I wrote a short story over 20 years ago, well, I started it over twenty years ago, and finished it about a year later. It was so long ago that I don’t even remember my writing process. All I remember is that it was so incredibly hard for me to write. I remember being so frustrated because what ended up on the page was never as good as what was in my head. Something was always lost in translation which is part of the reason why it took me so long to complete. My battle was trying to extract every bit of the story as I saw it in my head, as I heard it in my head, and transfer it onto the page. But no matter how hard I tried, there was something always left behind, until finally I gave up and just let it be. Eventually I came to realize that the part that was left behind wasn’t for you, the reader, it was for me.
That’s the beauty of a story. That’s the beauty of words on a page (or nowadays on a screen). It’s that while the words belong to all those who encounter them, to interpret and imagine as necessary, the images in my head are just for me, as yours are only for you to keep. Some things aren’t meant to be shared.
The New Yorker used to publish an issue where they featured short stories by new writers. It came out in the summer if I’m not mistaken. Once I found out about it, my goal was to get my story in that issue. That’s when writing my story went from an aimless challenge I’d put to myself on a boring bus ride to something I was doing with intention and purpose. Not that it changed what I wrote, but it did change why I wrote. I was no longer writing just because. At that point, I wanted to get published.
After painstaking efforts to battle feelings of not being good enough, I finally produced something that, though I wasn’t necessarily pleased with, I was at least willing to put it out there and give it a try. I shipped it off to New York in a large manila envelope along with another self-addressed stamped envelope also inside, a standard practice back in the day.
I dropped it off at the post office and pictured angels guarding it on a plane as it made its way East. This was it. This was going to be the beginning of my career as a published author. However, no sooner had I sent it off did I receive that self-addressed stamped envelope back with my story and a generic rejection slip inside. I swear it was like five days later. It literally went from California to New York and back in around five days (looking back now, what a blessing to get such a quick rejection). I was devastated. I’d worked up the nerve against all my I’m-not-good-enough-to-be-in-the-New-Yorker odds, only for my insecurities to get a win. Receiving my story back, especially so quickly, felt like the end of the world. I didn’t know what to do, so I did nothing. I just put that story away. Bad as I thought it was, I still wasn’t going to throw it away because I worked too hard on it.
It wasn’t until recently, maybe about two years or so ago, when I came across it again and decided to give it a read. And what do you know? I loved it! I thought the writing was pretty good, sure it could use some editing, but I marveled at the detail of the storyline, the detail period. I thought it was so good, in fact, that it felt like at some point God must have taken over and started writing for me, through me. I was so talented back then and I didn’t even realize it. I was so talented and I let rejection from a magazine, albeit a highly-regarded magazine, stop me from pursuing my dream.
How beautiful it is to be able to look back and discover that I was a much better writer than I thought. That’s part of the power of words. They make it possible for the writer in me of my early twenties to reach out to the writer in me now in my early forties, and let me know, like Glinda the Good Witch from The Wizard of Oz says, that I always had it in me.
Speaking of The Wizard of Oz, my short story is inspired by that movie. That and The Neverending Story were my two biggest influences. I wanted to write a fairytale for adults even though the main character is a child.
I don’t know how to describe this story without giving it away. All I can say is that it’s a story about beauty and how it’s interpreted even with that I’m afraid I’ve said too much.
What I will say is that I’ve renewed my desire to publish this story. I’m going to edit it myself. I’m going to hire an editor too, and then I’m going to self-publish it as a novella. So something to look out for, perhaps next year. In the meantime, here’s an excerpt from a printed copy I found:
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