What Are You Working On?
Writers on their works in progress

Dashka Slater

Novelist and children's author

Dashka Slater (website) is a novelist, journalist, and fiction writer, and the recipient of a 2004 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her novel The Wishing Box was named one of the best books of the year by the Los Angeles Times, which called it "an impish novel, hopeful and full of humor." She is also the author of Lights, Camera, Alcatraz: Hollywood's View of an American Landmark. Two children's books, Baby Shoes and Firefighters in the Dark, will be published this year by Bloomsbury Books and Houghton Mifflin, respectively.

 
I often say that I suffer from Writer's ADD because I work in many genres -- fiction, journalism, and children's books. I'm usually working on far too many projects at once. So at the moment I'm working simultaneously on a short story collection, a longer work of fiction, a half dozen books for children that are in various stages of completion, and a couple of magazine articles.

When my novel came out, I told everyone that I was most emphatically a long-form writer -- I wrote long articles for newspapers and magazines and I had never written a short story I liked. Then I had a baby, and suddenly I found myself thinking of short stories I wanted to write -- multitudes of them. I think it was partly because I was living the life of a parent, in which it's difficult to complete a thought, much less a long narrative. But beyond the practical impediments, there was also the fact that parenthood was such a profoundly new experience that I felt compelled to make sense of it in the only way I know -- by telling stories. So my short story collection, A Detour on the Way to the World, is about the relationship between caretakers and their charges, particularly parents and children.

In my life as a writer, I have written poetry, a novel, magazine articles, and picture books, and I find short stories to be the single most difficult genre I have ever attempted. There's just no room for error. It's like building a bridge out of toothpicks -- one false move and the whole thing collapses. I was immensely grateful to the National Endowment for the Arts for giving me a fiction-writing grant that allowed me to spend a lot of time failing -- writing pages and pages that I deleted at the end of the day, or simply writing the same sentence over and over again. There was one story that I wrote five times from top to bottom before I finally hit upon a way to tell it. When I got the grant, I imagined myself gliding along through the manuscript like a canoe in a current, but instead I did a lot of paddling, and even more portaging. My moment of inspiration, if there was one, was that it didn't matter whether the writing came easily or not -- at the end of the year, I couldn't tell the difference between the pages that came in a flood of inspiration and the ones that were laboriously constructed over weeks and weeks.

 
What's the best part about working on your short story collection?

Probably the most rewarding part has been learning how to write lean, how to work within the confines of the short story. I feel like I've been doing wind sprints for a year -- like my writing got more trim and muscular. And I've loved getting those stories that were buzzing around my head down on paper so I could think about something else.

 
Now that you have lean writing muscles from writing short stories, what do you think it will be like to work on another novel?

In everything I write, I tend to write long and then cut like crazy, and that will probably continue. But short stories have taught me a useful kind of impatience, which I hope will save me from having to cut as brutally as I did with my last novel, which I had to cut by about 350 pages.

 
When do you expect (or hope) to finish, and what's next for the project? Do you have a book contract, or prospects?

I have a couple more rounds of revisions to do, and one more story to write. Then of course there's the selling process, which I try not to think about, as my agent has informed me several times that I couldn't have picked a less marketable genre. One is supposed to write a short story collection first, using all the pieces one wrote in graduate school, and then write a novel. Instead I skipped graduate school, wrote a novel, and followed it up with a short story collection. But I love reading short stories, so if I can just find a few million other people who do as well, my success is virtually assured.

Links

Articles by Slater in Mother Jones, SF Gate, Legal Affairs, Sierra Magazine, (2), (3).

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published 21 Mar 06 on Too Beautiful. email copyright 2006 Mark Pritchard, Bernal Heights, San Francisco