Thank You for Nothing: The Time I Rewrote an Award-Winning Short Story (Or the Peak of a Still-Fragile Ego) - Part 2
Hey, Alexa… Play “A Cruel Angel’s Thesis (Neon Genesis Evangelion Theme Rework)” by Ginger Root.
For context, catch up here before reading on.
What I Did to the Story
Congratulations to those who’ve made it to part two of this essay series despite my Tim Rogers-esque musing and rambling. In this portion of my write-up, I will be providing a couple of things pertaining to the production stages of this project. If at any point you feel fatigued due to my salty word soup, I implore you all to take a break. Let your eyes undergo a quick refractory period after letting them dry under the blue light from your computer monitors and phone screens. Have a nice slice of cake. Go walk your dog because they deserve it. Get a good night’s rest. This isn’t priority reading after all, this is nothing but my verbose rantings about the mundane à la Seinfeld. But once you’re all done taking care of yourselves, I hope that you all have the strength to come back and finish ascending this etymological spire.
Like I said before, a couple of things will be covered in this section including the following: a “brief” summary and analysis of “Thank You, Ms. Mallory”, my pre-planning process for the prose doctoring, my drafting and editing cycle during production, acknowledgements, and a preface to the final product. So, without further ado, let’s begin.
Summary & Analysis
In order to present a summary of “Thank You, Ms. Mallory” in an accurate manner, that meant having to revisit it and giving the thing a proper readthrough. It has been more than three years since I’ve physically handled the copy of Bartleby where the story resided for the rest of incoming history. Luckily for me, a younger version of myself was angry enough back then to transcribe a copy and save it deep within my Google Drive. And after reading through Jim’s story, here’s my best try at a synopsis for it:
“Thank You, Ms. Mallory” begins with a nervous second-grade teacher, the titular Ms. Mallory, who has recently moved out of the city and into the woods to become a private educator/caretaker for a decrepit home for girls. When she arrives at the secluded estate, she’s greeted by 13 girls including their de facto leader, Lucy, the eldest of the bunch. After awkward introductions, Mallory is shown her room before supper. Mallory begins to prepare dinner for the girls but they all refuse to eat as Lucy draws in her notebook. Mallory asks them all where all of the grown-ups—specifically their past caretakers—have gone, and according to Lucy, they all left them behind due to the sheer strangeness of their home (I’m not kidding). Before everyone leaves the dining room, Mallory announces her plans to educate the girls come daybreak to which the girls shrug in apathy. Mallory is “tucked in” by Lucy once it’s time for bed, however, the teacher lady is unable to get any rest after hearing noises from outside of her room. She attempts to peek out of her door only to realize that her door’s been locked.
Morning comes and Mallory is greeted by Lucy who explains to her new teacher about some ongoing issues/peculiarities of the aging manor, citing the aforementioned strangeness of the place. The girls’ first day of class with Ms. Mallory begins but Mallory notices that one of the girls, Zel, is absent. Mallory finds Zel in her room with a deathly fever and immediately takes action to personally help her despite a brief suggestion by one of the girls to call a doctor. Over the next couple of days, Zel eventually succumbs to illness and is buried nearby in a shallow dirt grave by the estate. Following Zel’s death, all of the girls grow more despondent to Mallory so much so that they all refuse to eat more than before.
One sudden transition later, Mallory is trying to remove the troublesome lock from her door with one of the girls, Bea, who fills her in on how Lucy was the one to take care of the girls after the death of their first caretaker who just so happened to look a lot like Mallory. Later that night, Mallory is left sleepless due to the supposed tapping of an old radiator in her room only to find out that the radiator wasn’t even on. A dark figure hidden in the shadow stares back at Mallory—it’s Lucy. Upon meeting each other’s eyes, Lucy quietly leaves the room as if nothing had happened.
