Preemptive Retaliation

I had a short story rejected today. It had already been a bit of a day at work – looming deadlines, underappreciation of tasks, sheer banality of some subjects grinding me down – and at 5pm I opened my emails to see a “Congratulations to our Winners!” email. For a quick, quick moment I had a rush of hope. Are they emailing me because I’m one of the said winners? Of course not, they wouldn’t tell you that way, they would need to inform you, congratulate you, let you know what the next steps are.

Still, I opened the email with a bit of hope. I scanned the titles and the authors, and the stone in my gut drops when I’m not amongst them. But it doesn’t drop as far or as hard as I expect it to.

I don’t like submitting stories. I don’t think anyone does. There’s a road I follow, a path that’s only predictable because I’ve walked it already so many times. At some point my algorithm shifts to writing and my feeds are full of writing competitions, magazine requests, publishers looking for the next big thing etc. I tap on them because that’s exactly what I want my algorithm to show me, and I get excited. I think up new stories, I think of repurposing old stories . A chunk of these sites have anthologies of previous winners to buy and get a sense of their writing, which I inevitably do because hey, you gotta support them. And so I read these stories and I think of my own stories and how they would fit snugly together in those pages.

But then I have to write the fucking thing. You know, it’s an old joke but it still stands – writing is one of my favourite things to do in the whole world but man, does it really fucking suck sometimes.

I submitted a story to a competition just this week actually. I don’t think I’ll win. It was a story I wrote last year that came in at 2600 words, and I hacked it down to 1990 for the competition guidelines. I think I did a good job, good enough to submit, but I’m worried that in the name of streamlining I hacked off a part of its soul. Reworking an old story wasn’t my original intention, but it’s what I settled on. My original intention was to write a story about a time-loop. I’ve always loved a good time loop story, and I thought of an interesting twist on one that I’ve wanted to explore for a while. So I mulled it over, and have been for weeks, and came up with a rough plan of how it would work out, and even surprised myself with an unexpected ending. I was really excited for it.

But then I sat down to write it and I couldn’t get past the first damn paragraph. No, that’s a lie, I got three paragraphs in and then went back to the first one because it didn’t fit anymore. It wasn’t good enough. After all these years of writing I suddenly turned fifteen again, editing my story before I had even started it.

I think I just got too in my head about it all. Instead of just having a story to write, I was trying to write a story for something, for that competition. I wasn’t being true to myself, my style, and instead was trying to elevate the writing. I was trying to write what I thought they would want to award a prize to. Not at what they wanted to read, or even what I thought was good, but what I thought is prize worthy. Literary. Thoughtful. Deep. Layered.

And I hated it, and I struggled with it, so I abandoned it and gutted one that I do like.

And yes yes yes, I know the answer to this is to write the story now, when there’s no expectation on me. That’s the logical answer, but I don’t want logic right now. I want to feel a bit unsatisfied and defeated, I want to dwell for a moment on my anxiety prevailing again, and I want to think on the idea that I do this on purpose, that I kneecap my writing on purpose because what’s scarier than losing, but winning? What if I won a competition, and this whole charade of writing comes to light, and I have to actually do something about it?