The Short Story Graveyard
If you’re a writer, you know the feeling of the burst of inspiration. It usually comes in the shower, or when you’re falling asleep at night. It’s an idea that you MUST WRITE DOWN. It will be brilliant, it will be spectacular. It will rekindle your love of words, cure your athlete’s foot, and help you to grow thicker, longer, more luxurious hair. The idea is just that powerful.
You finally get the words down. And then…
Game over, man game over. But it might not happen right away. You might read it and say “This is the best thing I’ve ever written” and submit it, but after 54 rejections, you begin to have doubts.
That’s when you mercilessly murder that story and bury it deep where no one will ever find it. Sure instead of killing your darling, you might hack it up and use it for spare parts, but the soul of the piece is gone to wherever bad little stories go.
If I’m being honest, I’ve kept a few braindead short stories on life support far longer than they should have been. Allow me to share the not-so-dearly departed.
In Memoriam:
Artichoke: A refined gentleman is upset at a peer’s boorish behavior and is especially offended when the bloke doesn’t know how to eat an artichoke properly so he murders him in the same way you would peel apart an artichoke. I felt I didn’t go far enough in the first draft, so years later I decided to add gore and cannibalism. It made it worse. Cause of death: Artichoke Heart Attack.
The Lump: A woman forced to work from home goes slowly crazy and finds a lump hiding inside of her house. It follows her around for days and then suddenly one day she beats it up and stabs it to death. In the end, her neighbor asks where her husband has gone off to. Cause of death: Hanging – as in “this premise was hanging by a thread and the whole thing collapsed under its will to be clever”.
Eddie’s Last Job: I think this one might have ended up totally deleted but as I recall a redneck guy has a beer with his friend Eddie who has volunteered to be experimented on by a professor of some sorts and now has something crawling under his skin. I just remember a lot of swear words and two guys talking over beers. Nothing else much happened. Cause of death: Cirrhosis, probably.
So those are the stories inhabiting my short story graveyard and thankfully they have been put to rest, never to be heard from again.
Until they rise again from the dead. Oh crap.