Thank You for Nothing: The Time I Rewrote an Award-Winning Short Story (Or the Peak of a Still-Fragile Ego) - Part 1
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She was indeed out of her element, but as the car strained up a dirt hill into the clearing, she remembered why she had left it all behind. “I’m not so sure I’m right for this job,” she had admitted. Her confidence as a teacher had dwindled significantly after being let go. She could still see the solemn faces and farewell waves of her second-grade class as she sunk into a similar taxi soon after the last day of school had ended. “Yes, I know. I need the money. But surely you realize my predicament here—an orphanage isn’t really within my experience, and to be so far out in the country…”
But the mustachioed man behind the polished wooden desk had waved her concerns away. Ms. Mallory, of course, had the necessary experience, and worry not, it would be similar to her previous posts—oh yes, it was remote and more familial than a simple schoolroom, but Ms. Mallory was a strong woman, an adaptive woman, was she not?
“I suppose…” She had averted her eyes and trailed off, gazing at a pin board of grainy house mother photos.
Of course she was! His enthusiasm had startled even her. These girls had experienced a sour history of abandonment, chapter after disappointing chapter of teachers and mother figures who had not stuck around long before inevitably leaving, not even able to face his office again after giving up their tasks! Those girls needed a strong figure, someone to look up to, and he felt that the middle-aged teacher before him was the perfect fit. It wouldn’t be as hard as she might think, as most were already teenagers and well-versed in day-to-day routines, but a guiding, teaching hand was something they couldn’t do without—Your guiding, teaching hand, Ms. Mallory! he had certainly been thrown off by all of the praise she had received. She slept on it that night in her tiny apartment, dreaming of the helpless girls in the countryside crying out for a mother. In the morning she had returned to his office, bags packed. A feeling of excitement had filled her up inside—it was her mission and she had a duty to complete it. The schoolroom, she determined, had finished its need for her and a new calling had finally arrived!
What you’ve all just read through, grammatical errors and all, was not a previous work of mine but a very early section from “Thank You, Ms. Mallory!”, a short story that was published as the 2018 first prize winner for Bartleby, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County’s creative arts journal. See, ever since my undergrad days and up until now, I’ve struggled to produce anything that could be deemed as decent literary work. I was always running around campus seeking advice and inspiration for a short story, convinced that it was deeper than it actually was, or pitching a dark slice-of-life comedy comic in hopes of eventually getting published but to no avail. I was in pursuit of trying to prove to myself that I could actually be a working writer and that chasing an English degree wasn’t a mistake. To me, being published would have convinced me that, yes, I was a writer. It would’ve meant that I’d gotten a black belt of sorts in the craft and that, at the very least, my insights were entertaining enough to be shown to decent amounts of strangers. In retrospect, I admit that those writings of mine were unworthy of being published and it’s an ongoing lesson on humility that I’m grateful for. For the time being, I suppose that I’ve more in common with a journeyman fighter, punch-drunk and willing to scrap but ultimately not skilled enough to contend for championship gold—only time will tell.
Despite not being published at a relatively young age, at least I could say that I still had my morals and values when it came to creative writing. Alongside a healthy amount of duende and tenacity, I maintained a clear identity of myself as a writer. That is to say that I knew what I liked and what I didn’t like when it came to storytelling.
It’s because of my staunch position on writing that, among my peers, I tended to color myself as a sort of villain whenever I called anyone out in writers’ workshops. Were you trying to simply meet word count and expect everyone to say nice things about a story that you clearly did not give a shit about? Were you throwing tropes, vocabulary, and symbols at the audience in an attempt to seem smarter than you actually were rather than prioritizing authorial honesty? Were you going to do your fellow writers a disservice by faking smiles and lying to them by telling them that their writing was absolutely stellar and peachy? More times often than not, I was the one to call bullshit because nobody else was going to.
It certainly wasn’t personal, let’s get that straight. But I did not leave the world of computer science for an English major simply because I loved tea and tweed—I loved to see good, even great, writing thrive. When good writing appears, it does nothing but make readers think, talk, and feel fulfilled on an ethereal level (at least, for me) and I’m sure that many other people from all walks of life would be inclined to agree. However, that can’t be achieved without being able to recognize when something needs to be fixed or when something is simply broken within a story. For whatever reason, it seems that I’m a minority in upholding this belief. Very rarely do I speak with a writer that values this sentiment like I do. That is to probably say that many aspiring writers, regardless of their age or experience, fail to acknowledge that good writing requires hard work and doesn’t arrive overnight. Good writing is forged with a brutal amount of self-awareness and honesty. And the sooner we all realize that, the sooner we can rebuild ourselves to become the writers that we believe ourselves to be.
Now, to those who still think that I’m reveling in being a rambling asshole, allow me to provide a bit of a rebuttal. I will not apologize for maintaining my beliefs but I will apologize for my tone—only because I feel a little bit of remorse when thinking back to my undergrad creative writing courses and how I tried to help my fellow writers.
