Revisiting Raymond Carver

Some writing exercises based on his classic stories

This post is a reprint of a blog I posted to my website a few years ago, so it may sound familiar if you’ve been on my list for a while:

When I was in college in the early 2000s, Raymond Carver was the gateway to literary fiction. Hailed as “America’s Chekhov,” university writing professors introduced students to Carver as the model for good fiction — realistic short stories, drawn from life and imbued with mystery.

I never had a professor say I should write like Carver in style or material, but rather should aspire toward his example of clear prose and honest material. When writers and critics have lamented the sameness of MFA program “workshop stories,” I suspect what they mean is everyone is trying to write like Raymond Carver.

Below is an introduction to Carver as well as a few stories for young writers in particular to study. Everyone reads “Cathedral” in the writing anthologies, but several of his early stories might be more instructive for young writers. This is the blog I wish I’d stumbled on when I was writing my first stories.

Background on Raymond Carver

If you’re not familiar, Carver grew up in working class Washington state. He married young and had two children by his twenty-first birthday. He and his wife scratched their way along, he eventually made it to the Iowa Writers Workshop in his mid-twenties, and the rest was history.

He wrote several collections of short stories about the world he came out of—hard luck, working class characters. The waitress in a loveless marriage, the out-of-work salesman, the couple whose marriage is falling apart, the drunk wasting away in a motel room. His stories have been called “minimalist” and “dirty realism.”

He died at age 50 in the late 1980s, and for a generation stories like “Cathedral” have been on college writing syllabi. The story “Why Don’t You Dance?” was the basis for the film, Everything Must Go, which seems like the last time I heard the mainstream news talking about Carver.

Carver’s Reputation in the 21st Century

It’s been a long time since I’ve been near a writing class, but my sense is Carver’s reputation has taken a tumble, possibly for three reasons:

First, the publication of Carol Sklenicka’s Carver biography, A Writer’s Life, confirmed Carver was a less-than-upstanding citizen. In a review for the New York Times, Stephen King takes him to task as a “nasty drunk” and a “dangerous” husband. That biography seemed to take a little of the shine off Carver’s reputation.

Second, it’s easy to over-generalize about today’s literary culture being “woke,” but I nevertheless think it’s fair to say that white men from the late 20th century are no longer the talk of the town. Carver belongs to a different era of publishing.

Finally, and maybe most relevant, I suspect there’s been a “rebel against your father” element to my generation of writers. Whereas the realist short story was heralded as the be-all and end-all of literature in the 1990s and 2000s, my generation seems to have determined the “MFA workshop story” is boring — instead leaning into genre fiction and the fantastic. Instead of “show, don’t tell,” my generation seems to have responded, “Nah, telling is fine.”

You might remember the scene in Good Will Hunting, where they go to the bar and Matt Damon’s character takes the Harvard blowhard to task as a “first year grad student who just finished reading blah blah blah.” My sense is that Carver is déclassé in the same way — what you read in college or your first year of graduate school and then move beyond.

Revisiting him today reminds me of something I once heard about Henry James. I might be misremembering the details, but the story goes that Henry James and Edith Wharton were sitting around talking about high literature, which involved making fun of low-brow Walt Whitman.

James picked up his edition of Leaves of Grass to mock a few lines, but after reading a passage, they grew quiet. He put the book back on the shelf and never made fun of Whitman again. Who knows if that’s true, but I found revisiting Carver to be a similar experience.

(In the two years since I originally wrote the above paragraphs for my blog, I’ve seen a few social media posts about Carver, so maybe the wheel is turning again. I’m too far removed from MFA school world to know who’s hip and who’s not anymore.)

Finding a Style: “The Bath” versus “A Small, Good Thing”

One infamous aspect of Carver’s biography is his relationship Gordon Lish, the fiction editor of Esquire. Lish edited many of Carver’s early stories, stripping out details to carve out tight but bleak masterpieces. Allegedly, Lish’s edits were more stringent than Carver was comfortable with, and it eventually led to a break between the two men.

It might be instructive for young writers—or anyone interested in how fiction works—to study two versions of a famous Carver story. Lish edited the first version, published as “The Bath” in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Carver revised the story to be closer to his original, more expansive vision, and republished it as “A Small, Good Thing” in Cathedral.

The plot setup is the same in both stories: a mother reserves a special birthday cake for her eight-year-old son, Scotty. Then Scotty is hit by a car and goes into a coma. The anxious parents have forgotten the cake order.

In “The Bath,” the irate baker calls them up to remind them about the cake, and then starts calling repeatedly. The story ends with the mother alone at the house. She’s waiting any moment for news about her son, and instead receives a call, presumably from the baker, who tells her, “It is about Scotty.”

Like much of Carver’s early work, “The Bath” is spare (10 pages), and the scenes are short, a couple of paragraphs in places. The couple is referred to as “the father” or “the wife” rather than their first names. It’s also rife with ambiguity: who is calling at the end? Is it the baker or the hospital? The story’s overriding mood is one of dread—the way tragedy isolates us and how the outside world is cold and menacing.

