Ryan Werner's Blog, page 5

Shake Away These Constant Days: An Explanation in Thirty Parts (Part 18: "Focus")

My upcoming book of short short stories,  Shake Away These Constant Days , originated as a project called Our Band Could Be Your Lit, in which I wrote a story under 1000 words every week. To generate this much content, I based the stories on songs suggested my musicians and writers from around the world. The original idea was 100 songs, 100 stories: find the creative common ground between two mediums and cultivating the virtue found therein.

Until September 25th, I'll be doing a blog post a day about the stories in the book. After that, it's all up to you.

"Hyperballad" by Bjork, as suggested by writer Benjamin Rosenbaum, was the inspiration behind the story "Focus"
Originally OBCBYL #5. I love Manic Pixie Dream Girls, but if I had to pick another favorite harmful, terribly-affected female stereotype, it would be its opposite, an Unwilling Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

The problem with someone like Natalie Portman in Garden State or every character Zooey Deschanel has ever played is that they really play into it. Not that it isn’t charming, but there’s really no self-awareness to anchor the personality to anything. At least Kate Winslet’s character in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind know what she was being pigeonholed as, and rejected it in favor of figuring her own life out. (And good on her for doing do.)

The narrator in “Focus” is in a similar situation, I think. She’s not interested in being the solution for unhappy men. When a MPDG is reformed, when she decides not to let her purpose in life be defined by her relation to helping out the sad souls of young white men, what remains is a person trying to suss out their problems.

Zelda Fitzgerald ended up in a mental institution and Edie Sedgwick died of a drug overdose. Fucked up girls who don’t love themselves aren’t supposed to stay that way just to possibly help a young man “find himself.” They’re supposed to figure out how to love themselves, which is hard enough as is.

Then again, Natalie from Sports Night could really turn my life around, I think.


Tomorrow: A story named "Facts" that is based on the song "Crosseyed & Painless" by The Talking Heads. Suggested by writer Kirk Nesset.

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Shake Away These Constant Days: An Explanation in Thirty Parts (Part 17: "A Few Thoughts On Bloodlines")

My upcoming book of short short stories,  Shake Away These Constant Days , originated as a project called Our Band Could Be Your Lit, in which I wrote a story under 1000 words every week. To generate this much content, I based the stories on songs suggested my musicians and writers from around the world. The original idea was 100 songs, 100 stories: find the creative common ground between two mediums and cultivating the virtue found therein.

Until September 25th, I'll be doing a blog post a day about the stories in the book. After that, it's all up to you. 

"Cure For Pain" by Morphine was the inspiration behind the story "A Few Thoughts On Bloodlines"
Exclusive to SATCD. Even when excluding failed experiments in Catholicism, faith never did me much good. Even this book wasn’t supposed to be a book, wasn’t something I really believed in until I saw it happen.

I had never written anything like “Bloodlines” before—an oblique story of addiction told backwards in three parts—and upon finishing it I really thought it would make a difference in what I was hoping would be a writing career. But nobody wanted it. I’ve had over a dozen rejections on it, almost all form letters.

That doesn’t sound like a lot, but at some point it would make sense to maybe retool the story a bit, wonder why it keeps getting rejected. And I never do, which either makes me ostentatious or stupid. Either way, it’s not genius.

As far as stealing goes in this one, I took the spelling of “family” as “fambly” from the name of a Grandaddy album. The use of Lima, Ohio is a reference to the wrestler Al Snow’s billed-from hometown. Not sure where I got the Secretariat stuff from. My mom’s mom wasn’t named Pearl, but my mom’s mom’s mom was—holla back, Zombie Pearl.

Regardless, I’m proud of this, my one hold-out. I still think it’s a seriously heavy-hitter in my back catalog, even if I’m the only one. 

Tomorrow: A story named "Focus" that is based on the song "Hyperballad" by Bjork. Suggested by writer Reosenbaum.

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Shake Away These Constant Days: An Explanation in Thirty Parts (Part 16: "Follow the Water")

My upcoming book of short short stories,  Shake Away These Constant Days , originated as a project called Our Band Could Be Your Lit, in which I wrote a story under 1000 words every week. To generate this much content, I based the stories on songs suggested my musicians and writers from around the world. The original idea was 100 songs, 100 stories: find the creative common ground between two mediums and cultivating the virtue found therein.

Until September 25th, I'll be doing a blog post a day about the stories in the book. After that, it's all up to you.

