Zones of your brain affected: frontal, temporal, parietal. The doctor points at them in turn on the scan of your brain. Those traitorous parts, shrivelling out of existence, threatening to take pieces of you with them. I look from…
Is your mom a mail-order bride? I was once asked by a classmate in fourth grade while we sat at our desks making fake nails out of Elmer’s glue squeezed into the hollow of our plastic rulers. No, of…
She says go like this and bares her teeth at me, lips pulled back. All the other girls lean in to see inside my mouth, too close. I smell the leather of their shoes, but I don’t flinch. Jagged,…
Snap Not when your mother makes you go to the dance. You tell her you’re sick. Really sick this time. See? You’ve broken out in hives. Not when she slathers you in calamine lotion & stuffs you into tights…
When Ford made love to Calla, she felt something in him fight. It wasn’t against her ugliness. That matter was settled business, though Calla, in her youth, had held onto the idea that she was a winter-apple sort of…
Dau used to live in the apartment below me. He had skin so dry it fell like leaves on a windy day, so much he pixelated his floor with tiny fog-colored flakes, each thin and flappy as a plastic…
Esther was sixteen the summer that all the bees in her father’s hives died. Those were the days when she was in love with everything. The curtains in her room, billowing with the morning breeze; the spongy hills leading…
He was standing at the corner where we met every morning to walk to work because we were young and carless. I had gotten on a train and moved 2,000 miles for a walkable city. He had always lived…
Content Warning—self-harm and/or suicide attempt When I visit from the states my cousin Marco becomes wind. In the car to the restaurant where our mothers wait he’s all curls dancing, all cheeks stretching, speeding so fast I’m sure…
People will say Ry must have planned the robbery for weeks. They’ll want purpose and emotion and strategy. They’ll say she had a gun tucked into a pocket. They’ll say she must have been desperate: four kids at home…
I’ve struggled with writing this author’s note because it’s easy to feel like a big fraud as a writer, as in who am I to talk about craft? I drafted several versions and deleted them. Those versions included ideas like: stories have to make you feel something (I mean, of course); write the things that stick with you, that won’t go away (also not that revelatory); don’t write the static stories that are pretty but lack tension (also not particularly earth-shattering craft advice).
I think the biggest thing that I have to say about writing as it relates to this story is this: shut down your impulsivity as much as you can when you are drafting something. Quiet whatever Submittable forces are conspiring to make you think you have to SUBMIT RIGHT NOW and let a story sit. Draft and then think about it a few weeks from now. Read the draft on your phone while you’re walking, or print it and read it on paper if that helps you. Wait for the next submission round if needed.
Anyway, because I’m a slow learner, I wrote a draft of this story and quickly, impulsively submitted it immediately after three things happened:
I knew right away these three events were somehow going to go together in a story, so, in an excited fever, I wrote a draft and submitted it immediately to a few magazines, and it was, over the next weeks, rejected. I went through the usual, “I’m a terrible writer, I suck, this will never be anything” reactionary response. Then I reread the draft and saw all the holes and all the places that needed revamping and tightening and connection and emotion and different words or fewer words and more tension.
I rewrote it about ten times, and still, in editing, CRAFT’s amazing editors found about ten times when I said “things” instead of something more precise and about ten “blah blah blah, which” sentence constructions hanging around in annoying ways. My point, I guess, is something we all know but don’t always do: think about process as much or more than product. Slow down. Wait. Enjoy writing. Enjoy revising. Take your time. That’s all.
AMY STUBER is a fiction writer living in Lawrence, Kansas. She edits flash fiction for Split Lip Magazine. Her work has been published in or is forthcoming in Flash Fiction America, American Short Fiction, Copper Nickel, The Cincinnati Review, West Branch, New England Review, and elsewhere. She was the recipient of the Northwest Review Fiction Prize (2021) and a runner up for The Missouri Review Editors’ Prize (2022). Find her on Twitter @amy_stuber_.
