PROBLEM CHILDREN

by Rob Lopresti

I have a black plastic notebook on my desk with nine short stories in it. Each of these stories is a complete draft. Some have been revisited many times; one was first jotted down last week. All of them need more revision before they go out in the mail.

I am fairly confident that three of them will get published. Four others will probably never see the light of day, unless I stumble over an anthology that is looking for something with their particular charms. The other two I am not sure about, largely because they are too new.

I have worked just as hard on each of the stories. But some of the plots are not as marketable – I won’t say they aren’t as good — as the others.

So the obvious question arises: why bother to keep working on the ones I don’t think will sell?

All my children

Parents are supposed to love all their kiddos equally, and some even achieve that. Writers don’t have that obligation and they have been known to play favorites. Oh sure, it’s easy to brag about the story that reached the magazine cover or won an award, but don’t be surprised if the author has a secret place in his heart for the special one, the ugly little loser, the story that nobody loved but him.

Stanley Ellin, one of the greatest authors of mystery short stories, said that writers judge their work not on how objectively good it is (if that phrase means anything), but on how close it came to being what they intended to write. So I keep struggling with some stories in which no one but me may see any merit.

But there is another reason as well. This is one of those things I believe but can’t prove. You need to write the bad stuff to get to the good stuff. Putting it another way, if you are afraid to write bad, you will never write great, And you learn from everything you write, even – maybe especially the weaklings that never leave the nest.

Try to make ’em fly?

But should you send these weak stories out and try to get them published? Shouldn’t you only send your best stuff to the editors?

I know there are people who say exactly that. I disagree. My theory is that there is a reason the magazines print up rejection slips by the gross. My job is to send them what I write; their job is to accept it or send it home.

That doesn’t mean I will send an essay on race relations to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, or an erotic poem to Highlights For Children. You choose the appropriate market. But I never say, “this story isn’t appropriate for this market because it isn’t good enough.”

And as Ellin indicated, I’m not the best judge of my stories. I have had editors reject stuff I thought was great and buy things I thought were much lesser efforts. So I try not to make the decisions for them.

Because that, as the saying goes, is why they make the big bucks.