What a Writer Stands to Learn from the Death of Captain America

I read online today that Captain America’s funeral is this week.  No, I’m not delusional and think this is a real life event.  The comic book that features the event comes out on Thursday.  It might be the first comic book I buy in about four years.  And yes, I am comfortable enough in my comic book geekiness to refer to it as a comic book.  Only comic book geeks in denial refer to them as graphic novels. 

My first reaction to hearing that they killed off the Captain was shock.  How could they do this?  That’s a cardinal sin, killing off an icon of the comic book world.  You just don’t do that.  It was also my second and third reaction.  And it’s still my reaction.

You see, there are these unwritten rules that comic book geeks demand be adhered to.  It’s hard to explain, but after all the years that get invested in following a storyline, the reader takes on some ownership to the title, like it’s something they’ve been involved in and not just reading.  So, there are expectations.  Rules.

For those who may not be familiar with these rules, I’ll list some here, but I don’t have the time or energy to delve into all the expectations we, I mean, those darn comic book geeks demand.

 

1. You can kill the sidekick, you can kill a member of a team or a secondary character, but you can’t touch the icons.  We’ll be upset when the Robins and Colossus’s of the comic book world pass, but we’ll get over it.  If you kill Superman, you’ll just end up having to write really bad plots about how he comes back.

 

2. If you do kill a character, he or she should either stay dead or have a damn good reason and explanation why he or she came back.  No one just shows up in the shower like nothing happened.  Even worse, don’t give us the amnesia thing where the character doesn’t remember how he came back, saving your from having to come up with something acceptable. 

 

3. In casting the movie adaptations of our favorite titles, you stick as closely to the comic version as possible.  No changing names or genders.  No making a villain a good guy or vice versa.  And just know for a fact that we will complain about whoever you cast, but doesn’t mean you have a free pass to be throwing Michael Clarke Duncan into your movies.  

 

4. Have a reason for two icon figures to team up.  And that reason can never be “’Cause it’ll sell a buttload of comics.” 

 

5. Stay true to the rules of the universe you created.  There’s no way Wolverine could be in the 43 places you have him showing up in the course of one month.

 

6. Don’t think we’ll forget.  We remember the Spider-Man clone, the replacement Captain America, the further mutation of the Thing, etc.  It’s better that you make fun of yourself and acknowledge these poor choices than to leave it up to us. 

Despite his disregard for the rules, I can’t help but admire Ed Brubaker for writing this storyline.  If anyone knows the staunch rules that comic book geeks demand from the writers, it’s a comic book writer.  Okay, maybe the guy at the register of the comic book shop who has to endure hours upon hours of rants about how unjust the world is because Batman’s back was broken or Spider-Man publicly removed his mask knows just as well.  But the point is, he knew we’d freak out.  He knew some of the more obsessive fans would go so far as to call him a murderer (which is more than just a little unhealthy of a viewpoint).  He knew that there was not one fan out there that would say, “Hey, good choice.” 

But he wrote it anyway. 

That’s courageous writing.  To take chances in a short stories or even a novel, well, people are only reading that novel.  No one reads the same storyline of a novel for 50 years.  Well, it may take some people that long, but you’d never have to worry that they’re writing you bad reviews or hate mail. 

He did what a writer should do.  He took his story in the direction he saw it needed to go without fear of what you or I would think about it.  He knew we wouldn’t like it, but had confidence enough to know he could tell the story well enough that we’d come to understand or accept it.  He took his reader to uncomfortable places that we never wanted to see.  As weird as it may sound when talking about comic books, that’s real.  Sometimes, the bad guys win, the day isn’t saved, and people rarely live happily ever after.  To quote the genius Dante (The Quik Stop clerk, not the poet), “That’s what life is, a series of down endings.” 

And I don’t just like down endings.  That isn’t what impresses me.  I like stories that take you somewhere you didn’t expect. 

