Finding the Form with MJ Malleck

I began writing the story in 2018. I’d visited Getty Villa in 2014. Often my stories begin, not with a character, but with a place. The original story was called The Docent, and it featured a couple on the garden tour, with more emphasis on a disturbing docent, including a scene in the giftshop and washroom after the tour.

I showed the story to a writing instructor, and he said that the confines (limited time and space) of a garden tour suited a short  story well. I never consider structure, at first, but have come to realize that I do like to bind a story, put up some fences around the yard I’ll play in. For example, I set another story on a Greyhound bus ride (it’s now historical fiction, I guess, in Ontario) and one in a nursing home room. 

It was easy to remove the extra scenes. I tend to over-write, with most of my drafts clocking in around 4,500 words. I recognize now I am telling myself the story, and the backstory too. Not necessary to the reader but needed by me. It’s what teacher Betsy Warland calls the “scaffolding” and most of it comes out later. During 2022 and 2023 I kept revising the piece. My writing group workshopped it with me a few times. All of them are married women, and so they easily understood the relationship dynamics. I didn’t have to decide what the story was really about.

The early version was rejected by several magazines, and I knew why. I hadn’t fully landed; I was circling and skimming. I realized another of my common habits: The narrator was telling someone else’s story, not their own. Sure, it works, in masterpieces like The Great Gatsby, but I recognized it as my reluctance to invest.

I was also unhappy about the ending. Somewhere I had read the advice to “just bang out the first draft, all of it.” Gamely trying to comply, my stories often petered out in an unsatisfactory or too obvious way. Then, in 2023, I found George Saunder’s Substack. He teaches by unpacking short stories with his subscribers. Along the way, he shares his own messy and organic writing process. I exhaled. And on top of my working copy of Penance, in 2023, I quoted George: Don’t be afraid to draw attention to problems without quite knowing what to do about it.

With George’s permission to “not know” I felt less stupid, and more like an archeologist sweating in the sun to uncover a great treasure. I let go of the shame of writing with foggy intentions.

In the case of Penance, the teenaged girls and the virginal statues were in the first drafts. Also, hints about a conflict at home that the vacation was an escape from. Another trusted reader, male, told me he was interested in that. When I dove in, the story became the narrator’s, instead of the docent’s.