[Matthew Salesses was kind enough to expand just a bit on his earlier thoughts about ordering his new book, I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying, out now from Civil Coping Mechanisms. Thanks, Matthew!]
I used to have a picture of me standing among the chapters of I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying, which is out this month from Civil Coping Mechanisms, as I reordered the book before submitting it to my editor there. But then I went swimming with my phone in my pocket, and now I have only the memory.
I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying is made up of 115 one-page chapters, which were published in various lit mags as flash fiction pieces. When I was asked to put a book together, I had to figure out how those individual pieces could build into a larger, compelling and hopefully satisfying, arc.
What I did was print out everything I had–then about 140 stories–and ask my wife to clear the room. She kept our baby from crawling over (helpfully, this was before walking), and I tried my best to shoo away the cats. I left aisles between the columns of pages, and I walked between the stories, looking at them from this zoomed-out, very physical perspective. Obviously, I wasn’t going to read them like this, to get down into the details of the stories. What I was looking for was rising and falling action, was pacing, was repetition, was thematic connections. I wanted the reader to get caught up in the larger story, to wonder if my narrator was going to get his act together or not. I didn’t want the reader to be bogged down in places where too many alike stories sided together, or to forget about certain storylines or characters when they disappeared for pages at a time.
For example, the narrator has several affairs in the book–he has a little problem with commitment–and I didn’t want the book to be affair after affair. Neither did I want the book to be no affairs for a while and then one affair, then no affairs for a while and then one affair. I needed to space the affairs so that the reader gets the feeling that the affairs are ongoing, and that they take up a backstage part of the narrator’s life–to his mind–but that the stages are always threatening to flip. I needed to space the affairs for pacing and to keep the narrator from becoming too unsympathetic, especially before the reader gets a chance to know him. I needed to space the affairs so that they seem to be coming to a head and to demonstrate cause and effect, to show that they affect the rest of the narrator’s life, even if he denies this.
I did similar reorganization with regard to the narrator’s career, an extended fight between the narrator and the wifely woman, race, identity, getting used to being a father, etc.
It helped to be able to view these movements visually, before I went on to read the pieces aloud again and again, to let the ear sort them out as well.
Read the rest of the sequence on sequence here.