For example, one of my favorite upbeat, happy endings comes from Harry Crews.  The reason I didn’t see it coming?  Well, Crews isn’t exactly the happy ending type of guy.  I’m referring to writing here.  I have no idea what kind of massages he gets. 

Anyway, Crews is morbid and dark, so when I read this upbeat, optimistic ending, it through me for a loop.  I won’t tell you what book it was because then you will see it coming.  What he wrote in that book, though, might have disappointed fans that had come to expect dark and morbid.  But he wrote it anyway. 

I know in my own writing, I back down sometimes, worrying about what this person or that person will think when they read my story.  What will my family say when they read this story where they guy describes adult movies?  What will my dad think if he reads the story about a childhood accident eerily similar to my own in which the father doesn’t come off as a very nice guy?  Will people think I’m racist because I wrote a story about a guy who is a skinhead?  I find that I regularly have to tell myself to shut up in order to write what is real or true to my characters or stories. 

A story can’t always go where the majority thinks it should go.  It definitely can’t go where the majority expects it to go.   And that takes the kind of courage that Ed Brubaker had when writing the death of Captain America.  He’s still a bastard for doing it, though. 

What Does the Junkyard Have To Do With Anything?

One of my recent story ideas has to do with my weird affinity for the junkyard.  It has more to do with writing than it has to do with me being a gear head or grease monkey or…another odd pseudonym for someone who enjoys working on vehicles.

There are a million stories in the junkyard if you pay attention.  You can see a small reflection of whatever the vehicle’s last owner was going through at the time of the vehicle’s demise in all the crap left behind in the backseat or the trunk or the floorboards.  You can tell what kind of life the car or truck lived by what its interior looks like, whether it was a family car with happy meal boxes and broken toys left behind or a work truck with receipts from finished jobs and notes on upcoming estimates. 

You can tell what kind of owner drove it by the meticulous vehicle logs tracking gas mileage and oil changes left in the glove box or the complete chaos of old junk food rappers, books, broken cassette tapes, clothes, and whatever else could possibly pile up in a backseat.

And you can see some pretty gruesome stories to be told, too.  Spider web-shaped shatters in windshields right where someone’s head would hit if they weren’t wearing a seatbelt during the head-on collision that caved in the front end of the car.  Cars with their roofs crushed in to the point that they are touching the seats from when the car rolled over and over and you know there was no chance someone walked away from the accident.  A lot of these stories you know ended in tears and funerals.  These aren’t the stories I want to see or enjoy seeing, but sometimes, they cry out to be told.   I’m not so morbid that these stories are what keep me want to come back to the junkyard.  They are just hard to ignore.

What does make me want to come back is the slice out of life a lot of these junked vehicles represent.  What was so pressing about getting that van to the junkyard before anyone bothered to get the DP weight set out of the back?  Why on earth is the back seat of that Honda filled with plastic water cooler bottles?  How did that pick-up manage to end up with an almost perfectly round two foot hole punched completely through the bed?  What happened to C&E Contractors that they ended up with three work trucks all in the same lot?  It’s the same reason I love second-hand shops and yard sales.  All these things that were once important enough to shell out some cash for, now tossed away…what happened in-between to change that thing’s importance?

These are questions I’ll start answering with what I guess might have happened.  I usually leave with one story trumping the rest, stealing my attention away from the others I ran across. 

This new story is a little different though.  It doesn’t come from a story I ran across in a junkyard.  It comes directly from my odd interest in the junkyard. 

I noticed a junkyard in my town that I had never seen before.  By the looks of it, it’s been around forever, but it’s tucked away in a residential neighborhood, so I just never took notice of it.  It made me wonder about when it first came to the neighborhood, how up in arms the neighbors must have been.  I can imagine people would put up a pretty decent fight against letting the zoning board or whoever allow the business to move in. 

So in my wondering, my main character became the main adversary and eventually, the main supporter of the yard.  It’s probably a safe bet that his obsession with the stories behind the cars leads to his change of heart.

