Fear Not if Your Novel is Really a Short Story

Fear Not if Your Novel is Really a Short Story

by D.Z. Stone

It took multiple novel drafts written in various writing groups over twenty-five years for me to finally realize that what I’d been working on all this time was a short story. 

I discovered this all quite accidentally, after a seemingly innocuous Facebook exchange. I made a “good luck” comment on a post about the new short story anthology that writer/editor Mark Wish was launching with his wife, Random House design director Elizabeth Coffey, and Mark asked if I had anything to submit. I remember it was a Friday because I said I would be submitting something that Monday—and that I didn’t have an actual short story ready. I spent the next seventy-two hours going through my novel drafts and pulling out my favorite parts, which would become what Mark would later call a “killer” short story. And amazingly, at age sixty-seven, after trying to write fiction since 1994, my debut short story “Spies” was published in the inaugural edition of the highly acclaimed anthology COOLEST AMERICAN STORIES 2022. 

To say I was surprised would be an understatement, especially since of the thirteen writers featured in COOLEST 2022, I was the only one who’d never had fiction published. What’s more, “Spies” was among stories by writers as such New York Times bestseller S.A. Cosby, whose many awards include the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, as well as the award-winning novelist Frances Park and Pulitzer Prize finalist Lee Martin, who’s published five novels and two short story collections.

How did my late fortune happen? I think a primary reason is, not long before it happened, I realized that, even though I once needed writing groups for all sorts of reasons, I needed to be on my own to complete a work of fiction—I had to learn to trust my own judgment. To be sure, my telling Mark I’d submit something on that Monday didn’t leave me time to have anyone help me finish “Spies”; my own gut was all I had to rely on.

This is not to disparage writing groups or peer feedback; I don’t think I ever would have tried writing fiction in the first place if, in 1994, my older friend Grace hadn’t urged me to join a new writing workshop she’d heard about.

And, yes, it was true that, whether as a journalist, a copywriter, or a speechwriter, I pretty much wrote for my entire professional life. But I wrote nonfiction; I’d even had two nonfiction books published. I wrote about what other people did or were doing or what other people said or should say, or perhaps why people should invest in mutual funds or tap the equity in their homes.

This was all on assignment, the nonfiction I wrote for money. In my eyes, fiction seemed very unlikely to pay and therefore frivolous. Wouldn’t my time be better served on paid assignments? After all, I had children to send to college.

In the writing group my friend then convinced me to join, I could blame the group for my needing to “waste” time writing fiction. I needed to produce something because my writing group was going to read it and comment, and I didn’t want to look like a blocked idiot. The writing group helped then, insofar as it encouraged me to write fiction; on the other hand, because of it, I became too dependent on the opinion of others. It was too great a feeling when I wrote something and the writing group laughed where they were supposed to laugh and gasped where they were supposed to gasp. But there came a point where I was a slave to this group’s reactions; I lacked confidence in my own judgment.

I first noticed this lack of confidence when a friend told me she was going to write a novel. To do so, she redid an entire room in her grand Victorian home so she could write. The room had bay windows, built-in bookcases, and a chair with down cushions on which she could “think” when she wasn’t sitting at her Amish writing desk. When I saw this room space, I thought, how could I possibly write fiction, since I’d be doing it in a corner of a dining room with kids and their friends always wandering in and out?

It took me years to realize that to create and craft a publishable piece of fiction, you don’t need peer approval or criticism, or for that matter a fancy room where you can feel writerly. What you need is to be honest with yourself. 

I never did finish writing that novel, but I now know I can write a killer short story. And that’s more than okay by me. I love imagining twenty double-spaced pages of twists and turns when I’m not sitting at my computer until little drops of blood appear on my forehead ala the sportswriter Red Smith. I love making stuff up for readers while still being honest with myself. 

 —

In addition to having her short story “Spies” appear in Coolest American Stories 2022, D.Z. Stone is author of No Past Tense: Love and Survival in the Shadow of the Holocaust and co-author of A Fairy Tale Unmasked: The Teacher and the Nazi Slaves, both published by Vallentine Mitchell. She is a graduate of the College of William and Mary and holds a Masters from Columbia University

COOLEST AMERICAN STORIES 2022, including “Spies” by D.Z. Stone

“The tales in Coolest American Stories are surely plot-driven, and yet the characters are what lingered with me the most — not just who they are, but who they want to be and will be. And that’s pretty darn cool: hanging out with folks doing interesting things and wanting to stay with them for days afterward.” –widely published author Liz Prato, in the Washington Independent Review of Books.

In COOLEST AMERICAN STORIES 2022, America’s most talented storytellers share their most courageous, compelling, unputdownable work in a collection made for story lovers. Praised early on by Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk author Ben Fountain and The Weight of Blood author Laura McHugh, this is the inaugural volume of a new annual short story anthology whose guiding philosophy is that a collection of interesting “full meal” short stories could, as one @JustCoolStories Twitter follower put it, “make America cool again.”

BUY THE BOOK HERE

 

 

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing