Genre: Short story / novella
Title: 'Riptides' / Riptides
Estimated publication date: Hey kid, I send this to The New Yorker every Friday. So go ask them.
In October of 2016, I had the opportunity to dig up a number of my college notebooks, binders, and textbooks. One of my discoveries was the portfolio from my sophomore year creative writing class. It was a crystal ball of sorts predicting the future known as TOA: self-indulgent critiques of other people's work, pompous reviews of stories I barely understood, and even a diary-like entry about a day I (apparently) spent entirely apart from all electronics.
There were also my first two proper attempts at short fiction.
The first story seemed like something I would write if I were imitating my conceptualization of a short story. The story involves A Ho-Hum Event leading to A Bad Thing. As the narrative progresses, the protagonist struggles to do The Right Thing. We readers see through key passages that the protagonist is A Good Person who is also A Flawed Person, or just human. The story concludes with an event which may or may not represent The Growth Of The Protagonist.
I thought my professor's comments were perfect: 'Tim, this story has a beginning, a middle, and an end.' I returned this work to its rightful place at the bottom of the storage box.
The second story was a different...er, story. The basic plot involved a kid just younger than my age at the time, around eighteen, struggling to determine if his late father was a heroic or a tragic figure. He does this as he kills time during the summer before leaving for college.
There was also a slow-dawning of understanding here, a subtle undercurrent if you will, regarding the mediocrity expected of him by his world: get a degree, get a job, get out. Is that all success means? He tries to put these two parallel threads together and the result is a meditation on the wisdom of swimming when there is a great risk of sinking.
The process of recently reading the story was a little shocking to me because I have no idea how I wrote about those ideas. What experience was I drawing from? What observations did I base it on? Still, that's what the story was, and that's what I'm currently not working on at the moment.
I was not shocked at all to see how wildly different the first and second drafts were. In fact, only the title survived the first revision. I might not have been a good writer by any stretch in college but I did give this class the same huff-and-puff I brought to the coursework in my majors.
I bet all my effort led to this real critique from my professor: 'Sit on this one for a while.'
It's been a decade, and counting.
