Tobias Wolff wrote, “I write many, many drafts. That is why I rewrite, to try find ways of getting closer and closer to my characters”. It occurs to me that the only way to really succeed as a writer is to fall in love with you characters—to genuinely care about them as people. This love, I hope will give me the courage to write draft after draft of text (this discipline is the one thing more than anything that has eluded me as a writer up until this point).
As I was writing Mogi, I thought I knew my character well. I wrote and wrote, and I could see the main character Rath perfectly in my head. In fact, there was someone I had worked with during my university days at a coffee shop that was the perfect image of Rath. In my mind, I saw someone humble, but full of life. He was hulking, with wide shoulders, but also mellow with a light touch. The problem was that whenever I got into rough patches, I did what most writers do—I substituted my own voice for that of Rath (August 16, 2011).
I tried to think consciously of how Rath’s voice was different than my own, but it also occurred to me that as we write, we take on some of the aspects of our characters.
August 18, 2011. I thought I would start to read David Michael Kaplan’s “Doe Season” as a way of thinking through my own story “Mogi”. In a sense the two stories are surprisingly similar. They are both about killing, masculinity (though Hunters in the Snow is much more complex than my story) and they both deal with pleasing a father. The main character, Andy or Andrea is a daughter on hunt with her father and his friends. She is only eight years old and she is trying to figure out ways to please her father.
On August 17: I didn’t give this story any more than about an hour and 30 minutes of my time. Today will much different. Today I will use the logic of story breaks to help focus in on parts that need more work. What I want to do more than anything is find the lasting images in “Doe Season” that will stick with a reader. As I look through the story though I realize how much can be done with just simple images.
It’s August 18, and I’m still bogged down in “Mogi.” I’ve now finished Kaplan’s “Does Season”—the copy of it that I gutted from the America’s best short story collection. At the end of the story Andy becomes Andrea—she discovers that she wants nothing to do with the masculine world and its brutal rituals. The story is pregnant with deeper meanings, but for me there is only one universal truth to this story—stories are always more interesting if the character changes at the end. In terms of the details of the story—it proves the age-old adage that if the details are sparse and relevant then they are well-used. Much of the description is very simple.
It’s now August 20. Yesterday was a dud of a day because the power went out at my mom’s house. Nevertheless, it looks like I’m getting close to a draft of the story that I can send out to literary journals. All in all, the story took a long time to get out of my system—four years. But over those four years, I never really focused on the story the way I could have.
August 22. And now the boring stuff: mostly proof-reading, but I am also looking for things in the story that would suggest that it needs a new draft with new scenes to bring it to life. More than anything, I’m telling myself to trust in my writing process. A writer is only as good as the process he or she has. One page at a time. How many pages today? Two pages of proof-reading? That is enough for today. No good short story was ever built without patience.
August 25. I’m starting to realize that I will only be about 85 percent done with this story by the time I send it out. Short stories are like systems. Creating a basic system is easy enough, but improvement beyond that comes in small increments. In any event, it will be well-edited.
August 31: Submitted to 4 literary journals. I am done for the time being. Time to focus on something else. Maybe I will become an accountant instead of a short story writer.
Posted on August 31, 2011
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