Up this week on Tell Your True Tale, my storytelling website, is a piece by Kansas writer Rachel Kimbrough.
Check out “How I Know” — a story about doubt, faith, a child and a mother.
Rachel’s a great writer. This is her fourth TYTT story.
Remember, I’m eager to look at all submissions. I don’t pay, but I do edit.
So get writin’.
I’ve been meaning to send the author a note conveying my high regard—and affection—for this and the other three stories (“Help Needed,” “Emri’s Chest,” and “Smashing Plates”) published on your “Tell Your True Tale” web site. It’s half-past time I did so, as I keep turning to them—this marks at least the fourth time I’ve read “How I Know”—not only for the manifold pleasures of reading a great story, but also to gain some insight into how she does it, to learn just what it is that makes her so good and what she writes so affecting. I’ve decided that it boils down to this [ALERT: “secrets” and “shortcuts” of successful writers revealed after the next colon!]: (1) work hard; spare no effort–and take as much time as necessary–to get everything right; often it takes a lot of striving, strain, and travail to make it appear that what you’ve written caused you no trouble at all; (2) tell the truth, however discomfiting, distressing, or unseemly that may be—for the writer _or_ the reader; (3) don’t try to impress; just tell the damn story (“Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down,” as Ezra Pound enjoined in his Cantos; cf. also Samuel Johnson: “Read over your compositions and where ever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out”); (4) write about people, not some vague, disembodied concept or construct–yours or anyone else’s (Johnson again: “The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it”). Thank you, Rachel Kimbrough (and you, too, Sam), for enabling me better to enjoy and endure.