[Watch the video interview on Youtube here]
Film Courage: Do you always know where the story is going when you begin a short story?
Author and Instructor Jonathan Blum: No not at all. I really don’t know. I have a stronger sense and then in some cases I begin stories at the end which I think a lot of people do. There’s something interesting about that. Stories have to be stories, they have to have a beginning, middle and end but not necessarily in that order. Starting with the ending has certain structural opportunities that are attractive but in some cases I may have heard a story and there’s something about that story that drew me to it that I may sort of borrow something of the arc of that story or I may take elements of that story or the first stage of that story.
I’m never trying to sort of replicate something that happened in the world onto the page but certainly things that exist in the world do find their way onto the page. Where a story ends up I think is really important. Endings like beginnings like openings are really important, but as has been pointed out, I like open-ended endings. I like giving the characters the open destiny of life. I like giving them a chance to reveal who they really are. In the case of that story about the jazz pianist I had been thinking about him for a very long time and yet I had never given him the voice to tell his own story and I think in general I work in first person. It’s mostly because I like to give characters their own voice and let their stories go in the direction that they go in sort of un-manipulated by me which involves to an extent following your instincts or your impulses and in some cases you make decisions well this character has only loved one person. Do I show him with her? Do I have it just in his imagination? Do I dramatize it? There are always lots of choices and just try to follow the ones that are true to the character. I don’t know, does that answer the question?
Film Courage: It does. Should a writer know what their short story is not?
Jonathan: Yes, but that doesn’t happen until you’re already into the story. I think when you’re starting the story your sense of what it’s about is probably going to change…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
BUY THE BOOK – LAST WORD
BUY THE BOOK – THE USUAL UNCERTAINTIES: STORIES
About:
Jonathan Blum grew up in Miami and graduated from UCLA and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is the author of two books of fiction: The Usual Uncertainties (Rescue Press, 2019), a story collection, and Last Word (Rescue Press, 2013), a novella. Both were named one of the best books of the year by Iowa Public Radio, and The Usual Uncertainties was named one of the 15 Best Short Story Collections of 2019 by Electric Literature. Blum has twice appeared on KCRW’s Bookworm. His short stories have been published in Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, Northwest Review, Playboy, and Shanxi Literature, among others. His short story, “The White Spot,” which was published in Electric Literature with an introduction by Deborah Eisenberg, appears in the award-winning anthology The Best Peace Fiction (University of New Mexico Press, 2021). He has taught fiction writing at The University of Iowa, Drew University, and the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, and is the recipient of a Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award, a Hawthornden Fellowship in Scotland, and a grant from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. He has also been a guest writer at the Tianjin Binhai New Area International Writing Program in China. He lives in Los Angeles.
WRITING CLASSES WITH JONATHAN BLUM
Jonathanblumwriter.com/classes
CONNECT WITH JONATHAN BLUM
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