Art Arising Out of Craft

All Things Considered, which, along with Morning Edition, makes up the entirety of my non-satiric news consumption, is having a short story contest. Stories for the “Three-Minute Fiction” contest have to be no more than 600 words and based on the photograph at the link. I’m intending to write something for it, but, unfortunately, the picture is not particularly inspiring to me. I’ll keep it in my mind, and see if I can come up with anything.

The contest reminds me of the “Project Song” series on All Things Considered, in which songwriters write a song in two days, based on a photograph. One of the songwriters was public radio darling Stephin Merritt of The Magnetic Fields. Merritt is one of my favorite song writers (so is Nellie McKay, another Project Song participant), so I’m always interested in hearing about his creative process.

Merritt’s songs are often very short but also very textured — with story and characters that often get my own creative mind working. I recently heard Merritt on another All Things Considered story about The Magnetic Fields, and he reveals a very craftsman-like approach to writing songs. Often, he gives himself a technical challenge — the last three Magnetic Fields albums are the “no-synthesizer trilogy,” 69 Love Songs is an album of, yes, sixty-nine love songs, and all the songs on my favorite Magnetic Fields album, i (also one of the no-synthesizer trilogy; another one, Distortion, features distorted sounds), begin with the letter “i”. In this latest interview, Merritt comments that when he’s writing songs, “I’m thinking about is rhymes more than I’m thinking about characters. And I think the characters make themselves.”

This attitude got me thinking about how it can be applied to writing fiction. I heard prolific novelist Joyce Carol Oates on the local public radio show Forum recently, and she cautioned the host, Michael Krasny, not to go too far with the delusion that characters in novels are real people to the novelist. It is admittedly a real feeling, but the rational mind of the writer also knows that the characters are her invention. However, it does seem that real characters arise out of good craftsmanship — if you write about people in a realistic way, the way they think, talk, act, and interact, they will indeed begin to feel like actual people. And if the illusion of personhood can come from good craftsmanship, surely so can art.