primary source

Today in fiction class we were working on beginnings and endings.  Since the story I’m working on right now, a novella called “All Our Imaginary Friends Are Dead,” is nowhere close to having an ending, I brought in a story I wrote six months ago called “Nothing’s Faster Than Light.”  I showed it to my instructor, and he ended up reading it to the whole class.  We’ve done workshops before, but today was the first time I ever felt like I was a primary source.  My story was a friggin’ example about how to begin and end a story.  He called it “textbook,” whatever that means.  I took it as a compliment.  He asked me about my revision strategies, and if I would transcribe the first draft so he could compare it with the current draft.  And, here’s the crazy part, he wants to potentially use it as an example of revision in future classes.

All of this got me thinking about submission again.  I’ve submitted stories to a few journals: the literary magazine of my first college, and, ambitiously, Hayden’s Ferry Review.  They sent me a form rejection letter and a nice bookmark.  Oh, and Weird Tales rejected me as well.  But I keep hearing about how part of breaking into this profession of writing is piling up rejection letters, and I’ve been able to more or less insulate myself from that idea by simply saying that my stories aren’t done.  And they aren’t.  I have a huge stack of first drafts.  “Nothing’s Faster Than Light” was fun to revise because it was short, only a page and a half single-spaced, but it became apparent after looking back at the first draft that the second draft really was a lot better.  It makes me think then of that pile of first drafts: four novels, two novellas, a short story collection–that could be made so much better, but I just have to sit down and do it.