Loving the Falls

February 9th, 2005, I sent a draft of a story called “The Falls” to my friend and writing workshop-mate Pat Stansberry.

Hey Pat…
For what it’s worth I did some editing on the Dead story I wrote. I don’t know if you were still planning on doing anything with the Dead stuff, but I wanted you to have a look at it. What do you think?
Hugs,
Marie

There’s a follow-up email where I explain I was worried the draft wasn’t “different enough” from the previous to justify sending to to our writing workshop again, so it is at least the second draft.

On my computer, I have a file from a year earlier, February of 2004, titled “workshop notes for Falls.” This is the earliest evidence I have for the story that just came out in Cast of Wonders, “Loving the Falls” – but it’s enough to make it the oldest story I’ve had published, seventeen years after it was written.

Pat had workshopped a novel about murder victims being forcibly resurrected by future medical tech, so that they could testify or provide evidence. The protagonists were a group of women all killed by the same serial killer who grow frustrated with the lack of help from law enforcement and band together to find him themselves. On the way they deal with racism, sexism, and the new discrimination against resurrected persons, who are referred to as Dead, (or in the case of the murder victims, The Slain, and woah yeah consent issues.)

I loved it. He still hasn’t published it, the chicken. Everyone in the workshop loved it so much that we all started writing our own Dead stories, and talked about maybe making our own group anthology for them. I worked hard on mine, certain that getting in on an anthology with my more successful friends was my only chance at actually publishing before I died. (I would get a time machine and tell past me it all worked out, but I doubt it would actually calm her down.)

For my Dead story, I decided to deal with another consent issue – underage resurrection. A teen girl jumps over a waterfall (something I always wanted to do) and dies. When she is resurrected, she discovers that everyone thinks she was a suicide, including her father and her estranged mother. She has to confront this catastrophic mistake she made as well as realizing that her relationship with her dad isn’t as close as she thought.

This story draws on deep wells for me — fathers and daughters, anxiety, suicide, self-sabotage. I submitted it a couple dozen times and got all the rejections and put it in the trunk to think about what it had done wrong.

Last December, feeling sad I didn’t have a story to submit to some death-themed call, I took it out and read it, and … it was shocking to me, how clearly I saw what was wrong with the story and how to fix it. Like it was in neon on the page.

I had written beautiful descriptions and paragraphs. I had written complications to the protagonist’s struggle. They were all good descriptions and good complications. I had just … put things in the wrong order.

What I had written in 2005 or so had this structure:

Person in a place with a problem.
Problem is complicated.
Resolve complication one.
Problem is complicated.
Resolve complication two.
Problem is complicated.
Resolve complication three.
Resolve problem.

See what’s wrong? See how laughably easy this was to fix? I didn’t, for sixteen years. (Albeit I probably was only actively editing/shopping the story around for six of those.) Every time I ratcheted up the tension, I immediately let it slide down again by removing the complications I’d come up with. The result was something that felt more like a series of vignettes than a single, cohesive story.

The new structure:

Person in a place with a problem.
Problem is complicated.
Problem is complicated.
Problem is complicated.
Resolve complication one.
Resolve complication two.
Resolve complication three.
Resolve problem.

That’s it. I literally copy-pasted bits around. I didn’t even have to save a new draft file. Other than some editing for clarity, that was all I had to do to turn a failed story from 2005-me into a sold story for 2021-me. (Yes, past me is PISSED about that lack of a time machine and has some other drafts for me to look at.)

Oh, and I had to get rid of the name of the waterfall. Paine’s Falls is a real waterfall I was thinking of as I wrote the story, but every editor said “too on the nose that’s a terrible name” and this is also a lesson for writers of autobiography – “it’s true” isn’t a good defense against “it doesn’t work.”

Anyway, enjoy “Loving the Falls” in Cast of Wonders today!