A Fistful of Crayons

Remember when I talked about taking my lopsided pumpkin cupcakes with the runny cream cheese frosting to the British Baking Show?

Well, I did that. And paid $15 for the privilege.

I revised a story that has been languishing on my desk for months for submission to a Wisconsin writing contest. It is the same story that I submitted last year (when the cream cheese frosting was both lumpy and runny).

I remember last year when a much more experienced fiction writer friend critiqued the story, gave me gentle praise, and suggested many ways to improve it, and then said, “Just remember there are very experienced short story writers who enter this contest.” I understood his meaning. I was writing with crayons.

I might have moved up to colored pencils this year.

I rewrote the story, changing the tense from past to present, and straightening out many of the confusing elements of time and place. The story is about a woman, Carol, who takes her husband’s ashes to be scattered at their summer home on Lake Superior only to find that a young girl, Ruthie B., is living as a squatter in her house. I was very pleased with the story, pleased enough to take it to my writer’s group.

The opinion of the seven other writers in the group: Carol isn’t sad enough.

So, I embarked on making Carol sadder. First, I added crying and then numbness and then drinking heavily and then a slight hangover. If I hadn’t shown my work to the group, I would have thought Carol was plenty sad enough, just very stoic, very Midwestern.

You need more “internals” the group said. That part needs another “beat,” they said. The gist of it all was you need more than eight colors in your box, dear. And I took all of it in like people were bringing extra pies to dinner- there is no bad pie, every pie is a plus.

So now I have more crayons or more colored pencils and certainly plenty of pie and a submitted story which is probably as good as I can make it. And cupcakes which are pretty good no matter how runny the frosting is.

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Photo by Kristin Brown on Unsplash