Objectively, I was a bit of a problemed child back then. In Intro to Creative Writing, I was almost booted from workshops (which would’ve resulted in automatic failure in the course because workshops were graded for attendance) due to my eagerness to be callous with my words. However, thanks to a sudden change of heart after doling out a rough roasting, I personally approached and apologized to the author of the story after class.
Keep in mind that this story was spectacular for all the wrong reasons. The draft was so awful that I had to show my friends the piece. It wasn’t long until the story became a source for drunk survival challenges in our circle and, after waking up slightly hungover one day, I learned that one of my close friends had transcribed the cursed scripture. The writing itself was absolutely Lovecraftian in that you would go absolutely mad if you attempted to give it an honest read—just take a look at the first paragraph of the tale:
She’s so fucking good and so fucking sweet. She loves attention, but she moves like mice under opaque blanket sheets bursting out of the seams into the frame at the shine of a light. She wears tight clothes that emphasize her skeleton, her liquid sunrise heart beating out of her chest. She gets stressed too easily from work and from life and she cries. She does this quietly an motionlessly. The tears bubble up and pour over the edge of her purple, rounded lids. She stares into space and the emotions tear through her body like tiny internal hurricanes. She likes watching the smoke bounce off the leaves of her plants, stealing pens from restaurants, and how the stars look when they are through the moving car window. I murdered her.
To this day, nobody who has lasted past the first paragraph knows what the fuck it means to move “like mice under opaque blanket sheets” and I’m pretty sure that that is a mystery that will haunt me until I’m dead and gone. So, when the day came to talk about the story in workshop, I couldn’t contain myself for the first few minutes when everyone around the table blatantly lied to the author’s face—I was the only one there willing to be honest with them.
After class ended that day, I uncharacteristically apologized to the author after grilling them and, to my surprise, the author in question accepted my apology. They told me that they were actually about to report me to the professor for my assery, confusing good advice with bad tone but I understand why they would do that. What luck in my favor to soften up before catching a red card, I suppose. While that conversation was going on, our professor was conveniently hidden within range to hear the both of us smiling, thinking they were like Mr. Feeny during a dramatic story climax, and that’s how that went.
Anyway, the point that I was trying to make with this little “rebuttal” was to fully acknowledge that my opinion probably doesn’t carry much weight due to my lack of merit but I still stand by it. In that regard, I’m no Gordon Ramsay in the metaphorical kitchen. But the thing is, when it comes to being an artist well-versed in the culture and language of a certain medium such as creative writing, you don’t have to be Gordon Ramsay to know when someone’s taken a shit in your sandwich.
A semester after my rude-boy campaign ended with an A- in Intro to Creative Writing, I found myself enrolled in an Intermediate Creative Writing course. Unlike the introductory course, there was a much more subdued vibe within the classroom itself. Everyone had grown older without noticing. The professor for the course was nice, everyone was nice, and everyone’s writing (mine included) wasn’t as bad as the aforementioned introductory course. It probably also didn’t help that lectures were held in a cramped monotone space without windows and a clock hung above the door, not that any of us could do anything about it other than to thank the drone responsible for randomly booking the soul-sucking room for that semester. It was in that course where I was acquainted with the author of “Thank You, Ms. Mallory”. We’ll address him as Jim.
Jim and I never did grow close to know one another past our short story drafts. I’d written some nothing story based on a house party I’d gone to once that only showcased how much of life I hadn’t lived and how much of a “literary” neophyte I actually was. As for Jim, he’d written something called “Seashell Motel” which stood out as it reminded me of the material from my previous semester.
In said draft, Jim had somehow managed to pack 186 references to water and had some of the worst dialogue I’d seen. My second claim isn’t hyperbole (nor is the first). I honestly believe that if you took a line of dialogue from that draft of “Seashell Motel” and put it up against some random erotic paperback or pink film, you would most definitely give yourself at least 30 seconds for concentrated thinking. For example:
“You like me?” she murmured to the base of his neck. He noticed three slanted scars clinging to the side of her own. “I saw the way you looked at me. In the lobby. I know you want to fuck me.”
Was that from Jim’s story or was that from something that E.L. James wrote? I’ll never tell just to prove a point.
Fast forward to the end of that semester and I get my hands on the latest copy of UMBC’s Bartleby and whose name do I see printed under the words “First Prize Winner - Fiction” in Times font? Jim’s. Keep in mind that I’d also submitted a story of mine for that same edition of Bartleby and found out that my story hadn’t been published that same day.
I swear that it didn’t register on a personal level.
