Think They Won’t Spot It? They Will
You can’t cheat your way to a good story.
A nice derangement of the publishing balance of power brought me this free space on a massive platform where the glorious feathers of my creativity may spread unclipped by editorial caprice and wordcount constraints, and in my giddy frolic through now-unbounded vistas of artistic freedom, damn if I didn’t step on a rake and smack myself right in the face.
After taking some time to deal with the humiliation and figure out how to pull something useful from it, I’m back to tell you:
Never try to fool a reader.
I’ve never planned or sketched out a story, I just write it, and when I was submitting to webzines, eventually I realized I was subverting imposed limitations by trying to compress entire novels, more or less, into one thousand words of flash fiction. This demands tight control of voice and pacing and where to be explicit and what to let the reader infer.
Voice—it’s everything; you’ve got to find the true voice for every character and if you’ve got an omniscient narrator, that tone must be perfect too.
I’ve been reposting that previously-published work here, and time has let me see that some had been slightly less than perfect. There were places where those wordcount constraints forced me to be spare in the narrative when a little expansiveness would’ve made a deeper story, and now I can be more leisurely.
And I thought, in my haste to put all the existing content up here first, that I could get away with being a bit lazy too, and I took one of my favorite and most well-received stories and added a little extra in places I thought could use some expanding, and of course that threw off the tempo everywhere else.
And a reader, whose sensibilities in general seem to well-complement my own, sensed exactly where that happened and remarked upon it in the most thoughtful and useful way and absolutely wrecked my week.
I managed just enough grace to respond with honest appreciation before hiding myself away to inflict some necessary and purposeful self-caning. I hope I’ve over-exaggerated to myself the damage I’m afraid I’ve now done to my credibility, in my fiction and otherwise, but a dose of comeuppance occasionally administered is a valuable therapeutic.
Years ago, one of the best authors on the webzine where I was also being published started to notice my work. Her own writing has appeared in many other places; it’s unique and I think matchless, and her regard really thrilled me.
But she said this about one of the stories I felt most pride in:
“A very difficult subject and I think you nearly carried
it off, not quite, but better than most writers could.”
She gave it full marks anyway (the site had a rating system) and that drove me nuts for a decade. Just show me, I wanted to scream; just show me where the damn flaw is.
And this year, finally, preparing to post that story to this Substack, I did see something lacking, and fixed it.
That author had done me, I think, a great honor in not specifying the points of her own dissatisfaction, and they might still remain. But my discomfort, suspecting she wasn’t wrong in seeing a failure to complete the mission? That’s gone now.
I don’t hope to please all, or most, or even a lot of my readers. I write what I want to and hope people who might like it will find me. So far I’m getting pretty much exactly the same tiny percentage of fans as I did when exposed to a much wider audience.
What I do hope is that you’ll tell me what you really think, and not hold back ’cause you fear I’ve got tender feelings. Of course they’re tender. But they ain’t the part to be considering as you consider what to tell me about my work.
I am glad that you have forgiven yourself as I believe that you are a good writer. It does take time to hone talent and enjoy the journey all in one go. Best wishes to you on your way to the best you can be. Thanks for sharing your stories.
I am so in awe of you as a fiction writer, far better than I have ever been, that I can't imagine anyone criticizing you for it.