My Biggest Hurdle

 The same huge problem in my approach to writing that has held me back over and over has sidelined me in my pursuit of becoming published for quite some time now.

Laziness.  Or maybe procrastination. 

It wouldn’t be nearly as impossible to fit writing into my life as I’ve allowed it to seem lately.  True, I’ve been putting in all kind of crazy work hours and had plenty of stuff to acomplish that, priority-wise, should come first.  That’s doesn’t mean I can just let writing completely disappear from my life .

That’s exactly what I’ve let happen, though. 

So, earlier this week, I forced myself to sit down in front of the computer and do some work.  First, I jotted down some notes on two new story ideas.  They are about two things I really get into, the junkyard and the NBA.  MAybe I’ll explain more later.   

After getting the bare bones of these two stories down before i forgot my  ideas, I revisited my biggest project for the first time in a looooooong time.  Staying away from that project wasn’t just laziness, though.  That was a choice. 

I had put together the skeleton of my first novel awhile back, but had decided to approach writing with a plan for a change and not just deal with whatever pops into my head. 

The plan was to focus on short stories first, then revisit the novel later.  I had several reasons why this made sense. 

First, it’s simply easier to get a short story published than to get a book deal.  If I can get an established name out there through a handful of published short stories, it would give a publisher a reason to pay a little more attention to a manuscript.

Secondly, short stories fit in with my work schedule a lot better.  It’s pretty hard to stay committed to a project as big as a novel with only an hour here or there that I could set aside for working on it.  I tried working on the novel in small incriments of time, but it made organizing my thoughts really difficult and tying one plot point to another even harder.

And just as importantly, it gives me practice to fine tune my writing on smaller projects. 

While I still think this plan makes sense and should be where my focus was, revisiting the novel gave me some enthusiasm and determination I’d been missing lately.  It was a lot like getting back on the basketball court after a long time away from it and somehow, despite the lack of practice and exercise, still playing well and remembering why the game was so much fun.   

So the novel can go on the back burner again, as long as my writing altogether doesn’t go with it. 

But What I Know is Boring

 

But what I know is boring.

That was my response the first three or four hundred times I heard the universal advice to creative writers, “Write what you know.”  The first time I heard it, I was crushed.  I thought the advice was a death sentence to any dreams I had of writing.  I was a 14 year old freshman who didn’t even know who he was, so how could anything I knew be worth telling? 

I refused to believe this to be good advice for a long time.  I found myself pointing out how some big names in writing seemed to do just fine without adhering to this advice. 

Stephen King didn’t, couldn’t “know” vampires, possessed cars, undead pets and children, or girls that started fires or destroyed proms just with their thoughts, but he sure seemed to be successfully writing those things. 

Tolkien didn’t know any elves, dwarfs, faceless eyes, wizards, dragons, goblins, orcs, or hobbits. 

Ray Bradbury didn’t know any electronic grandmothers.

I just figured since all these established writers were writing about things beyond the realm of what one can possibly know and it was only teachers and textbooks telling giving me this repeated advice, “Write what you know” translated into “I’m not a writer, so I don’t really know what to tell you about how to write well.” 

I went on thinking this for probably somewhere around four more years, writing some of the crap I described in my bad story ideas.  I thought I was being creative and escaping that dreaded, limiting advice of writing what I know.  And then Ray Bradbury had to really throw me off. 

It was my first year or two of college and I was at a bookstore, probably while I was supposed to be in class, looking through the usually disappointing “how –to” section of writing books.  Most of these books of how to get published or how to write a best-selling novel are by authors I’d never heard of and the couple of times I took the time to look up what level of success the author has had, the only books they’ve had published are the how to write books.  Look up a handful of the unrecognizable names in this section and you’ll see what I’m talking about.  This day, however, I saw that my favorite author at the time had put one together.  I remember thinking How did I not already know about this? as I snatched it up. 