Mallory, still trying to recollect herself and still wondering if she’s dreaming or not, creeps out of bed a few moments after to find a small figure wandering in the hallway. Worrying that it could be one of the girls sleepwalking, Mallory decides to follow the small figure to make sure that they don’t get hurt. She follows the girl as it waltzes into the kitchen’s walk-in freezer and catches the girl biting into one of the carcasses of frozen meat before being woken up by Mallory. After being sleep deprived every night that she’s been at the manor, Mallory snaps at the children as they all come down towards the sound of a commotion in the freezer and trying to wave away the fact that one of the girls was sleep-eating raw meat. They all claim that they were wrong about Mallory to which Mallory immediately tries to apologize for her outburst but to no avail.
Another morning comes and so too does a new enthusiastic attitude in Mallory. She runs class with the girls and she notices, in passing, one of Lucy’s drawings in her notebook—a portrait of Mallory, masterfully crafted. Lucy immediately hides her drawing away from Mallory before asking what she really wants. Mallory announces that she’s cancelled the next few days of class to focus on reconnecting with each other after what happened the previous night (with no mention of Zel fucking dying by the way). She asks Lucy if she was in her room the other night to which Lucy replies, “No.” Afterwards, Lucy gives in and tells her that they can start spending time together reconnecting after a quick shower.
While Lucy is in the shower, Mallory takes Lucy’s notebook, simply curious, and peruses through to find portraits of other women. As she flips through more and more pages, she discovers recipes alongside more photos of women—brutalized and mutilated, portrayed with photographic detail. Lucy quickly finds out that Mallory had stolen her notebook, and Mallory owns up to her actions. Lucy smiles at her teacher before one of the girls clubs Mallory in the back of the head with a wooden post. Groaning in pain, Mallory asks why they did that. In reply, Lucy explains that the first caretaker gave the girls everything—including their appetite for human flesh.
Pre-Planning
Hey Alexa… Play “I Think I’m Going To Kill Myself” by Elton John.
I can remember being a defiant little shit after lambasting all 16 single-spaced pages of Jim’s story. Those feelings of anger of course were amplified by spending a good two weeks digitizing the manuscript, transcribing it for analysis. I’d told my close circle of friends about this project to which they met with concerned okays and apathetic snorts. I was living at home with my parents all while Jim lived rent free in the back of my skull.
Surprisingly, this was not the first time I’d done this—attempt to rewrite something in a way that I saw fit. Do whatever you want to do with that information. I’m pretty sure it deserves its own subsection in abnormal psychology textbooks around the world but I digress.
I knew back then that I’d have to tend to a couple of things before investing time on actual writing. That meant that I would have to break down and effectively define what was objectively “bad” and what was subjectively “awkward”—two important distinctions to make when critiquing anything at all (quoted terms may vary from person to person). Unfortunately, that would mean that I had to go back and reread Jim’s work—an act, in my case, that was akin to taking a needle and sewing the ends of banner for a lost cause to my body…
I have no record of my initial comments on Jim’s story back then nor did I predict that I would be coming back to “Thank You, Ms. Mallory” after three years. So, I had to give the story a few more reads recently for the summary and analysis sections found here. And what I found with Jim’s writing was not what I expected.
The time between now and then has softened me just a little bit. While I can’t say that I like Jim’s writing, I can definitely say that it isn’t as awful as I remember it to be. In the state that I found it, it was nowhere nearly ready for publication—the thing is riddled with punctuation errors that could easily be caught in a single reading. However, I think that that’s more of a knock onto Bartleby’s publication standards rather than Jim’s own ability to write. Of course, there’s gonna be a couple of typos during the writing process but it wouldn’t hurt to proofread your own work before sending it off—lest you send it over to blind editors.
Other than that, there were other larger issues which I found when reading Jim’s work. For one, I think that the prose’s greatest strength was its eye for sensory detail in proximity to the protagonist and it’s very apparent from the first paragraph—“Instead of signs glowing through the steam that rose lazily off the street, the dusk forest was illuminated only by faded sunlight and the stark gleam of the car’s headlights, visible through a puff of smoke from the driver’s cigarette.”