"New Kind of Kick" by The Cramps, as suggested by writer yt sumner, was the inspiration behind the story "Follow the Water"
Originally OBCBYL #7. A cool thing to say is that I never tried to do drugs, I just fucking did them. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t be true. I’ve never done drugs at all, and not just because there are some things I do that are definitely drugs that I don’t consider drugs—I know pill poppers and potheads who “don’t do drugs” too.

I’ve never tried a cigarette and I don’t drink and I only recently started to allow small amounts of caffeine back into my body. (Arnold Palmer, you’re killing me.) Cautionary tales are much more interesting, though, so I’ve studied them instead of the prettier opposites that are the facts of my life. Motley Crue and Robert Evans and Len Bias and so on.

The Circuit described in the story is based in Chicago. I was trying to write something that might work for Victor David Gyron’s Curbside Splendor journal, which was more urban-themed at the time. It ended up working out nicely, as I needed a place bigger and dirtier and weirder than the small faceless Midwestern towns I normally set stories in. It’s easier to believe the drug-addled weirdos in a bigger city as well. A guy like Drano Dave would surely die in my hometown of 1100 people, he can somehow exist in Humboldt Park with no problems.

The whole story has a sort of circus feel to it that I can really only compare to that of a Lifter Puller song. The Cramps are there, for sure—loose and forceful, the pain in recreation and vice versa—but Lifter Puller are everything ridiculous and harrowing about a scene built on drugs and confusion.

And that soft second person voice here. I think it works. I think it sounds like someone standing around outside a fountain somewhere explaining to you how things are going to go, which is exactly what you need, always.


Tomorrow: A story named "A Few Thoughts On Bloodlines" that is based on the song "Cure For Pain" by Morphine. 


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Shake Away These Constant Days: An Explanation in Thirty Parts (Part 15: "After I Threw the Ball At Thomas Hernandez and Before It Killed Him")

My upcoming book of short short stories,  Shake Away These Constant Days , originated as a project called Our Band Could Be Your Lit, in which I wrote a story under 1000 words every week. To generate this much content, I based the stories on songs suggested my musicians and writers from around the world. The original idea was 100 songs, 100 stories: find the creative common ground between two mediums and cultivating the virtue found therein.

Until September 25th, I'll be doing a blog post a day about the stories in the book. After that, it's all up to you. 

"Jesus Christ" by Brand New, as suggested by writer Adam Gallari, was the inspiration behind the story "After I Threw the Ball At Thomas Hernandez and Before It Killed Him"
Originally OBCBYL #9. On first glance, it would appear that I was merely looking to create a situation in which I could murder a Mexican dude and get away with it. There’s more to it than that, mainly the amount of justice in any level of retribution involving home-wrecking and murder. (And Mexican baseball leagues.) The explanation is simple and involves a healthy amount of cribbing from several sides of the plate.

Dave Eggers has a story called “After I Was Thrown In the River and Before I Drowned” that is narrated by a dog and is pretty damn awesome. It’s a lot more creative than the stuff I write, that’s for damn sure. After I wrote a shitty first draft of this story—it was about twice as long and not in one big paragraph like the final version ended up being—I got totally stuck on a revision. And it definitely needed a revision, as it felt way too slight, even for a piece of 450 word prose. I popped that title up on top and everything sort of fell into place from there.

I don’t consider it a baseball story because it’s not about the game and how it parallels life. That’s the only criteria for a sports story, as far as I’m concerned, and I don’t think this one qualifies. A baseball game makes a wonderful excuse to throw a baseball at someone’s head, which is about the only reason I chose it. And the man who suggested the song, Adam Gallari, write a lot about baseball. I enjoyed his book, We Are Never As Beautiful As We Are Now, and felt like I should reciprocate with a baseball story of my own.

The part where Anne stands up was inspired by the part in The Natural where Iris Gaines stands up. Not that it’s really a rip off—it’s just a simple sentence that’s more connective tissue than anything else—but I always think of that scene.

As for the song itself, it’s haunting. Jesus Christ was a ghost, right? I’m not sure, but there was a strong sense of light-versus-dark that I got from the song, and because I spent all my time researching Mexican baseball leagues—the same ones I’m assuming Tom Berenger’s character in Major League was sent to—I just went with it. If it’s good enough for The Substitute, it’s good enough for me.


Tomorrow: A story named "Follow the Water" that is based on the song "New Kind of Kick" by The Cramps. 

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Shake Away These Constant Days: An Explanation in Thirty Parts (Part 13: "--:--")

My upcoming book of short short stories,  Shake Away These Constant Days , originated as a project called Our Band Could Be Your Lit, in which I wrote a story under 1000 words every week. To generate this much content, I based the stories on songs suggested my musicians and writers from around the world. The original idea was 100 songs, 100 stories: find the creative common ground between two mediums and cultivating the virtue found therein.

