Write Right, a guest post from Rita Plush

Let’s say your first short story was turned down ninety-three times before a journal gave it a thumbs-up. And let’s say the other stories you labored over, the ones you fine-tuned and brought back to your writers’ group ad nauseam, were shown the door as well. Any normal person would think to try another line of work. But who’s talking normal. We’re talking writer here. A nutcase who stockpiled 74XL ink jet cartridges and reams of multipurpose office paper, only to tear the flap of an envelope and find a “try us again” form letter inside. What made me want to write when no one wanted to read my writing? I’m a writer damn it! I can write!

Was I out to prove that The Little Engine That Could chugged away inside me—The Little Engine that Could Not stop writing. I write therefore I am?

Perhaps I was lonely and didn’t know it, longing for a promise of closeness with imagined readers. Was real intimacy lacking in my life? Could there have been something I couldn’t get from the people I knew in the flesh, that I had to invent them? Or did I want to create worlds with words? A wizard who could dream up characters and make things happen to them—wonderful and terrible things that only I had the power to create?

They say write what you know, and maybe that’s where I went wrong.

What did I know about a mountain woman in a far-flung cabin in the woods? The very thought of a roughhewn log gives me a full-body rash. Get me some calamine lotion!

And that date-from-hell story.  Last time I had a date I was eighteen, just me and a boy, one on one, out for a movie and something to eat, back in the day before mob-dating. What’s it called now? Oh, right, “hanging out.”

Maybe I should have been getting out more instead of backsliding decades for my stories and making up half-truths.  

Take that Brooklyn story about the mother who was a dressmaker. My mother was not a dressmaker, though I think I got the details down: the pin cushion bracelet, the mother on her knees taking up a customer’s hem. My father, in the needle trade for over sixty five years—that must be where the sewing bit came from—proud that my mother did not have to work because he was such a good provider—would be horrified, rest his soul, to learn that I’d given her a job of any kind.

And then there was the tale about the little girl whose mother died—the it-took-ninety-three-tries-before-a-journal-picked-it-up story. No wonder it took so long; my mother didn’t die when I was a little girl.  And the mother’s friend who had varicose veins?—very close veins the child called it. Cute, but it never happened. Plus it was my mother who had those swollen, bluish, purpley veins bulging out her skin that I couldn’t bear to look at, not her friend.

Now I see now where I went wrong! I was writing make-believe stories I didn’t believe in, inventing characters instead of writing what I knew!  A built-in pattern of failure, if ever there was one. But changes will be made! Attention will be paid! From now on I write only the truth.  I’ll not only name the name, I’ll throw in place and time of day.

I’ll start with that juicy bit of gossip going around my neighborhood that Selina down the block is getting it on with the UPS guy. And my sister… it’s high time Mom knew Selena spiked her Ensure and got her to sign over her house to Free a Felon dot org.  My boss at my day job? He’s selling worthless Florida swamp land to old folks in the Bronx. Where’s my whistle?

Ruin a marriage? Break a mother’s heart? Lose my job? What the hey! It’s what I know.

Update: Rita Plush is happy to announce that though she did use her imagination in writing her short stories they have been published in a collection called Alterations (Penumbra 2013).

Rita Plush’s writing practice includes fiction and non-fiction. Her short stories appeared in many literary journals including The Alaska Quarterly Review, The Iconoclast, The MacGuffin and Passager, before they were included in the collection, Alterations (Penumbra 2013). She is the author of the novel, Lily Steps Out (Penumbra 2012).  Rita, and the publication of Lily Steps Out was the feature article,“published and proud,” in Newsday’s Act II section in July, 2012, and Rita Steps Out, was featured in the Times Ledger, August, 2012. She is at work on a second novel, Feminine Products, that follows some of the characters in “Lily.”

Visit www.ritaplush.com to learn more about Rita and her upcoming venues.

And you can get your very own copy of Alterations from Amazon US (ebook or paper), Amazon UK (ebook or paper, Barnes & Noble, or Smashwords.