In turn, I also noticed a tendency in which Jim would try hard to sound super literary in his descriptive writing which resulted in odd literature. For instance, in order to paint a picture of the protagonist’s previous life in the city, the protagonist recalls “the usual thick smell of oil.” Now, this particular example might just rub me the wrong way but the scent of crude oil wouldn’t be the way that I would put it. Perhaps the smell of gas, cigarettes, or garbage left out on the street might be better descriptors? I don’t know, it’s a minute detail but I had it noted down on a document while I was sifting through the story.
Moving right along, I also noticed that Jim had a very firm stance on where they stood in the “Show vs. Tell” debate. Contrary to what many book-tubers might say, it’s better to think of “showing” and “telling” in creative writing as a spectrum rather than a simple binary. And in the case of “Thank You, Ms. Mallory”, it’s very apparent that Jim very much prefers to “tell” their story rather than “show”. This would not be a pressing issue if it weren’t for an unfortunate pairing of this and a strange voice in the prose’s narration, never lacking its bright-side enthusiasm and know-it-all confidence which could catch readers off-guard due to it’s intensity early on. However, upon further review, it does simmer down once you get past the first page.
I felt that there were a lot of opportunities for elaboration that were wasted or awkwardly missed their cue to transition smoothly. The best comparison that I can use to explain this feeling is that those sections felt like hard smash cuts—think of Family Guy cutaway gags—with really loose connection between scene settings.
Come to think of it, as I’m reviewing through my notes on Jim’s story, a lot of my gripes stemmed from the very beginning of the piece. Again, it’s quite weird and obnoxious in my opinion with the way that the narration feels like the prose’s cadence which reminded me of a mix between Mary Poppins and an old Hollywood starlet:
“Clearly she was Lucy, and by the way she captured the attention of everyone in the room, especially the younger girls, it looked as if she acted as the leader of the group.”
Yada, yada, yada, something about more telling, more redundancy; I just felt that Jim ought to be more economic with his words and lead with some description about Lucy’s behavior, blah, blah, blah.
If it isn’t clear already, I’ve hit a bit of a slump already early on in this rewriting thing. Perhaps I was a lot more stupid than I thought back then to think that this thing was more awful than it really was because I’m having a hard time looking at any bright red flags. Again, looking back at my notes, there aren’t any story-breaking offenses—all the stuff predominantly focuses on Jim’s writing style. Don’t get me wrong, the story doesn’t break any ground and I wouldn’t exactly call it literary—it has more in common with a horror blockbuster than a nightmarish art film. If I’m being quite frank, “Thank You, Ms. Mallory” does not have any dynamic nor memorable characters, the setting isn’t anything that you haven’t seen already from an Scooby-Doo episode, and there’s nothing underneath this story’s iceberg in terms of deeper meaning.
Maybe that’s why I’ve been feeling so awkward? I acknowledged and promised that I would do my best to try and remain objective with my criticism but it seems that the majority of my critique so far has been subjective. What defense do I have against possible detractors who will dismiss my arguments as groundless due to their subjective nature? I suppose it will be because I can refer back to several points in the original text and defend my claims—I’m not saying that my opinion is factual, I’m simply discussing my opinion alongside examples which can back my claims up.
Like I said before, I simply know what I like and what I don’t like in creative writing. So, what’s the point of writing this in the first place? Clout? (Yes.) Therapy? (Maybe.) My best guess would be to simply start a discussion. One of the beautiful things about writing is that it takes a village to raise a baby—the baby in this case being Jim’s story. And how that baby gets raised depends on who decides to speak up and have an opinion on the story.
Now, as much as I’d love to post the transcribed copy of Jim’s story and let you all share and discuss, I simply cannot do that due to privacy concerns. The best I can do is present my findings in the best way I can. Only those who read that story in that edition of Bartleby can truly take part in discourse, I suppose. But I swear that I’m doing my best to report back with my findings in good spirits with occasional jesting. The last thing that I want to do is spew ad hominem without Jim in the chatroom. With that said, allow me to try and continue on.
