In the Fall of 2002, I sailed around the world.
While that is a fun sentence to type, and certainly an interesting fact about myself to bring up at parties, sometimes it’s hard to remember that I actually did it.
Have you ever told a story over and over again, so many times, that you become desensitized to it? Or, haven’t told a story in so long you don’t know if you even remember how it goes? I don’t know if I’m a forgetful person or if it’s just literally impossible for a human brain to hold too many things in it at once, but i’ll be damned if I can’t recall a specific detail about my trip around the world without some prompting.
Then again, I never have been a “specifics” kind of person. I take that back, I live in specifics. What I mean is, that while I can’t remember the date the above picture was taken or even what I did after I held a giant snake, I do remember the taste of the weird fruit I bought off one of the vendors in the Mekong Delta. I remember the smell of the humid air as some of my fellow students and I canoed down the river and how freeing it felt to be so far away from home, exploring parts of the world so different from my own.
Today I submitted a short story to a literary magazine. I have plans to write and submit many more, but today was the first and I thought I would document it here.
I chose a story I had written while I participated in Semester at Sea in the Fall of 2002. I remember my English Comp. Professor aboard the ship had assigned The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien as a fine example of how an author mixes what could be fact and what most certainly is fiction in a novel.
Sometime after reading O’Brien’s book, I visited the Cu Chi Tunnels in Vietnam and was inspired to write about my own experience in an assignment for class (hat tip to Tim O’Brien and in particular, the story about Mary Anne).
This week, in preparation for a possible submission ready piece, I read back over the story I had written so long ago. I was pleased. It was pretty true to what I remembered, but it needed something more.
I found rewriting an already finished story to be rather challenging. I was often torn between what I had previously written and what I wanted to include. I asked myself a lot of questions. What facts are pertinent to this new story? Which details are clues to something more I can invent? How far can I go with a character that is now no longer me? The flow was not organic and I had to iron out a lot of plot, theme and tense issues in copious rewrites.
That being said, rereading the story and giving it new life was overall a rewarding exercise. Writers hope to experience the world so they’ll have some damn thing to write about when they sit down at the desk. I just happened to be lucky enough to remember…scratch that, lucky enough to have had the frame of mind in 2002 to take notes to remind myself of that one time I sailed around the world.
I sent off the submission today to Bridge Eight Literary Magazine, fingers crossed. Until then, on to the next story.
ERIN WOLF 