Finding the Form with Mary-Lynn Murphy

I wasn’t working on a specific project at the time I wrote “Recalculating” and had no ideas in mind, so I approached the page with a familiar mixture of anticipation and hopelessness. I often begin by putting something—anything—on the page, sometimes just what I see out the window. Something to get the pen moving. The first line of writing that day was this: “There are things you want to outlive. Others you don’t.” I have no idea what that was all about, but what I wrote next began the ramblings that turned into “Recalculating.” That’s often how things go.

Not much of what I write is planned in advance; I just follow where the pen takes me. The “silent type” with the chainsaw at the beginning of this story had shown up before in writing that didn’t lead anywhere; I didn’t know what to do with him. This time, I found his opposite, and that ended up giving shape to the piece. The second-person point of view was there from the beginning of this effort; it seemed to drive the writing in a way.

I’m drawn to work by writers like Amy Hempel, whose stories are often very short and don’t always follow “the rules” about structure—at least not that I can see. So I find myself wondering, what is a story? Even when I reached what seemed to be the end of this piece after several revisions, I had no idea whether it was a story.

I’m grateful to be a member of a small writing group whose focus is critiquing each other’s work. I submitted “Recalculating” to the group one time when I had little else to offer. After making a few good editing suggestions, they told me to submit it somewhere as a piece of flash fiction. And now it’s in TNQ; I guess it is a story after all.

Mary-Lynn Murphy’s poetry and fiction have appeared in The New Quarterly, The Antigonish Review, Event, The Fiddlehead, FreeFall, Grain and Dandelion. She was a prize winner in TNQ’s 2012 Occasional Verse contest. Her novel, Finding Grace, was published by Scrivener Press in 2013. She lives in Northern Ontario, near Superior’s eastern shore.

Cover image by https://writix.co.uk/