I recently had a story “Acorn, Honey, Fat, and Foxglove” published at “The Literary Fantasy Magazine”.
It’s a story I’ve been working on since at least 2017. That’s almost nine years.
That’s writing at a pace that William Gass could appreciate.
This should raise a few questions.
Let’s get the most important out of the way - is it the greatest short story ever written?
Answer: hell no. Don’t be stupid, please. Some say it’s Joyce’s “The Dead”, but for my money, it’s either “Victory Lap” by Saunders, “The Specialist’s Hat” by Link, or “The School” by Barthelme. YMMV.
It’s not even my best short story, depending on what dimension you’re using to determine “best” (along almost all dimensions, number of nominations, number of translations, and number of copies - it’ll be my story “Brand new ways (to lose you over and over and over again)”, originally published in Omenana).
What I can say is that it’s by far the most personal story I’ve ever written - and this is one of the reasons it took as long as it did to write, and why, in the end, I had to let it go as it lay.
It’s also, if I’m allowed to choose favourites, the story of mine with the ending that brings me absolute satisfaction. It’s my favourite ending, by far.
The Spark
The story began with a memory I had of living in Heathwood (it’s a real place, https://maps.app.goo.gl/jbh6ZdQZgExnMvqo8). I spent a lot of time alone in this set of flats, walking up and down the stairs, riding the lift, working out little games to occupy the afternoons before my parents came home.
I had a tiny Bart Simpson figurine which I would put into the lift, as though he were riding it, I’d press the button for the lift to go down to the first floor, and I would race it downstairs, me jumping down the stairs like 8 steps at a time.
Back in 2015 or so, I was thinking about this game I’d play, and I imagined how freaky it would be if when I got down to the first floor, that the Bart figurine would be turned to face the direction opposite to how I put him in the lift.
That was the story spark. Imagine that when the lift doors closed, there was something (unspecified) that could interact with stuff I’d put in the lift.
This is actually still a cool idea, and among everything I’ve written, there may be at least one other story here.
Draft upon draft.
I have at least seven quite different versions of this story. All of them involve a building with a hidden floor, a lonely kid, and some interactions between him and something from the “other place”.
The earliest version (and several of the versions) don’t quite specify what kind of things live on the 4th floor - here is the “reveal” at the end of the July 2016 version which was called “Going up to four”:
The door slid open and he heard a shifting or a shuffling, something like sand on paper.
Dan. The voice was high, like a voice from one of his cartoons.
Then it touched him, gently, on his face. A hand, impossibly long, and hot, almost like velvet left in the sun.
The method of communications between these beings and Dan was, initially, just notes left in the lift. Dan would put a note in the lift, and one would come back, until something happens to make him ascend the lift where the invisible floor would be revealed to him (and only to him - we never get to see the creature writing the notes).
In fact, in the version quoted above, Dan can’t see them, the condition of him ascending is that he cannot look at the creatures.
I have an epistolary version of the story which involves another kid who seems to enjoy killing animals, here’s an excerpt
“Is it bleeding?” I ask.
“I think you got it in the back,” said Jeff, not taking his eyes off that bird.
“Give me the knife,” he says. And I do.
He flips it open and the next thing sticks the blade straight into the dove’s wing, right up near where it joins its body. And the bird is now just shaking in the sand, throwing up dust and I tell Jeff to stop it, and so he stands up and stomps on the bird’s head as hard as he can.
Dan and Jeff stop speaking after that and, with that, Jeff leaves my drafts forever.
But this draft is important because it’s the first time that the Angela character (called “Evie” in this draft) makes her debut.
She looks about my age, maybe a little older. Brown hair, cut into this awful bob, and the biggest forehead I’ve ever seen outside an SF movie.
She obviously changes as the drafts progress, and here Dan is reading, rather than playing handball (we’ll get to that).
We also get the first version of what was to become the story’s proper ending:
I’m not sure what I expected to find, to be honest, but not that. A tiny room, like, maybe the size of a bathroom. There was a small table with some clothes folded on it, including Evie’s dress. A few pairs of shoes on the floor. Then, on the other side of the small room there was another door. That one looked really old. I walked over to that door and pressed my hand up against it. And the wood was freezing and felt kinda brittle, but I pushed and after a bit of sticking, it swung open.
It was another room, a stairwell. And it went up.
Once when I was standing outside school, about to walk home, I saw this girl step into the road and get knocked over by a car. It wasn’t bloody, and she wasn’t badly hurt, but in that moment I heard the tires, I smelled the tires, I saw her head knock against the bonnet, and watched her fly forward into the street, I felt a weird kind of dizziness, like something in the world had cracked for a moment and had leaked out all over normal. Standing at the bottom of those stairs, I felt that same way again. There it was, a flight of stairs, going up into the murky darkness where there shouldn’t, no, where there couldn’t be stairs.
There are several more drafts, including one where the whole story is set at the Four Seasons hotel in Durban, but these become staples. Angela/Evie just butting into Dan’s loneliness, and Dan eventually finding the stairs to wherever it is he eventually ends up.
