Who Am I To Tell This Story?

When a flood came to my region I became witness to a set of circumstances that people needed to know about. Then my barely finished story was shortlisted.

Flooded possessions on the street awaiting collection.

I didn’t always shudder at the sound of torrential rain. Before the great rains of 2022, I would say, ‘Quick, get the washing off the line?’, ‘Check the windows’, ‘Open the brolly.’ ‘Get inside.’

At first light on the day of writing this letter, the rain pounded the roof and drowned out other sounds. No dawn chorus. Then it stopped, and the birds re-emerged in full song.

When the birds fall silent

In early 2022 we heard little birdsong. Where do birds go when the rain is relentless? Do they keep flying, flying, flying, until clear of the clouds? Do they fly above clouds? To think of the birds flying and flying reminds me of a Toddy tale, stories I heard from a man called Graham Todd who travelled to China for 50 years starting in the 1960s. Sightings of birds were so rare as to be remarkable, he said. On his travels Toddy noted rare sightings of birds in his diaries. Birds were considered a threat to crops. Orders were issued for shots be fired to keep birds flying until they expired and fell from the sky. When the birdsong stops I think of that.

Toddy’s notebooks were a wonder, recording places and events in China few people from the west had seen or knew about. He didn’t go ahead with the book we were working on. It was looking difficult to find a publisher and Toddy was not into vanity projects. I was sorry he didn’t go ahead because I was sure others would love his stories as much as I did.

Will I ever take rain in my stride again?

So where do birds go during torrential rains? They shelter in dense shrubs and under decking. Do birds shudder at the rain? I don’t know. Will I ever take rain in my stride again? I can’t say.

Now when heavy rain starts, I raise my eyes and brows at anyone else in the vicinity in person, or even virtually, as if to say, ‘Can you hear that?’ It’s involuntary now, it triggers me. I also check for mould often too, and I never even thought of it before.

In 2017, as March turned to April, there was a flood so big we believed it would be the worst of our lifetimes. Wrong! This year it rained constantly here from November to May, a La Nina weather pattern. Then came an epic flood as as February turned to March, and another as March turned to April.

The district is so messy it looks like we stopped caring about maintenance

A few months on, evidence of the flood remains - watermarks on homes and stables, the churned grass of the riverside parks, potholes that mean we steer and veer our cars as if driving under the influence of drink.

The district looks like we stopped caring about maintenance. The events are easy to recall but the emotion has dialled down, like a drama we watched, though more a 3D horror movie than small screen. On a side note, does anyone have a small TV anymore? Anyone?

As the flood and its aftermath unfolded, and the minutiae of details squelched through my mind, I felt compelled to write about it. I wrote and wrote and wrote, and still I omitted dozens of stories. One I left out was a call out for size 12 shoes for a male nurse who lost his home and had no shoes to wear as he worked double shifts in the hospital. Wildly hoping they were a big fitting, I took some size 11s from home. You just want to help. Somebody would need them.

I realised I was a witness to events, and people needed to know what was going on here

As I wrote the story, I questioned myself. Safe on my hill above the valley where lives lay in ruin, who was I to write about the flood? Inconveniences were relatively minor for me, cancelled plans, closed roads, fuel shortages, empty supermarket shelves, and outages, of the internet and card machines. Who was I to write about the flood? I was an imposter. Then I dropped the self-indulgence, the navel-gazing. I was a witness to a particular set of events, and in a position to let other people know what had happened here. The people at the centre of the disaster had no time or energy for that.

If you feel compelled to write or picture a particular event, you must write it when you are feeling it, deep inside that moment. You can never fully capture the emotion later. Nor should it fester inside you. You must let it out for your well-being. To make space for what else will come, call it the writer’s gut, the digestive system. Even if you don’t know where that story will go, even if only a handful of people read it, you must let it out. There will be someone out there who wants, no needs, this information.

So I wrote about the flood, at first thinking it would be a 600 or 800-word story but soon I had written 1200 words. Perhaps I can pitch this story to a newspaper I thought. But it felt incomplete so I kept writing, past 2,000 words, 3,615 words, 4,190 words. Eventually 5,312 words (a guess) were down. It felt ridiculous. Where could I pitch such a large story? What outlet would take it? Yes, I could have put it online. But writing is my work, so I like to treat it as work and earn income from that work. How could I strip it back to a feature story? Or could it be several stories? For more than 30 years I was a journalist, and will be always, even if not working at newspapers any more. But it still matters to me to find a home for my stories for them to reach the readers I think of while writing.

