Squeee-! I’m so excited that “Catching College” is up on Metaphorosis today! This story had such an immense journey to publication, I cannot even tell you. I absolutely hated the first draft of this story. I pounded it out, but I couldn’t wait to set it aside to cool off. Everything seemed wrong with it. Then, about a year later, I finally felt able to come back to it, and surprised myself by how much I enjoyed it!
Two months later, I’d rewritten it almost from scratch, filling in everything it needed, and cutting it back from almost 12k to 8.5k. Then it was off to the submission races! And…nothing. Lots of form rejections, a few really nice personalized ones, but nothing that could help me pinpoint what needed fixing. It was killing me, because by this point I loved this story, and I whole heartedly believed in it.
Enter Metaphorosis and the tenacious B. Morris Allen. He came back with a clear vision for what he felt the story could be, but it was going to take a lot of work. I won’t lie: the rewrite request scared the sh*t out of me. I’d never done a rewrite request before, and I was nervous: nervous I’d mess up the thing I loved about the story (I have a bad habit myself of throwing the baby out with the bathwater when I need to fix something), and nervous that it might not be worth it. It was right at the heart of the holiday season, which any parent knows is a wild, busy, chaotic time. I barely had time to write–could I rework (essentially from scratch) this 8.5k story?
I could! I still don’t know where the energy for it came from, except that after doing a lot of research into the magazine and Morris himself and finding his very helpful statistics on their rewrite requests, I decided it was worth it, and more than that: his suggestions felt right. That’s always my meter for whether or not a critique suggestion is one I’ll take: does it feel in line with the story I’m trying to tell? His felt right, so I decided, what the hell. I’ll give it a go. Worst case scenario, I’d waste some time and some words and come out with something he didn’t like. I’d still have my original draft, so nothing much lost for me. Best case scenario, I’d learn something about writing short fiction that had eluded me, and come out with a better story. The one thing I wouldn’t compromise on was that I had to feel like it was still the same story I’d set out to write, and that was the first thing I did when tackling the edit: write out what originally inspired this story for me, and what had to be in there for it to still be the story I wanted to tell.
After I locked that down (which I’d never really thought about prior, and from now on, will probably ALWAYS do on short stories, because holy crap, it’s helpful in guiding editing decisions, even really hard ones like the ones I made in this story revision), I plunged in full-force. I ended up writing TWO different versions, removing different characters to see what the effect would be. The end result wound up combining BOTH of those versions, eliminating all but two characters and thousands of words, but also resulting in tighter world-building, stronger theme development, and a story I’m quite proud of. It took several months to hammer its original steel into a proper tale, but I’m so glad I took the time and made the effort. I did learn a lot about my writing process, and proved to myself that even a huge edit can be accomplished with a little foresight and diligence.
At any rate, I hope you enjoy “Catching College,” which is now available via the Metaphorosis website, in print, and in audio formats!
Maggie Slater 