This post from back in 2010 helps explain why I've made so little progress moving into short story writing. Other factors:
- Lack of practice. The eight children's books published prior to 2008 took a lot of time. I've also written a number of unpublished novels since then. Unpublished, but still time consuming.
- Lack of training. I'm trying to address that now with workshops and self-study.
- Lack of focus. By which I mean I'm also interested in writing humor and essays. And within essays I'm interested in writing about eating and maybe nature and travel. (I have a submission in somewhere that I'm claiming fits their nature theme.) I recognize that I'm spreading myself pretty thin in terms of developing a level of knowledge of all those forms.
Back to "What We Do"
This story began decades ago. My interest was in the women as a group, as protectors and defenders. I submitted a much earlier third-person version with no main character, to a women's magazine that doesn't exist anymore. I took an on-line flash fiction class during the first year of the pandemic where I was able to get feedback on this particular story from the instructor. At that point, I had shortened it a great deal and created a first-person narrator--the predator. The story began with a description of the setting, and the instructor made the very valid point that if the story was about the women, I shouldn't be giving up the valuable introduction to the beach.
The most interesting part of her feedback was that she didn't see the strength of the women at all. She accepted the women as being mundane, stereotypical moms being dissed by the author and didn't recognize that they were operating on two levels.
I needed to address both those points.
I revised and then submitted the story five more times before submitting to Stonecoast.
Why I Think This Story Was Finally Published
- Stonecoast Review made a call for stories dealing with the theme of "power." I find writing on someone else's themes difficult and rarely do it. However, in this case, I felt I already had a story dealing with power. I pitched What We Do as a story about people who are traditionally viewed as powerless but are not.
- Traditionally, short stories are supposed to show change in some way. By the time I submitted this story to Stonecoast, I had revised once again and given it a main character who has little respect for the women around her in the opening, recognizes what they are doing, and changes her attitude, which is made clear when she entrusts something valuable to one of them.
- It also had a new title--What We Do instead of On the Beach, which is what I'd been using for the most recent drafts and submissions. Titles in flash are particularly important. They need to be doing some of the lifting and What We Do does, if for no other reason than that it shows action, which On the Beach does not. On the Beach also puts too much focus on the setting, instead of the women.
You can see what I mean about lack of training holding me back with my short fiction writing. This was a long learning curve for me that I hope will have an impact on my future writing.
Oh, And I Attended a Launch Event for This Issue
I didn't volunteer to read, since I hadn't been to one of these events before and wanted to test the waters. I'm glad I didn't, because at that event I wasn't in children's publishing world or on-line publishing world. I was in academic/literary world with people who had had work nominated for writing awards, who had or were editors of literary journals I'd heard of, who had MFAs and were up for Ph.D.s and who are teachers. I definitely have professional writing accomplishments, but they aren't the same kind of accomplishments these people had. Mine aren't better, they aren't worse, they're just different.
This was a very different kind of pool for me, and I'm glad to have had an opportunity to wade in it.
