For the past six months, I've been freelancing on Fridays. I write six posts a month for BlogHer. I write as many reviews as I can for Cool Mom Picks. I wrote for an environmental site called SuperEco for a while. I ghost-edited a manuscript for a self-help book. I pitched and pitched and pitched and a result have an article coming out on Babble in September and in Scholastic Parent & Child in November. I put up two short stories and three micro-collections of poetry on Kindle. I wrote five pages of a new novel. I wrote and am attempting to sell a picture book. But I've been ignoring short fiction completely, until now.
Last Friday, I rewrote a short story I originally wrote around 2005ish. Then I sent it to five or six people for feedback. And that workshopping thing happened again, in which I see the story through other people's eyes and:
- Wonder what the hell I was thinking when I wrote it
- Wonder how one person can love, love, love a sentence while someone else can find it useless to the story
- Wonder when to go with my gut and when to go with a suggestion
- Know someone is right but also know I'm too lazy to completely change the ending
- Dig up Best American Short Stories from the years 1999-2004 and see what other people do
- Think I'll probably let this go on for about two weeks and then send the damn thing in anyway
All that sounded pretty negative, but the truth is that I love workshopping. Having five or six writers read your stuff is the best way to get a read on which parts are working and which aren't. In a short story, every single word has to be doing work or it shouldn't be there, so workshopping is the best way to find your offenders. (And there are always offenders.) Sometimes, at the end, people are so confused I end up throwing the story out. My two consistent weaknesses in short form are 1) unsympathetic main characters and 2) utterly confusing sentences. Don't I sound awesome? But I do tend to take on multiple issues in one very short space, so I understand why I confuse people a lot.
I don't always understand why I'm writing short stories in the first place. There's really no market for them anymore. I could be putting all that time and effort into my novel. But last Friday, even knowing I'd just sent this story out to some heavy hitters, even knowing they'd probably tell me how confused they were and how they didn't really *like* my main character, I felt really good, like Sleep Is for the Weak good. I created something from scratch again, something that exists solely for my own and others' entertainment. I didn't get paid to write it, I don't have a market for it, I just wrote it because I thought it needed to be out there in the world. If it doesn't get traction where I'm sending it, I'll put it out on Kindle with the others.
In a week, I'll be leaving for BlogHer to see my tribe of heart-on-the-sleeve writers. I think a lot of us are questioning why we write lately, whether it's worth the effort, if the tree really fell if nobody hears it. I wonder if we need to start sending each other our writing again, in a link, in a Tweet, just in case life has taken over too much for the Google Reader (as it often does for me). Nothing quite beats having someone send you their stuff or getting their specific comments on yours.
