by Melissa Yi
Enter John Grisham and a whole new publishing world order.
Before that, we bowed down Stephen King, who nursed a generation or two or three on horror and became his own brand.
After Kris had told me I was uncategorizable, and I’d recovered my voice, I’d said, "But…no one liked my stories."
She’d made a face at me. "They’re confused. You need to learn information flow. Read bestsellers. Read Jeffrey Deaver." She’d also mentioned, "You are so direct, it makes people uncomfortable."
Okay. So, ten years later, I was at another writing workshop in Oregon. After "Om," I had just enough juice to eke out one more expertise story to throw down with Eric.
Because I’d unwittingly limited my own topics, it had to be about motherhood.
I remembered "Extenuating Circumstances," the Joyce Carol Oates story in the hard-hitting anthology, Sisters in Crime 5. That story had lingered in my subconscious for over two decades.
I started typing.
It’s not difficult for me to stare at the dark underbelly of motherhood. Everyone likes pastel-coated, Pinterest-worthy parenthood, but the truth is that it’s a relentless, endless task that delivers both the purest joy and the greatest devastation.
As dusk fell, I stopped and stared at my laptop. The story was short. Under 500 words. I moved around a few paragraphs, but I had nothing to add. It was finished.
It was the first story (and actually, only) story I wrote at that workshop that immediately felt right. Even if no one else liked it. Even if no one else theoretically bought it. It was correct.
I printed out "Because" and brought it to the jury of my classmates.
Nearly everyone ‘bought’ "Because."
And then Kris asked to buy it for real, for the anthology Fiction River.
As someone who’s studied Buddhism, I try not to get blown away by life events. Good things and bad things happen to everyone. I did consider it a validation that, in ten years, I’d gone from only two of my peers selecting my story to something like 80 percent of discerning readers and writers not only choosing it, but many of them placing it in a position of honour in an anthology, as the opener or, more often, the closer story.
I wrote down their comments. Kris encourages us to write down the good and bad comments because we tend to remember only the bad stuff.
Inside, I glowed, but not too brightly.
Equanimity is what they call it, in Buddhism.
Some people liked it. Good. Keep writing.
And if they’d booed me?
Some people didn’t like it. How sad for them. Keep going.
Two classmate were concerned that Kris hadn’t bought any of their stories. My forehead pleated in honest confusion. I was like, "But that’s only one market. It’s the finger, not the moon."
Which was my turn to puzzle them. So then I explained how Buddha said, "I must state clearly that my teaching is a method to experience reality and not reality itself, just as a finger pointing at the moon is not the moon itself. A thinking person makes use of the finger to see the moon. A person who only looks at the finger and mistakes it for the moon will never see the real moon."
Selling one story to Kris doesn’t make you a writer. Getting the thumbs-up from your classmates doesn’t make you a writer. Those are fingers pointing in the right direction, that’s all.
Writing makes you a writer. Period.
Writing is the moon. And what a magnificent moon it is, full of shade and wonder and heartache.
Yesterday, at the end of my emergency room shift, I discovered that "Because" is a finalist for the Derringer Award.
In case you’re like me and don’t know firearms, a derringer is a pocket-sized pistol. A fine metaphor for the double-barrel wallop packed in a short story. So the Derringer Award celebrates the finest short mystery fiction published in the English language every year.
I felt walloped myself. My tiny story, squeezed out of competitive exhaustion, up for the Derringer Award?
Wow, wow, wow.
Time for me to tell you it’s an honour to be short-listed. But this time, it’s true. Thank you, Eric, for spurring me on. Thank you, Kris, for reading my work with clear eyes and an unsparing tongue (this is a good thing). Thank you, my classmates. Thank you, Matt, Max, and Anastasia, for letting me disappear for days at a time. And thank you, my readers. My writing wouldn’t regenerate or evolve without you.
***
Melissa Yi is an emergency physician whose latest Hope Sze medical thriller, Stockholm Syndrome, lasers in on a hostage-taking on an obstetrics ward. To decompress, she takes dance lessons and eats curry and Lindt chocolate.
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