Good themes for contests, challenges, and anthologies are typically stretchy. As a person who organizes things like this, I always want the theme to give someone enough to get their wheels turning, but also keep the lid off the box so that the authors can be as creative as they want.
I love it when someone surprises me with something that honors the theme, but uses it in a way I never expected.
If an author wants to participate, but doesn’t have any idea what to write, I want the theme to be specific enough to immediately spark an idea. But the theme shouldn’t be so constraining that an author can’t do something unexpected with it.
This spring I was asked to write a sample story as part of The Company’s Spring Writing Challenge, led by Alli Prince. Each week the challenge gave writers a prompt that they had to incorporate into a flash fiction story. Each week a different author on The Company’s team wrote a sample story to help participants see how they might use the prompt.
I’d done a great job of delegating this whole project out, and I wasn’t originally on the docket to write a story. But I guess I was the first alternate when someone else had a change of plans. (Heavy lies the crown and all.)
I was tasked to write a flash fiction story with the prompt: “Write a short story about a character who experiences a rebirth.” It had to be less than 1,000 words.
1,000 words is not a lot. That’s about two typed pages.
The key to great flash fiction is writing a complete story. Even though it’s short, we still need a complete narrative arc with a beginning, a middle, and an end.
I’m anything but a conventionalist. When someone gives me an assigned theme, I feel it’s my duty to do something unexpected with it. I also felt like this was a good opportunity to demonstrate to the challenge participants how to stretch a theme to fit your work.
The Spring Writing Challenge mostly attracted younger Christian writers, 14-25 years old. A lot of what we saw was what you would expect from young Christian writers: fantasy, supernatural, angsty young protagonists, obvious Christian themes. There’s nothing wrong with any of that, but I wanted to demonstrate something different.
Key question: If I strip away all of my assumptions, what is the actual definition of the theme?
“Rebirth” has a lot of cultural connotations. My head goes to things like zombies, phoenix, baptism. Those are the kinds of “rebirths” we know.
But I pondered for a few minutes: what is a rebirth, really?
Really a rebirth just means that an old thing passes away, and a new thing emerges. Merriam-Webster defines rebirth as “a new or second birth.” That’s all it means.
As an added challenge for myself, I sometimes like to take something that’s ordinary and make it interesting. When I write short stories, I often want to take something so small and see how big I can make it.
Because that’s how life works. Most of our lives aren’t made up of grand romantic gestures. Our lives are made up of small decisions that in the moment feel like the whole world.
This was the Spring writing challenge. So I wrote this story about a young man who has earned money shoveling snow all winter. That part of him must die, and something new must emerge.
Read the story below, and following that, I’ll share some inside information about my process for writing a story like this.
Birth of a Salesman
$87. Eight-seven.
Dad could make it work.
Wilson picked his nose with the nail of his thumb, in a kind of off-handed circular motion while his index finger scratched the front of his nose. He’d seen adults do something similar, and thought it a mature way to fidget with his boogers. Unlike the adults, Wilson held the molten snot and rolled it into a ball between his thumb and forefinger before flicking it down into the gravel.
He stared at the mower. He’d seen how you pull the lever on the handle and pull the string. But there was a tiny lever on the side of the engine, and he wondered what it did. Maybe it pumped the oil.
He stood motionless, staring at the machine while he waited for the junk man.
“No, I didn’t carve it,” the junk man jawed with another man as they stood over a chainsaw statue of an eagle raising its wings in flight. “But tell you what, that ding dang thing weighs 200 flibbity pounds, tell you what.”
But he didn’t say ding dang or flibbity, those are just the words Wilson stamped in his mind. He learned from the preacher that even your thoughts can be a sin.
The men laughed as they rambled on with a lot more ding dangs and flibbities mixed in for good measure.
Wilson fingered the wad of cash in his pocket as he waited.
He’d shoveled eleven driveways last winter for eight bucks each. Except for Mrs. Bedford, cause she only had seven dollars in her purse.
Not bad for only three snowfalls.
He looked at the sign attached to the handle with packing tape, flapping in the wind while men talked with their adult words. “$110. Starts good,” the sign said.
$23 short. More than 20% different, he figured in his head.
But his dad could do it.
He once saw his dad pay $40 for a bicycle the lady wanted $150 for. Dad had told her about the tires, and how they didn’t do brakes like that on new bicycles no more. And Dad had picked at the little bit of rust on the handlebars with his fingernail as he talked.
And the thing was that Dad really knew all that stuff. About brakes and rust and how much new tires might cost.
Wilson didn’t know too much about mowers.
He knew he only had $87. He knew Dad would say anybody’d come down 10% easy.
But that wasn’t enough.
As the other man wandered off and the junk man turned towards Wilson, the boy squatted down and felt the place where the paint had started to chip off.
“See something ya like?” the junk man asked. His voice sounded like a hard wind blowing through a holey sheet, but his eyes squinted and sort of twinkled in the sunlight as he stepped over and looked down at Wilson.
“How much ya want for this here mower?” Wilson asked. He wouldn’t normally say something quite so much like “this here” but he knew that when Dad talked to somebody, he sometimes changed his voice just a little bit.
Wilson had seen the junk man many times set up at the curve of the road when he would whip past in the backseat of his mom’s car. But this was the first time he’d talked to him.
