I was on the phone with a literary magazine editor who had recently accepted one of my stories for publication. The call was drawing to a close when I decided I had to ask: When he first came across my story in the submission queue, did the fact that it had the word “abortion” in the title put him off?
I wouldn’t have blamed him if it had. Anyone who has worked as a literary editor recognizes certain types of familiar stories, and some subjects—like abortion, or incest, or the death of a parent, or infidelity, or infertility—might raise an immediate red flag. It’s not that someone can’t write a really great story about, say, losing a parent to cancer, but if the editor has seen this premise again and again, she can’t help but feel an initial zing of disappointment the instant she opens a submission called “My Mother Died of Cancer.” It’s only human nature. (And I say this as a writer who not only lost her mother to cancer, but has written about it.)
When I was fiction editor for Mid-American Review, I consciously worked to overcome my knee-jerk reactions in order to look at a piece objectively. So I knew firsthand that writing a story about abortion and titling it “The Abortion Club” was risky. A lot of editors would see that title in the queue and inwardly, unconsciously, roll their eyes. It was a first impression that my story might not be able to survive.
But I wrote the story anyway. The key for writers in this position, I believe, is to first be aware that you’re in familiar territory. The next step is to recognize that if you’re going to write about this, then you better step it up and make your submission stand out. For example, when I think of an “abortion story,” I immediately envision a very particular, predictable sort of story—so I set out to write not that, but something that could ideally come across as fresh, strange, or surprising on the page.
In the end, I submitted a story called “The Abortion Club” to literary journals based on faith—faith that at least some editors would put aside any initial negative reaction to read on and, possibly, get drawn into the story no matter its subject.
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My in-progress story collection surrounds taboo subject matter. I have recently published or am contracted to publish stories about cannibalism, necrophilia, zoophilia, euthanasia, virginity, and, yes, abortion. But when I first sat down to write “The Abortion Club,” I felt apprehensive. I knew that if I had to explain the story’s premise to someone, it would sound so ridiculous that I’d immediately abandon the whole thing. So I didn’t say a word about that story until I completed a full draft and was ready to workshop it.
I often protect my writing this way. It’s also why, if I ever meet you in person and you ask me to describe the plot of my novel or one of my unpublished stories, I will probably develop a look of total panic. First, I’m not so great at verbalizing my fiction projects (it’s why I’m a writer in the first place). But more than that, I worry that talking about the story will kill a part of it precisely because I’ll make it sound so stupid.
In a blog post after winning The Story Prize for her collection Battleborn, Claire Vaye Watkins suggests that perhaps “every idea for a story is bad until you make it good.” She writes:
Any time I’ve written anything good I’ve spent the vast majority of the composition process convinced it was an utter stinker. And they were stinkers, until they weren’t, at which point they were done. The only way to get from one to the other is work . . . The idea is a formality, mere permission. The triumph is what you do with it.
Any story idea can become a winner if told in a masterful way. Take Jenny Offill’s unusual novel, Dept. of Speculation. I use the word “unusual” even though the book is about a marriage that falls apart following an affair. Infidelity is standard-issue subject matter in fiction, and yet Offill takes this familiar premise and turns it into something startling.
In an NPR interview, Offill admits she was initially wary about writing about infidelity:
I felt incredible trepidation about writing about motherhood and marriage. I was particularly not interested in writing a book that had an affair in it, because I thought that we’ve all read that a million times. But at a certain point, I realized that I wanted the book to kind of break apart in the middle—to have a before and an after. And I realized that if you defamiliarize things enough, you really can write about anything.
“Defamiliarize” is the perfect word for how to make an old premise feel new again. I didn’t know to describe my process that way when I was drafting the abortion story, but this was more or less what I was reaching for.
“The Abortion Club” did get rejected, but before long, it found a home. And when I asked my editor whether the title put him off, he hesitated—not because he wasn’t sure how to answer, but rather because he seemed surprised I’d asked the question at all. His answer, in the end, was a resolute no. He did not come to “The Abortion Club” with preconceived notions, skepticism, or doubts. Like any good editor, he waited to see the material at hand.
If the writing comes alive, he told me, that’s all that matters.