This year I have been on a short-story-writing kick. This is new for me, since I spent the majority of my life trying to write novels. Actually, I spent the majority of my 20's trying to write ONE novel. Every November for NaNoWriMo (if you don't know what NaNoWriMo is, find out here), I would start over and rewrite this ONE novel. After writing and rewriting 150-single-spaced pages of this novel, I frustratingly put it aside and wrote a totally different novel (that I love and is currently being tweaked). The thing about this ONE novel is that.. well, it's not good. And I spent a long time trying to make it GOOD. There's a lot of things I like about this novel, there are a lot of cool things in the novel, but as a whole, it just won't come together and make me have that overall yummy feeling of completedness.
There are a few key reasons I've pinpointed for this novel just not coming together:
Non-authoritative narrator with limited scope. My novel is written in first-person, by an unreliable, possibly insane narrator. While many successful authors have pulled this off, I am not one of them.
Multiple points-of-view. My novel contains chapters with other characters' point of view, at random, also first-person.
No common thread. My novel is an amalgamation of at least five people's separate stories that just never come together in any meaningful way, no matter how hard I try.
Disjointed plot. The main plot is dragged down by the other characters' stories to the point where it stands still for the majority of the novel, only to climax in a completely strange, unrelated way.
While these features in themselves don't necessarily make for a bad novel, they are the particular weak points of my ONE novel.
These reasons are also, however, the makings of some great short stories. I have here at my fingertips 150-pages of material for short stories. All the disjointedness, all the separate points of view, and non-interlocking character stories, suddenly become a huge advantage.
So in the midst of my short-story-writing kick, I'm taking apart my Frankenstein monster-novel, taking all the bits and pieces that I desperately tried for years to sew together to form a spectacular human being and bring him to life, and instead I am tearing the pieces apart, cleaning them up, and admiring them for the beautiful hunks of flesh that they are.
Here is an excerpt of my new short-story “Boy's Rock” that I ripped from the body of my monster-novel. It was the first chapter memory of my unreliable-insane-first-person narrator. And I kind of like it better this way. Mostly I'm happy that my 20's were not spent in vain.
(*Note: I'm currently submitting “Boy's Rock” to literary magazines, so, depending on their guidelines, the following excerpt may be omitted later. The excerpt is short because the story is short. About 2,000 words.)
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Boy's Rock (EXCERPT)
by Veronica McDonald
Boy stands on the large rock, a short ways offshore in the sparkling waters of the quiet lake. He's young, no more than four years old, with bright eyes and a contagious laugh that bounces off the still water. His wet yellow hair touches his eyelashes, glistening in the midsummer sun as he looks down at me. Boy's swim trunks are baby-blue, held up with a white string tied into a tight bow that he picks at with his fingers. His suntanned belly juts out over the elastic blue band. He's thin, with stringy brown arms that wave at me as he laughs, but he has that little cantaloupe belly sticking over his shorts with a white bellybutton that sticks out even farther. I ask him his name. A mosquito buzzes by my ear as he tells me. I smack at it and miss, and I miss the name. I don't ask him again because it doesn't matter, not really. The sun is hot on my skin, the air thick and moist, and the shallow water is a sweet escape from the heat...
END OF EXCERPT