So, once you’ve read your way through Catsignal — all the fiction, all the haiku, all the odds and ends that have crept into this site — you could click over to this page at Esquire’s website and read stories that were written on napkins.
It’s an intriguing idea. I haven’t tried it yet, but it’s a reminder for me that web fiction is by both necessity and definition short. Attention spans are measured in pixels and picoseconds, not pages and “perhaps just one more chapter.” I’ve been writing longer stories lately, which I have actually felt just the tiniest bit guilty about, feeling as though I don’t at present possess the discipline required to write something of 500 words or less. (And what would Freud make of writers trying to write shorter and narrower stories rather than longer and broader ones?)
There’s something charming about the idea of writing a whole, entire story on a napkin. It has a reductionist appeal, declaring that something worthwhile and beautiful can be done so simply and with such humble materials. And it forces one to write tightly, unless the last words one comes to are: “Continued on next napkin.”
PROGRAMMING NOTE: Speaking of reductionism, this is the last Friday Pen to Paper. Catsignal will be a Monday through Thursday blog, starting with Pen to Paper, then a haiku, a quote, and finishing up on Thursdays with some fiction. Sorry, but I need that time back for other projects.
Thanks for pointing this out. I like it. I’ve seen other types of Internet short fiction that didn’t appeal to me, such as stories that are assemblages of Twitter “tweets”.
I like this one. I like the aesthetic, and It has a familiar charm. Who hasn’t jotted down an idea on a napkin while sitting at a bar or cafe?
Kurt Vonnegut’s Hocus Pocus was written in short bursts with quad-spaces (breaks) between, purportedly because the narrator was writing his life story while imprisoned in a college library. He would fill up the back of a business card, and that would be one section. A stray bookmark would hold the next, and so on. He did not allow himself to tear out the endsheets of the books or otherwise deface them. The scraps of paper he numbered so a future editor could assemble them.
I always thought that sounded like a cool way to write a book. It meshes with Vonnegut’s style perfectly.