I knew I’d not only learn a ton from this book, but I was certain Bradbury’s teaching would tell me how I was tapping into this resource of imagination and  pushing beyond the mere limits of human knowledge.  Guess what the first chapter said.

Write what you know. 

Maybe not in those exact words, but that was the message.  He was preaching to tap into your zest or gusto, if I am remembering the words correctly.  When I read that, I thought I was on the right track.  When he started saying that I writer that didn’t know himself couldn’t possibly tap into the zest in him, that’s when things got a little shaky.  I tried my best to pretend I didn’t know where this was headed, but when he pointed out that the only way for your writing to seem real is addressing your real fears and your real dreams and your real desires and your real loves and your real passions… I couldn’t duck the message any longer. 

I still didn’t get it though.  It was just seen as Bradbury turning his back on me, joining the ever-growing list of people telling me that I had nothing to offer the literary world.  The message was spelled out so well by Bradbury, but I still was not getting it.  And I still didn’t for maybe another six or seven years.   Not completely anyway. 

My story Nick was my first real experience of following this much feared and hated advice.  It wasn’t a conscious effort.  I didn’t decide Alright, I’ll give this writing what I know thing a try.  I just got into the idea deeply enough that I wasn’t trying for anything other than telling the story.  No gimmicks or attempts to write in a similar style to whatever writer I’d most recently been interested in.  No molding a voice or forcing the story to be some cutting edge eye-opener. 

The story started off in what has become my favorite way a new idea becomes a story.  I just found myself wondering What would happen if…In finding the answer to what would happen if, the story just kind of unfolded.  By the time it was done, this story about a man and a dog reflected the futility I felt in taking a loved one to rehab only to have them check themselves out days later, my views on materialistic people, and probably some of the subconscious reasons I’ve taken a career path that is not exactly the norm.  I didn’t plan any of that, but the subjects came up, so I had to include what I knew about those parts of life.

And you know what?  I STILL didn’t get it.  Not until a couple of people I knew read it and made comments like “This line is so you,” or “I can totally hear you ranting just like that.”  I reread the story and thought that they were right.  I would say things like that.  It was one of those moments were several past events all click together and make you embarrassed for not getting it sooner. 

Sure, King doesn’t know all these monsters But King does know what scares him.  It just so happened to be vampires and monsters with clown faces and getting lost in the woods and rabid dogs and S&M gone wrong and cell phones and… man, the guy has issues.  Anyway, he takes these characters and gives them his fears.  He doesn’t have to know these events first hand, just how he would react to them.

It took all that time to learn that all writers have to know is what scares them.  Or thrills them.  Or interests them.  Or appalls them.  Or… just the stuff life has taught them.  It doesn’t limit a writer to telling only what has happened in his life.  It just means that in order to ring true, to talk the reader into suspending disbelief and really buying into the fiction, it has to reflect something of the writer.  Something he knows. 

Two More Rejections

They came like machine gun fire today…okay, that’s a little over-the-top.  There were two right in a row, so i guess that doesn’t qualify as machine gun-like.  It was rapid fire, though.  47 seconds apart, according to email time stamps. 

It’s not a big surprise that the rejections were close together because they were both from the same magazine.  One Story told me, “unfortunately,  we feel your story doesn’t fit with One Story.”  And then told me the same thing 47 seconds later. 

 You can’t even open two emails and their attachments that quickly, nonetheless read a story and respond to it.  So I see two possibilities.  I’m not sure which I dislike more…

The first possibility is that there was a list of stories to review, so the editors got together, made their final selection, as One Story is precisely that…One story at a time makes up the whole issue, and then emailed everyone else that didn’t make that final cut all in one sitting. 

 The second possibility is that they saw my submission, didn’t recognize the name as anyone noteworthy in the literary world and sent me the cut and paste or autoresponse.

I don’t like the first possibility becuase it means I didn’t make the grade. 

I don’t like the second possibility because I didn’t even get a chance.

 My first response is to think the second possibility is better, not having been rejected on my actual work, but solely because my name is not yet marketable, but the more I think about that, the more I tend to think the second possibility is much worse. 

