Way back in the murky mists of the year 2000 I wrote a story called "Empty Moon" for a fiction writing class at UNH. I believe it was one of the first fiction classes I'd ever taken, and I remember feeling like the one big, fat flounder in the middle of a bowl of cherries. In short: horribly out of place. I was in a class bring taught by a professional writer (Professor Charlotte Bacon had published a novel and a book of short stories by that point), surrounded by writers, at least some of whom were sure to be future professional writers, and all of whom were sure to be more suited to a fiction writing class than me.
As it turns out, my fish out of water feeling was short-lived, and soon I was a big, fat flounder swimming in the ocean amongst the other fishes. I had taken prose writing, and essay writing, and had submitted some very well-written papers for other classes. The big difference here was that I got to make things up. I may not have been as well-read as my classmates. I may not have had the same background as my classmates (having spent the first couple years of my college career pursuing an engineering degree). What I discovered, though, was that I could write as well as any of them.
Fiction writing at UNH was taught from the "literary" perspective, meaning character-driven, non-genre fiction. We weren't to write science fiction. We weren't to write mysteries. We weren't to write horror stories featuring vampires. When I'm feeling even marginally confident of something, telling me I can't do something just makes me want to do it more. I was feeling somewhat confident about writing, so I felt confident I could write a genre story as a character-driven piece of "literary" fiction.
Which brings us to "Empty Moon". I decided that if I treated the vampire as just another character, I could write a story about two people meeting, falling in love, and then discovering the secret one of them was hiding. The word "vampire" never even needed to appear in the story (though it does once). I thought it could work, and I was determined not to listen to advice from my professor that it was better to write the stories as two humans, and plunged on ahead. Believe it or not, at one time, I was kind of cocky.
The other reason I chose to write about a vampire was that the first image that popped into my head, that sparked the story to life, was that of a person crying over a broken vase, and the idea that everything breaks eventually. No matter how careful we are with things, no matter how much we protect them, something will happen. The vase shatters. The car breaks down. The loved one dies. Who better to put voice to that idea than someone who has lived a long long time, and seen a lot of loss. An immortal. A vampire! Who can walk around in the daytime. Yeah, I beat Stephanie Meyer to that bit of...stupidity.
The actual execution of this story was a bit clunky. I resist the urge to cringe upon re-reading (and retyping, since I can't find a digital copy of it), because I know it was one of my early stories, and is a raw first draft. There are words and phrases that I can see immediately should have been axed, and I'm already reconstructing the entire story in my head. The reveal is...well, the reveal kind of craps on my whole initial concept. A family of (not quite) vampires?
What is interesting is that I revised this for my final portfolio for that class. I have the revised story, in which I removed the vampiric element, and changed the story a bit to make it more realistic, and, in my extremely humble opinion, ruined it. Maybe I'll rework that into something completely different.
So, while I don't think "Empty Moon" is anything great, I certainly think it's better than what it turned into. As such, I have decided that revising and rewriting "Empty Moon" will be my next project. I will post the results of said project here. First, though, I will post the original, raw, unedited first draft of "Empty Moon" in 3 parts.
Please feel free to comment on any or all of the parts.
Showing posts with label back story. Show all posts
Showing posts with label back story. Show all posts
2014-06-16
2014-05-27
The Story Behind "Folded"
So, I feel weird about doing this, but I've revised Folded, and replaced the post with the updated copy. The changes this time are minor, though overall, they're pretty big.
Some people reading this blog have probably read "Folded" before, as I showed it off to family and friends, and posted an earlier draft of it online (more on that later). Either way, here's a quick* history of the story, in case you don't know it:
I was in my fifth year at UNH, finishing up my degrees, taking a fiction writing class. Our first short story was due at the beginning of September. I actually didn't procrastinate. I had an idea of what I wanted to write, and I knew that once I started, it would flow out. So, two days before it was due (I know, that doesn't sound like much, but for me, it's a lot) on the morning of September 11th, I sat down to write. I will always remember that date, as it was 2001. Not long after I started working, my best friend sent me an instant message, I turned the TV on, and didn't get any more work done for the rest of the day.
In our class later that day, Professor Denman acknowledged the gravity of the day and extended the due date until the beginning of October. She could have just pushed it back a week, but I think she understood - perhaps instinctively - that the next couple of weeks would be tumultuous. Looking back, I do wonder if she thought some of us might like to write about it, as a way of dealing with such an unimaginable event. I don't think anyone did. I think we all wrote about something as far away from it as possible. Writing can be a great tool for coping, but sometimes, when the wounds are too fresh, it is also a great tool for escaping.
I put the paper off, again, picking up where I'd left off, and finishing it the night before it was due. I handed it in, and it was read by the rest of the workshop a few weeks later, to mostly positive commentary. Some people were put off by the 2nd-person narrator, and most wanted more details of the relationship. Looking at my notes from that class, there seemed to be a definite split by gender on the line "She always wanted something more from you." The guys liked it (one noted: "That's the way I usually feel in relationships."), while the women were confused or put off, mostly, I think because there was not enough detail about the relationship.
Looking back at the original draft of the story, it didn't change much on first revision. One major change was the removal of a large chunk near the beginning that was basically me ruminating on my time working at McDonald's. I like some of the details I used, but for a short story, it was just too off-topic. All of the dialog from that scene was cut, as I decided to keep actual dialog as part of the narrative until the very end. I tweaked just about everything on that first revision, then again in a second revision that would be submitted as part of my final portfolio.
