A Well-Received Story
I once wrote a short story that was very well received. All it was was an examination of the minutia of a man’s life. The opening page contained a paragraph dedicated to the rituals that my narrator went through every morning with his sock drawer, how he organized and folded his socks in a certain way. He was very particular about his sock drawer, and he had a lot to say about it.
As the story went on, the narrator underwent growth that was not much different from the kind of growth that you and I go through everyday; he learned some baseball scores, and that was it. I treated him very sympathetically. He may as well have been a real person, he seemed so real and was presented with such a lack of bias.
I wasn’t sure if my story was inane enough, so I took it to a group of my peers. There were a few sentences in there that they couldn’t glean the meaning of from less than a second’s worth of reading, and they advised me to remove them. Likewise they advised I delete the use of the word “fuck” in the narration, as to not risk offending anybody. After I had followed both of these pieces of advice, they all agreed that the story was ripe for publication.
The editor I met with was a big, hairy man who worked in a basement of a magazine. When I hesitated to sit in the chair he offered me because it was covered with spilt Mountain Dew, he laughed about how messy his office was and told me he was pretty much one step above a guy working in a mail room. That wasn’t true, but he wanted me to feel sympathy towards him, which I did. Then he explained to me that one of his readers thought my story was the tops. He hadn’t read it, though, and so he asked me what it was about, and I told him it was the story of a man who goes through a day at work. The man is a gym teacher. He has a wife who is cold and distant at the start of the story and is cold and distant at the end of the story. The kids he teaches don’t give a darn about gym class, and he does nothing to make them start giving a darn. When the story starts out the man is waking up, and when it ends he is going to sleep.
“Just like real life?” the editor asked.
“Exactly like real life,” I told him.
He smiled and said that that was all well and good, but that he wanted characters and scenes that were bigger than life, but only by a little bit. If my character were dealing with the pains of being gay, for example…
“I’m not gay,” I told him.
“That’s a shame,” he said. “Then I could ‘a opened up some space.”
He ran down a list of things I could have changed in the story to give it cultural currency. He suggested that I make it so one of the kids the gym teacher taught was getting bullied for being black. I said no, the teacher wouldn’t notice or care. Then he suggested that one of the kids the gym teacher taught was getting bullied for being gay. I said no, the teacher still wouldn’t care. Then he was out of ideas, and very sorry but he didn’t have enough space to run a story as long as mine.
“What if I cut it down?” I asked.
“Maybe,” he said, raising his eyebrows with hope. “Send in whatever you get.”
I went home and deleted several parts of the story. The gym teacher now lived alone, instead of with a wife, so as to cut out all descriptions of their marriage. Then I cut out some of the gym teacher’s musings—he wasn’t the type to speechify, anyway. I sent the shorter version to the editor, and was told that it was an improvement, but that it was still too long. I agreed. I cut out the fact that the narrator was a gym teacher. I made him unemployed. Instead of going to work, he just walked around his block. Some of the characters who used to appear at the school now appeared outside.
The editor told me that this draft was even better than the last one, but that it still wasn’t short enough, and so I made some more edits. I cut out the part where the man came home from his walk. I cut out the part where he went on a walk. I cut out the part where ate breakfast before leaving the house.
“This is great!” said the editor. “But it’s got too much description. Pare it down a little, then I’ll run it right away.”
I cut out the explanation of the man’s limp. I cut out my description of how the man looked. I cut out how the man thought of himself. I cut out all references to the man’s hopes and dreams. This was all that was left of my story:
“The horrible alarm let loose a tinny pulse, and Charley awoke from his six hours of sleep. He was groggy, but had to get up and face the day. He had to go to his sock drawer, unfold and refold all of his socks, and then refile them in descending order according to size. Identical-sized socks were ordered according to age, with the newer ones standing upfront. Charley was very particular about his sock drawer.”
The editor loved the story. He said it was the most realistic thing he had ever read. He liked it so much it was the first thing he included in his anthology. The cover called it a bold new take on story telling, and it was reprinted in four other, more-respected anthologies and magazines.
My peers all started emulating my style, asking me for advice on how they could make their writing more like mine. I told them that they had to feel the story inside them. They had to feel its realness, close their eyes, and let that realness flow from their brains into the tips of their typing fingers. I repeated the advice at book signings, and added my opinion that traditional fiction was dead in the digital age. I once told a crowd of fifty people that in a world where the average man has access to trillions of trillions of bits of information, it’s unfair to expect him to spend more than ten seconds absorbing a single piece. I wrote such short stories because I was humble, I said. I knew my place.
By this time I had written several other micro-stories, as I had termed them. One was about a man who was fascinated by perspiring cheese. My personal favorite was about a little boy who gets his foot caught in a bicycle spoke. All it consisted of was a description of how he thought the spoke was soft, clean chrome but it turned out to be low-grade steel wrapped in shiny mylar. Another story was about a woman who was inserting a tampon into herself. That one was thought particularly groundbreaking.
Then there came the inevitable backlash. Someone on the internet posted a picture of me reading Balzac, suggesting that I didn’t take my own credo seriously. I tried explaining that I wasn’t Balzac and that Balzac had more important things to say than I did, but no one listened to me. Other people pointed out the fact that the digital age was kind of bullshit, because about half of the world’s population has never even used a telephone, let alone gotten onto Wikipedia. More argued that anybody could write a micro-story, that it took no talent, dedication, or skill. If everyone could do something, then it’s certainly nothing special.
The first and only issue of Micro-Story Monthly withdrew their dedication to me. The issue sold very poorly, even so far as literary magazines are concerned. Then I knew I was washed up.
The logical step forward from the tragic detour of micro-stories, my critics argued, was to retreat to epic poetry. Right away, all of the nation’s major literary anthologies began printing single works, sometimes spread over several issues. Most of these poems dealt with ordinary events that took place in the ordinary lives of ordinary people. One very talented young man wrote a 3,700 page free verse poem about a car ride to the grocery store. It was entirely in Pig Latin and the middle 2,000 pages were a collection of random letters, to signify that the man was taking a nap.
I recovered well from my fall from grace. My girlfriend said she still loved me, and I hadn’t been popular long enough to convince myself that my new friends had been made in earnest. I spent the next two and a half years turning my initial story—the one about the gym teacher—into an epic poem. I sent it to a publisher, and their reader liked it enough to show it to an editor. He agreed that it was great, but he was afraid that my name had too much baggage still attached to it from that whole micro-fiction debacle.
“Tell you what,” he said, leaning towards me. “You wouldn’t happen to be gay, would you?”
“No, sorry.”
“Damn. Then I could a’ worked you in. Have you ever been the victim of racial prejudice?”
“Not really. One time a woman called me a beaner, but she had bad vision.”
“Damn,” he said, sitting back in his chair and brining his eyes up to the top of his head, to think.
“I tell you what,” he said. “How about you try and make this longer…”