Until September 25th, I'll be doing a blog post a day about the stories in the book. After that, it's all up to you.

"The Beginning and the End" by ISIS was the inspiration behind the story "--:--"
(This story will be appearing soon in issue #4 of Fractured West.)

Exclusive to SATCD. It doesn’t make much sense to dissect a story in which the majority of the story is a dissection of the story. I was wrapped up in Amy Hempel—again. It’s my only excuse.

The song is part of a loose concept album called Oceanic. It deals with love, incest, suicide, and large bodies of untamable water. I covered most of that except the incest, which wasn’t really necessary. (I’m not sure how it plays into Oceanic, either, except as a point of confusion and shame.)

I wrote the first section—the “story” section where a man meets a woman and they marry and then he kills himself by jumping off a boat—and couldn’t figure out what to do next. I considered leaving it as is, a little 100-word prose-poem with some good sentences, but instead just wrote down what the story had done so far. I was trying to do a literary analysis on what should be there and wasn’t, and through that, I hoped to e able to finish the story.

What I came up with ended up being better than any story I was going to write. I was really prolific at the time in hopes of putting together an OBCBYL book and wanting to have extra, exclusive material to draw from. I had lots of ideas about stories—what drives them, what makes them work. For the first time in awhile, I was actively considering what must be twisted and what must be pure.

That isn’t to say I’ll ever dedicate myself to meta-fiction or any other sort of writing about writing. I’ve got a nice size stack of books about all sorts of styles of writing, most of them covered in highlighter and worn ragged. The majority of my blatant studying—I like to think I study by proxy now, just reading and writing as much as I can—happened independently in college. Those few years of obsession over craft were necessary in making sure that they eventually became unnecessary.

As for the title, I don’t know how it’s pronounced. I don’t even know what it means. I like to think of it as a blank clock, a commentary on time. But it could be a comparison, a variation on an analogy. It could be a topic and a list. I’m not sure. All I know is that when I put it at the top of the page, it made sense. That’s not something you can learn in a book—on purpose, at least.

Tomorrow: A story named "Haunt" that is based on the song "Ghosts of the Garden City" by Caspian. Suggested by musician Philip Jamieson of Caspian. 

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Shake Away These Constant Days: An Explanation in Thirty Parts (Part 14: "Haunt")

My upcoming book of short short stories,  Shake Away These Constant Days , originated as a project called Our Band Could Be Your Lit, in which I wrote a story under 1000 words every week. To generate this much content, I based the stories on songs suggested my musicians and writers from around the world. The original idea was 100 songs, 100 stories: find the creative common ground between two mediums and cultivating the virtue found therein.

Until September 25th, I'll be doing a blog post a day about the stories in the book. After that, it's all up to you.

"Ghosts of the Garden City" by Caspian, as suggested by musician Philip Jamieson of Caspian, was the inspiration behind the story "Haunt"
Originally OBCBYL #6. Dead people are only interesting if they’re more like actual people instead of corpses. Everyone from generic zombies to specific Bernies follow this rule.

I myself had just finished reading Kevin Brockmeier’s brilliant novel The Brief History of the Dead and could think of almost nothing else when needing to write a story based on "Ghosts of the Garden City." The book is what my friend Sam would call, I think, post-mortal fiction, and the song is an instrumental with intensely sad glockenspiel--or whatever--and the word “ghost” in its title. Serendipity was too much.

The story is set in a world similar to Brockmeier’s, a land of the dead that isn’t heaven, hell, or purgatory. The difference is that his has a rational explanation that works to further the plot with its mystery and then, later, with its logic. Mine’s more just like, “What the fuck is going on. Well, I guess we’ll never know.”

The story almost didn’t make the cut, but upon rereading it, I’m glad it did. There’s a sense of lingering that you don’t need to be dead to understand. The end of the story says it best, and I don’t want to ruin it, but I will say when I lose something I tend to cling tightly to the things I still have as opposed to trying to get back what was lost. I don’t consider this giving up, but I don’t know if it’s right.


Tomorrow: A story named "After I Threw the Ball At Thomas Hernandez and Before It Killed Him" that is based on the song "Jesus Christ" by Brand New. Suggested by writer Adam Gallari.


