“The Depletion Prompts”
by David Means
from the November 1, 2021 issue of The New Yorker
Some of my favorite New Yorker stories of the last decade have been by David Means, so I’m glad to see his work show up again. Here we get “The Depletion Prompts,” a story that is structured as a series of writing prompts intended to keep the author writing during the pandemic. Here is the first:
Write about that night, long ago, when you lay in bed listening to the sound of wind buzzing through the old television aerial mounted on the porch outside your bedroom—remember the door out to the tin roof, the buckle and ting against your toes—a deeply disturbing sound, like a stuck harmonica reed, one that, combined with the sound of crying drifting up from downstairs through the heater duct, seemed indicative of more troubling harmonics.
That does not necessarily escort me into the narrative behind the prompt itself, but I like the writing, and I’m confident that Means will offer quite a bit as I go on.
I hope everyone is having a good October, as it winds down. Please feel welcome to comment here with your thoughts on this story or any of Means’s work.
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I enjoyed this story in the beginning but the repetition became tiring to me. I loved the story line but just not my style of writing.
As someone who likes writing short story prompts but not the stories themselves, I enjoyed this story a lot. The meta nature of the story didn’t feel like an artifice.
Some readers like to see short stories in fully finished form without having to look at all the torture the writer went through to get the story to a higher level or high enough level to be published or widely read. If you’ve ever been close to the mental torture involved in trying to write well, you are probably closer to enjoying this story rather than feeling a little exasperated.
Philip Roth said his first writing was happy with good endings but many of his best books are very sad and tragic. So that is difficult.
As a style or framing device, it is interesting but the repetition of certain elements contributes to a concept of depletion. And prompts tend to suggest, as the writer explains, a formula or assembly instructions like in putting together something from IKEA. The options seem constricting which points toward loss of anything even remotely creative.
A really good prompt for writing or stand-up comedy or painting takes you through the everyday or the ordinary to break on through to something special and unique that you never would have otherwise noticed. It’s a tightrope. Any wrong move and the editor says no, the audience won’t laugh or the person at the art gallery moves so quickly past any and all of your pictures.
I like how Means explores this kind of journey that many writers repeatedly undertake. It mirrors life in how we try to do things any which way to try to get a good result. It feels sometimes like glass empty. Because once there is nothing more to do, that’s when something new emerges or the glass can seem to start to fill again.
I totally understand how it is difficult to read instructions when the reader wants to see the actual start and then progression of action though to a meaningful conclusion.