Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

It amazes me how, every time I read something I’ve written, I want to change it. When I finish it I think it’s great, then I put it down for a while, and when I pick it up again, I’m like…bleah…and I’ve got to make changes.

This has never been more true than with “The Book of Solomon,” my most recent short story, which I’ve recently ceased trying to sell to the “literary” markets.

Now, in my defense, this story is a major departure from my previous fiction, on many levels. It’s a genre I’ve not tried before (historical fiction), and it’s a style very unlike most of my other work. influenced heavily by authors like Gabriel Garcia Márquez and Alice Hoffman, I purposefully avoided dialogue, working toward a more internal narrative and fluid style. Also, I did not shy away from complex syntax; I wanted to let the narrative flow in the way my character might think rather than how a storyteller might speak. Lastly, there’s a flipping ton of chronological intrication, jumping around from present to past to deep past to near future to imagined future.

The result was a minefield. Every page carried dangers.

In one place I mentioned a reaction to something from my character’s past, but forgot to mention the event causing the reaction until two pages later. Oops. Restructure. Several times I ran out of breath reading a sentence aloud. Oops. Break it up. And through the whole story, if I kept all the verb tenses precisely correct, the result was a ponderous, pedantic voice that is not my narrator. On the other hand, if I threw away too many hads or had beens, the reader won’t know if I’m talking about the present or the previous autumn.

Overall, it was a massive learning experience, especially since this is the style I want to employ in my next book.

So, did it get rejected because of these problems? I’ll never know. The heart of the story, the mainline of the prose, is unchanged. The style is essentially the same, too, though tighter now. It may have been rejected due to these errors and inconsistencies, or it may, truly, just not have been right for the market. While I suspect that the days of asking for rewrites is nearly gone–editors have such a surfeit of manuscripts that they can toss aside anything that isn’t a perfect match–there’s no way to know one way or the other.

Regardless, it’s a better story now. It’s tighter, cleaner, smoother. And I learned a lot both from the writing of it and from the editing.

k