In As Few Words as Possible
On Borges' poem "Juan López and John Ward," being succinct, and my birthday.
All the wars from now on should be fought by old men.
—Stephen Wilson Jr.
For the past three weeks, I’ve been in a storytelling workshop with writer Hernán Casciari, whom many of you know to be one of my literary heroes. As part of the workshop, each participant submitted a 300-word anecdote to refine over a month’s time. Mine was a scene from Paddlehands, in which the dastardly antagonist—my real-life archnemesis—slaps me across the table with a Ping-Pong ball1.
Last week, our lesson focused on engaging the reader and not pleasing oneself, a sin I commit with my endless digressions and obnoxious word choices (though, in the case of the latter, I do it as much to sound smart as to wink at my best friends, fellow connoisseurs of the Dictionary.com Word of the Day). Casciari challenged us to trim our stories down for maximum impact in the least number of words, from 300 to 200 to 150, and so on. (I couldn’t do it.)
This tactic, from flash fiction, has its origin in an urban legend attributed to Ernest Hemingway, who was said to have wagered $10 at a lunch with other famous writers that he could write a novel in six words. “Do it,” they said before Hemingway wrote out these lines on a napkin, which he then passed around the table:
“For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.”
Casciari shared a longer example in class: Jorge Luis Borges’ prose poem, “Juan López y John Ward,” which was published in his 1985 collection The Conjured and contains 156 words. I translate it below:
Chance found them in a strange age.
The planet had been parceled into different countries, each armed with loyalties, cherished memories, and an undoubtedly heroic past; with rights, grievances, and peculiar mythologies; with brazen forefathers, anniversaries, demagogues, and symbols. This division, the work of cartographers, was fertile ground for starting wars.
López was born in the city that stands by the immobile river; Ward, on the outskirts of the city once walked by Father Brown. He had studied Spanish to read Don Quixote.
The other professed love for Conrad, who had been revealed to him in a classroom on Viamonte Street. They might have been friends, but they saw each other only once, face to face, somewhere in those too-famous islands.
And each of the them was Cain. And each, Abel.
They were buried together, left to snow and decay.
The events took place an age we cannot understand.
The story’s impact may not be the same in English as in Spanish, written versus spoken, and without the history of the Falkland Islands War bouncing around in the back of your brain. But many of the 700 of us in the workshop cried as Casciari read it because the words pulled up pictures like Google Image queries in our minds.
Regardless of your position on war, the one incontestable thing is that, in most cases, those who are sent off to fight it are children. According to science—which you know I’m not the biggest fan of—the brain isn’t mature until your mid-20s. (Probably later if you play too many video games.) Every strategist, from Winston Churchill to my 4-year-old daughter, who sends her younger brother as an emissary for toys and ice after being told of the consequences if they leave their room after bedtime, knows the pawns of society are the youth, those easiest to manipulate for gain. Why do you think the frontline pieces on a chessboard are the weakest and most limited? (To learn more on this topic, ask the Apocalyptic Cowboy about the Soviet strategy on the Eastern Front in World War II.)
What Borges does succinctly in his poem that more recent examples in this genre—1917, All Quiet on the Western Front—do in longer form and with the benefit of pictures is make you feel beneath the surface of the work, where more is revealed than what meets the eye. (As a writing technique, this is known as the iceberg theory and also attributed to Hemingway.)
Great work should do this. It should trigger a reaction. It should make you feel something. Because without feeling, we’re corpses.
Speaking of corpses, this week, I turned 36.
A year ago, I was rewatching Big Fish in the den when a stranger from the future knocked on my door and told me things about my writing life that have yet to come to pass. I’m waiting for the sounds of him on my front porch again so I can bash the bozo’s teeth in.
In the next weeks, I may be writing fewer columns and stories as I prioritize finding freelance work to pay the bills (if you have leads, email me). I’m also ready to be done with Paddlehands. I will practice writing shorter stories. And though I still distrust publishing houses and consider pitching gatekeepers a waste of time, I am cold-DMing other publications with like-minded creators. This month, I’ll submit a piece on The Motorcycle Diaries to The Art of Conversation, a Substack worth subscribing to if you like arts and culture essays (rec: “On Collecting Books”).
