As the contest developed a question formed in my head. Whose story is it?
We ask that question the whole time we compete in WRiTE CLUB. The first level is the guessing game. I recognized my mother’s voice right away, and I thought for sure I knew who Dovey Grimm was. It turns out I was dead wrong, but that’s the beauty of writing anonymously. But there’s another level. There’s what happens to the story once you click send and it goes live for everyone to read. What I took from Write Club this year is that as writers, the story we put out there doesn’t even belong to us anymore once it’s in the readers’ hands.
My bout with Peace and Quiet is an obvious case in point. I wanted to show I could do something different than I had with my original piece, and boy did I. The character I wrote struck some as insecure and nervous, and others as aggressive to the point where violence might be an issue. Peace and Quiet gave us a woman who couldn’t bear to live without her child. Some readers found it powerful, but some were offended that she would leave a husband behind. Whether we did it intentionally or inadvertently, we put people off with the characters we wrote.
Looking back, I wouldn’t have it any other way. If my character is funny to some and scary to others, don’t we all know someone who’s checked both of those boxes? If Peace and Quiet had left out the phone call with the husband, would that make the decision to end her life more palatable? People who make the decision to end their own lives do leave people behind; glossing over that wouldn’t have changed the fact. It’s just interesting to me to see what people do with the characters we give them, and the lives they take on in the readers’ eyes.
The comment I saw pop up the most for everyone’s stories was, I want to know what happens next. At first I thought, nothing happens next. It’s a five-hundred word piece, and that’s all we’ve got. But that’s not true. All these stories took on a life of their own, if only for a moment, in the reader’s mind. I’ve heard it described as a form of telepathy, the ability to put your thoughts on a page and hand it to someone else and make them think the same thing, but it’s so much more than that. It’s the ability to plant a seed of emotion in someone and throw in a drop of imagination. We might not be there to see it grow, and we have no idea what might blossom, but no matter what emotion it sparks, it’s a beautiful thing.
I look forward to coming back next year as a slush pile reader.