There is a famous Chekhov quote that goes, “There ought to be a man with a hammer behind the door of every happy man, to remind him by his constant knocks that there are unhappy people, and that happy as he himself may be, life will sooner or later show him its claws.” Passive protagonists having good days are hardly, if ever, the components of lasting, memorable fiction.
The protagonists of these stories confront life’s claws. Developing these stories, I was particularly concerned with knowing the protagonist’s voice and using it to guide my writing. The stories are all either first-person or third-person-limited. Sometimes I knew where the story was going from the outset; other times the path of the story unfurled as it was written. The crux in writing these stories was to stay consistent with the narrative voice, through every impulsive maneuver.
Humor is an important component of these stories. I admire characters that find solace in humor, and I find humor is an effective device to subtly punctuate the deftness of many risky narrative situations. Every story contained within is a footnote to other stories; they are the stories of an apprentice given go at the forge.
