A few years ago, I found myself in the middle of a writing slump.  All the short stories I sent out came back with a five-word rejection:  Not Right For Our List.  For a writer, those five words have the same effect as someone saying:   “Are you kidding with this manuscript?”

Those rejections eroded my confidence.  Day after day, I tried to write the perfect short story.  But every time my fingers touched the keyboard, my brain went into instant paralysis.  My mean ninth grade teacher Miss Mayer would float into view.  She’d say,  “You call that a plot?  The back of my cereal box is better reading.”  Or, “I hate your main character.  What a whiner!  You ought to kill her off on the first page.”

My trashcan filled with crumpled pages.  The weeks went by.  Finally, I became so desperate I actually prayed for inspiration.  Well, God works in mysterious ways.

Soon after, my youngest son—Typhoid Harry—came home with a raging flu. Within three days, we all became sick.  One night I went to bed with a nice toasty fever and I dreamed in vivid color about a silver tuba, an upholstery repairman and a big old
Victorian house.

When I woke up, I realized I had been given the kernel of a short story.  Too sick to sit at the computer, I lay in bed speaking into a tape recorder.  I didn’t have a plot in mind, just the images of the tuba and the repairman.  Instead of allowing the evil Miss Mayer into my bedroom, I pictured friends and family members.  Then, I plunged into my story.  I didn’t worry about plot, characters or grammar.  I just spilled out the tale as quickly as it came to my hot little brain.

Several days later, when I felt better, I sat at the computer and typed.  I intentionally did not go back and listen to the tape.  I didn’t try to recapture words or ideas.  I just wrote what came to mind.

After writing, I listened to the tape.  Interestingly, my written story differed significantly from my taped story. Without realizing the shift, I told the story in the third person, but I wrote the story in the first person.  The dialogue in the taped story sounded lively, spoken in fragments rather than given as ponderous speeches.

However, I gave little sense of setting in the spoken version.  As I plowed along in the story, I garbled details about characters.  Then, I came up with an ending that didn’t make much sense, and therefore did not entirely satisfy.

My written version carefully set the scene.  I spent time puzzling through the details of the plot.  I fleshed out the characters by including flashbacks.  I did research on turn of the century tubas and used the information to make the story more credible. When I read the story out loud, though, the dialogue sounded clunky.  The story bogged down with all the detail and flashbacks.

So, I went back and as I listened to the tape, I re-wrote sections of material.  Finally, I came up with a third version, combining the best elements of both stories.   I incorporated the lively dialogue, trimmed the descriptions and flashbacks, and tightened up the plot and pacing.

What did I learn from this little exercise?  First, the obvious: it is impossible to write when you have imagined a negative critic peering over your shoulder.  Being sick caused me to forget the ninth grade English teacher and allowed the creative part of my brain free play.

Also, I realized that telling a story is somewhat like playing ping pong.  You plunge right in and keep going.  Your audience is listening expectantly.  You can’t stop to figure out the finer points of your plot or the tiny details that make your character who he is.  You hope that comes to you.  Regardless, you keep going and come up with the tale that spills out, flaws and all.

Writing a story is more like playing a chess game.  You think through each move, puzzling out the relative benefits of any choice you may make.  The process is slower, more intentional.  The end result may fit together better.  Yet, the overall story may collapse under the weight of all that deliberateness.

So, my bout with the flu gave me a new way to approach writing a short story.  Perhaps we make use of one  area of our brain to tell a story and another area  to write one.  By using both approaches to create my tale, I came up with a far better story in the end.

You are probably wondering whether the story ever saw the light of day.  Well, miraculously, it was published in The Virginia Quarterly Review.  Here is the link: http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2000/autumn/prum-requiem-b/