Stefani Nellen’s Comments

Is it customary to publicly thank editors who rejected your now-published piece in the past? Well, I’ll try it.

I think these flashes owe a lot to Aaron Burch, who rejected a longer version of “Metaphors” I’d sent to Hobart with the comment that it might work much better as a flash, “where the more concept-heavy feel might work to its advantage.” This comment stayed with me; I immediately liked the idea, and a couple of days later I cut “Metaphors” apart and found that this particular story could indeed be told with a few poignant scenes. In fact, the story was little more than this central idea and a lot of extraneous tissue, and once the extraneous stuff was gone, it finally felt right. Fascinated, I applied the same principle to two other short stories—the two other flashes in this triplet—and found that, again, the stories could be told, and told better, through a few crucial “snapshot” scenes. I found this surprising, since all three pieces span a relatively long time, but the ruthless cutting enhanced this sense of development rather than obscuring it, in my opinion. So, thanks, Aaron!

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