No, I am positive the second possibility is worse. 

It would be worlds better to have an editor write back, telling me how he really didn’t like what I wrote, why it sucked, what needs his magazine has that I failed to meet, all the problems he saw with what I wrote than to just have my stuff thrown out. 

This initial response, thinking it might be better not to have been rejected based on my work, is almost the exact cowardice that kept me from sending any stories out to publishers for years.  I could come up with a million reasons back then why it wasn’t time yet.  Didn’t have enough stories.  Didn’t have a plan.  Didn’t have my “voice” yet.  Didn’t know how it all worked yet.  Didn’t think this story or that story was polished enough….

And I believed every one of them. 

I can’t speak for everyone who writes, but I know for me, it’s a real roller coaster of confidence.  I’ll finish a story, read it through and think it’s a good strong piece that I am proud to have my name attached to.  I’ll read it and know it has a real shot at being published.

Then, my confidence will roll over the top of that hill and start its way down.  I’ll try to explain a story to someone and hear my own verbal explanation of the story and think, Wow, that really sounds awful when I explain it like that.  I’ll start to think of the sheer volume of people trying to get published out there and start to wonder what exactly makes me think my stuff should stand out or what keeps my stuff from just being run of the mill.  I’ll read a fantastic short story and think Now that’s how it’s done.

But then i’ll pick up some literary magazine or even a book and run across something I feel really is run of the mill. That’s when I start up the next hill.  At the risk of sounding cocky, I have to admit, I’ve read published material and thought If this got published I know my stuff is good enough.  Sometimes all it takes is just to re-read one of my stories to boost my confidence again.

As time goes by, despite the rejections, I have more ups than downs in my confidence level.  More and more, the downs are just becoming moments of doubt that are fleeting.  I think i’ll need to find a new analogy to replace my roller coaster one.  it’s a pretty boring roller coaster that spends most of its time going uphill.

How do you shake a bad story idea?

I can’t get rid of this really crappy story idea.  I keep thinking up new plot twists and character details and I don’t want to.  It’s not even a genre I’ve written in before or ever planned on.  It’s science fiction.   I am not a science fiction fan at all.  I loved the Star Wars movies as a kid and occasionally, i’ll still like a science fiction movie, like Pitch Black, Fifth Element, or 12 Monkeys, but most of the time, it’s horrible.  Especially the books.  Bradbury is a wonderful author and at one time, I thought he was the best, but I don’t think his stuff was really science fiction.  There just isn’t a genre for what he writes, so they stuck that label on. 

To play word association, science fiction makes me think of words like redundant, played out, unoriginal, virgin…okay, just kidding about the last one.  After shamefully going to the Star Wars convention (which made me never refer to myself as a Star Wars fan again), I am well aware that there are plenty of space nerds that are female and are likely to be aroused by the size of a man’s lightsaber…no, literally a lightsaber, so science fiction fans are much more likely to lose their virginity than the stereotypes give them credit for.  Though I’d be willing to bet they’d call it “docking my starship” or “connecting to her USB port” or “engaging in the mating ritual”…something like that. 

Anyway, the few pieces of science fiction that I like do away with the cliches and formulas of science fiction, which most of the time have to do with intentionally going for weirdness, like “Oh, look how different these aliens are…the MEN have the babies!” type of stuff.  The big cliche is the rouge badboy starfighter that has a heart of gold under his sarcasm and rough exterior…and my story idea has that cliche.

It’s awful.  I have these played out plot details about the hunting down and exterminating of a predatory alien race that was discovered after a settlement of humans was already established on their planet.  Okay, I guess that makes them native, not alien, but you get the gist.  There is a special squad that patrols for these creatures,  of which my cliched character is the most effective yet problematic member.  You know the guy.  You’ve seen him in a thousand other movies.  The guy no one understands yet respects because of what he has been through.  The guy that just won’t conform.

