“Creeper” is the perfect example of a story where I pulled the trigger too early and sent it out for consideration before it was ready. I workshopped it and made cuts after workshopping. Then I submitted it a few places, and I thought it was good, but it got rejected, and the rejections came quickly. Nothing personal or we like it but not for us try sending something else. It was a straight string of cold-shoulder forms. The problem, as sometimes happens, was that I was seeing the story I believed was there rather than the one that was actually there. Or, to put it more accurately, I was seeing past the thousand words that needed to be cut without having cut them yet. The story was crowded by excess, by lines that over-explained where something should have been ambiguous, by dialogue that was too on the nose. Six months after I’d first sent it out, I went back to it, and as I made further cuts, I tried to be merciless. I wanted to excise anything that could be excised, to remove any extraneous commentary. I simply wanted to present the situation itself and allow the reader to judge.
I heard the story from a friend while sitting out back of El Bar in Fishtown one night last fall. She has started her own furniture business and was doing well. She rented a studio in a building that housed a carpenter’s union. They were all pretty cool with her, but one of the guys was making advances that, while not necessarily inappropriate, were on the cusp of inappropriate, enough to make her feel uncomfortable. This is something I’ve never had to deal with, and I found it unsettling to hear about. The line she had to walk between evading him in order to ensure her own comfort within her own space, but engaging him enough to not provoke. As I sat listening more and more, the lack of clarity about how to act in such social situations made me think there was a story there, a story that, though I hadn’t experienced it, I might be able to write, so I asked if I could, and she said fine. Of course, whenever I sit down to write from the perspective of a female character, I run the story by women, and given the workshop I’m part of is 50/50 on the gender front, I was provided suggestions about mannerisms and behaviors that helped bring the character to life, so I hope she comes off as authentic.
For my birthday my wife had given me Moleskine notebooks, and this was the story I wrote to break one of them in. I have trouble with Moleskine simply because they’re pretty, nicely bound. I feel almost as if I have to transcribe the story perfectly from my head in order to maintain the pristine appearance of a Moleskine’s pages. Generally, I like to write longhand during my first drafts. I scribble and cross out, and then when I type it up, I’m already performing one edit. There were many more to come, of course. More and more, I’m becoming interested in my stories posing questions without answering them. By removing commentary and simply conveying action and thought, my hopes are that it’s not easy to decide what’s bad and good, what the right or wrong actions were, who’s the hero, and who’s the villain. In any case, once I’d removed what I saw as the polemical commentary, the story was accepted by the first place I sent it to. If you happen to read the issue, which can be purchased here, I hope you enjoy my work. I feel honored to have been included in Clackamas Literary Review and I’d like to thank the editors for accepting it.
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