write a good short story

Wow. Really very heartening, if not exactly in the way I’d been shooting for. I think that deadline story I wrote last week did turn out very well, even if it didn’t get created in the more thoughtful and temporally expansive way that I’d wanted it to.

I had to go down to Clarkdale to participate in a reading last Thursday, and I wasn’t sure what I was going to read until I got there, but right at the last moment I decided to read the deadline story (titled “Solidarity”). It actually went over well, in part because I was experimenting in the piece with telling a story without any exposition at all, which kept it moving in a fairly linear and fairly brisk way. But also, I guess it’s a pretty good story. In any event, it went over pretty well with the audience. So. There was that.

Then it got workshopped on Friday afternoon, and not only did my classmates have mainly good things to say about it, and not only did most of the subtle character stuff that I wanted to get across actually get across to the readers, the professor (who really does have it going on, and who I respect enormously, and by whom I was expecting to get savaged) kind of closed out the discussion by saying that it was sort of a first with her in a graduate workshop, but if she were a magazine editor she’d buy the piece as is, and that aside from a couple of minor line edits she didn’t think it needed revision at all. That sort of blew me away…it sort of still does. I’m pretty happy about that. So.

Yay.

I dunno. Under a deadline…have to hand in a new story to my fiction workshop on Friday. Seven hours ago I had NOTHING. So I wrote five pages in my journal, enough to clear all the crap out of my head so that a concept could waft in that might actually grow into a story of acceptable length, with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

And check it out. I brewed a small pot of coffee, started writing, and four hours and change later I had an eleven page story that does indeed begin, and end, and have some stuff in the middle. I don’t know that it’s good, at least not according to how I had imagined “good” in relation to this goal. Three hours ago I hated it. Two hours ago it kind of amused me, for the punk-rock manner in which it was written if nothing else. An hour ago I started to genuinely warm to it. Now, I think it might actually be good.

But, in the interest of objective judgement, and not giving myself too much of a break or a free ride, I’m going to hold off on concluding whether it’s good or not until my workshop reads it, and gives me their feedback. So. Until Friday next. We shall see. Cheers.

Today I made a web of something that could become a good short story

I don’t know why, but I’ve got that word stuck in my head. It’s resonating with me right now. I’ve got one more story to write for my fiction workshop this semester, and I want it to be a good one. Seems like that word pops into my head every time I think about that last story. So I dunno. Maybe I should go with it. It makes a nice title, anyway.