Michelle Richmond's third novel, No One You Know, will be out in June. Her most recent book is the New York Times best seller The Year of Fog. Her stories have appeared in Glimmer Train, The Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. www.michellerichmond.com
On the Joys of Not Finishing What You Started I'd been struggling for two years with a novel I was writing on contract, unable to find my way, when I finally confessed to my editor that the book just wasn't working. "Do you think you could write something else?" she asked. Strangely, that simple solution had never occurred to me. After all, I had invested 300 pages and hundreds of hours in the book, and the thought of abandoning it seemed obscene. Days later, officially released from the unwieldy mass of my failed manuscript, I started from scratch. Blank page, new premise; new characters, voice, and setting. The freedom proved exhilarating, and the result was No One You Know, a novel about the stories we tell ourselves and those that others tell for us. It's also about math, and the dangers of literary ambition. Writing it was a joy and a relief. Our impulse as writers is to attempt to salvage the words, to make good on the promise we made to ourselves when we penned the very first line. While there is beauty in perseverance, sometimes the best thing you can do for a story is let it go, and give yourself the freedom to begin again. |
Every story we publish is unsolicited, and 86% of the stories we accepted last year came to us directly from the writer. One of the most respected short-story journals in print, Glimmer Train Stories is represented in recent editions of the Pushcart Prize, New Stories from the Midwest, O.Henry, New Stories from the South, Best of the West, and Best American Short Stories anthologies. Glimmer Train Press, 4763 SW Maplewood, PO Box 80430, Portland, OR 97280-1430 USA |