November 2, 2010
Wednesday

I wrote ten thousand words today! I wrote ten thousand words today!
       — exclamation attributed to American novelist Thomas Wolfe, 1900-1938

I did not write any fiction today. Not one word. Instead, I read, two versions of the same story. I had the earlier version in a photocopy that I made before I left from the journal it first appeared in. I had the later version in the author’s newly-published collection, which I bought because I couldn’t find it in a library before I left.* I also couldn’t find it in a bookstore before I left, and had to have it ordered for me for delivery to the delightful independent Ebenezer Books here in Johnson. Before I was very far into reading the second version, I took it to be photocopied, because I knew I wanted to mark it up, and I didn’t want to spoil my hardback.

The story is “Shirley Wants Her Nickel Back,” a fairly long (around 12,000 words) short story by Jessica Treadway that appeared in Ploughshares, the literary magazine of Emerson College, in the Fall 2004 issue. I read it at the beginning of December that year, and, in a phrase I use for a startling experience (that I think I lifted from Andrew Wyeth talking about the color of Christina’s dress), it pulled the top of my head off.

I didn’t read it to learn, then, I read it to enjoy. Three times. I wrote about it here, in connection with the holiday conundrum of gratuities. The story had made me think hard about the service people, like our newspaper carriers, whom we seldom see and whose hardships in their work are invisible to us. The piece got a “Best of Holidailies” citation. I figured there were a lot of present or former service workers on the readers’ panel.

The story concerns a young woman whose husband has lost his job because of a drunk driving accident he caused in which someone died. They face not only the normal expenses of any young couple, but also the financial judgment against them handed down when the survivors sued. To support herself, her husband, and their infant son, Norine takes a job driving around her town from four in the morning until dawn delivering newspapers.

The story opened my eyes to this kind of work (I didn’t know that newspaper carriers have to stuff the papers in the plastic bags themselves, and that sometimes they have to buy those bags). Since 2004 I have sent a holiday gratuity to our paper delivery woman, even the last two years when the one we had back then was replaced by someone less competent and careful. (Finding the paper can be like a scavenger hunt some mornings.)

In the summer, I learned that Jessica Treadway’s second story collection, Please Come Back To Me, had won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. I learned this from a notice on the Facebook page of Lori Ostlund, who is herself a former recipient of the same award. In the chains of connections among Facebook Friends, I had fallen into acquaintance with Lori when she saw, through a mutual friend, that I was not only going to Bread Loaf, as she was, but that I would be visiting Flannnery O’Connor’s home in Georgia, something that personal circumstances had prevented her from doing when she won the award.

When I saw that “Shirley Wants Her Nickel Back” was in this new collection, I impulsively wrote a fan letter to Jessica Treadway, telling her how much I liked that story and that I was looking forward to reading the others. (Despite my devotion to “Shirley,” I had not sought out her novel or her first collection.) She wrote back (and friended me! — my giddiness at attention from the writers I admire can make Justin Bieber fans’ swooning look restrained), telling me that the story had gone through a lot of changes.

This excited me — how could this already compelling story change? When I determined that I would be working on revision at Vermont, I put “Shirley . . . ,” in both incarnations, on my list of works to study.

The version in the collection does indeed show a lot of changes. To an already long story, Treadway added about 2000 words, but actually more than that, because many passages were cut and replaced with other passages. Some changes were minor — Betty is Paula now, and Jimmy (Norine’s husband) has a different last name. Some elements were cut, some were expanded. A whole new angle was introduced, and the ending, which I had called “ambiguous” in the 2004 version, became less so.  Treadway did what we are constantly encouraged to do by our writing teachers. She raised the stakes for Norine, and thus for the reader. The result is a deeper, richer story.

Treadway used many details that helped fix the story in place and in time, something that Kevin McIlvoy encouraged me to do with the story I took to his workshop this summer. I became fascinated with determining the timeline for the story. Norine is pregnant and “just beginning to show” when the accident happens, in April. The present action of the story takes place during football playoff season, presumably the same year, because the baby is an infant.

Norine goes into a bar near her home in upstate New York (Utica in one version, Rochester in the other) where there is a football game on the television. In the original, “It was a playoff game between the Patriots and the Bills. The score went up six for the Patriots, and some guy yelled, ‘Bledsoe sucks!'”

In the second version, “It was a playoff game between the Dolphins and the Bills. . . . The Dolphins went ahead by six and some guy yelled ‘Flutie sucks!'”

Well, I had to look that up!

According to Wikipedia (my Bible for quick and superficial research), Drew Bledsoe played for the Patriots and then the Bills. He played for the Bills from 2002 to 2004. In 2004 (well after the 2004 version of the story would have been written), the Bills fell one game short of the playoffs.

In the 1998 season, “Buffalo was eliminated in the first round by the rival Dolphins, as Flutie’s fumble on the 5-yard line with 17 seconds left cost him his first, and only, loss against both Jimmy Johnson and Dan Marino.”

The actual year that the story takes place remains undetermined, by me anyway. Fiction can be slippery that way. In the story I worked on last week, I have a scene that takes place on a summer’s evening when the neighbors are all discussing the death of a movie star who may have taken her own life, but may also have been murdered. The reference is clearly Marilyn Monroe, who died in 1962, although in my imagination the events of the story unfold in 1959.

The six-year-old manuscript that I am addressing this week is under 5,000 words and suffers from the lack of specificity that Kevin McIlvoy commented on in a later, much better effort. I started adding in details and texture yesterday. Reading the two versions of Jessica Treadway’s story has given me the confidence to keep on going with mine.

In 2007, during my first residency, I used the thought from Thomas Wolfe that I use today, noting that I had written one thousand words that day. Ironically, they were part of the manuscript I worked on last week. I wrote not one word of fiction today, but I expect to get back to work tomorrow, adding, expanding, getting to know my story even better,

*Readers of this space will recall that I am trying not to buy any more books for a while, using the public and college libraries I have access to instead, and putting the money I would spend on books to the 2011 Gallivant fund. I apologize to the authors, many of them debut authors, whose books I am not buying.

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