And it just keeps growing in my head without an original detail to the story.  I have thought about it being a fish-out of-water story, having my rogue antihero awakened from suspended animation several years into the future, as he was top pilot of his time and trained on the prototypes of ships that it took years to actually put into the field.  Something horrible like that.  You know, the old being part of a military experiment that he comes to regret and resent plot line. 

I wrote a story…well, okay, I started a story that I never finished about these awful story ideas and how they invade what I consider decent story ideas.  It was about two college sophomores both majoring in creative writing who, after they both experienced awful freshman roommates, decided it would be best to room with each other.  Both agreed that it would be the only way to guarantee having a roommate that would respect writing and create an atmoshpere that supported the needs of a writer.  How it turned out though, was that their definition of that atmosphere was very different and there were two really horrible qualities in the roommate that kept the main character from being the productive writer he wanted to be.  It was really about the two problems with my own writing and how I get in my way of being the productive writer I want to be.

 The first quality the roommate and I share is the tendency to not see a story through.  The roommate, who was named Sam, would be all fired up about his story, talking about it and focusing on it and only it for several days, then never managing to put it on paper.  It drove the main character crazy, as Sam would share all the details with him and then, after invading the thoughts of his roommate, Sam would just leave him hanging, never finding out how the story ended up.  It was like watching 45 minutes of an hour long TV show time after time.   

I think I have at least 20 stories that I have started that are left in my unfinished short stories folder on my computer.  I think all of them are strong enough ideas to follow through with, some of them I already have mentally written the entire story.  I just get sidetracked and start a new story or revisit an old one, putting whatever i’m working on in limbo.  Some of these have been in that folder for four or five years. 

 The other one is the bad story idea.  While his roommate was working on serious ideas or trying to concrentrate on other things, good old Sammo would bombard him with these really awful story ideas, full of gimmicks and cliches.  I do this same thing to myself. 

My brain just won’t cooperate when I want to stop entertaining a story idea.  I want to move on, work on something I feel is worthwhile, I just can’t let the crappy one die.

What’s really awful, is this science fiction story is not a short story type of idea.  It just keeps getting longer and longer. 

So please, someone convince me to let this garbage die.  Laugh at me.  Make fun of me.  Something.  Let’s somehow put this turd to rest right here.

 Actually, that might be a good idea.  Maybe the humility it would take to put the garbage story ideas out there would be what it took to never go down that path again.

So, let’s try to put to rest some of the really horrible, completely shit ideas i’ve had, put to rest right here.  I’ll just lay them all out on the table and see if maybe the shame of letting them out allows me to leave them behind forever.  Some of them are single scenes of a story, some are just general concepts, some are dialogue, and some are plot aspects.  Some are bad because they are cliches.  Some are bad because they are so far-fetched.  Some are bad because they are just so damn stupid.  Some are from years ago, some are pretty fresh.  Some I put on paper, some I just let fester in my head.  So, in no particular order, the bad ideas are…

- People being trapped at a diner that somehow has become this place where nothing electrical will work anymore (where the hell did I think this Twilight Zone reject was going?).

 - A futuristic story about a guy figuring out that the computer system that connected and ran everything was fatally flawed committing suicide after being framed for creating that fatal flaw ( I promise I wrote this beauty before I’d ever heard of the internet…and yeah, I did actually write this one.  i’ll blame it on being 14 years old at the time…even though I was 18.  14 just sounds, I don’t know…less humiliating?).

- A Caucasian man discovering his grandfather wasn’t really his grandfather after being diagnosed with Sickle Cell Anemia.

 - A homicide detective and full-blooded Seminole tracks down a childhood friend, chocked full of Seminole traditions pulled from an encyclopedia and forced into the plot

- A story that started with the sentence I had died.  I have no clue where that idea could go, but I’m sure it wouldn’t go anywhere near “interesting.”