Another tendency that I found in Jim’s writing was that he seemed to share similarities found in writer/director M. Night Shyamalan’s works. Jim writes as if they’re writing to a room of apes with more impulsive questions than a kindergartener tripping off a bag of skittles. There’s a lot of echoing and emphasis on details that have already been mentioned way too soon. Yes, there are sometimes when such a reminder might be needed depending on the story’s length. However, reminding the reader of the main speaker’s name and profession every page or paragraph is just frustrating to deal with. There seems to be a failure—or ignorance—to acknowledge and trust the audience’s ability to remember the protagonist’s name after introducing it on page one.
There’s a nitpick that I noted concerning the girls that Mallory meets. Canonically, there are 13 girls in the house and the only way of telling them apart—the significant ones that is—are specific differences in hair color and eye color and broad differences in assumed age. Other than that, it can get really difficult to tell one from another since there aren’t any physical peculiarities or dialogue idiolects. However, by the end, you can remember some of the girls based on previous behaviors and associated acts (making me look like a hypocrite).
Okay, so at this point, I realize that I’ve been going on for a while and, to be quite honest, it’s getting rather difficult to transition from bullet to bullet so I think the best option from then on is to share the remaining few reading notes that I have on my document, out of context, while I go ahead and reflect on how foolish I am and how the 2018 version of me was acting like a damn fool:
Jim has a knack to kill drama with his style of writing: “She glanced at Lucy, who stared back with a cold, uninterested look at Ms. Mallory. Of course, the new teacher was intruding on her territory and her protectiveness of her fellow sisters was kicking in. The teacher wouldn’t be welcomed with open arms by everyone right away. Lucy fiddled with her straight black hair, her deep gleaming eyes appearing almost violet in the lamplight” (3).
Backhanded compliment by the narration with “In a tight walk-in freezer nearby, Ms. Mallory discovered a number of meats hanging by still metal hooks in a surprisingly organized fashion, considering it was maintained by teenage girls” (4).
“Still metal hooks”—as opposed to what? Plastic hooks? Was [Mallory] expecting them to be rusted? I’m pretty sure that it could’ve been “steel metal hooks” which would make this less confusing but not less stupid (4).
Not even trying to be subtle with the fact that the girls had something to do with the disappearances of the last few house mothers— “‘It’s this place,’ she sighed, closing her book and setting down her pen. ‘I suppose it gets to them. It is old, and creepy, and in the middle of nowhere. There are things that happen here sometimes—strange things.”—said the girl with canonically violet eyes (4).
Ms. Mallory reacts in a manner which I can only describe has been seen in cutaway reaction gags in anime and manga—“How tragic! she thought. How inhumane! They had been cast aside for the sake of the teachers’ comfort. She could barely believe it” (4).
Who the fuck serves plain hamburgers without a bun, sauce, or side (4)?
So we only really know four out of the 13 girls mentioned--Abby (little girl), Zel (redhead with a bow), Bea (answered the door), Lucy (leader).
Only one who doesn’t sound awkward in the story so far is Lucy.
Keeps getting interrupted by the new opening song for Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid S and other anime opening videos.
Bruh: “After Lucy left, Ms. Mallory watched the trees moan and bend in the wind outside” (13).
The story itself isn’t bad—nothing cutting edge, a bit predictable, but the beats are present; the presentation of the story however--the early narration, the over-the-top Mary Poppins voice present with Ms. Mallory, and the numerous grammatical flubs—was subpar. Overall, this was not as bad as I remembered it to be—but I think that I can still refine it to be something that doesn’t make one cringe in the wrong way early on.
Production
At this point in the process, it was no longer a matter of why I was hanging myself with my own hubris but how I was to do the deed. And the solution was simple: write Jim’s story the way that I would. It would still be Jim’s story but supposedly better—to me, at the very least. So, I did that for about two straight weeks.
