An Editor Gave Me Something I Didn’t Ask For

I graduated from college in 1993 with the sense that I may have found what I was looking for: I was hired to be an English teacher to a group of thirteen year olds, and, just as importantly, I was a young man who, for his 22nd birthday, asked his mom for and received the latest edition of the Writer’s Market that listed an almost limitless set of potential homes for the shitty stories I wanted to write.

While I lacked a trained and nuanced understanding of form and convention, I possessed a percolating sense of what being a writer felt like. I knew the sensation of hitting the vein, and I enjoyed that feeling immensely. I wanted to feel it as many times as possible. 

But I didn't know how to do it. I went to Skidmore College, where there were fantastic fiction writers , but I was too afraid to actually take their classes. So I took poetry classes and wrote some loathsome stuff that gave me the sensation I was looking for, even if the form embarrassed me somehow.

So, straight out of college, I decided I would try my hand at fiction. I wanted to write the short stories that I loved to read and that I was sharing with the cluster of young teenagers who seemed to see me both as a gratifying target and,  on good days, as a plausible teacher. 

I wrote a story. It was called “A Gift.” It was not a good story -- and the vapid title was the least of its flaws. After work, when the photocopier was free, I printed up copies out of view from my boss and colleagues.

 I treated my writing as a secret, but the kind that children hold, the kind you’re bursting to share if only someone would catch you in the act.  

I bought manila envelopes at the drugstore. I learned from the Writer’s Market that an SASE was a self-addressed stamped envelope. I put the stories in the mail, and I waited. 

My wife and I were living in a spring house on the estate of a family of one of my students. It's a long story there. But I do remember in those early years of our absurdly young marriage -- we were 23 at the time -- I do remember the long driveway on Dolington Road in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, flanked on either side by cornfields, with stalks long and straight as arrows, as bones, as femurs. 

I would go into the mailbox every day to see if New York had written back. Most days, there was nothing in there. But one day, I recognized something in that gaping mouth of the mailbox: my own childish handwriting on my SASE.

The note was from a journal called Story Quarterly, and, as you can see from the letter I received, an editor named Diane Williams wanted to see my story again. She asked me to call her if I had any questions. She invited me to call collect. 

Of course she did. See how easy this is? 

So I called her. As I remember, she was intrigued with my story and encouraged me to trim it. To get to its essence. Sitting on my slip-covered futon, I responded like I knew what she meant. 

In my head, I was like, I knew it. Through osmosis or raw talent, I understood how to compose the kind of story that made editors sit up. This was the secret I wanted everyone to know. I had both the aspirations and the tickets. 

 Actually, I didn't know it. I hoped it. I bit down on it, like the inside of a cheek.

I sent her the revision and waited again. 

I look back at that version of me with a tilt of the head and something like wistfulness if not envy. That guy wanted it as badly as this guy does, and for a short string of time, he felt like he might be able to bypass the trials and humiliations that plagued the artists and writers he knew about (which, to be honest, were not that many). 

I probably told people at work. I’m sure I did. I probably bragged about it, striving unsuccessfully for humility because,  How to be humble when I dreamed my dream into being? When I willed it into the world just by typing? I’d skirted the hard work and stumbled my way into her pages. A drunk in the bar of literary brilliance. 

I walked that driveway day after day, waiting to hear from my editor (was she mine now? Isn’t that what writers called people like Diane?). When the next letter appeared, I received my gift back. You can read her note and her revision of my revision for yourself. I remember being stunned at it, because part of me felt, how could an acceptance feel like a rejection? 

I remember feeling embarrassed that I had felt so confident in my abilities, only to learn that she didn't like my story as much as she liked about a dozen of its sentences.

I remember weighing it like it was some sort of moral, ethical conundrum:.

Do I accept my first publication, truncated and abbreviated and curated as it was, or do I stand on principle about my great short story, “A Gift?”

I probably talked to my twin brother about it. I know I talked to my wife about it. I didn't know any other writers, so it probably ended there.

In the end, it didn’t take much time or thought to decide.

I said, Sure. I said, Thank you. 

Diane changed nearly every word, including and especially the title -- “A Man Gave Me Something I Didn’t Ask For.”

I hated it at first. Now, of course, I think it’s about the only good part of the story.

When the issue of Story Quarterly finally appeared in the same mailbox, I was both lifted and grounded.  It was so disappointing, but also, it was pretty cool. Look at my name there on the back of the journal. 

In the aftermath, New York did not come calling. I trudged on writing my stories, submitting, getting rejected, revising, submitting. It took another three years for an editor to pluck a story out of the pile. If the submissions dropped into the mailboxes at a steady pace, the publications came in unpredictable waves. 

I look back at the experience, and, cheekily I know, it really was a gift. 

The obvious moral of the story is that writers can barely see their own work, and as such, it’s best to approach the act with a humble pen.

I believe that.

What I mostly take away is that the act of putting something in the world is a cleaving, and it's best to approach it like a Civil War surgeon and a Civil War patient. Bite down, ready yourself for the blade, and then get used to what life is afterwards. 

Because there's no parade -- nor should there be.

I write because it’s the only way I’ve discovered to make the time I spend away from home and family feel valuable and valued. I mark time word by word. I honor my time on the planet in the form of sentences and the airy messages they sometimes manage to send.

Diane’s title is so much better than mine. I admire how she took a trite, formulaic story and turned it into something interesting.

I also learned not to be embarrassed by myself, but maybe to be a little bit quieter about the act and its occasional successes (ironic here as I write these words). 

It's a humiliating and gratifying act to put words to paper and put them out in the world. It’s best to look down at them, soak in the sensation, and then turn away.