I've drifted from the kind of story-telling I love. Like most writers, I think my primary motivation in writing is that I don't see the stories I want to read out there in the world, so I have to create them. Part of that, though, should be remembering not just what stories I love, but what kind of story-telling I love, also.