The Fountain Pen Blog

This weekend, I’ve been getting ready to submit some short stories and poems I wrote for college in the hopes of getting them published. In the process of doing this, I opened up a story that had been rejected a couple of times over six months ago to reread it, and had a big realization: it still needs a lot of work.

I was a bit shocked to realize this. Finding that it needs a few small changes on the sentence level wouldn’t have been a surprise, but the story had already been through many drafts. It was workshopped a few times in my creative writing classes during college, and revised for each of those, then revised again at least twice on my own time. With all that revision, I sincerely believed it was as good as it was going to get. Then it sat untouched on my computer for about 8 months (since the last time I submitted it), and when I looked back on it with fresh eyes, I was able to read it much more objectively.

I found myself wondering how I could have thought this was ready to submit in the first place. One of the major characters was extremely underdeveloped. So underdeveloped in fact that his relationship with the protagonist didn’t seem plausible. Their relationship is the focal point of the entire short story, so no wonder it hadn’t been accepted!

I spent this weekend reworking it a little at a time. On Friday and Saturday, I rewrote my description of that character and the main character’s first thoughts about him. I also added several pages of conversation between the couple when they first meet. Now I’m tackling the ending. I think I had already nailed the last paragraph and the basics of how their relationship is going to end, but just hadn’t filled in all the details that make it believable. I’m probably going to ask a former classmate to take a look at it before I submit it again, since I don’t want to wait another 8 months before revising one more time. This whole experience definitely shows something though: never underestimate the power of having a fresh pair of eyes check out your work, even if those eyes are just you in the future.

While I’ve known for a while that time is great for getting some distance from your work before revising, I simultaneously can’t believe how many major flaws I caught by just letting this story sit on my computer for 8 months. Have you experienced something like this? Feel free to leave a comment below!