I was apathetic to my shortcomings with getting published in a literary magazine (probably due to chronic depression and my experimentation with casual electro-chemistry). I took the failure in stride and tried to not dwell on it too much. I mean, it’s only an absolute loss if you don’t learn something on your way down, right? However, something caught my eye as I traced down the table of contents. Beneath Jim’s “Thank You, Ms. Mallory” was an odd sight—it was Jim’s name beside another story title and the words “Runner-Up”. Jim had managed to get published twice in the same edition of the magazine.
At first, I was still unfazed. I like to believe that I’d said something generic and somewhat standoffish like “Good for him” only to mask the pain that wouldn’t manifest until hours or maybe even days after this revelation. I was dumbfounded though. The same guy who wrote lines like “She looked like a wandering waitress who’d been kept at work too long, staring out a window longingly with her chin resting on her hand. ‘Ocean,’ her nametag read” was objectively better than me. Perhaps he was and he still is—I’m not afraid to face that possibility.
And who was I to judge? I was but a bemoaning bastard rollicking in what they deemed to be inferior literature like a masochistic king gripping and fastening their crown of thorns, deepening my wounds, only because I knew that I couldn’t compete with name-brand authors like Vonnegut, Murakami, or Oates. Maybe karma was finally paying me a visit for my past actions back in that introductory course or maybe I simply wasn’t good enough to beat Jim. Or maybe I was just being overly competitive as a writer, only then realizing why a lot of bookish folk tended to have a non-competitive attitude when it came to writing—it’s exhausting and unhealthy to hold petty anger and resentment like I did.
But then I actually read “Thank You, Ms. Mallory” and I could’ve sworn that someone shit in my sandwich.
I was infuriated behind my scoffs and jeering laughter. I was confused and questioned my abilities as a writer and whether or not I’d actually have a future in that sort of industry. To be quite honest, I’m still confused by Bartleby’s decision to give Jim two slots in the magazine, never mind the fact that he won best prize in the short fiction category. When was the last time The New Yorker published more than one story written by the same author in the same issue? I don’t have a subscription to the magazine but I can already tell you that the answer is a confident “Not recently”.
As many of you all can probably tell, I was jealous of Jim. “Thank You, Ms. Mallory” was an improvement from “Seashell Motel” but I failed to see why it was the publication’s top pick for that edition. Was nobody submitting anything to Bartleby? How bad was my fucking story? Was I going crazy? I certainly felt like it but that could’ve just been me living life fast with Adderall, nicotine, and Irish breakfast tea running through my bloodstream.
Even up until now, I can’t call it “good” and if you’ve read a casual amount of short stories then I believe that you’d be on my side of this argument. So, all of this setup and background has come to this. After bitching and moaning to many friends about how this story is vindicated by a university publication, I decided to begin a vanity project which would let everyone around me know exactly how needlessly petty and spiteful I was towards Jim’s literal award-winning short story and the establishment that rewarded him in the first place. I was going to attempt to play the role of a script doctor and rewrite Jim’s story to the best of my ability. I was intent on making a serious attempt to make Jim’s writing “good”. To this day, I still don’t know if I achieved that given the source material and my level of experience at the time—I plan to let you all be the judge of that. At the very least, rewriting “Thank You, Ms. Mallory” was going to be an interesting grieving process for me and my ego.
So here’s what I did to the story…
Hello to the ones of tens who made it to the end of the first act in a three-part (subject to change) series about this interesting time in my life. Obviously, this is not part two of the series but an explanation of sorts.
Despite the lack of regular postings, this piece has taken up the majority of my time recently in just the drafting stages hence why I missed my personal deadline about a week ago. The initial plan was to present this behemoth of a post in its entirety which could have easily gone over 10,000 words. However, after some thinking, some sweaty nights because I forgot to turn on my fan before bed, and some perusing among my fellow peers’ Substack newsletters, I decided that a better option would’ve been to swing a katana at my draft and split it up into more digestible chunks.
All hail online analytics, I am but a slave to validation and attention from strangers on the internet! The algorithm beckons!
So, thanks to all of that, you can expect a proper schedule for the next few weeks as I see this thing through. At the time of writing this, I’m about halfway through Part 2 and hope to be editing that quite soon. As always, thank you all for your time and take care of yourselves as instructed by my standard footer blurb below this farewell message. Return next week for part two of this series where I chronicle the production phase of “Thank You, Ms. Mallory”.
Click here to read Part 2 of “Thank You for Nothing: The Time I Rewrote an Award-Winning Short Story (Or the Peak of a Still-Fragile Ego).”
Thank you for reading this edition of The Morning Owl. If you liked what you saw here, it would be please share this degenerate’s blog to other sentient folk with internet access, subscribe, and leave a comment. Until we meet again, drink plenty of water and take care.
Yes, the importance of peer review! Even if the constructive criticism might sting (and it probably will), it’s ultimately so much more helpful to tell writers what works with their project and what doesn’t. You can’t fix a problem if you don’t know it’s there!