Post date: Jul 30, 2016 4:01:55 PM
Becoming a Writer: my first short story
One of my primary objectives in taking early retirement is to have more time to write. Since the end of the semester in May, I have done a weekly blog post. I’ve also done some traveling, more decluttering, babysitting my grandsons, and gone through a lot of books and papers, organizing ideas for future writing. After the Writer’s Workshop in June, I decided that I needed to write shorter, more focused blog posts, as well as explore opportunities to write short articles for publication.
I’ve written a couple of columns for the Cedar Valley Business Monthly this summer. However, I have spent much of my time working on several projects: I’m working on an Iowa Writers class that helps students learn a little more about our state’s history as well as its more notable writers. I’ve also begun work on a story for a Chicken Soup anthology and a short article on teaching for a journal.
Most recently, I submitted a short story for a contest on a website only recently discovered: the writepractice.com. The instructions were simple: write a short story of no more than 1500 words about a scar. I found this task both enjoyable and a little nerve-wracking: I’ve read a lot of short stories but it is not my genre of choice for writing, so it pushed me out of my comfort zone. I wrote short stories as a teen and young adult, but probably not for 20 years. As I brainstormed, I thought about my scars and scars of people I had known or seen…and suddenly saw a picture in my mind of a young high school girl on a school bus avoiding everyone because of her scar.
As I drafted, I realized that I had to cut out some of the description and the back story of the young bus driver, a college dropout who had come home to help with Grandma, and didn’t go back to the University. Instead, she got her CDL and started driving a school bus. She became my narrator. I decided that she would observe two girls on the bus: one, the young girl with a scar, and the other girl someone forced to ride the bus because of getting speeding tickets. I worried about dialogue: even though I’ve spent the last 20+ years hanging around teenagers, I wasn’t sure that my teens sounded authentic.
We posted our stories and gave each other feedback on a series of discussion forums: it was an interesting reversal for me, who used peer review in my Composition classes, with varying success. The teacher in me picked those submissions who had not gotten any feedback yet. I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the writing: the attention to detail, the ability to develop a plot and several characters in such a tight space, and at least a few surprise endings. I tried to not sound too much like an English teacher clutching her red pen as I gave feedback, and was pleased overall with the feedback that I received.
After doing three drafts of “The New Girl on Bus #5,” I submitted the final version of the story yesterday, and it felt good! Part of the appeal of this contest was that all stories would be published on shortfictionbreak.com if we went through the workshop process. It was also a great experience of meeting deadlines, getting feedback, and revising a draft: so in many ways, I have practiced what I preached to my students for so many years.
For my writing friends, I hope your summer has been productive! What are you working on? I’d love to hear from you.
Last updated July 30, 2016