Most weekends, the junk man parked his rusted, broken-back pickup in the gravel beside the carryout store, and he’d set the things he had that day out on the grass with homemade paper signs taped to each one. He often had things like chainsaw sculptures or rockin chairs that looked like they was made out of real tree branches. Sometimes he’d have tools or a generator or a ceiling fan, new in its box.
“Hunderd ten,” the junk man said, and nodded towards the sign hanging from the handle. The junk man wore an old baseball cap propped back on his head to reveal a thinning hairline. His jeans were old and stained with something dark, like coffee or motor oil, and he wore suspenders over a white tank top that clinged to his belly in the heat.
“Hundred ten?” Wilson asked while he tried to think of something to say about the rust, or the size of the engine, or how the cable was held to the handlebars with a ziptie in one place. But all Wilson could say under the watchful gaze of the junk man was, “Best you can do?”
The junk man shrugged and Wilson blurted out, “I was thinking eighty-seven?”
The man thought for a moment, closed one eye. “I might take a hunderd,” he said.
He’d seen one more thing from Dad, and this one didn’t take no knowledge about bicycles or lawnmowers. Wilson stood up, said “thank you then,” and began to walk away.
The junk man watched and the corner of his lip turned up in a smile. A rasping kind of chuckle emanated from his chest. “Well, hold on there, son. I suspect eight-seven might be the right price for this here mower.”
Wilson turned. The tension dropped from his shoulders as his face burst into a smile. He knew you’re not supposed to, but he jumped and hooted. “Really, mister? Really?”
The junk man just smiled and nodded. He tore the sign from the handlebars and accepted the money from Wilson’s hand.
“You just don’t forget old Lloyd when you make y’first million,” the man said through his grin. “I ain’t got no other retirement plan, you know.”
Wilson didn’t really know what he meant, but he promised he’d remember as he grabbed the mower and began to wheel it away.
The wad of cash that cushioned his pocket on the walk there was gone. But his mind was busy as he made the half-mile walk toward home. Fifteen dollars a lawn, times five lawns, times 4 weeks, times 6 months…
THE END
The snow shoveler is dead. The lawn mower must emerge. It’s a small thing, but to the boy in the story, it’s everything.
He’s not just buying a lawn mower, he’s also figuring out how he fits in the world.
The story has a beginning, a middle, and an end.
The beginning sets the premise of the junk man and the lawn mower the boy wants to buy. In the middle, the boy negotiates and fails. In the end, the boy successfully buys the lawn mower.
The end is intentionally ambiguous. Either the junk man has compassion and blesses the boy, or the boy successfully negotiates the sale by walking away. The reader’s worldview will likely inform why he believes the ending unfolds as it does.
Note that the action of the ending is NOT ambiguous. You know exactly what happens. This is critical to good ambiguity. Your reader should always know what happened. By supporting more than one idea, you can leave them pondering why it happened. But they must always know what happened.
How do I revise a short story that’s too long?
When I wrote the story, it was too long. I had some stuff in there that I really liked, and it was hard to know what to cut.
So I employed the “Moment of the Story” to figure out what to change.
This is something I taught about as part of the Spring Writing Challenge, and you can find it on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEtsIS6Y_sc
Every short story should have a “moment.” A key point at which everything changes. A good short story turns around a solitary moment.
When I first came up with the idea for this short story, I was really excited about a part at the end, where the junk man stops Wilson before he leaves and gives him a gas can from the back of his truck to go with the mower. I thought it would be really thematically important that this rough around the edges guy turns out to be kind and helpful. I thought that was the moment of the story.
But I only had 1,000 words to work with.
As I wrote the story, I filled in the details about the characters and they came alive on the page. I saw that the moment of the story was really when the boy walks away. That’s the decision, the moment, that changes everything.
I really liked the ending that I had that fleshed out the junk man’s actions. And I really liked the way the boy’s character had developed with the influence of his father.
But I needed to cut about 200 words.
The mistake, the temptation, would be to try to keep both, and pare both parts down. Now of course I tried to tighten things up throughout the whole story and eliminate extra stuff.
But ultimately, the right strategy is to make one element work really well.
Identifying the “moment” of the story helped me to see which thing was more important to the story I told. Now I could focus on preserving that and making sure the boy’s conversion did all the work it could.
That theme with the junk man is still there, but I only gave it the word count that I could spare. We have hints of the junk man’s character and kindness, but not like before.
Unfortunately, something had to go. Identifying the “moment” was the tool that allowed me to be effective and strategic in that decision.
The moment of the story changed from my plan to my revision. That’s OK. It was still important that I knew it when I started writing, even though I later changed it.
You can also apply this idea of the “moment” to a scene and to an act when writing a novel.
What did you think of “Birth of a Salesman”?
I hope you enjoyed “Birth of a Salesman.” I was on a tight word count and a tight deadline. By thinking through the beginning, middle, and end of the story prior to drafting, and then using the “moment” of the story to inform my revisions, I was able to put something together that I was happy with on a short timeline.
And I was able to use the theme in a way that I wanted, and hopefully subverted some expectations.
If you’d like to read what some of the challenge participants did with the assignment, you can find those flash fiction stories on The Company’s website here: https://writers.company/question/week-six-the-character-prompt/
What do you think? Did this story satisfy the theme of “Rebirth”? What do you think is the “moment” of the story? Leave a comment below.
Before you go, do you want to keep talking about stories and writing? Grab the first 50 pages of my bestselling book, The Novel Matrix, for free:
Recent Comments