Fragments

I call myself "retired" as a writer. My brain hasn't gotten the message. I woke up with this fragment in my head:

Writing outside-in is an attempt at commerce. Writing inside-out is a leap of faith.

This brought to mind my short story Fragments Before the Fall, which appeared in The Literary Review in 1971. The story has a highly unusual genesis and history. It is, for example, my only work of "automatic writing." Let me explain.

In the late 1960s, I dropped out of graduate school to "become a writer." I had two goals: make some money, which I finally did in journalism mainly; and to publish literary fiction in some journals I respected, including The Literary Review and Prism International, where I eventually published several times.

One afternoon I received a mailbox fulll of rejections. I don't recall the number but it was at least four, maybe six. Six sounds sexy, let's say six. A bunch. All of literary stories to places I wanted to be. I was disheartened. I came into the house we rented and threw the envelopes across the room. I put a sheet of paper in my manual Remington and, in a state of outrage and fury, banged out "Fragments Before the Fall." Without changing it, I stuck it into an envelope and mailed it right away to The Literary Review, which had been one of the rejections.

The Beats embraced "automatic writing" -- no plan or pre-thought, just let her rip. This story was automatic writing, in my emotional condition after receiving so many rejections the same day. In retrospect, it strikes me as the closest I've ever come to a statement of aesthetics, a theory about how fiction works, or should work. The writer who sacrifices himself to cushion the future pain of the reader. Very idealistic -- but I was a young writer then.

The Literary Review accepted the story and it appeared a couple years later. Things took so long in those days. But here was my "breakthrough" to one of the highly respected literary journals in the land, a piece of automatic writing in a moment of outrage. Well, they say write with passion. I certainly did that ha ha.

I haven't written much automatic writing since. Now and again, in a more planned work, moments of automatic writing happen within it. But for the most part, I demand more efficiency from myself and others than automatic writing delivers.

The fragment in my head might suggest a collection of fragments, Fragments Before the Fall II or something.