The Quandary of Short-Story Publishing
The word of short stories is an odd one. Literary magazines are not exactly “en vogue” these days. Despite being bastions of art and culture, these publications are essentially fighting to justify their continued existence, never mind selling for prices high enough to pay their contributors.
When you’re a writer and you have a short story to publish, you dive into a pool of magazines and websites seeking contributors—but only a fraction of them are willing to pay, and most are expecting you to pay them. If there are any other industries where the worker is expected to pay their client—and with no guarantee that the client will even take the work, at that—I’m not aware of them. It’s a baffling concept. Still, as a writer with a short story to publish, you sort through the heap, identifying contests and publications that pay and prioritizing them based on the reading fee. You hope that you’re one of the lucky few whose story hits the right desk and the right moment, and you get paid something for your work.
That’s the process I’m going through now with my short story, Shades of Green, which was considered for a The Master’s Review contest last year. I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to find a home for it, but the process has me thinking. How long can an industry last when it charges its workers more than it pays them?
Free-Write:
Free-writes are short scenes that come out of a short stint of writing time on a program called FlowState, which deletes everything I’ve written if I stop writing. I go into them blind, can’t stop to think while I write, and don’t edit them before they’re posted here beyond correcting any typos or punctuation. Basically: I don’t know what this is about, either!
A character study is when a writer choses a character from a larger project and throws them into a situation to explore how they react. It’s an exercise to help an author explore the character and develop them on a deeper level. Here I chose a character I came up with many years ago and imagined he was awake at 3:00 am and couldn’t sleep. It got away from me a bit, but certainly gave me some ideas for the broader story and world as it’s changed over the years. I’m not sure if this is a concept I’ll ever truly go back to from a publishing standpoint, but it’s probably a given at this point that it’s going to live rent-free in my head for the rest of my life.
15-Minute Free-Write: Character Study: Derreck Awake at 3 A.M.
Derreck watched as the glowing green number changed. 3:06. He wondered if it was even worth trying to sleep at this point. He had to be up in three more hours. He could just get up, get some work done on that essay that was due on Thursday. Then he could hit the sack early tomorrow night. It would be the crappiest Tuesday of his life, probably, but he would survive. And laying here staring wide-eyed at the damn clock really wasn’t getting him anywhere.
Derreck rolled over, staring at the ceiling instead. He squeezed his eyes shut. Counted one sheep, two sheep, three sheep, four… was that music? His eyes opened again and he looked towards his phone on the nightstand. But, no, it wasn’t coming from there. He shut his eyes again, this time with purpose, and listened.
It was definitely music. High and tinny, cheerful, like carnival music. Not something his roommate would play, even when he was high out of his mind.
He sat up, tilting his head this way and that. Was it coming from outside?
The floor was cool against his feet. He split a gap between the blinds, peeking out. The street was silent, even for a college town. There was one guy standing at the corner, staring down at his phone. Given the way his bag bulged, Derreck suspected the guy had just gotten kicked out of the late-night coffee shop on the corner after a cram session. Midterms would do that to you. He grimaced at the guy in sympathy.
The lilt of the music still tickled at him, coming from behind him, he thought. Maybe to the left a bit. Which didn’t make any sense at all, the only thing over there was the crappy, too small closet, and Derreck didn’t keep anything in there that would make music, never mind music like that. Still, he crossed the room to check. MAybe this was his roommate’s idea of a shitty prank. If he found some crappy little music box under his boxers, he was going to go across the hall and strangle the guy.
He opened the narrow door, and the music got louder. Derreck frowned. It still sounded distant, somehow. Like when he found the source of it, it would be beyond the room, and too loud to be coming from anything as small as a music box. It was brassier, more electric, like a proper carnival. Derreck shoved his shirts aside, ignoring the screech of hangers on the metal pole. There was a light along the edges of the back wall. Yellow light, electric light. Except every other time Derreck had opened his closet since moving into this crappy apartment in the fall, it was been dark and solid, and it shared a wall with the bathroom so he could always tell when his roommate was stoned because the guy would go to the bathroom over and over again at 3 am. Never had there been music back here. Never had their been light.
