What the Hell Kind of Nest am I Building Here?

 

“All I know is that at a very ear­ly stage of the nov­el­’s devel­op­ment I get this urge to gar­ner bits of straw and fluff, and eat peb­bles. Nobody will ever dis­cov­er how clear­ly a bird visu­al­izes, or if it visu­al­izes at all, the future nest and the eggs in it.” — V. Nabokov, Play­boy inter­view, 1964

For weeks—no, make that months—I’ve been col­lect­ing some weird-ass twigs, mud and oth­er junk to build a new nest, or nov­el, of my own, but I have no idea what the dis­parate items mean in terms of what the “future nest and the eggs in it” will look like.

I’d like to share this list with you in the hopes that some­body will email me a cogent the­o­ry on the sto­ry my sub­con­scious is work­ing on.

So, fol­low­ing are the “bits of straw and fluff” I’ve been gath­er­ing, in the form of books read, sub­jects inves­ti­gat­ed, old mem­o­ries remem­bered, ques­tions asked, and top­ics debat­ed. I look for­ward to your the­o­ries. Good luck.

  • Sto­ries by Russ­ian & French authors about duels (yes, duels): Chekov’s “The Duel”; Nabokov’s “An Affair of Hon­our”; Pushk­in’s “The Shot”; Ler­mon­tov’s “A Hero of Our Time”; and Mau­pas­san­t’s “A Duel”.
  • A New York­er arti­cle on the his­to­ry of duelling.
  • A mem­o­ry from when I was a news­pa­per reporter and, rogue that I was, dat­ed my edi­tor’s girl­friend; I only asked her out because she did the announce­ments at a now-defunct depart­ment store that I hap­pened to be in, and she had a pro­found­ly sexy Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe-like voice, and I decid­ed then and there that I want­ed to hear that voice whis­per­ing sweet noth­ings in my ear—not to men­tion I won­dered what kind of kiss­er a girl with such a voice would be like; to this day, I have to call her “Cal­dor Girl” because I can’t remem­ber her name.
  • McCan­n’s steel-cut oat­meal.
  • How good can a pen­cil be if it isn’t made any­more (the Eber­hard Faber Black­wing 602) yet peo­ple are will­ing to shell out $250 and up for a box of twelve of them?
  • Mod­el train “lay­outs” and the idea of what goes on there when you’re not around.
  • Why the F–K did they can­cel my favorite TV show, Boston Legal?
  • Should I give the check­ers at our local gro­cery store a Christ­mas tip? And if so, what about the UPS guy? The wait­ress­es at the din­er? Where does it end? What’s the eti­quette here?
  • Is fic­tion, as James Joyce once said, “imag­ined auto­bi­og­ra­phy”? Or was he just drunk when he said this?
  • Should I go out to Boston soon to vis­it my old professor/mentor, and when I do, should I take the train, and if I take the train, how will the expe­ri­ence tie into my mus­ings on mod­el trains?
  • Charles Ingalls as a role mod­el for young men.
  • Is it pos­si­ble to anthro­po­mor­phize the quin­tes­sen­tial inan­i­mate object, a pen­cil, to the extent that when its lit­tle sto­ry is done (or the pen­cil “dies”), read­ers or “fol­low­ers” feel a sense of loss?
  • Why do I keep expe­ri­enc­ing phan­tom smells? Over the past few years, they’ve been smells of gas, garbage, sewage and now smoke. Are they caused by nose polyps as the ENT guy recent­ly sug­gest­ed, my his­to­ry of migraines, or are we talk­ing some­thing more dis­turb­ing here like tem­po­ral lobe seizures or a tumor? And, is there some way I could give this trait to a char­ac­ter?
  • Old-fash­ioned glass milk bottles—they were great; why’d they get rid of them?
  • The lack of integri­ty of most peo­ple, like my land­lord, and know­ing how the Russ­ian writ­ers lam­pooned guys like him.
  • Kashi Heart-to-Heart Apples and Cin­na­mon Instant Oatmeal—yummy.
  • Why Alexas despis­es oat­meal; what trau­mat­ic event hap­pened to her at camp as a kid?
  • The unbe­liev­able assort­ment of CRAP you find in dol­lar stores; yet, at the same time, how you serendip­i­tous­ly stum­ble upon good books there, includ­ing this lit­er­ary gem.
By Chris Orcutt

CHRIS ORCUTT is an American novelist and fiction writer with over 30 years' writing experience and more than a dozen books in his oeuvre. Since 2015, Chris been working exclusively on his magnum opus. Bodaciously True & Totally Awesome: The Legendary Adventures of Avery “Ace” Craig is a 9-episode novel about teens in the 1980s. It’s about ’80s teens, but for adults (in other words, it’s decidedly not YA literature), and he’s applied this epic storytelling approach to the least examined, most misunderstood, most marginalized narrative space in American literature: the lives and inner worlds of teenagers.

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