Carver revised the story into the much longer “A Small, Good Thing” (30 pages). Here, the husband and wife are named Howard and Ann. We learn Scotty does in fact die from the accident, and it was the baker calling to harass them about the cake at the end of “The Bath.” But instead of ending on a note of menace, the couple go to the bakery, where the contrite baker breaks bread with them.

“Breaking bread” might be a heavy-handed Christian symbol, but with this scene “A Small, Good Thing” is a polar opposite of “The Bath” — a world of healing and communion rather than isolation and menace. It’s amazing that the same author wrote both stories.

I’m fond of quoting Kierkegaard’s assertion that “subjectivity is truth,” and writers tend to prefer one version of this story over the other. I prefer “A Small, Good Thing” because I’m a sentimental humanist, but I know other writers who champion “The Bath.” Both versions together offer a tutorial in how you can approach content via style.

A Writing Exercise: “Bicycles, Muscles, Cigarettes”

As an undergraduate, I was assigned to read the collection Cathedral, which did bowl me over. The first story, “Feathers,” is about a guy and his wife who go over to a colleague’s house for drinks. The colleague and his wife have a strange setup, including a pet peacock and an ugly baby.

It’s an excellent introduction to Carver, but I’m not sure it’s ideal for young writers. When I read it, I was 20, unmarried, had never worked in a factory, and didn’t have any close friends with a baby. Of course, that didn’t stop me from promptly turning into workshop a Carver-ish story about a factory worker with a troubled marriage. (Cue: eyeroll.)

A better story for young writers might be “Bicycles, Muscles, Cigarettes,” published in Carver’s first collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

This story is about a man named Hamilton who is on edge from trying to quit smoking. One evening, a boy shows up and says there is trouble with his son and two other boys — something about a missing bicycle. Hamilton follows the boy to a block he’s never visited, where sure enough his son, his son’s friend and another, older boy are in the hot seat. A fourth boy’s bicycle has gone missing, and the mother is trying to figure it out.

Hamilton’s son and friend say they don’t know anything about it, and the older boy is both aggressive and suspicious. When the older boy’s father arrives on scene, he too is aggressive — and Hamilton eventually gets in a fight with him. On the way home Hamilton apologizes to his son for having to witness that.

I think this is a great story for a young writer to study because it’s short, contained to one evening, and has one central character. It’s full of tension, and has a clear beginning, middle, and ending.

I imagine it also would be instructive to help a young writer find his or her material. The assignment could be to think through a time in your own life when you witnessed a moment of violence, or when one of your parents did something that made you see them in a new light.

Try writing the story from the parents’ point of view, and see if you can confine it to a single extended scene. This solves two challenges for beginning writers, who tend to have trouble getting out of their own heads and who tend to write pages and pages of summary without an actual story (an incident).

Literature in Conversation: Raymond Carver’s “Fat”

Another story to look at is “Fat,” also published in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? This story’s narrator is a waitress married to the cook in something like a Waffle House. She’s telling the story to another waitress, so immediately you can see the two women leaned up against the wall on a slow night, gossiping by the waitress station.

She tells of how an obese customer came in and very politely proceeded to eat a multi-course meal. While she was serving him, everyone else in the diner commented on how fat and grotesque he was, but she feels a connection to him. He’s polite and reserved, an easy customer despite his portions.

After work, she and her husband goes home, where he takes advantage of her in bed, and then the story ends, “My life is going to change. I feel it.”

This is a good story for a beginning writer to study because, again, it’s short and confined to a single evening. While there is no climactic moment of violence, Carver sets up the fat man’s visit as the catalyst to shake up the narrator’s life. Who knows if she actually will change anything, but she has the realization that she’s worth more than this dead-end life where she’s found herself.

An exercise for a beginning writer might be to look up in your life at the people around you. What kind of story could you write about them? What’s going on inside their heads? You could do worse than hang out in a Waffle House and wait for an incident to happen that you can write about—a fight, an argument, a power outage, or just someone unusual looking for a meal.

One final note about “Fat”: I don’t know if Carver or anyone else ever pointed this out, but I presume the last line is a nod to either Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo” or James Wright’s “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota.”

In the Rilke poem, the speaker is ruminating on a seemingly objective terms, and the poem ends, “You must change your life.”

Wright is somewhat like the poetry equivalent of Carver — narrative, accessible, highly anthologized — and like the Rilke poem, the speaker in “Lying in a Hammock” describes a farm scene in seemingly objective terms before ending with, “I have wasted my life.”

I don’t know if there’s any evidence that Wright’s ending is a nod to Rilke, but I suspect it is, and I suspect Carver’s story is a wink at one or both of those poems. Writers do this kind of thing — what software developers might call an Easter egg.

An exercise for beginning writers could be to write your own “I must change my life” story. Take a character and write about a seemingly unimportant incident, and end it with some variation of “I have wasted my life” or “My life is going to change.”

This probably has been done too many times to try to publish such a story (or poem) but it’ll give you something to write about for a few days.

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