Arts Institute Blog

Believe it or not, not every word I write is literary gold. Shocking, I know! Sometimes I start a story and it goes nowhere. Sometimes the story needs to cut some dead weight before it can move ahead. Sometimes it is obvious—painfully obvious—why I rejected these passages. Other times the lines seem to have some potential and, in fact, may one day become stories—but today is not that day.  

Taking a slightly different approach to my chosen topic, I thought I would share some of these rejected fragments. Take a look and judge them for yourself. See any potential or are they better left for dead? 

1. Jimmy and me lived in a one bedroom walk-up on the questionable side of town. Except for the bugs, the heat, the smell, the thin walls, and the over-abundant sexual acrobatics of our next door neighbor, it was a real nice place to live. And at least Darlene, the neighbor, had the good manners to act embarrassed when she’d see us in the hallway and sometimes she even baked cookies. I didn’t  mind the sexcapades, really. It gave me and Jimmy something to aspire to. And, besides, whenever the trains rolled by I couldn’t barely hear her. 

2. The yellow dog comes at me and carries in its mouth what appears to be a human hand. I stand very still and hope the dog will pass me by, but it stops and stares at me. I decide that this is a male dog because of his unapologetic manner, though I’m not sure why I care. He drops the object at my feet and I am relieved to see that it is, in fact, a suntanned human hand. Relieved not because it is human, but because everyone I know is pale. I step over the hand and leave it and the dog sitting on the sidewalk. I am fifteen minutes late for work.  At work, I remember that Cathleen had been to the beach lately but find her at the copier, both hands in tact. I am glad that she is not handless as I would be expected to pick up any of her copying or phoning duties that her handlessness might prevent. It was silly of me to worry about the hand, I decide. It is just a random hand—someone else’s problem. The hand is still lying on the sidewalk when I leave for home. I watch crowds of people step over it without noticing. One man kicks the hand and it skitters across the ground like a spider. The man doesn’t look back.  I walk to where the hand lies curled among the city trash and wait. I turn my shoulders to the passing crowd and point my foot toward the hand. Does anyone see it, I wonder.  Surely, someone will see it and pick it up. It is, after all, a human hand. When I glance down, the thumb seems to be pointing up and I take that as a sign to stop worrying and go home. 

3. Henry had been taking the I-25 to work for nearly six years, ever since the slithering beast had first been set loose on the country side. The highway snaked through the county, swallowing entire neighborhoods, parks and most of the native swampland, promising the fastest east-west route since people first got the notion to head in those directions. The day it opened, local residents sailed across town praising the gods of civil engineering as a half-hour trip took fifteen minutes, an hour trip took forty-five. That day, the I-25 was the best thing to happen to anyone, anywhere, ever. And that was the very last day anyone, anywhere felt that way, ever. 

4. Cosmo was a boxer. People called him a boxer because there isn’t a word for someone who stands in a boxing ring and wears gloves but drops so quick it looks like a conditioned response to the bell. He was more like one of those fainting goats that go stiff and fall over at the fist sign of danger. There isn’t a word for a person like that either, so everyone just went with boxer because at least he wore the right kind of shorts. 

5. Walter, the world’s fattest man, went on a diet. He lost fifty pounds in the first week, three hundred in the first month. His friends asked him how he did it. “I finally learned to let go,” he said.  When Walter was at last just an ordinary man, he tried to give away his clothes but no one fit them. All the charities turned him away. So did consignment stores. No one wanted his clothes. “Not even the fat farm,” he told Ida, his wife. “They said taking them would send the wrong message.” “Shame,” she said. “Guess we’ll have to keep them.” “No. I’ll just throw them away.”

I have nearly finished designing and working out the spacial situation for this painting.  Until this point there have only been a few colors involved which create a tonal map of the picture and allows the color and space to develop gradually.  I began this painting with raw sienna which created the orange and brown.  You could think of this as working in a specific key and the rest of the color will develop in relation to that key.   I find this a useful way to work because it helps in keeping color harmonious.  This is really the hardest stage of the painting for me.  There will be many more hours spent staring than painting. 

Everything, of course!

The title of my novel, at its conception, was Sonny and the Santa-Fe Chief.  Sonny is the main character of the story and the “Santa Fe Chief” refers to both an iconic passenger train and a model, electric train that Sonny has in the book.  This title worked well on a thematic level, and it has a sort of playfulness that I liked.  The story, after all, is set in rural 1960, and Sonny and the Santa-Fe Chief captured a sort of Saturday-morning-serial tone that I liked.

But as I worked and wrote more, Sonny and the Santa Fe Chief became either a happy promise that was never fulfilled or a joke too dark for the attitude and personality of the story.  Sure, there is irony here (a lot of it), but there is also seriousness, sincerity—almost earnestness—and I wanted the title to reflect that combination.

In the end, my wife graciously helped me decide on the title: Abel, N.C.  “Abel” is the name of the town where the story happens, and all the connotations and allusions of the name/word make it a nicely complex appellation. Here’s the first epigraph from the book—it’s Genesis 4.8: “And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother and slew him.”

Most interesting about all this is that once I had decided on the title, really believed in it, thinking of it in terms of Abel, N.C. instead of Sonny and the Santa-Fe Chief brought the whole story into focus for me, both thematically and tonally.

Perhaps you think you are the only one who is getting rejected these days. Or perhaps you think that I am the only one who is getting rejected and that I am a big loser. In that case, you’d be half right. Here are a couple of links to web sites where people share their rejection stories:

Literary Rejections on Display

http://www.literaryrejectionsondisplay.blogspot.com/

Rejection Collection

http://rejectioncollection.com/

This page here responds to Rejection Collection–giving some insight into the pains of editors who must sort through the massive amounts submissions they receive. A bit barbed, but offers useful advice and perspective:

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/004641.html

I was in Denver last weekend. Sitting next to me on the crowded plane was a woman with a long, brown braid. Over the course of the flight, she silently drank four Whiskey Sours, clutching the armrest with one hand. She wore earth-colored tones and her hair smelled woodsy, herbal.