The final bit was having the adult version of Dan be the one who returns and ascends. This seems to be introduced in an outline sometime in 2017.
Coming together
I think that I was getting close to the version that’s at “The Arcarnist” about two years ago.
I wasn’t writing, and, in fact, had mostly given up the idea that I should be writing, or that I had anything in particular to give to the world, artistically.
I was approached by another local writer who wanted someone to discuss publishing - we have subsequently become great friends - but it was him, and this story, that shook me out of my funk.
He encouraged me to start writing again, and suggested that I should send him something. This was late August 2024, and the story I sent to him was about two drafts off what is now published.
His response was polite and lukewarm, and I got the sense that he was like “oh god, I thought I was meeting with a writer?” but what he got was me and my construction site of a story.
Still, I persisted and started shaping it up into something that I could send out. And it started getting closer and closer to the published version. Even my writer friend seemed to enjoy the newer drafts (much to my relief).
Why so long? Why not longer. Also, a wound.
It’s very difficult not to read a story you’ve written and see only its faults. I have had some good feedback on this piece, and the people who read it and enjoyed it are people who I trust not to mislead me on that. So I won’t speak to what I think the story’s strengths and weaknesses are - I’m far too close for that.
Why, then, does this feel like such an important story for me? Why did I spend so much time on it? Why couldn’t I let it go?
The problem with this story is that it’s far too personal. Dan experiences a break in his life in the exact building that I did. This was the place where my family fell apart.
The drive that Dan’s mother takes him on is the same drive that my father took my sister and I on the morning my parents decided to get a divorce.
I’m not going to dive into the specifics of my life back there - it was different to Dan’s, but the loneliness I describe in the story, the kind of loneliness that makes you willing to believe anything, is something that we share. The story is relentless in its description of Dan’s loneliness, but it’s pretty much as I remember it.
And the fact that this story was so personal, that I was obsessed with paying tribute to what was one of the worst times in my life, something absolutely pivotal to the trajectory of my adolescence was the reason I couldn’t actually bring myself to commit to the story, to finish it, or to put it away.
And it was getting in the way. There were times I would sit to write, and the only thing that would come into my head was this story about ascending to the fourth floor. It completely sapped my ability to think of anything new.
I had to finish this story to write anything else. So I had to commit to some shape. I had to get this story out somehow.
Why this shape?
The reason why this shape is simple. It was the closest thing I had to being complete.
The problem with being a writer is that we have this platonic ideal of what we could produce, and anything that we do write tends to pale in comparison to this imagined piece of work.
Maybe this is just me?
So I had the shape, but needed to flesh it out. So I started digging in.
I knew I wanted to write a fairy story. So there’s a lot there if you look for it (which isn’t surprising, since it’s subtitled “a fairy story”). It’s also partly a kind of reverse Alice story, so you’ll find that in there too.
Perhaps the most prevalent theme is that of reflection, the story is dripping with the notion of reflection. This is everywhere in the story. Look out for it if you manage to read it.
Ultimately, it has this shape because this is the shape that was closest to hand. It was the shape that would get me submitting the thing and out of my head.
They say that sometimes you must kill your darlings. But sometimes you must just dress them up and get them the hell out of your life. Which is what I did with this story, with this version of this story.
It is a good lesson, though - how obsession isn’t always the best guide to what you should spend your time on, or that people will necessarily connect with what you’ve done with that obsession.
Conclusion, and where to from here?
So a few important lessons came from this.
First, other than this opening up my writing again, it turns out that there’s another story that mirrors it, of which this is just a tiny part. The father, unnamed and a monster in this story, is the protagonist in another much longer story that explores his trauma and the world of the fourth floor in far more depth (although it doesn’t take place there).
Second, I learned a fair amount about what works and what doesn’t in a longer piece. This was the first piece I’d really written and finished at the 5K length, which is a step change from what I’ve primarily written in the past (1000-3000 words). I learned a fair bit about structuring a longer piece and it seemed to have broken me through to a new space, since basically everything I’ve written since has been closer to 5k than flash. Still, this means I have much more to learn - there are pacing issues that can creep in at these longer lengths that I’ve never had to deal with before.
Finally, it gave me my favourite ending I’ve ever written. I’ve not really played with modulating language to this extent before, and not in a way that mirrors form. As Dan is ascending in the lift, his language is literally ascending too - compare the two paragraphs from the beginning and ending of the final scene, it begins:
It’s funny what we remember and what we don’t. As I stand here I can swear that there was never a button for the fourth floor in the lift’s control panel. But here it is, clear as anything. One, two, three, four. I don’t know how I could’ve missed it?
And ends:
There is no answer and no echo. But then, I think I hear something, perhaps feet shuffling on stone, much, much further above me. Maybe the whisper of a hand poised above strings, the moment before the music begins.
“Tell Dad, tell everybody. I’m here.”
There is the slightest breeze. Redolent of flowers and rain.
There’s no more reason to wait.
I put my foot on the first step and start to climb.
