Broken Frontier

I’ve often found I do my best work when I am most unaware of doing the work. I’m sure some of you out there know what I’m talking about. It has a little something to do with the old proverb: “Pride goeth before the fall.” In other words, when you think you’re doing something great, it usually ends up being pretty lousy. But when you’re just having fun, it often ends up being some of your best work.

That’s exactly how I sold my first story.

I was reading John Gardner’s excellent book, The Art of Fiction, and I came across the following exercise.

“Describe a barn from the point of view of a man who has just learned that his son has been killed in a war. Do not mention the son, the war, or the death. (The exercise should run to about one typed page.)”

Gardner goes on to say that if the writer works hard, and if they have the talent to be a writer, the result of the work will be a powerful and disturbing image, a faithful description of some apparently real barn but one from which the reader gets a sense of the father’s emotion.

I decided to try the exercise myself and I wrote the following passage:

The barn was different today. Impossible, of course, that a barn could change overnight. Yet, somehow it had. It seemed bigger than before. Out of place, too. Before today, the barn had always seemed like a natural part of the landscape, as if it belonged right where it was, there between the house and the stand of oak trees. The bright red walls and white trim had looked as natural a feature of the terrain as the rope swing over the river at Jacob's Point or the well behind Carl's Gas-N-Go. Yes, they were man-made things, but they belonged. Like the barn. Only not today. Today the barn looked out of place. Like a fly on a vanilla ice cream cone. Like the flayed corpse of some prehistoric creature, all red muscle and white bone gleaming in the hot sun. Someone would have to do something about it, of course. Cover it up. Take it away. Someone would have to call Doc Otter to come over from Preston. The Sheriff would have to be there, too. One of them would ask to use the phone to call Murray from the funeral parlor. And what good would it do? Not a spot. A body of that size could never be moved, not even with one of those mobile-home haulers. No. Only one way to get rid of it. They would have to burn it right there. The stench and smoke would both be blinding, no doubt. Then it would be gone, and after a few days, the feeling would pass. The sting would dull to a throb and only the memory of the pain would stay behind. Then the barn would look like it belonged again. And this moment, too, would be nothing but a memory.

Once I had gotten that far, however, I found that I couldn’t stop. The rest of the story demanded to be written. I had to find out what happened next. So I kept on writing.

I ended up writing about 2200 words (just under 10 pages) and felt surprisingly good about what I had written. Good enough, in fact, to try and get it published. It wasn’t the first time. I used to have a collection of my favorite rejection letters (one of them said simply: “Jokes are for your friends, Dip. Don’t waste my time like this ever again.”) Undaunted by all those previous rejections, I made a few copies of my story, which I had titled, simply, “The Barn,” and sent them out.

I was pleasantly surprised when John Benson at Not One of Us magazine bought the story. It was my first fiction sale.

That credit was a particular milestone for me. I had two feature films in release and I had published tons of non-fiction -- including a book -- but I had never gotten paid for a piece of fiction.

It made perfect sense, of course. I had written the story as an exercise and nothing more. I didn’t start with the idea that I was going to get published; I just wanted to find out if I had the talent to be a writer of fiction.

What I’d like to do now is challenge everyone out there to try the exercise. Send your best work to me at marksteensland@brokenfrontier.com. I’ll pick the one I think is the best and award the author a prize. Since I know all of you who read last week’s column now carry pen and paper with you all the time, you can get started right now.