exhuming ghosts

I got jittery today. Anxious. Eating compulsively, fretting even more compulsively. Convinced that the projects I’m waiting on (among them, a short story lingering at two high profile literary magazines for twice as long as usual, this is usually considered a good thing) are all going to turn to shit. That nothing’s going to work out. That no news is bad news. That the charter school people who visited Damian’s class today saw him at his worst and will now reject him, thereby decimating our safety school option (all this because the teacher told me, “He was pretty much himself, just a little quiet in circle after handwriting group.”) That we’re never, no not ever going to be able to move from this house where we’re surrounded by noisy renters on every side. (Even though we chatted with the very responsive landlord on the north side, who will help us with the old lady with her loud Russian TV.)

So yeah. That was my day. Ms. Negativity, that’s me. Ms. Anxious and Depressed For No Reason.

Coincidentally I started writing a new short story yesterday and worked on it more today, getting into the meat of the piece.

Coincidentally, this story is making me extremely uncomfortable. It’s based on a real incident – two, actually – and it hurts to even think about. So why am I writing it? Because good stories come out of pain. Oh, not necessarily, not for everyone. But for me? I think yes. I think my best stuff, at least my best short fiction and maybe the longer material too, comes from tapping into some deep-seated and extremely uncomfortable emotional issues. Sometimes they're transmuted into completely fictional scenarios, sometimes they're closer to my remembered reality.

The trick is to shape the latter so they’re not just thinly disguised therapy, unsatisfying to anyone besides me. And though I know the essentials of how to tell a strong tale and I know the kinds of thematic resonance that can achieve this, I don’t really have any idea when I’m in the midst of it whether this one (whichever this one is) comes anywhere near that. I just have to trust. And know that if I don’t make it this time, I can toss the story and nobody has to know. But if I do, then I’ve written something with some emotional punch. Maybe. If I’m lucky. If the muse is with me and if I have enough clarity to see past my own reaction to the raw material.

There’s this voice in my head, it started up last night. It says “Why are you writing this? Everyone writes a story about this. It’s one of those rites of passage sorts of stories, I bet every magazine editor from Alaska to Florida has read one of these this week. And I bet every magazine editor from Alaska to Florida has rejected twenty of them this month. Why should yours be any different? Why not just abandon it now? You’ll never succeed, this will never get published, it doesn’t deserve to be published,” (this based on the two pages I’d written yesterday) “it’s trite and overwrought and melodramatic and ridiculous” (did I mention? two pages?) “and an unworthy follow up to your last home run of a story, just put it down and walk away slowly, you’ll never amount to anything, you’re a one hit wonder – assuming that other one even gets published, because even if that one is good, one of your best, that doesn’t mean it measures up to the other stories out there because you’re just not that good, certainly not as good as you think you are or someone would have discovered you already, come knocking on your door and riffling through your files, because that's how people get published, not all this send it out and wait nonsense. You're doomed, face it.”

I recognize that voice, though I haven’t heard it in years, not with this intensity. It comes from the time this story takes place. It comes from the pages of the story itself, a frozen insecure painfully eager to please but sure she can’t self. A much younger self.

I write this story partly because it’s good fodder for a piece of fiction, partly because it’s time. But writing it is hard. Ghosts lurk here. Nasty, slimy icky ghosts.

Now I just have to figure out how to work them into the story.

Posted by Tamar at April 20, 2004 09:36 PM