Rummaging in Drawers
This past week, I worked on the stories that will be included in the Family and Other Ailments collection recently accepted by a publisher. You would think there’s little editing needed on tales that have already gone, individually, through several rounds of submission. And it’s true that compared to a novel, the changes are minimal, mostly to ensure spelling consistency across the pieces. I also found a couple of typos. It’s always surprising how these pesky critters manage to slip through multiple readings by multiple people.
What I found most interesting about the process was the “rediscovery”, not of the stories themselves—I remember them fairly well—but of specific lines of text. I forgot I wrote that. Or, rather, I forgot I described that this way. It may seem like a silly comment. After all, nobody expects an author to remember every single paragraph of a book. Short stories are different, however. They pack a lot in a small suitcase. In flash fiction, defined as less than 1000 words (about 4 pages of double-spaced text), that suitcase is more like a handbag. Every sentence has a big job to do and words are weighed. They literally count. In theory, I should remember them. Yet, I didn’t and the rediscovery was a pleasant gift.
Like this from the story No Recoil:
The barrel of the rifle rests on the windowsill catching the rays of the midday sun. It could be made of liquid gold. A burnished wasp lands on the end of it, swings its nipped waist, jiggles its probing antennae against the mouth of the gun and peers inside.
Or, from the story Spiked:
He has no name and no face. Nobody knows what his voice sounds like or in what part of the country he lives. He’s spread so thin across so many police files that he’s achieved invisibility. Like the Bible says: he is many.
(Both stories are included in the collection)
If you asked me to write a story right now, off the cuff, about a girl who protects her family, or the last days of an elderly killer-for-hire, I would not come up with the fragments quoted above. Those words were conjured out of the particular atmosphere of the story and cannot exist outside of it. They are of the moment. Ten minutes before hitting the keyboard I didn’t know I would write them.
For me, that’s the charm of short stories. The pleasure of pulling something intriguing out of the hat. Or as Roald Dahl titled one of his collections: Tales of the Unexpected. His stories are about surprising events, but maybe they were a surprise for the writer too.
The downside of short stories is directly linked to their spontaneous nature.
They have a much shorter shelf life than books. They’re quick magazine or blog reads, then they go to archives. When the magazine is online, the story may live for a week. Slightly better than a mayfly, much worse than a mosquito that has a 1-3 months life expectancy away from insecticides. Which is why writers like collections. To give these nimble narrative performers another chance to show their stuff on stage.
For a few months, I played around with the selection. What stories to include in the collection, what to leave out. I had the title from the start. Family and Other Ailments is one of my favorite stories. It introduces Mae Rollins, a sheriff deputy that will star in a book down the road. She definitely needs more time in the limelight.
That title is also a solid thematic anchor. I realized, rummaging through the story drawer, that many of my crime, or crime-adjacent tales revolved around families. Happy ones, troubled ones, challenging ones. It helped with the choice. The retro noir and PI stories (except one) were set aside, those that flirted with science fiction or fantasy were also excluded.
In the end, after pruning, it came to a total of twenty-six pieces for a book-size word count.
I believe in giving readers something to sink their teeth in!
More news to come …