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Shake Away These Constant Days: An Explanation in Thirty Parts (Part 12: "Signal")

My upcoming book of short short stories,  Shake Away These Constant Days , originated as a project called Our Band Could Be Your Lit, in which I wrote a story under 1000 words every week. To generate this much content, I based the stories on songs suggested my musicians and writers from around the world. The original idea was 100 songs, 100 stories: find the creative common ground between two mediums and cultivating the virtue found therein.

Until September 25th, I'll be doing a blog post a day about the stories in the book. After that, it's all up to you.

"Have a Cigar" by Pink Floyd, as suggested by writer Don Balch, was the inspiration behind the story "Signal"
Originally OBCBYL #29. Like I mentioned yesterday, the music of Pink Floyd is hard to separate from the mythology of Pink Floyd. I’m no good at reinventions, and, like with “Smoke On the Water,” I’d known the Wish You Were Here story forever. Some people can take a fairy tale and make it something new. I can barely take a story I invented myself and make it something at all.

The opening image of someone watching the family videos of strangers was something I’d had in mind for awhile. A story like this is why I think prompts are good. If a writer is worth a goddamn, their personality and voice will come out no matter what. Any sort of direction a prompt gives is just that: direction. It ain’t the car.

One of the dumbest things I’ve ever done in my writing is take the line about riding the gravy train and automatically turning it into a reason to set the story at a Thanksgiving dinner.

There’s something about this story that I think is missing, but I’m not sure exactly what it is. I don’t want to ruin anything for anyone who might actually be inclined to read the book, but I think the set-up of the narrator watching those home videos of other people’s lives needs another sentence, two at the most, to really solidify the parallels between him and the man in the Thanksgiving video. I think it works as is—obviously, as it made the book—and maybe it’s just me, but I want a bit of Gary Lutz exposition in there right away.

At 286 words, it’s the shortest story in the book, one of the shortest stories I’ve ever written. Now might be a good time to admit that I never wanted to be a flash fiction writer, but, now that I think about it, maybe not. Why waste the words?


Tomorrow: A story named "--:--" that is based on the song "The Beginning and the End" by ISIS. 


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Shake Away These Constant Days: An Explanation in Thirty Parts (Part 11: "The Vikings")

My upcoming book of short short stories,  Shake Away These Constant Days , originated as a project called Our Band Could Be Your Lit, in which I wrote a story under 1000 words every week. To generate this much content, I based the stories on songs suggested my musicians and writers from around the world. The original idea was 100 songs, 100 stories: find the creative common ground between two mediums and cultivating the virtue found therein.

Until September 25th, I'll be doing a blog post a day about the stories in the book. After that, it's all up to you.

"Smoke on the Water" by Deep Purple, as suggested by musician Kristian Dunn of El Ten Eleven, was the inspiration behind the story "The Vikings"
Originally OBCBYL #33. When Kristian suggested this song to me, I assumed he was fucking with me. I didn’t want to write about “Smoke On the Water” for the same reasons I didn’t want to write about “Have A Cigar” by Pink Floyd. There’s too much culture attached to either one, and separating it is another task entirely from writing the story. How can I do anything with “Smoke On the Water” if I can’t peel away the history of annoying kids in guitar shops playing that riff?

I knew the story already, or at least a somewhat factually-incorrect version of it: Frank Zappa and the Mothers burnt down a nautical recording studio with a flare gun and the members of Deep Purple saw it and wrote a song about it. Eventually, through some manipulation of the lyrics and a tiny miracle of the imagination, I came up with a story about a man in a plea-bargain employment situation, babysitting rich, violent idiots in hopes that his future self will be better.

I think this one took a lot out of me. I had come back from an OBCBYL hiatus earlier on in the year and been pretty faithful to the updates. After writing “The Vikings,” I took a long break to sort of recharge. I was also recording the first album with my band, Legal Fingers, which required a lot of on-the-spot guidance to turn my shitty Ace Frehley licks into something I wouldn’t mind having on a version of a song forever. Sam Snoek-Brown—the unofficial OBCBYL editor—took over for a month or so while I got my shit together.

I can’t read the name Ricky without thinking of Trailer Park Boys. I was steamrolling through the entire series at the time and had time for pretty much nothing else when it came time to relax. Around this time I also named a character JP, which was Julian’s real name.

Writing about money—I’m a janitor, so I have none—is a good way for me to subtly point out that we vote with our dollars with everything we buy or don’t buy, and too much of our lives are built around being a consumer. It may be for the better that it’s subtle, because whenever I have an opinion I can elaborate on, I always sound like a maniac and an idiot, which is exactly what everyone else with a dogmatic opinion sounds like. I think I offset all of this by having a scene involving wrestling at the end, but even that could go back to the Million Dollar Man: everybody’s got a price.


