Day Twenty-Seven is a Sunday, so shouldn’t even be a writing day. And anyway, it’s late evening (and night), not early morning, so what am I doing on the computer, typing so fast my hands hurt? (Maybe it’s because the builders aren’t here?)
I decided that I wanted to show the influence of my favourite short stories in my writing. I wasn’t sure how to do that, other than to try it out and let my fingers do the writing, as it were. The three I am particularly excited about at the moment are Gabriel García Márquez’s A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings (Penguin 2014), Katherine Mansfield’s Miss Brill (Penguin 2015), and ‘Bullet in the Brain’ by Tobias Wolff (New Yorker, 1995). How do I demonstrate how much I love these stories? How do I write about them without retelling them? Enter a short story competition, with a fast approaching deadline, that’s how!
Knowing the deadline for the short story competition I wanted to enter was upon me, I stayed up to write the story I had had in my head for a while. It involved a contemporary Miss Brill character, contemplating her mortality without really knowing it, at a supermarket check out. In a tribute to Anders from ‘Bullet in the Brain’, it involved stream of consciousness experienced by someone getting hurt in a queue – although she isn’t shot. Most of all, it was about someone who grows wings, although I didn’t make them the large, feathery kind, and she’s an old woman, not an old man, and the way she falls is different – without giving too much away.
Writing that four thousand words was a revelation. I hope it doesn’t sound too odd to say it was like a fountain of words pouring out of me, one that had been dammed up for a while. It felt wonderful. It felt like the beginning of a creative breakthrough. I’ve been doing a lot of healing over the summer and here, now, all at once, I had a story ready to go. I simply needed to write it.