This semester, I’m teaching multimedia and feature writing at the university. More than any other I’ve taught in the past eight years, my features class is my favorite because it’s the perfect excuse for me to brainwash young people.
This week, we’re reading “When We Are Called to Part” by Brooke Jarvis (Maryville, Tennessee native; Seattle transplant) about her time living in a leper colony on a remote Hawaiian island the year after graduating college. Because I believe academic research is, mostly, a waste of time and taxpayer money, I don’t see myself ever earning a PhD. But I love teaching and hope to one day run my own workshops, as Casciari does, for people who are less interested in sticking up their noses at the crowd and more interested in playing together.
Telling stories should be fun, like sitting around a campfire with your best friends.
When it stops being fun, it stops being worth it.
That’s all I have for now.
If you want to get me a gift to celebrate my inching one year closer to decay, consider upgrading your subscription for $4.17/month—it comes with special access to my clubhouse of confidantes—or sharing my Substack with one of your weirder friends who talks or thinks too much.
Words from the Wise
“My soul insists that I mourn not a man but a child. I do not say that children at war do not die like men, if they have to die. To their everlasting honor and our everlasting shame, they do die like men, thus making possible the manly jubilation of patriotic holidays. But they are murdered children all the same.”
—Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle
Useful Trivia
Many people have read about the famous Christmas Truce of 1914, in which British, German, and French soldiers along the Western Front during World War I put down their weapons to play soccer, exchange gifts, and help bury each other’s dead brothers.
Its last survivor, Scotsman Alfred Anderson, died in 2005 at the age of 109. “There was a dead silence that morning, right across the land as far as you could see,” he said, recalling the truce. “We shouted ‘Merry Christmas,’ even though nobody felt merry. The silence ended early in the afternoon and the killing started again. It was a short peace in a terrible war.”
The story of the truce is captured in the fictional Joyeux Noël, a 2005 Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film and one of the few Christmas movies with substance.
What I’m Reading
No updates. Still working my way through Wool, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and selecting good stories to teach my students about in my feature writing course at the University of Tennessee.
What I’m Listening To
Right now, my favorite artist is Stephen Wilson Jr, who Ben Bannister introduced me to on a whim. His album, “søn of dad” is the pinnacle of storytelling in song. And he’s got a heckuva backstory: a former Golden Gloves boxer who studied microbiology at MTSU, worked as a research scientist for Mars Inc. while selling songs to Nashville pop stars, and then began singing his own out of sadness after his dad died unexpectedly in 2018. Now, the dude’s a star. (His Knoxville show at the Bijou on April 12 is sold out, yet I may make the financially reckless decision of buying after-market tickets because he’s that good.)
In the same vein, another confessional songwriter who was somehow my Artist of the Year on Spotify, despite being a Gen-Z girl who sings about break-ups, is Lizzy McAlpine. She had one of my favorite NPR Tiny Desk concerts in 2022 with the harmonizing trio Tiny Habits. In 2024, she released two albums tinged with the melancholia of getting older—Older and Older (and Wiser)—which are very appropriate for birthdays in this season of life.
I’ve been trying to listen to less vocal music while writing. I preach to my students to read their writing out loud to find the natural rhythms in their sentences. I really enjoy the instrumental music of good movies. If you do, too, listen to the Past Lives soundtrack.
What I’m Watching
I watched The Brutalist at Downtown West last Friday. Even with its broken artist-genius narrative, which panders to folks like me who believe they’re diamonds in the rough, I didn’t love it.
Fortunately, I was able to keep my yearly birthday film tradition at the same place. I watched The Seed of the Sacred Fig, which was filmed in secret in Iran and resulted in the director's 8-year prison sentence (he escaped on foot over mountains and has asylum in Germany). The film is nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars. It’s slow, deliberate, and is about what can happen to a family under tension. Though the context is different, it reminded me very much of another film I loved by an Iranian director, Everybody Knows, with Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz.
Since Casciari hates traditional literary workshops—he considers them a power imbalance in which the teachers either try to sell stuff or sleep with their students—he’s added crowd-participation features, such as voting on written and narrated versions of each story. For what it's worth, mine currently ranks No. 165 (of 746) for written and No. 127 (of 386) for recorded stories.