Entering the realm of the short story, I was extremely excited. It seemed like a soft cube of clay in front of me that was waiting for me to mold it into something beautiful, something meaningful. But, when I actually took the plunge and attempted to start writing, I scowled at my previous idealistic views. Truth is, the process was much more difficult than I had thought, and as I soon discovered, the way my story transformed revealed a lot about my own thinking.
Everything started with the quest to find a ripe idea, and even this was more difficult than I had anticipated. I’ve always prided myself in the fact that creativity comes relatively easily to me, but I started to draw from the creative ideas I had accumulated in the back of my mind, I was surprised to find that most of them, when placed in the role of a story, were painfully cliché. I remembered the words of advice we had been given at the get-go: “don’t make everything perfect for your character”. I decided it would be wiser and more fruitful to pursue a story idea which made me feel uncomfortable to some degree and thus begged some serious questions. Immediately, I fell upon the image of an ailing old man… a man with Alzheimer’s—an image which had always resurfaced in my thoughts and made me cringe. To be so innately and permanently disconnected from the people one loves was the saddest thought I could imagine.
With this platform, I pulled wisps of substance from here and there to try to build the skeleton of my story. I found myself with a clear vision of the story’s eventual meaning: I wanted it to have to do with understanding and listening to someone, even when the mere words they speak are unintelligible.
My first draft was submitted with this goal in mind, and it seemed like it was somewhat on the right path, but the characters, dialogue, and even the fundamental structure of it (it was told from the point of view of the Alzheimer’s patient who thought intelligently, but spoke unintelligibly) felt fabricated and fake. And that deep, warm satisfaction which I usually feel when I turn in a piece of writing just didn’t come. For the first time in a very long time, I longed to continue writing, to keep kneading the clay.
However, my initial changes to this draft were very conservative. As much as we were told to let go of our “weak” material, I couldn’t help feeling that there was a reason that I put that material there in the first place, and taking it out would leave my story with more holes rather than strengthening it.
It wasn’t until I was forced to shoot holes into my story that I finally recognized the potential value of such a step in the process. We had already completed four steps when this push to dramatically reshape came. Apparently, I had been working with no clear main character. Somewhere in the far corners of my mind, I had been whispering reassuring words to myself, trying to make myself believe that I would make it work somehow. I soon found, however, that it was this blind faith of mine that I would somehow make it out of the dense fog surrounding my story which was holding me back.
So… after highlighting approximately 1700 words and pressing ‘delete’, I started from scratch. And this time, I planned it out first. Now, my steps 2-4 had not been a complete waste… in fact, they played more into my final story than I had thought they would. Although my focus character shifted, and the tone of the story was altered, my initial question-igniting plotline became the glue which held it together. The result was shocking. Even through seemingly heartbreaking amounts of ‘delete’-key-pressing, the core questions my story was meant to bring up didn’t change, but the way those questions were posed was transformed. And, along with that, my view of the process of writing transformed as well. I experienced for the first time the feeling of deleting something yet not losing it. And, when I finally stapled all my drafts together, with my final one on top, I was relieved to feel that warm satisfaction once again.
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