{"id":11060,"date":"2014-03-12T05:00:39","date_gmt":"2014-03-12T12:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bullmensfiction.com\/?p=11060"},"modified":"2022-08-03T13:15:52","modified_gmt":"2022-08-03T17:15:52","slug":"bullshot-forrest-anderson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/fiction\/bullshot-forrest-anderson\/","title":{"rendered":"BULLshot: Forrest Anderson"},"content":{"rendered":"

PW<\/strong>: I love how \u201cAmerican Vitality\u201d is a story that unfolds over a series of correspondence\/letters. Will you talk about your creative process and how you decided on this form for \u201cAmerican Vitality?\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

FA<\/strong>: Thank you for the question, Pete. I adore the epistolary novel Fair and Tender Ladies by Lee Smith. It\u2019s one of the most emotionally affecting novels I\u2019ve ever read. I read it about ten years ago and I still feel like I have \u2018something in my eye\u2019 when I think of Ivy burning her never-mailed letters to Silvaney. I\u2019d always wanted to give the epistolary form a try, but I never really had a story that suited it.<\/p>\n

Then, a couple of years ago I was four pages into a story that was going absolutely nowhere. I was pretty frustrated. Honestly, I was frustrated with writing in general. It seemed to me that the writing I liked, which I guess I\u2019d call realism, was out of fashion. I was worn out by so-called experimental and trendy flash fiction. I remember thinking while driving my son, Benji, to daycare one morning that if realistic short fiction was over and done with than I didn\u2019t want anything to do with writing anymore. It was a pretty weak moment.<\/p>\n

I walked Benji to his classroom and when I got back in the car I heard an advertisement on the radio for a male performance enhancer. Since I\u2019m a thirteen-year old kid at heart, I found the commercial hilarious but instead of laughing I thought, \u201cMan-oh-man, I ought to write an experimental flash fiction from the perspective of a guy hooked on a male performance enhancer.\u201d I drove straight home, abandoned the four-page disaster, and wrote the story\u2019s opening page as a letter to a company. Admittedly, the story started out from a pretty cynical place\u2014writing what I thought was hip\u2014but gradually I started thinking I could try to inject a bit of the heart and the sincerity of realism into the story. When I did, the story opened up in surprising ways. I finished the opening letter and realized with no small amount of dread that the company was going to have to write back. Before I knew it (not really, though, because the first draft took about seven months), I had a forty-eight page epistolary story that the good people at BULL helped trim down to thirty-two.<\/p>\n

I guess I\u2019d say my creative process is one of imitation, frustration, resentment, and a small dose of peevishness. Every now and then, though, it\u2019ll approach something that resembles joy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The author of “American Vitality” on how he chose the epistolary form to tell this story<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":10483,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[387,342],"class_list":["post-11060","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction","tag-the-writing-craft","tag-writing","writer-pete-witte"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11060","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11060"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11060\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17521,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11060\/revisions\/17521"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10483"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11060"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11060"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11060"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}