The Story in the Story

I finished The Haven last week and, except for a few minor edits, it is ready for the collection I am working on. It is time to move on to the last story, Treat Yourself to the Best.

When I decided to create this collection I culled through a huge stack of short stories that had been languishing in my desk - some of them for years. With one novel being reviewed by yet another agent and the second novel “ripening” between rewrites, I decided it was time to do something with all these short stories. One of them has been previously published but will still be included.

The thing about short story writing is that even the writer isn’t always sure what the story is about. Most writers, from Stephen King to Rebecca Rule, agree that the best short stories happen when you take an interesting character or two, put them in a situation, and then wait to see what happens to them. Whether or not you have a story when you finish depends on whether there is any story in your story when you read it.

Not every story turns out to have a story in it. That probably surprises some people. Those are the ones that you set aside and, if something good at all happened in them, you might find another place for those characters and situations but mostly they are just good exercise.

But the stories that have something to them - they are the good ones. When I was sorting through the stack of stories in my drawer (and all the rejection slips stuck in their files with them), I picked out eight of them that seemed to have a common theme. I couldn’t quite explain the theme, that has only come over the past six months of working on them. They are all about awareness - awareness of what they have, or what they most want, or what they have lost.

As I went through each story, rewriting, editing, and rewriting again, I kept asking myself “what is the story in this story?” and, in each case, it came to me. It is about becoming aware of what you have. It is about becoming aware of what you have lost. It is about realizing that the mistake you made was not really a mistake. On and on. Of all of them, the one I saved for last, is proving the most difficult.

Treat Yourself to the Best is about a woman who left her earthy, plain-spoken rural family for a life of “romance” and some years later, married and successful, is bringing her very elegant husband home to them. She is nervous about doing this because her family, despite being good, decent people, has always embarrassed her. And she absolutely cannot understand her husband’s fascination with them.

I knew I wanted the setting of the story to be in a Pennsylvania Dutch community much like the one I grew up in. I have never written about being Pennsylvania Dutch and thought it might make a colorful setting. I was doing a little research on the internet when I clicked into a site on PA Dutch heritage and the speakers on my PC suddenly blasted Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians playing the Pennsylvania Polka. I found myself suddenly embarrassed and I immediately turned the sound down. I can’t stand that “music”. And then it came to me - I was embarrassed. I was embarrassed, after all these years of being away, by hearing the Pennsylvania Polka. The story in this story is my story. This could be a challenge to write.

In a sense every story is our story - an aspect of our selves. But in finding the stories in the story, we find the stories in our own lives and offer them as fodder for others to find their stories, too.

Thanks for reading.