What is the date you began writing this piece of fiction and the date when you completely finished the piece of fiction? I began writing the linked stories in All the Ruined Men in September 2016 and I made the last edits submitted to my publisher (St. Martin’s) on September 17, 2021. Five years of work. I had to make some tough decisions along the way, like cutting some completed stories from the collection. One such story, “Lost and Found,” was a story that I loved and had been published by the online publication, Bottom Shelf Whiskey. However, the story’s theme of a veteran’s alienation from family was repeated in another story, so one of them had to go. The other story did a better job of showing the earlier, joyful relationships the husband enjoyed with his wife and daughter, so that was the story that stayed in the book.
Click on the link below to read bout linked stories
https://www.writingclasses.com/toolbox/ask-writer/what-is-a-collection-of-linked-stories-is-this-a-relatively-new-genre
Where did you do most of your writing for this fiction work? And please describe in detail. And can you please include a photo? I did the vast majority of my writing on my laptop computer in the writer’s nook I created next to my kitchen. The space was designed to be a dining room, but I had other ideas. I pushed the dining table against one wall and surrounded it with bookcases. When I’m sitting at my computer, all of my writing reference books are within arm’s reach in the bookshelves on my left; and in the bookshelves on my right are the various novels and non-fiction books that have inspired me over the years.
The other places where I composed these stories are too numerous to fully list—the recliner, the library, sitting in traffic with a notepad balanced on my knee, and so on. Wherever I was when an idea struck me, I would jot down my thoughts on legal pads (or whatever wisp of paper I could find) and carry them back to the computer in my writer’s nook. There, I would transfer these half-formed thoughts and pound them into shape like a smithy hammering a radiant scrap of metal into something with form and function.
What were your writing habits while writing this work- did you drink something as you wrote, listen to music, write in pen and paper, directly on laptop; specific time of day? I usually wake early in the morning, long before sunrise, and set off on a walk or run to start my day. On these jaunts, I will mull over whatever it is I’m writing at the moment and puzzle through where I want to take it next (or where it wants to take me). Once back home, after cooling down, I sit at the computer in my writer’s nook and dive back into the story I’m currently writing. Unless I’m buzzing with a fresh idea from my walk/run, I’ll read the previous section to get reacquainted with the work, and then start writing after that. Reading the previous section gets the voice of the narrative going in my head so that when I get to the writing part, the story seems to already be in motion and all I have to do is try to keep up.
I don’t worry about writing perfect sentences when I am creating, Knowing that many, many rewrites lie ahead in my future, I write whatever comes to me. The story, the character’s wants and desires, the obstacles in his way and how he plans to get around them—those are my only thoughts. I let the story flow and carry me away in its current. Writing the story is a wild, passionate ride filled with unexpected turns. Editing is a dispassionate endeavor to examine the creation and ask difficult questions about every sentence, every word. I do my writing in the morning when I feel most alive, and I do my editing in the afternoon, when I’m more irritable and harder to please. I pick apart the story and carve it up with a knife, cutting out lumps of fat and slicing down to the savory meat.
Please include just one excerpt and include page numbers as reference. This one excerpt can be as short or as long as you prefer. Here is an excerpt from the story “Dog is Not a Palindrome” on pages 85-87 of All the Ruined Men:
The rottweiler snarls at the end of its chain as soon as the backhoe arrives. Two hours later, it’s still barking, disrupting the harmony of this otherwise quiet subdivision of Colonials, Georgians, and Regencies where every pristine yard is professionally landscaped. Tied to a tree two houses down from the pool dig, it strains against its bonds and snaps the air as silvery ropes of drool shake free from its mouth.
The backhoe has already dug the shallow end and is working on the deep. … Curt stands dangerously close to the toothy bucket as it carves out plugs of earth the size of a washing machine. A veteran of five combat tours, he doesn’t scare easily. Waving for the operator to pause, Curt sets a ten-foot rod on the lowest point of the scraped earth. The pole is marked like a ruler with sixteenth-inch hashes. …
Getting the closest dig out of the backhoe is an art form. Now that they’re close to target depth, Curt signals the backhoe to cut long, thin slices from the bottom, then steps back to watch. The ground is blue marl, a lime-rich sediment whose crumbly texture near the surface becomes more like hard-packed clay the deeper they dig. All the while, the dog keeps barking. Just like the wild dogs that scavenged the littered streets of Tikrit.
