"Just Something to Do"

I finished this story yesterday, and have sent it off to a couple of prospective publishers. I'll let you know when it appears, either in print or online.

I've had it sketched out for months now. I got down roughly what happens and something about the central character. I won't even call it a draft; it was a page or two of ideas, and it stayed like that for months. I couldn't decide what to do with it. I knew that something bad was going to happen, but I couldn't decide who it was going to happen to. Then, about two months ago, something moved me to just tie it up and come to some kind of conclusion. Any kind. At least in that way, I'd have something to work with.

The result was a piece about 5000 words long, which, I thought, looked pretty good. It was a start, at any rate.

I shared this draft with my friend John (that is his real name), and he was very kind, as he always is. The story, he said, didn't come up to its potential. And he was right, as John usually is. The story wasn't really all that good, and it was hard for me to see what exactly was wrong with it. Over the course of several weeks, I fiddled around with it, added some things and cut out passages that didn't contribute anything. I rearranged paragraphs, sentences, and even words. It wasn't a total rewrite; it's still about 5000 words, but what really does happen is not what I had first envisioned.

My editing and tinkering have paid off, I think. Like a lot of my work, the story is based on an actual event, and also like many of my stories, it's ambiguous. My characters rarely say what they're thinking, and I'm not privy to their thoughts. But the challenge was to shape that ambiguity into a cohesive piece of fiction that provoked questions, with characters that might not be sympathetic but were interesting. That means putting it out so that the reader keeps coming back to it, puzzling, perhaps, about what it all means. Why did Keith come back home if he knew nothing was going to be any different? Did he actually see something crossing the road that made him slam on the brakes? Was it a ghost, or just a jackrabbit? Why did Brianna scream and curse at him? What happens next?

The moral of this post is that hard work pays off! Try, and you will succeed! as Amanda Wingfield said. But it's also that you can really screw up by thinking that something is done when it's not. And there's a tremendous danger in thinking something you've worked on is complete, just because you've put a lot of time and effort into it. I'm grateful to my friend John for telling me, gently, that in its present form, "Just Something to Do" wasn't very good, but that it had promise. If I were willing to put in the extra effort. If I were willing to be honest and ruthless, and to demand answers to the questions that the text raised for me. Or, more precisely, to articulate those questions precisely and put them out there for my reader.

That's all for now. If you watch the national news on TV at all, you know that Connecticut got hammered with three snowstorms in a row, and I've got to go out and shovel away the most recent one. Not an inspirational task, I'll grant you, but one of those things that you've just got to do. Like revising and rewriting, so that you can see what's really underneath.