At the very end of the semester, I picked up my portfolio from outside the professor's office. In her comments on the story, she commended me for my revisions, and suggested I submit it to Aegis, UNH's literary journal. So I did, and then I forgot about it. I'd submitted to Aegis a couple of years before, and received the submission back in my mail box with a short rejection letter. More of a notice, really. I never saw "Folded" in my mailbox, but I didn't think that was odd. A couple of months into the Spring semester, a classmate asked if I'd seen the latest issue. I hadn't, so she fetched me a copy. There, in the back, was "Folded, by Matt Pedone". I'd been published! In a campus literary journal. I was still excited. They only published two short stories a year, so it was a little victory to be chosen.
Since then, I've gone back to the story a couple of times, touching up language here and there. recording it as the vocals to a bunch of techno songs I wrote in GarageBand. Lately, as I've tried to get back to writing, I decided to do another major overhaul, analyzing every line of every paragraph, tightening up what I could, expanding where needed. What I think works best about the original is the compactness of the writing, the flow. It's not long, sweeping descriptions, pages of narration of a single event. Scenes are laid out in a couple of sentences.
For example, I wanted to show the apartment better, but I couldn't just have him walk around looking at stuff. I couldn't really even have him lounging around different parts of the apartment, as that would break up the flow too much. I think my edits maintain that flow, while giving a better picture of the story. Hopefully my edits worked. I wanted to punch up the opening a little, a couple of paragraphs that I don't think I'd touched since 2011. I wanted to make the castle towards the end a little more real. Again, I hope I've done that, and not just ruined one of my better stories. Time will tell, I suppose.
To read an earlier version of this Folded, click here.
*Believe it or not, this was quick for me. I'll try** to be better in the future.
**But, I probably won't be.
Some people reading this blog have probably read "Folded" before, as I showed it off to family and friends, and posted an earlier draft of it online (more on that later). Either way, here's a quick* history of the story, in case you don't know it:
I was in my fifth year at UNH, finishing up my degrees, taking a fiction writing class. Our first short story was due at the beginning of September. I actually didn't procrastinate. I had an idea of what I wanted to write, and I knew that once I started, it would flow out. So, two days before it was due (I know, that doesn't sound like much, but for me, it's a lot) on the morning of September 11th, I sat down to write. I will always remember that date, as it was 2001. Not long after I started working, my best friend sent me an instant message, I turned the TV on, and didn't get any more work done for the rest of the day.
In our class later that day, Professor Denman acknowledged the gravity of the day and extended the due date until the beginning of October. She could have just pushed it back a week, but I think she understood - perhaps instinctively - that the next couple of weeks would be tumultuous. Looking back, I do wonder if she thought some of us might like to write about it, as a way of dealing with such an unimaginable event. I don't think anyone did. I think we all wrote about something as far away from it as possible. Writing can be a great tool for coping, but sometimes, when the wounds are too fresh, it is also a great tool for escaping.
I put the paper off, again, picking up where I'd left off, and finishing it the night before it was due. I handed it in, and it was read by the rest of the workshop a few weeks later, to mostly positive commentary. Some people were put off by the 2nd-person narrator, and most wanted more details of the relationship. Looking at my notes from that class, there seemed to be a definite split by gender on the line "She always wanted something more from you." The guys liked it (one noted: "That's the way I usually feel in relationships."), while the women were confused or put off, mostly, I think because there was not enough detail about the relationship.
Looking back at the original draft of the story, it didn't change much on first revision. One major change was the removal of a large chunk near the beginning that was basically me ruminating on my time working at McDonald's. I like some of the details I used, but for a short story, it was just too off-topic. All of the dialog from that scene was cut, as I decided to keep actual dialog as part of the narrative until the very end. I tweaked just about everything on that first revision, then again in a second revision that would be submitted as part of my final portfolio.
At the very end of the semester, I picked up my portfolio from outside the professor's office. In her comments on the story, she commended me for my revisions, and suggested I submit it to Aegis, UNH's literary journal. So I did, and then I forgot about it. I'd submitted to Aegis a couple of years before, and received the submission back in my mail box with a short rejection letter. More of a notice, really. I never saw "Folded" in my mailbox, but I didn't think that was odd. A couple of months into the Spring semester, a classmate asked if I'd seen the latest issue. I hadn't, so she fetched me a copy. There, in the back, was "Folded, by Matt Pedone". I'd been published! In a campus literary journal. I was still excited. They only published two short stories a year, so it was a little victory to be chosen.
Since then, I've gone back to the story a couple of times, touching up language here and there. recording it as the vocals to a bunch of techno songs I wrote in GarageBand. Lately, as I've tried to get back to writing, I decided to do another major overhaul, analyzing every line of every paragraph, tightening up what I could, expanding where needed. What I think works best about the original is the compactness of the writing, the flow. It's not long, sweeping descriptions, pages of narration of a single event. Scenes are laid out in a couple of sentences.
For example, I wanted to show the apartment better, but I couldn't just have him walk around looking at stuff. I couldn't really even have him lounging around different parts of the apartment, as that would break up the flow too much. I think my edits maintain that flow, while giving a better picture of the story. Hopefully my edits worked. I wanted to punch up the opening a little, a couple of paragraphs that I don't think I'd touched since 2011. I wanted to make the castle towards the end a little more real. Again, I hope I've done that, and not just ruined one of my better stories. Time will tell, I suppose.
To read an earlier version of this Folded, click here.
*Believe it or not, this was quick for me. I'll try** to be better in the future.
**But, I probably won't be.
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