Michael C. Keith

RS:

I’m a huge fan of your short fiction, as you know, because you have one of the most vivid imaginations I’ve ever witnessed. So, what is it like to live in your head?

 

MCK:

Well, thank you for that. Coming from you, it means a lot. Despite my often darkish subject matter, humor mostly informs my thoughts, so being in my head wouldn’t be such a scary place. My radar for things to write about is always pulsing and mostly on alert. During this pandemic, I’ve been having trouble finding the switch to kick on the scope (bad metaphor?). That is to say, the current hasn’t been flowing like I would like. Distracted too much by all the bizarre things happening in the world—and then there’s the plague in the White House. These two things have robbed me of my usual creative lift-off. However, I have been producing a tiny bit, although I’m not confident that it possesses the spark and verve of my pre-pandemic/pre-Trump work. I’m thankful that my mind always seems to generate some scriptable observations, albeit in more modest amounts right now.

 

RS:

You tend to write a lot of macabre. What do you think is the challenge of that genre, what makes a macabre piece succeed, and what mistakes make it fail?

 

MCK:

I’ve been fascinated by the creepy and surreal since I was a kid. Watched too many Twilight Zones, maybe. That fascination has never left me, so it necessarily insinuates itself in my writing. Anything that has a dominant place in your thoughts does that. The challenge of writing horror or science-fi is to come up with something fresh, because there’s so much out there, and much of it doesn’t achieve launch. Tone and atmosphere are very key to a piece succeeding, too. I tend to write in a lean, minimalistic fashion—nothing gothic or abstract. Direct and accessible coupled with the right story line can be the most compelling for the reader, I believe. At least at this point in time, when people tend to shy away from lavish or idiosyncratic prose—blame the screen for that. People can’t sit too long in front of the printed page. The short-attention span universe.

 

RS:

What themes crop up a lot for you?

 

MCK:

In the last couple of years, I’ve shifted my writing efforts to prose/poetry (micro fiction) with topics nested in realism (with obvious exceptions.) Perhaps because of my age, in terms of themes, I’ve been more concerned with the consequences of physical (mental, too) deterioration and death in recent years. That was the clear thrust of Let Us Now Speak of Extinction (MadHat Press, 2018) and is essentially the focus of Insomnia 11 (same press, 2020.) As I said earlier, although the subject matter is dark, the pieces are not without humor. That’s just how I deal with it. Laugh while crying.

 

RS:

We always tease you about how many collections of short fiction you’ve written. How much time is spent writing and how much time is spent revising? Do you ever work a story and then realize you no longer like it?

 

MCK:

I don’t spend quite as much time as I used to in the first draft stage, given the micro nature of what I’m doing versus the longer short story. What I do now hits the page pretty quickly and takes more time to revise than to originate. What I engage often descends on me in a flash (flash fiction?). And then the challenge is to capture the nucleus wholly/fully for later refinement, if that makes sense. I typically hear the quintessential line while I’m doing something else (not at my desk) and then race to write it down. From there I build. It doesn’t always result in something I like and more often than not, I give up on it. That said, I may leave it on my desktop and return to it the next day, rather than just delete it. That time away can breathe new life into what I felt was moribund. I guess the lesson there is not to be too quick to abandon something.

 

RS:

Favorite tip for writing short fiction?

 

MCK:

Be clear about what you’re attempting to convey. Is your message vivid? Is it original, or cliché? Does it have what I call “ping”—immediacy and meaning? Sculpt it down to its quintessence. Stand back from it a day or two and see if you’ve said what you intended, and ask yourself if what you intended is worth the saying.