Wow! Bare Bones was your first short story? I'm speechless. Otherwise, I'm so interested in your experience of shifting into enjoying short written forms once you were in Japan. I may be stretching a point to say this, but I have always thought that some forms of writing are as embedded in the rhythms of everyday life as color is the play of light. If this is so, I'm not surprised that with your sensitivity to your surroundings, and with the culture as a whole created by boundaries of sensitivity to nature, I'm not surprised that short forms would emerge to be identities whose tangible presence finds you. A "win-win" as they say!
When I was studying Chinese, it must have been about 20 years ago, a private tutor set me an essay topic about "snow". Well, I wrote a short piece about depressing weather conditions (I can't really remember what I wrote), and right at the end of the story I wrote that it snowed. The point was that snow was a welcome relief from what went before.
I was told I hadn't written on the topic and I should have looked in one of those books that give you all kinds of Chinese idioms and expressions describing snow.
Not quite the same as writing a short story -- the point was to improve my Chinese -- but I was quite taken aback by the requirement to write a piece about "snow", just "snow".
Wow! Bare Bones was your first short story? I'm speechless. Otherwise, I'm so interested in your experience of shifting into enjoying short written forms once you were in Japan. I may be stretching a point to say this, but I have always thought that some forms of writing are as embedded in the rhythms of everyday life as color is the play of light. If this is so, I'm not surprised that with your sensitivity to your surroundings, and with the culture as a whole created by boundaries of sensitivity to nature, I'm not surprised that short forms would emerge to be identities whose tangible presence finds you. A "win-win" as they say!
Not a writer myself but....
When I was studying Chinese, it must have been about 20 years ago, a private tutor set me an essay topic about "snow". Well, I wrote a short piece about depressing weather conditions (I can't really remember what I wrote), and right at the end of the story I wrote that it snowed. The point was that snow was a welcome relief from what went before.
I was told I hadn't written on the topic and I should have looked in one of those books that give you all kinds of Chinese idioms and expressions describing snow.
Not quite the same as writing a short story -- the point was to improve my Chinese -- but I was quite taken aback by the requirement to write a piece about "snow", just "snow".