Short, not so sweet

The act of writing is one that's laborious. Mentally, even physically exhausting.

Altogether time-consuming.

This is perhaps one reason why Jason Sinclair Long decided to try another way. He and his wife had just welcomed their first son. All that writing he’d done in a prefatherhood life was now something of a luxury.

“I was lamenting the time [I] used to have in college to write. I used to write every day for years,” Long remembers.

And so he decided to get back into the game. But this time, Long reasoned, he’d try a more practical approach: Write short. Really short. Very, very short. As in 88-words-or-less short-stories short.

Great plan—except that, at least in this case, less turned out to be a lot more than Long bargained for.

The result is Tiny Giants: 101 Stories Under 101 Words (Ad Lumen Press, $14.95), but for the Auburn-based writer, filmmaker and performer (his résumé includes a stint with the Blue Man Group), the slim tome hardly represents an easy endeavor.

“I didn’t really save any time; it was grueling. I was writing for hours, thinking, writing and rewriting,” Long says now. “The joke was on me.”

The genesis of Tiny Giants can actually be traced back 16 years, when Long entered an SN&R Flash Fiction Contest inviting writers to submit stories that totaled 59 words or less.

“I thought that [concept] was neat. I’d never written anything that short before,” said Long, who nabbed a third-place honor in 1998 for his story “Romeo and Juliet in the Trailer Park.”

Fast-foward to 2008, and Long decided to give microfiction another go. This time, he set his own rules: Each day, Long would take his cue from a pair of eight-sided Dungeons & Dragons dice. The possible number combinations meant he’d write anywhere between 11-88 words daily.

Long then created a blog to make it Internet-official, and on January 1, 2009, he rolled an 86. The next day, the dice turned up a higher number. And then, three days in, Long rolled a 12.

“I found out really quickly just how hard this was going to be,” he said. “It’s tremendously hard to write in 88 words or less.”

In fact, he says, he probably spent as much time on those tiny handfuls of words as he would have on any larger chunk of text. Revising. Tweaking. Changing words here and there. Endlessly polishing.

Eventually, however, Long fell into a rhythm. Maybe it even became kind of easy—relatively speaking, because writing is hell, of course.

And then he changed the game.

Eleven months in, Long was invited to discuss the project on Capital Public Radio’s Insight program. After the show aired, Long suddenly had a bevy of new fans that migrated to his blog. One visitor had a suggestion: Take title ideas from readers and friends.

Long accepted the challenge—but not necessarily because he wanted to make the process less difficult. Just the opposite, actually.

“I [thought], ’It’s becoming easier. Let’s make it harder.’”

Long compares the endeavor to Lars von Trier’s 2003 documentary The Five Obstructions, for which the Danish filmmaker challenged his friend Jørgen Leth to remake the latter filmmaker’s 1967 film The Perfect Human five times, each time following a new set of guidelines.

“[Leth] keeps making a better [film], and Lars says, ’Screw you, let’s make it harder,’” Long says. “He keeps putting in more obstructions, and the film just keeps getting better.”

That same concept helped him, Long says.

“There’s something about painting yourself into a corner, artistically speaking, and forcing yourself to rise to the challenge,” he says.

One such title, “Hot Peppers,” for example, came via a longtime friend who drew upon a childhood experience they’d shared eating peppers harvested by Long’s father.

The resulting story takes a very different leap, ruminating that, at age 19, love felt like eating a mouthful of spicy ones: “You chose whether to eat, and once you did, only the strongest kept chewing.”

Tiny Giants is built on such sentences. The storytelling is carved with precision, down to the barest, most telling details. Some stories, such as “Housemates (All in the Timing)” are conveyed entirely in dialogue. Others, such as the ethereal “Warming,” capture a beautiful, surreal moment (“As the snowman began to melt back into the earth”), while stories such as “What Lies Ahead” are compellingly raw (“It wasn’t just the heroin. There were also other … misadventures.”).

Long’s friend, the Auburn-based writer Christian Kiefer, puts the work in its own genre: “super-Carver.” It’s a nod, of course, to Raymond Carver, the late master of short, spare fiction, but Kiefer adds, the work also defies easy categorization.

“[Long’s stories] are also very whimsical, which Carver doesn’t do,” Kiefer says. “He has the sparseness of language, which is very necessary for the genre and this project … but there’s also a breadth of imagination.”

And capturing that breadth in 88 words or less is a difficult task.

“I can’t even write a sentence that’s that short,” Kiefer says. “As a fellow writer, I’m amazed he could do that kind of magic.”

Kiefer names “Balancing Rack” as a favorite in the collection. The entry chronicles a pivotal moment in a couple’s relationship, told over a game of Scrabble, no less.

“That story truly transcends the limit of the word count, in a way that all really great lit does,” Kiefer says. “Even very long novels are greater than sum of word count. ’Balancing Racks’ so fully transcends its own brevity, I find it utterly breathtaking.”

Long completed his challenge on December 31, 2009, and then set about trying to find a publisher. But while many editors loved the book, Long says, most felt it too esoteric for their catalog. That’s when Kiefer suggested Ad Lumen Press, the imprint housed at American River College where both Kiefer and Long teach.

Signing on with Ad Lumen proved to be the easy part. From there, Long and an editor spent months figuring out the details: How many stories? And in what kind of order?

Long finally settled on 101 stories (“99 stories sounds like ’Congratulations, you almost made it’; 100 sounds awesome; and 101 sounded triumphant”) and divided the book into four sections.

The stories are so brief, so fleeting, Long explains, it felt like the book as a whole needed, in a sense, chapter breaks.

“I wanted it to have clues, I wanted a breath, something to [give the reader] a moment,” he says.

As a whole, Tiny Giants exudes a discernible rhythm—a fact that can be attributed, arguably, to Long’s stint with the Blue Man Group, the famed theatrical troupe comprising actor-musicians sporting bald caps and indigo body paint. Long, who majored in theater at UC Santa Cruz and received an MFA in fiction from UCLA, was teaching high school in Auburn in 2001 when his students dared him to try out for the group. Long accepted the challenge, got the part, moved to New York and spent the next several years drumming with the group.

That experience, he said, exerted an indirect impact on his writing.

“It’s a unique experience for any performer … not speaking for 90 minutes, just drumming and using your eyes, it changes your perspective on everything,” Long says. “It has changed how I write. If I write in first person, I’m inside the character, I harken back to that time in the Blue Man Group and seeing everything through Blue Man’s eyes. It’s cool and exciting and allows you to see things in a fresh and different way.”

Long’s theatrical side has had another noticeable effect on his life as an author. Recently he invited readers to film themselves reading one of his stories and then upload it to his YouTube channel.

Long’s next book is a novel set in a small town and told via multiple points of view. Like Tiny Giants, it started out as a project—the writer had challenged himself to write one short story a week for a year. This time, however, the assignment didn’t work out quite as planned and Long shifted focus after a few months.

But, hey, that’s part of the fun, part of the game. Keeps things interesting.

“I like change,” Long says.