I was compelled to give her a back-story, a name…some sort of mission. I needed a break from the short story I had brought with me to revise. Maybe a new story would jump-start the old one.

Pulling out my laptop, I tried not to spill the woman’s whiskey. Her braid reminded me of Fitzgerald’s short story, “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” and despite myself, I laughed out loud several times. I think this unhinged the woman even more and she glanced at me with caution in her eyes.

Several pages later, I realized that the story really wasn’t going anywhere. The woman had fallen asleep, and I switched back to my old story. Was it all just procrastination? Maybe, but it felt good to write something new, something that made me laugh. I am beginning to accept that this is all part of the revision process.

On those days when I come home to find one of my stamped self-addressed envelopes waiting in my mailbox, and a polite little rejection slip tucked inside,  I think I should just call it quits. Sometimes I see a rejection and I think I should give it all up and go to cosmetology school like I’ve always secretly wanted. I could become a make-up artist, move to Hollywood, and begin an ill-fated affair with one of my celebrity clients. He would eventually leave me for some fancy young starlet and they’d move to the Hills and adopt a million beautiful but impoverished foreign babies and I’d waste away in bitterness and regret, dying an anonymous death in my $2,000 a month studio apartment and my cats would eventually eat my face. Sometimes that seems like the only feasible plan. That is, until I get a letter like this:

From the Advisory Board Committee:

Your story is excellent. It set the scene and mood immediately and presented the conflict. Then the two wonderful characters—we love the mother. At that point, we could not give up on your excellent story and read through to the end. What an ending! Not expected but it fits.

Yes, it will find a good publisher. We are sorry it cannot be us.

From the Editor:

I read it too—a great story. It’s too bad we have to send it back.

So, it’s still a rejection—I guess I didn’t submit in time as they’d already filled their issues for the year. But considering the number of submissions journals get and the time it takes to comment on manuscripts, a note like this really is the next best thing to an acceptance. It’s not a publication but it’s enough to keep me going. I choose to believe them when they say my story will be published. Cosmetology school will have to wait. Which is a shame, really. I’ve always wanted to powder George Clooney’s nose.

Until next time!

Rachel Luria

PS

Sorry for the late post—this has been a busy week of conferences. I will return to my Monday posting schedule after Spring Break—I’ll be off having a mild vacation.

So, this one is brief—briefer than my previous posts anyway. 

I enjoy writing dialogue.  I think it’s one of my strengths.  But with this project (remember, it’s set in the rural South) I struggled to find a consistent and helpful method for dropping the g off of –ing words.  I began by dropping nearly every g in sight.  Everybody was workin and runnin and thinkin.  This quickly became overwhelming and annoying.  Just start writing like this intentionally and you’ll see how often –ing words show up.  So then I started keeping all the gs and only dropped the ones that I could rationalize in some way.  Eventually this, too, stopped, and now there’s practically a g on the end of everything.  (Get it?)  You wouldn’t think one letter could be such a worry, but in my story—or any other that attempts to render a dialect—there is a constant balancing act between the “sound” and the “standard” conventions of language.  The question that I keep asking myself is: how much do I need to spell out for my readers to hear these characters’ accents?  Increasingly, I am trying to bring the accents out through syntax and diction, rather than through dropped gs and the like.

Working on this painting has been a significantly different experience than I’ve had with other pieces.  The two nudes i’ve blogged about were created with models and several preliminary studies.  The landscapes I have worked on were painted from life as well.  This picture began with a vague idea that I tossed around in my head for a year and then began working directly on the large canvas from memory and imagination without any preliminary sketches.  The process has been like looking at the texture on a ceiling until you see something recognizeable.  It is suprising what can be recalled with just the slightest suggestion.  I also have a couple of mirrors in my studio and in the right spot I can see myself from any angle.  I use the mirrors and myself as a model to act out the characters when there is a drawing problem.  Here are a few images that show how the painting has progressed over the semester.  The figures are lifesize so progress is not fast. 

I lived in Manhattan for most of my twenties. Writing in my studio, peering through barred windows at my fire escape…it was claustrophobia that prompted me to walk for hours through my adopted neighborhood. It was on one of these treks through the West Village that I came upon the underbelly of an elevated railroad. The steel tracks were a relic of the industrial-era, abandoned long ago. I remember stopping for a moment, wondering what it might be like up there with a view of the Hudson River and the cobblestone streets.

I researched the railroad, and tried to write about this Exquisite Corpse. You can see pictures on http://www.thehighline.org/

I ran into a few problems while drafting my story:

1) How to make this a character driven story when I am fascinated by location, place, and history?
2) How to include factual information in a fictional piece without boring the reader? (I had way too much factual information)
3) How to separate myself from the object, and not bog down the prose with too many details?
4) How to revise, revise, revise, without losing my initial enthusiasm.

I am still thinking about the first 3, and I decided to start with revision–a favorite topic on this blog. The initial creation of a story is exciting, but the more I revise the more control I have over my own work.

First try, below:
“Graham looked up, shielding his eyes. Beneath the massive, metal underbelly of the High Line Railroad, he felt like a small man. The steel tracks, a relic of the industrial-era, had been abandoned long ago. Now the structure hung over the West Village like an oversized tombstone.”

Tomorrow, another revision. Many problems… but the line, “he felt like a small man,” is the one bothering me the most.