I suppose that pretending to write an award-winning short story sounded better than actually writing an award-winning story at the time. Let me be an example for why everyone should have an opportunity to see a therapist. Funny enough, I can recall my high school days and being in AP psychology where my teacher once defined the word “Catharsis”—coming from the Greek katharsis meaning “purification” or “cleansing”, and defined as an emotional release, particularly associated with stress, anxiety, fear, trauma, and anger.
I suppose those aforementioned feelings often peaked back then. Prior to Bartleby, I’d attempted to submit elsewhere with no luck for two years. I had a nice gig as a writing center tutor but who knows what that meant in terms of what I actually knew about writing. Other projects involving comic scripts fell through. Family wouldn’t stop harassing me about my useless English degree. Hell, even when I finally got my degree and got admitted to Towson University to pursue a Masters’ in Professional Writing, I thought that the department was simply looking for a body to fill in a quota. I thought, Some poor fucker must’ve forgot to sign some papers if they’re gonna let me into the program—imposter syndrome is a bitch.
Looking back at myself and how I was fueled by pure spite and whatever emotions make up a fledgling Sith Lord, I can confidently say that I was probably grieving my loss to Jim without knowing it. Luckily, I also think that the fact that I did all that was funny enough for me to warrant this entire essay series (and that is the closest thing to a thesis statement you’ll get from me).
Final Product
Hey Alexa… Play “Pyramid Song” by Radiohead.
Let this be a preface for the actual rework of “Thank You, Ms. Mallory” and the mark of a climax (that sounded suspicious) for my comical grieving process. I’d initially rewritten Jim’s story back in 2018 and simply locked it away in my Google Drive afterwards not knowing that I was going to do this. And, being the try-hard writer that I am, I had to give it a couple of reads in order to do my part for this circus act of a series. I, much like Jim, did not write a good story but not a bad story either. The biggest differences made were proofreading edits and stylistic decisions. It may seem a bit unfair to only show my version of the story without having the original in its entirety right next to it for comparison. But let me remind you of not only the sections of the original that I’ve shown thus far but keep in mind that Jim already won this inane secret war back in 2018—they have the prize money, they have the accolade, they got published. So with that in mind, while reading my version, imagine what Jim’s story must have been like. I may have been in the wrong to think that their story was unfit but you all know that already. I’ll just go ahead and shut up and let you get to reading my rework of Jim’s piece—“The Craving”.
Here we are again at the end of another essay. It’s a bit weird, isn’t it? This whole limited essay series thing.
What do you think of the new logo and banner? It’s pretty sweet, huh? Special thanks and shout out to the powerful Fay Reed for helping me with willing Trimothy (that’s the official name of the owl and there’s nothing you can do about it) into existence. Go check out her other stuff here if you’re interested in maybe commissioning her for your own newsletter logo (feel free to do that, Trimothy might get lonely).
So, yeah. Tune in next week for the penultimate edition to the TYFN: TTIRAA-WSS (OTPOAS-FE) series (the initialism’s got a real nice ring to it).
Oh, also, as a bit of a break between series because I do have another series like this one lined up in the future, I’m seriously considering posting an old short story for one week. I’m still unsure if I’m going to do that but it’s a serious possibility since I don’t want to go ahead and write up another overly wordy listicle like I did with the fast food drabble. Don’t get me wrong, it was fun and it went well but it was also birthed because I didn’t know what to write about.
Wouldn’t it be funny if I decided to make my shitpost articles paid exclusives?
Anyway, it’s late at the time that I’m drafting this and I’m not going to edit this part out before posting) and so I’ll leave it at that. If y’all don’t know, a couple of comic creators have been making their way onto the website and I actually recognize a few of the names so go check them out. I specifically recommend Scott Snyder, who will be running a monthly course on comic writing for all levels, and Chip Zdarsky because he’s actually a newsletter zaddy, and you can find embedded links to those sites below. Good night, farewell, like, subscribe, comment, share (please), and all that jazz.
Click here to read Part 3 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 subscribe, leave a comment, and share this degenerate’s blog to other sentient folk with internet access. Until we meet again, drink plenty of water and take care.