After four weeks of writing, last night I made the final revisions to my latest short story, Samuel’s Wife.  This morning, I sat in my study drinking a cup of coffee, my dog at my feet, my family still asleep, and read the story one last time. When I finished, I held the thirteen sheets of typed, double-spaced paper in my hands and thought of how much time I put into each short story I write.  When I say I wrote for four weeks on Samuel’s Wife, I don’t mean I wrote off and on, now and then, a few minutes here and a few minutes there. I wrote eight hours a day at least four days a week while laundry piled up, while dog hair accumulated on the red oriental rug and in the corners of the hardwood floors.  While my family slept and went to school and spread straw in the garden and bought groceries and watched television, I was locked in my study creating conflict and struggle between two strong women. My medical appointments were postponed, invitations declined. Many nights, I’d still be researching life in southern Georgia during the 19th century until well after midnight.  I studied the Trail of Tears and my own family history involving Indians.  Interruptions from the outside world caused me considerable stress.  For three days straight I had to drop my writing in order to complete end-of-year reports for a women’s club.  If you are a writer reading this, you know how difficult it can be to abandon a manuscript and focus on other projects.  When writing, I tend to become reclusive with an urgency to control the door that leads to me.  But it is never possible to control events beyond my study.  Life goes on and pulls me into it, like it or not.

Samuel’s Wife is written in first person present tense.  Some say this is one of the most difficult and limited formats for writing, yet for certain stories I prefer the sense of immediacy that comes from first person present and the distinctive voice it demands from the narrator.  The opening line of Samuel’s Wife is “Here comes Bess.”  To be sure, I tried retelling the story in first person past and third person past, but the story fell flat.

When I wrote Sleeping on Paul’s Mattress there was no other point of view and tense that would work.  It needed a strong voice and first person present pulled the narrator’s anger and hurt to the surface where it pulsed with life. Sleeping on Paul’s Mattress starts with, “From my crouching position under the house, I watch a hearse back into the yard and stop right short of the front porch.  It’s late in the day, and the sun is bleeding red across the sky for as far as I can see.  Four men with fleshy faces climb out of the hearse, straightening their ties, flipping imaginary hairs from their dark suits.  They look like white sugar frosting on a shit-pile if you ask me.  You can’t dress up poverty like ours.  No, you can’t color our house anything but ugly no matter how many polished shoes walk up its decaying steps.”

I don’t always write in first person present tense.  Most of my stories won’t accept that limited format, yet I’ve learned to be true to myself and buck off the rules of writing whenever I need something fresh and alive.  By doing so, I often open myself up to criticism, but if I am afraid to plow new ground, then I have no business planting words.