April 13th, 2020 - The Other One

Dear TNY,

Thank you for saving me some time with “The Other One” on this, another installment of the ‘ronies lockdown.

How did you save me time?  Well, within the first thousand words or so I was able to determine that this story was unfit to be published or consumed by anyone with any knowledge of short stories or literature.  So I skimmed the rest to see if Heloise would diddle Delia.  Spoiler alert:  big nope.

I do want to thank you for last week, though.  Because I talked to the Big Man himself, and it was grand, and now I’m sitting here feeling guilty because I know I need to articulate why this story wasn’t very good because that’s what the Big Man has manifested within me.

First, summary.  I cannot count the times I have had to remind you that summary is a weapon of story destruction if used improperly.  Here, we have so much summary that it brings the narrative flow to a full stop.  Each paragraph is filled with unnecessary detail about every goddamn thing, more backstory than needed, and character after character whose roles seems to be to entertain the author, not carry the story forward.  If you were to look at this as a Word doc and zoom way out (as I did), you’d see that almost the entire story is made up of block chunks of summary.  When scanning, I was able to pick one or two phrases from each of these chunks and move on; and I missed nothing.  As they would say on Letterkenny, better take 23 to 27 percent off there, bud.  But in this case, this story could lose closer to 50% in order to become a short story with a proper arc.

Secondly, boring.  What I mean when I say boring is that you have some key ingredients:  An affair, a death, and the daughter of the man that had the affair meeting the woman her father had an affair with.  There’s natural tension there.  God, what could have been done with that.  But this story, instead, meanders through characters and subplots like a fucking telenovela, all of which distract and obfuscate the narrative arc (which, 101 level shit here, is necessary to get us to care about any of these characters at all).  Once again, seems like you are publishing novel style writing in a short story slot in your magazine, which is a waste of my time, but I know you don’t care about that.  What you should care about is that this trains readers to believe that this type of big, rambling, self-absorbed voice is what short stories are about.  And they aren’t.  At all.  Motherfuckers should be an arrow straight for your heart.  This is that smug, modern, look-at-my-words type shit (words that are so important to the author and editor that they couldn’t find it in themselves to cut them; any of them).

A couple of days ago I was digging around in my book stash in the van I live in (yep, hobo), and I yarded out a copy of The Old Man and the Sea that I forgot I owned.  It only took 10 pages of reading before I once again fell in love.  I have been reading your bullshit for so long that I forgot that real writers wrote real shit once upon a time and that shit was immaculate and fucking rang with truth.  That there were writers that gave some of themselves up when writing, each piece taking a toll on the artist, vs what I see from your magazine, where the writers seem to be using these pieces as ways to puff themselves up.

And maybe that’s just one more thing that I hate about you that I haven’t thought about until right now.  Real Art is a finite resource that slowly destroys the artist as they have to journey into the collective unconscious (i.e. pure fucking madness) and come back to document it.  Your weekly waste of everyone’s time ignores this and instead favors the documentation of navel-gazing and narcissism.

But that’s cool.  You already knew that.  Because if you understood anything about literary art, you’d respond.  Because what artist doesn’t want to be better?  I’ll tell you which one:  The one that already thinks they are the best.  And that shit…that’s fucking death.

Nick