These days, Curt tries not to think about war. The IEDs, the shredded bodies, the sudden firefights clapping away silence and leaving ears ringing for hours. All that death and ruin are locked in a strongbox deep in his mind. But with the dog’s incessant barking, the box cracks its lid. The gouged-out hole resembling a bomb crater, the rumble of the backhoe like a Humvee’s diesel roar, the smell of oil and gas like the lingering odors of a firefight—it all combines to send him back to the days of sand and blood.
He remembers the raid where they waded through a sewer line to approach their target house undetected. But the wild dogs weren’t fooled. They howled the squad’s approach better than an early warning system. An AK opened fire, tracers splitting the night like lasers, and everyone dove for cover in the shit-filled ditch. The LT had come along that mission, and he was all kinds of pissed after submerging himself in sewage. After that, it was open season on dogs. Patrols hunted them down and soldiers made necklaces from their teeth.
Click on the below link to purchase ALL THE RUINED Men from Amazon
Why is this excerpt so emotional for you as a writer to write? And can you describe your own emotional experience of writing this specific excerpt? I am a huge dog lover; I love all animals, but dogs more than any other. How anyone could ever harm a dog is beyond me. And yet, they do. The last line in this passage was a tough one for me to write. Or even think about. Although I did not personally hear any stories of anyone hunting or harming dogs, I do know that crises in wartime can make people do atrocious things. Just look at what Russian soldiers are doing in Ukraine.
The only dogs that my unit encountered were strays that soldiers would feed and play with. That was my experience. However, as is the case with much fiction, I imagined an alternate situation, one where the dogs were deemed a hazard to military operations and soldiers were tasked with shooting them as a form of operational security. Wild dogs were everywhere in the streets of Iraqi towns, and they often took away the element of surprise on night raids with their barking, so this edict was something in the realm of possibility. Imagining soldiers shooting dogs and writing about the hostile, neglected dog in this story was as difficult for me as it was for Curt in the story.
Were there any deletions from “Dog is Not a Palindrome” that you can share with us? And can you please include a photo of your marked up rough drafts of this excerpt. My original concept was an emotionally scarred veteran decides to adopt an emotionally scarred dog, and in trying to heal the dog, he heals himself as well. I kept the key concepts (an emotionally scarred veteran and dog) but I changed the premise as the story evolved. Instead of looking for a dog to adopt, the veteran encounters the mistreated dog while working a pool construction job at a neighboring home. With each passing day, the snarling dog reminds the veteran of everything he’d tried to forget about the war, and those memories push him to take some radical actions.
In the first draft, I wrote:
Muñoz always asks for the meanest bitch on trips to the pound, battle-scarred mutts bred for fighting, now scheduled for the blue-juice needle. In vain, the vet tries to talk him down, explaining how ruined they are. He means the dogs, Muñoz knows, but still he feels the sharp stab of judgment piercing his own heart.
A brindled pit bull launches itself against its cage. One-eyed, ear-torn, eighty pounds of snarl. Just like the wild dogs of Fallujah, the ones his commander cursed each time their howls broadcasted the approach of a snatch-and-grab convoy. He puts out his hand for the pit bull to sniff and it snaps the air on the other side of the bars, gobbets of froth shaking free from its muzzle.
In later drafts, this became:
Removing a Ziploc from his cooler, Curt marches across the intervening yard, Zay by his side. The sun is still low enough for loblolly pines to throw a blanket of shade over the circle of worn earth surrounding the chained dog. As they approach, its barking heightens to a frantic pitch. Without pause, Curt hops the waist-high, chain-link fence and Zay follows. The barking stops, replaced by a low growl and raised hackles. Eighty pounds of snarl aching to be released.
Stopping on the fringe of grass just short of biting range, Curt squats down and unseals his baggie. Inside is the cooked steak cut into strips. Curt says nothing to the dog, no singsongy patter, no Who’s a good boy? Who’s a good boy? He just holds out a strip of steak in a gloved hand and inches forward.
The rottweiler can smell the meat, but it seems more intent on the hand holding it and, if it could break its chain, the neck beyond. It launches forward, snapping the air, gobbets of froth on its muzzle.
Click on the link below to visit Bill Glose’s website
Most of the INSIDE THE EMOTION OF FICTION links can be found at the very end of the below feature:
http://chrisricecooper.blogspot.com/2021/03/stephenson-holts-arranged-marriage-is.html