Short Story

Submitted.  Including a $25 submission fee. Once in a while, a journal or magazine to which I subscribe invites short stories from readers and others with the prize being seeing your name in print and your ideas broadcast to others.  I've entered two medical ones sponsored by The New England Journal in recent years.  To be sure, the ones the editors selected far exceeded my 1500 words in imagination and elegance.  Yet there was value to me in the few hours it took to compose, edit, and submit my own manuscript.  Much of what I write, the means of expressing myself, is descriptive, bordering on journalism.  Term papers are long gone and I've never had a published research paper.  But I engage in a lot of commentary.  Those 1000 word submissions created over a few hours appear periodically and generate a little comment.  Unfortunately, in this day of FB, X, and similar public forums, thought has been replaced by Tweets, those quick sentence or two retorts whose brevity and straightforward wording get captured in less than a minute.  Journalists seem to hang out on Twitter when not composing their own articles because of the brevity, and usually superficiality, of the comments, which often reflect the id of the typer. 

My current challenge arrived passively from a reputable and widely read Jewish magazine, which has printed my letters in the past, along with one tongue in cheek satiric photo I took near my workplace.  It had to be of Jewish content, less than 5K words, and with a due date.  Short story, fiction.  I rarely write fiction, though I've taken to assigning myself at least two novels a year since retirement, never falling short of that quota and often exceeding it.  But short stories are often difficult for me to read, as they are expected to be read in a single sitting, the length frequently in excess of my attention span.  Yet fiction may reflect the pinnacle of language.  It requires the author to transform his or her mindset to somebody else's, to tell a story with actions, physical descriptions, conflicts, and unexpected outcomes all projected on a narrator other than himself.  In effect, giving the glory of language to people who do not exist in reality, yet would be recognizable if they did.

The writer, or verbal storyteller, also has to have motivation to organize and convey what he thinks.  Frequently the stories are tangential to an author's experience, or a real encounter fictionalized.  But sometimes the subject is somebody else's experience either witnessed or imagined by the storyteller.

For me the Jewish subject was easy to choose.  People designated as leaders often do not put optimal treatment of people ahead of the objectives of the institutions they are trained to lead.  Some very good people who could have been contributors, or often were contributors, become ideological sacrifices.  No shortage of these incidents to expound upon.  And I did.

Off it went to an electronic submission service along with a credit card authorization.  And there it is likely to stay until dismissed by the magazine's editor scanning the first paragraph some time after the due date.  But somebody, maybe a professional, maybe a writing hobbyist like me, will compose a tale that merits a broad audience.