Tomorrow: A story named "Signal" that is based on the song "Have a Cigar" by Pink Floyd. Suggested by writer Don Balch.


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Shake Away These Constant Days: An Explanation in Thirty Parts (Part 10: "Rust")

My upcoming book of short short stories,  Shake Away These Constant Days , originated as a project called Our Band Could Be Your Lit, in which I wrote a story under 1000 words every week. To generate this much content, I based the stories on songs suggested my musicians and writers from around the world. The original idea was 100 songs, 100 stories: find the creative common ground between two mediums and cultivating the virtue found therein.

Until September 25th, I'll be doing a blog post a day about the stories in the book. After that, it's all up to you.

"Your Friend And Mine--Neil's Song" by Love, as suggested by musician Bob Bucko Jr, was the inspiration behind the story "Rust"
Originally OBCBYL #14. I used to have an old Bill Nye the Science Guy VHS where he taught the viewer how to rip a phone book in half. It was physics, not force. I never figured it out because I couldn’t think past my hands. All the phonebooks in our house ended up with minimal damage, bent down the center with a few pages on the front slightly torn.

I’m interested in writing about strength because I’m interested, outside of writing, in its opposite. I like when Hulk Hogan body slammed Andre the Giant. I like when Magnús Ver Magnússon deadlifted a 981 pound tire. I like it when Juggernaut runs through walls. I can only think of all the times I’ve never been able to do any of those things.

I like how in this story the narrator and his friend Neil are both strong men with weak wills, how one never equals the other in their lives. And Neil’s strength is mythical when you consider his size, which is a little fantasy element I always want to use and never really do. It feels good to accept a mismatch.

The scene in the rock quarry ended up in the story only because my friend Shawn was drunk a couple days before and telling me about where he’d stash a dead body if he had to. I had an ex-girlfriend accuse me of writing this story about her, which was untrue. (“. . . rock quarries by parent’s house and people who have nothing to be proud about . . .” was her argument.) She also accused me of referring to her negatively in a discussion I had online about the merits of Mandy Moore. This was also untrue.

Recently, a girl I know named Courtney told me that she went through a phase where she was really into getting drunk and ripping phone books in half. She weighs about 100 pounds and is often crying, and I am constantly amazed by the ways in which humankind can be so many things at once.


Tomorrow: A story named "The Vikings" that is based on the song "Smoke On the Water" by Deep Purple. Suggested by musician Kristian Dunn of El Ten Eleven.


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Shake Away These Constant Days: An Explanation in Thirty Parts (Part 9: "Monsters: A Series of Non-Chronological Vignettes")

My upcoming book of short short stories,  Shake Away These Constant Days , originated as a project called Our Band Could Be Your Lit, in which I wrote a story under 1000 words every week. To generate this much content, I based the stories on songs suggested my musicians and writers from around the world. The original idea was 100 songs, 100 stories: find the creative common ground between two mediums and cultivating the virtue found therein.

Until September 25th, I'll be doing a blog post a day about the stories in the book. After that, it's all up to you.

"Snow & Lights" by Explosions In the Sky was the inspiration behind the story "Monsters: A Series of Non-Chronological Vignettes"
Exclusive to SATCD. Eventually, I was able to separate the girl from the songs we shared, but not this one. The truth is more effective here than any sort of dissection of the story itself. So:

I had a KISS tribute band, but we only talked about a Valentine's Day show, never actually played one. And I really did snap some KISS CDs trying to scrape off my windshield, but that was with a different girl, one who didn't have to run a relationship by Jesus first but one who, ultimately, worked out just the same.

The girl in the story cooked something, but it wasn't chicken cacciatore. I built something, but it wasn't a bookshelf. We weren't house-sitting, and our periods of manic compatibility lasted much longer than a week.

We had a conversation about her breaking up with her high school boyfriend due to faith-related issues, but I much prefer the one I wrote, in which I'm very clever and tactful as opposed to neither, which is what I actually was.

"Stop. It's all right as long as I don't cum," was what she said, but I couldn't make it sound like I wasn't making it up.

Discussing our futures as they pertained to one another was beyond never discussed. It was actively avoided. We had a minor argument about nothing in particular, but that wasn't the end. I don't know what the end is because I don't know if it's happened yet—residuals, and whathaveyou.

We hung out in cornfields, but only in the non-snow months. I don't think the dancing in the headlights thing ever happened. I also don't think it matters.


Tomorrow: A story named "Rust" that is based on the song "Your Friend and Mine--Neil's Song" by Love. Suggested by musician Bob Bucko Jr.


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