The past few days have been a trip back in time inside my own head. While searching the fiction submission database The Grinder (as distinct from Grinder), I happened upon a themed anthology that made me think of a story I had first written nearly 14 years earlier. Let’s call it – with apologies to Ernest Hemingway and his estate – ‘The Old Man and the Sea’.
I dragged it out of the TRUNK folder and read it over. Like much of my work from that period, the central idea was a good one, but I’d gone at the story like a bull at a gate, as my grandmother used to say, and made an absolute hash of it.
My main problem in those days was that I still considered Stephen King a literary messiah and believed I should write as he did. So, I put two characters in a scenario and then let them do what they would, which was one of King’s favourite methods (and admittedly resulted in quality novels like Misery, Gerald’s Game and Delores Claiborne). In 2003, though, I was no Stephen King, and what emerged was an overwritten 6,000-word story that didn’t know if it was a character study or a speculative fiction piece.
While ‘theme’ in the context of literary criticism can sometimes seem excessively open to interpretation, as a writer I’ve come to learn it often erects the piles beneath the jetty on which the reader will eventually walk. In the original version of ‘The Old Man and the Sea’, I set up a sort of Odd Couple situation that existed for no other reason than to arrive at the high concept, which formed an ending to the story. The planks of the jetty, subsequently, fell into the water and drifted away.
Reading over the story with an additional decade and a half of experience, however, I saw it could easily be imbued with an environmentalist theme – in fact, it was almost as though my subconscious mind had been trying to suggest it, but my impetuous 26-year-old self was too focused on getting to that climax. Once I applied that theme to the storyline, everything began to fall into place. Irrelevant scenes got the axe and new motivations and dialogue popped up like dandelions after rain.
It still needs another draft or two, and whether it is accepted in the anthology remains to be seen, but whatever the outcome, I have used theme to make a directionless, muddled mess into a coherent story that will at least have a chance at publication.
In recent months, I did something similar to a newly-written story of mine, which in its first iteration was called ‘Crows’. In its original conception, I imagined it as a downbeat ‘peculiar little town’ story, but when it was done I could see it wasn’t working – it ended too abruptly and left the reader empty-handed. So, I read it over and asked myself the question at the root of all thematic thinking: “What’s this story really about?”
It was almost like incanting a magical spell. Over the next few days it grew from 2000 to 4000 words and has, at this writing, been shortlisted by two hard-to-crack speculative fiction markets.
So, if you have a story that’s not working or is being rejected over and over, don’t be afraid to go back to the start and ask yourself what it’s really about.