Tentatively, Derreck reached out and pushed on the wall. It bounced back a little, like a door opening against some sort of blockage. He reached out with both hands, pushing harder, and music and light spilled over him at the door opened.
There on the other side of his closet was a clearing filled with people and colorful stalls. A waft of rich scents hit him hard, making his mouth water. A merry-go-round sang brightly off to his right, and children rode ponies around a coral at the end of the row of stalls nearest him. Derreck gaped at the spectacle as a juggler tossed a torch high into the air in the center of the chaos.
Maybe he’d managed to fall asleep after all.
A woman turned from the nearest stall, counting out some coins. She looked up and locked eyes with him. The cloak she wore covered her hair and hid most of her face in shadow, but her eyes were such a vibrant green they seemed to glow in the darkness. For a moment, they seemed familiar, tickling memories from a long time ago, memories he’d tucked away in a box in his mother’s attic and not looked at in years.
“Aleshia?” he asked.
The woman hesitated a moment, then shook her head, the cloak falling lower over her face so she was obscured entirely. She waved a hand, and a gust of air knocked Derreck back. He stumbled on a few textbooks, nearly turning his ankle before falling back into his bed. He blinked back up at the ceiling for a moment, then sat up and scrambled for the closet door, which was shut. He opened it up, shoved his shirts out of the way, and started feeling along the back wall of the closet. Finding nothing, he stepped back and sat heavily on the bed, staring at the closet. He could still smell the food, savory venison and sweet caramel. But the yellow light was gone, and he couldn’t hear the carnival music. It was silent and dark.
Derreck looked at the clock. The glowing green numbers seemed to mock him, the minute hand ticking over just as he looked up.
3:07.
Book Review
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
The Bell Jar is frequently described as harrowing, intense, and haunting. I'm not sure I would use any of those words to describe it. It's fascinating, certainly, and it does a wonderful job of describing the spiral into madness that Esther Greenwood experiences, but there's a stillness to it. Esther's own detachment from her life and experiences prevents the reader from being too drawn into the madness. It's like encountering a wild animal or interesting bug, and sitting very still while you watch what it's going to do. There's a sense that you're witnessing something unique; or a sense that you're paying attention to something common made uncommon by the fact that we typically ignore it. The feeling drives you through the story, fascinated by the unfolding of each progressive step, feeling a bit like a voyeur or a nature documentarian or a scientist. Compelled to observe, yet somehow detached from the subject of your observation.
This novel is clearly quite personal to Plath, as it's more of a thinly-veiled memoir than a fictional novel. However, I felt in reading it that her continued struggles were evident in the writing of it. There's a sense of apathy that rings of depression, and that distance from a subject that's so inherently intimate feels disjointed. That being said, I think that aspect lends itself to The Bell Jar's success. Dealing with such intense subject matter, a slight sense of distance makes what might otherwise be a truly harrowing read into something manageable.
There are many themes throughout the book that are unfortunately relatable and relevant today. There's a moment where Esther's mother says "I knew my baby wasn't like that... I knew you'd decide to be alright again." That moment really struck me, because there's this idea which still persists today, that when you're struggling with your mental health, you should be able to strong-arm yourself into being alright again. Mind-over-matter. When you tell someone you're depressed they advise you to "look on the brightside" as if depression is a choice, not an illness. No one would tell you to just walk it off if your tibia was sticking out of your leg. They'd tell you not to move and call and ambulance, and everyone would sign your cast and send you flowers and help carry your bag until it healed and the cast came off. The way society handles mental illness is a prevalent theme throughout the novel, and Plath does a wonderful job of criticizing it without outright criticizing it. Similarly, her handling of the way women were treated in the early 20th century, the expectations of them and the subversions of those expectations by women like her, is subtle and masterful. She never criticizes, simply lets the actions of various characters speak for themselves.
Overall, I found The Bell Jar to be an interesting and thought-provoking read. Definitely worth a look for anyone who is interested in feminism or mental health.
