I was congratulated by our instructor when I arrived for the third session of the fall writing class offered by our library. I’d taken first place in the library’s annual short story contest in the Adult Writer category. As I hadn’t received official notification I was pleasantly surprised and verified my success on the library website.
I entered the contest last year but didn’t make the top three. My story ideas are generally novel length — so the limitation of 1,500 words is difficult for me. Last year I condensed an existing Christmas story that required editing out what I considered some of the fun aspects of the tale about the North Pole ponies.
This year I created a story from scratch. In doing so I considered what I most appreciated in a short story and decided it was a twist at the end. O. Henry and Shirley Jackson came to mind. Then I thought about how this is done. Basically the characters, situation, and action of the story set up certain expectations for the reader. But interpreted differently the story provides a fair but surprising end that the reader didn’t see coming.
So how do I apply this to my story? As it happened, I was reading a novel about a story set-up I have in mind about a stand-in for a princess who takes the royal’s place in dangerous situations. The stand-in will need to be trained to convincingly imitate the princess and I was reading the novel to see how the author addressed this. Romance is a central aspect of the novel and it occurred to me that some of the descriptions of the characters’ physical symptoms of attraction could also apply to other emotions.
As these things go — an idea comes along, the lightbulb turns on, and the writer tries to capture the spark of inspiration. I created a protagonist that I placed in a setting that would send the reader down one path. I took inspiration from the romance genre for descriptive phrases, cognitive that they must also relate to the protagonist’s actual emotions. I imagined a fictional world that was similar to a couple of popular historical series on cable television. And I then attempted to capture the moment when the protagonist makes a decision that changes the whole meaning of the scene I’d prepared for the reader.
I spent a month writing and rewriting the story. As I tend to think in novel length, I had to find a means of succinctly transmitting information that would explain the ending without giving it away. So there was a lot of editing out, adding a bit back in, selecting the exact word instead of several, and so forth. After much massaging of the story I sent it off to my First Readers who approved of it (one pointed out a line of dialogue that also bothered me that I amended). There was nothing more left to do but submit my story days before the deadline.
The judges apparently agreed with my First Readers. The top stories in each category and the winning stories are available at the Wilsonville Library website. Note: the young writers’ stories are not to be skipped.
Mary S. Potter 