- A story about a guy selling his soul to the devil, which the devil keeps in a jar…yeah, a jar…in his room full of soul-jars in hell.  In return, the devil gives the guy all kinds of powers to help hunt down all the escaped souls from hell.  the guy, instead, uses his powers to free his own soul from hell and then spends eternity running from the devil and fighting off other super-powered minions.  Probably would be a pretty long book, it going on through eternity and all.  Man, was that one embarrassing to share.

- Another soul stealing story idea, inspired by the steaming turd of a story I just described, in which a man is approached by the devil and informed that the man’s father sold his son’s soul and the devil was going to collect in three days, taking the man to hell.  The story was all about how he would handle those three days.  Petty revenge and life regrets faced and dealt with.  Maybe I should have never read Legion, or Son of Rosemary.  Yeah, I’ll blame it on that.

- A story about bounty hunters.  The only thing I came up with was the detail of how the leader had a sawed-off shotgun chained to his belt so it was always ready for a quick draw.  I have no clue what to blame this little nugget on.

- A story about someone leaving an unsolvable math problem on the chalkboard and one night, the janitor…oh, wait.  That wasn’t my bad story idea.  Never mind.

- A football story about a guy who is always stuck with the dirty work assignments on plays finally getting his chance at glory. The bad thing about this story, other than it being another huge cliche, was the fact I wrote this as a teenager who didn’t know much about football.  The final play of the game would have been whistled for illegal man down field.  It was a pretty embarrassing moment when I let my free safety friend read it before anyone else and as soon as he finished, he pretended to blow a whistle, yelled out the call of illegal man down field, and started laughing.

 - A story for which, somehow…my money is on pity…I got an A on in my 9th grade journalism and writing class.  It was this really awful Vietnam war story called…oh, man, I can’t believe I’m admitting this…Scared Little Boys.  Mr. Grieve, if you’re reading this, please contact me and explain how you refrained from laughing in my face when I turned this in.  The incredibly awful climax of the story was our main character trying to steal a helicopter to get to somewhere he could make a clean break from the army and go off to live his life in hiding rather than to continue to face the horrors of war.  You know, something subtle like that would be sure to work.  Ehh, I killed him in the getaway anyway.

- Another war story written later that same year…a really long one…about a family in which someone from each generation had fought in every American war.  I guess you can imagine how hard I laughed years later when I saw Forrest Gump and Forrest explained about Lt. Dan’s family history.  That 30 second scene totally summed up my craptastic war epic.  I still laugh when I see that scene. 

 - A story, actually a novel, about a guy who worked in a psych facility discovering that some of the patients were in the middle of this battle between good and evil, but he can never sort out what is truth and what is delusion when the patients share the details of their struggles.  Yeah, thank goodness for that tendency to not follow through with some stories, huh?  I let this one peter out after 50 or 60 pages.  Wow, that’s a lot of wasted time. 

I’m sure there have been plenty more, but for now, that’s all I can remember, mercifully.  It really is ugly to see them spelled out there in front of me. I hope the humiliation of sharing this is incentive enough to steer me away from entertaining those bad story ideas.  I’m sure more will pop up.  I don’t really have a problem with that.  I just really want to stop feeding them and helping them grow. 

The First Rejection

I knew as soon as I picked up the envelope. Too thin, too light. No way it contained anything like a letter explaining the next step of the process and when to expect to see the published story or, oh, I don’t know, a check? I could see there was only a little rectangle of yellow paper inside, about 2 inches by 3 inches. I was pretty sure all that could fit on such a small piece of paper was “NO.”

I was close. It was from the Georgia Review. It wasn’t even a letter, just a photocopied note that thank me for considering them but my work didn’t fit their needs. Good luck, unspecified writer!

I still have that piece of paper, along with all the other rejection notices. I don’t know the total count off the top of my head, but it’s a long way from that awful “First 100 submissions” I keep hearing about.

I keep them all just to remind me that I still have a lot of work to do and I can’t let “No thanks” be the last thing I hear about my writing. Also, it helps me keep track of who to send junk to when I get to that phase of my career that Vonnegut went through when he knew he was so well received he could write trash and it would be widely accepted and praised. I mean, that’s likely, right?

