So, today I've started to work on my collection of short fiction. It's been a lot of fun going through my old stories to find ones I like enough to continue working on. What most interests me, though, is that I found stories from all stages of my writing career that I liked--from my first workshop class stories to the one I've been playing with for the last several months.
I thought, when I first imagined this project, that there was no way I would ever be interested in returning to my very first stories. I had the idea that all of them were tragically disfigured and there was no way of putting them to rights. However, upon revisiting them, I'm pretty impressed. I know that sounds egotistical, but it's true. Granted, all three of the stories I've chosen from my first workshop need much more attention than any of the rest of my stories, but they're good stories. Interesting stories. There's something in them that says to me, "This is true. This is who you are. Don't let these ones slip into anonymity."
I had a bit of a scare while trying to decide which stories to include. The one I most wanted to have in this collection was missing. I lost the jump drive I had saved it to, and like a dummy, I hadn't backed it up on my hard drive. Well, I looked all over the freakin' house for the folder the hard copy was in, (I have hard copies of all my stories. Thank God!) but I couldn't find it. I thought about the advice Ali and Jenny gave about doing a blind rewrite, but the thought depressed me. I loved the story the way it was already written, and I was afraid that I would destroy the tone I had set for it with a blind rewrite. To make a long story short (too late,) I finally had a wave of genius and checked in the empty chest of drawers in the spare bedroom. Not only was this story in it, but I found the critiques of many of the other stories I had chosen for my collection. Whoopee! It felt like Christmas. At any rate, the conclusion to this is that I really should label that drawer as holding all my hard copies. I could have saved myself a lot of grief if I had already done it.
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2 comments:
That's the funny thing about revisiting old work. Sometimes you find that a couple of the old, messy pieces are writings you actually like better than the last thing you produced. Funny, isn't it?
So, I'm curious about the collection. Have you decided what kind of thing is going to unify it? i.e. similarities in plot, tone, characters, setting, or something else? Or will the unifying factor simply be that you're the author?
I haven't found the "unifying factor," yet. Right now I'm just picking stories that I want to revisit. Most of them are in fairly awful condition, but they have a spark that needs, nay wants, to be fanned into a raging kegger fire. I have noticed, though, that an interesting pattern is taking place.
I've got the realism stories--they include stories of kids and adults, stories of abuse and triumph, and stories of despair and joy (okay, not joy--you know me.) and I've got my magical realism stories--talking dogs and coma kids in the afterlife kind of things. They keep bumping into each other. I'm not sure how I'm going to end up organizing the collection, especially once I put yet to be written pieces in it, but I think that it's going to revolve around the juxtaposition of the mundane vs the magical. Maybe I'll try to create a discussion of whether what we consider mundane isn't actully magical. Hmmmm.
I don't know. I'm kinda blowin' smoke right now. I'll let you know more later once I've finished choosing from the stories I have written already.
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