I wasn’t the most passionate student in high-school, but I always had a mind for English.
I won’t linger on this point for too long because I’ve got to assume that 90% of people who’ve taken the time to create a Substack profile are cut from this very same cloth. It’s the first thing they were good at. The talent that likely felt like a gift from providence when discovered.
I've got no doubt that for a lot of people, this discovery provided a bit of hope in an otherwise rough life, so I don’t want to crush anyone’s dreams here.
But…
I don’t think it’s anything to boast about. Not for me at least.
When you boil it down, this type of talent is a happy accident at best. It’s a combination of well placed neurons, a subjective canvas to demonstrate it on, judged by a class of people who like to make out that they know more than they do,
And I can prove it.
My peak in classroom academics came by complete accident.
It was in English class and we’d been given an assignment to capture the essence of a story through visual symbolism.
Naturally, my image erred on the dark side. The specifics escape me now, but my picture showed a man with a gun to his head, being forced to shoot himself under duress by a rival gang.
I drew a red stick figure with blue ink melting off him into a puddle on the floor representing the gang affiliations falling away to leave only humanity behind.
Very creative.
Anyway as my finished assignment was sitting on the table of my desk, I proceeded to get into a wrestling match with one of my dorm mates. As you do. Can’t remember who, par for the course. Long story short, I ripped off an entire corner of my recently completed assignment, which was due in an hour.
Rather than start again or come up with a pity story about how this happened, I found some scraps of paper, painted them yellow and glued them to each corner of the image explaining that they not only represented the light of death closing in, but also, the silver lining death can bring to an inhuman existence.
That bullshit explanation earned me an Excellence grade and my work was used as an exemplar any time that assignment was given to future classes.
I’m treating the grade as cynically as it deserves, but in truth, it wasn’t all bullshit.
I learned a lesson that day about not only revision, but also perspective.
I’m going to bring Dostoevsky into this to explain things.
Revision and perspective
Last Christmas I got given a very cool collection of Fyodor Dosdoevsky’s best short stories.
Outside of the illustrations in this book, the most interesting thing about it are the germs of his later more famous works that you can see in there.
The Brother Karamazov exist in fragments of these stories, Crime and Punishment, Notes from the Underground are hinted at, though not fully captured.
I suspect if the great Russian writer stopped with these short stories and never tackled a long form version of them, we would never know his name. Even though the essence of his grand ideas were there in these works.
This shows that great writing does not rely on a strong premise alone, it takes craft and the right medium to express them in a way that allows their depth to resonate. I’m not sure how calculated Dostoevsky was in his small beginnings, holding off on the thousand plus page Brothers K until he was ready to tackle that monolith, but I suspect it was no accident that he waited until the end of his career to attempt that magnum opus.
So where does my ripped assignment come into this?
It’s about recognizing that something isn’t necessarily done just because you’ve captured the vision you went into it with. Sometimes, it takes some persistence, asking the question, could more be added to infuse it with layers, to make it bigger than the sum of it’s parts?
That’s the revision part.
The perspective part comes from looking at your work, taking a circular stroll around it and seeing if you can find a different angle. In my case, what started as a concept requiring execution, became a crisis requiring a solution. I had no choice but to change my perspective or I was going to fail.
And while it may seem like I’m making too much of a narrowly dodged bullet. I carried those benefits through life.
In Dosdoevskey’s case, the perspective came with time.
He was an older man when he wrote his later pieces, much like the subject of my English art project he was forced into a mock execution (which he did not know was mock at the time) between the first works and the later ones. By then he was also a more skilled wordsmith. So his case was an extreme example of revision plus perspective.
This allowed him to take the original ideas, broaden them and apply his new perspective to create works that are unequivocally great.
Knowing this is freeing.
I’ve currently got eighteen original stories on the backburner that I haven’t posted on this Substack page for a host of reason.
Part of it is practical: I’m pitching to literary journals who won’t accept previously published pieces, but the other part is worry.
What if I’m not doing these stories justice? Every time I read at them, I sense there could be more. There’s a broader riff on each premise that I know I can capture, once I just get a little bit more skilled—and I do feel myself getting more skilled with each story I write.
But that’s a trap.
A trap I don’t need to worry about it.
Dostoevsky proved that.
If I put these stories out in their original form; their unripped, first iteration. Nothing is stopping me from coming back and reworking them once I get to the place I envision myself getting to.
That is the ethos of this page after all. Showing my evolution as a writer in real time.
So it’s silly to hold back.
For this reason, season two of my fiction posts will roll out shortly. I'm waiting to hear back from two or three journals, but once I’ve got those answers I’ll start my fortnightly fiction posts again.
So that’s on it’s way down the tunnel.
It’s been a while.
Interesting!