That first one stands out to me because I wasn’t as ready as I thought I was to hear no. I’d imagined a lot of different responses from the Georgia Review, some good, some bad, but none of them were as complete of a blow off as what I’d received. I’d done what everyone does with the unknown, filled it in what assumptions and guesses. I’d assumed that I’d get some comments about my story and guessed there might be a critique of my work. Now that I know how extremely rare it is to get any personal response, it’s not quite the shock it was to get some generic rejection that doesn’t even conform that anyone had even lifted the coverpage.

The story was called Sideshow. It’s a story I wrote all in one sitting in one of those rare times the words just seem to keep stringing themselves together without any effort from me. If writing was always like that, I’d be a complete junkie. I’d be like I was with video games when I was in middle school, pretending to have thrown up so I could get a little bit closer to rescuing Zelda and running on two or three hours of sleep because I was just so close to figuring out how to beat Super Machoman and finally get that bout with Tyson.

As great as that “zone” as I’ve heard other writers refer to it is, it incredibly rare and completely unpredictable. It’s such a rare thing that the few times it’s happened, I’ve thought it just might be the last time I was fortunate enough to experience it. 

Alright, so that first one is out of the way.  It was a good experience, looking back.  No, seriously.  I’m not just trying to convince myself that getting shot down on the first try was wonderful.  That part of it still sucks.  I mean it was a good experience in that I now know what to expect and I don’t have to rely just on my imagination to conjure up the reaction of editors.  There’s not the anxiety that comes with the complete unknown. 

The “Important Characters”

The titled I picked for this page probably has a fairly universal response of “huh?”  That is, except for the select few people that have read the stories that I’m presently shopping around. Anyone who has sent his writing in to get published would probably agree that it is extremely difficult to sum up the gist of your story in a neat little paragraph well enough to make an editor take notice.  I temporary become obsessive compulsive or neurotic or something when I try to write a submission letter, writing and rewriting that descriptive paragraph and thinking every time That sucks.  It doesn’t even sound like the story I wrote.  I probably have written 10 to 20 versions of each letter I’ve sent.  I kind of wish I could talk myself into being that intense in editing and rewriting the actual story.   I mention this because I know I won’t be able to explain these characters very well without the whole story to support them.  I’ll try anyway. 

 

The characters I mentioned in the page’s title aren’t the full list of my characters or anything, just the ones that stand out as most memorable to me.  They are also featured in the stories I have shopped around the most.  

The man and the dog are both from a story I wrote called Nick.  Nick’s the dog…kind of.  It’s really just the name the main character has mentally assigned this dog that lives in his neighborhood.  He has perceived a bond with this animal that he has never really met, only driven past.   Why it’s important to him is that it’s the only consistent thing in his life.  He starts and ends every day with greeting the dog from his car.  See, doesn’t make much sense in a summary.   

The Bathroom Graffiti refers to my story Stance.  In this story, political statements penned on a bathroom stall lead the main character to self-realizations.  Is used almost all actual graffiti I’d seen, mostly in the same bathroom at a local Laundromat.   This one is actually is easy to sum up, just difficult to make sound interesting.   

This visor is somewhat challenging to explain.  I witnessed a guy at a Goodwill thrift store beg for money, offer to sell his personal items, and almost get into a fight, all over wanting to buy a 49 cent visor…a 49 cent purple women’s visor.  He spent about 30 not-so-sane minutes in the store and I followed him around to see what crazy thing he’d do next.  I was obsessed with figuring out why that visor would be so important, so I filled in the blanks and wrote the story.  No big surprise that I call it 49 Cents.   This one is my favorite of my stories and the one I think has the best chance of being published.  I’m kind of alone in this opinion, though, as the people close to me all point out the ones they think have a better chance.  Hell, I just want one of us to be right.  I don’t care which one.