Bed is a medium-sized book of nine stories. Each story is a professional, Best American Short Stories-style, 20-page short story with professionally-constructed themes, realistic yet “engaging” narrative arcs, and an attention to language both noticeable and unobtrusive. I am professional. While writing these stories I studied stories by Lorrie Moore and Joy Williams. I created charts for some of these stories. I made charts. I stared at the charts. I printed the stories in single-spaced, size-6 font to “gain perspective.” I wrote notes on the paper. I wrote things like, “Insert something for flow,” “Make this a lot tighter,” “Edit this part tonight you piece of shit,” or “Terrible shit [arrows pointing at circled parts].” I submitted these stories to undergraduate writing workshops at New York University. I like writing workshops. Whenever a person criticized my stories I lectured them until they stopped talking. In one class someone attacked me for being “postmodern.” I just stared at my computer screen for about 3 minutes trying to remember another instance of someone “attacking” me in workshop but could not think of anything. I don’t remember specifics. I almost never criticized anyone else’s stories. I always found something I liked in every story. I am nice. I worked many hours on the stories in Bed. Maybe an average of 175 hours per story. That is how many hours it takes me to write a professional, 20-page short story with themes on the language level. Lorrie Moore is the only writer I have read that is consistently “thematic” on the language level. I don’t know what that means. I think it means she repeats the same words or images or ideas or else variations of those words or images or ideas throughout the story. Yes. That is what it means. I think I lectured people in class about that. I wanted them to understand that Lorrie Moore is the only writer I have read that is consistently “thematic” on the language level. I am impressed by stories that are “thematic on the language level.” When I lectured my classmates they listened politely then talked about something else. I don’t read much Lorrie Moore anymore. I read Joy Williams now. The stories “influenced” by Joy Williams in this collection are stories number 5, 6, 7 and maybe 2 a little. The other stories are “influenced” by Lorrie Moore. Story 8 is “influenced” also a little by Jean Rhys. I think “influenced” means I read them and liked how I felt and then wanted to make new things that would make me feel how they made me feel. I also like stories by Ann Beattie, Lydia Davis, Todd Hasak-Lowy, Bobbie Ann Mason, Richard Yates, Trinie Dalton, and others but they did not “influence” any of the stories in this book, either because I read them later or just did not feel uncontrollable urges to create the same effects as they did. Mostly I write what I want to read. That is why I am mostly impervious to criticism. I am the only person who knows what I want to read. If someone interrogated me using intense psychological methods and discovered exactly what I want to read I would still be mostly impervious to their criticism, because “what I want to read” is always changing. But if someone criticizes my actions in concrete reality I am not impervious to that, I will listen politely and, ideally, discuss my actions in a detached way, as if I were someone else, in order to decide how to “fix” them. All the stories in Bed are in third-person, with some rhetoric in second-person. I like writing in third person. It is easier maybe to talk kind-hearted shit about the characters if I write in third-person. I don’t like bitterness. When I talk shit about my characters I always try to make it “kind-hearted shit.”
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