I’ve been doing it all wrong (short stories)

I’ve come to realize I’ve been doing it all wrong, so it only makes sense that I continue to fail at getting my short stories published.

Revision
Revision (Photo credit: raindog)

When I was in school, I was the epitome of the procrastinator.  Why do ahead of time what you can do at the last possible second and still get the same grade? (Don’t let my kids know I said that, by the way.) Even in college, when the stakes should have been higher, I would often wait until the very end to begin work. I’d spend a long night, part of a pot of coffee (side note: it was college that got me over the hump and into the coffee drinking world), and produce a ten, twenty, once even fifty pages of typed words. Within hours of producing these words, they would be out of my hands and into someone else’s, and it got so my brain was used to the lack of revision and work. Produce the words in one fell swoop, then pass them on to someone else.

After college, I got marginally better, but only for a little while. When I first tried my hand at writing, lacking the funds and means, I wrote by hand in fits of near hypographia, then later would transcribe these. I’ve even commented on that recently (and then failed to follow through), that that process was like its own editing and revision cycle. But when I had the means to have some manner of portable keyboard, I took it, and away went the revision stage all together. The fact that most magazine are now online just fuels that – how can you wait to edit and revise when its so much more convenient to finish writing and just send it?

How? How about a list of nothing but rejections as a result? How about I think I’ve finally sat back and taken notice that that method just doesn’t work for me. For some people, sure, what comes out of their mind and onto the screen is perfection on the first try. But as I sit here today, I realize, finally, I am not one of those people.

I do not produce gold on the first try.

I have a backlog of stories I’ve written this year, most of them submitted at least once, somewhere, for consideration, all of them rejected. A funny thing has happened, though. As I sit leafing through this pile of what I thought, at the time of writing, was gold, I see all kinds of flaws, errors, and plainly inadmissible writing. The stories, the adventures they contain, they’re all still vibrant and worthy, but the writing needs to be cleaned up. I need to revise.

This is a process I’ve heard others talk about and scoffed. But now, I think they may be onto something. It certainly puts a fresh spin on the old Hemingway quote, “The first draft of anything is shit.” I’d always interpreted that as being an excuse for something you were working on that you felt wasn’t up to par. But now I realize its something more than that – even when you don’t realize its crap, it is. Setting aside, as painful as it is, and letting a story fester on its own for a few months lets you come back with a fresh perspective. You come back a reader, a part of the critical audience, rather than the writer that just hammered out words for hours.

I wonder if editors keep the same submission notes that authors do? Do they automatically reject something that comes in a second time without reading it to see if its any better? I’d understand if the answer to that was yes, but looking over this stack in front of me, I hope at least some of them give second chances. Because I have a lot of revisions to do.

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