Competitions are fun if you win but they are not all that

Then I happened to see a competition advertised. The Furphy Open Short Story Competition sought Australian fiction and non-fiction short stories. The competition was closing a day or two later. It was years since I had entered a writing competition. I had given up on them after spending small fortunes in entry fees. I had helped friends and encouraged them to enter competitions. I would urge them to enter and they would win. I was so happy for them, but it became painful. Imagine being first in a very short shortlist when the winners were two friends you persuaded to enter? Of course it is a mistake to give up when you are close. But being close does not guarantee future success.

Competition results are random. In spite of best efforts, and integrity of the individuals involved, judging is subjective, influenced by personalities and personal preferences. I recall a competition that for a small fee provided the judges feedback. One judge delighted in my story and another loathed it and could find no redeeming qualities. I decided to take that as a positive. Far better to stir feeling in the reader than leaving them unmoved. Right?
I keep in mind that competitions are not all that, not the be all. Winning a competition or being shortlisted is fun, but it says nothing more than you won that time. The prize of cash, or publishing of your piece, or the teaching fellowship or mentorship may help get you noticed, and boost your confidence and ease stress by providing income, but they do not define you as being a greater writer - or person - than anyone else.

Competitions can be a distraction, a diversion from your main project. But they can propel you, and help you push out the words for your main project. And never forget, plenty of writers produce great stories and go on to publish without ever entering a competition.

All of that withstanding, I worked frantically on polishing my story in order to enter the Furphy Open Short Story Competition, and submitted in the final minutes. It was not what I would call finished.

What if your story is not really finished? Choose your compromise

Who gets to decide what finished looks like? My flood story was a work in progress and I was not clear about how it should begin or end! But it was ok. Entering was a long shot. There was no entry fee. Nothing ventured. I would make it the best I could in the short time I had. I was used to the act of compromise ahead of a deadline. In daily journalism I encountered that compromise every day. Every news story, every feature that I ever wrote, or edited, was made as good as it could be in the available time with the available sources and resources. Was it perfect? Almost never! I made the story as clear as I could, checked it and let it go…

In news stories you put the most important information at the top. In newsrooms and colleges that’s called an inverted pyramid.

INVERTED PYRAMID OF JOURNALISM

MOST IMPORTANT INFO

NEXT MOST IMPORTANT INFO

NICE BUT NOT ESSENTIAL INFO

Feature stories weave between the big picture and details that illuminate the impact of a particular event on individuals. They often start with a one person’s experience then broaden to explore the issue and how it relates to the many. The weaving of anecdotes with the big picture continues through the story. In the closing paragraphs the story circles back to the individual featured in the opening paragraph, with them looking ahead to worsening or improving circumstances.

These are details I had not fully worked out when it came time to enter my flood story into the Furphy Awards. Was it even journalism anyway?

Does it matter? Do you have to define what a story will be? Must a story have a proper ending or can it be where you decide to stop?

How do you know what your story will be?

One of the rules of the Furphy Literature Awards is that stories can’t be entered in other competitions or published elsewhere. After I entered my story I set it aside. A few days later, I picked it up again and kept working on it. I needed to be realistic. There was no way it would win, so I wanted it ready to pitch as soon as the competition was decided. I didn’t want this story to miss its moment.

I asked an editor to review it and suggest how I might improve the structure and where I might look to publish it. Of course I could publish the story here on my Substack or social media but I wanted to pursue publication. So I kept working on it. It took much longer than expected. Eventually in mid-July, two and a half months after entering the competition, I completed the redraft. But before I had got around to sending it to the editor I received an email from Furphy to say that The Flood was one of shortlisted short stories out of more than 600 entries.

Email informing me of Furphy Short Story Shortlisting.

It was so unexpected yet I could see why it was selected. It was a truly Australian story, and timely after floods all along the eastern seaboard. But I knew the narrative wandered back and forth between the aftermath, the flood, the last flood and the peak of the emergency. No matter how hard I tried, and I had tried, I could not put the story into a tidy linear structure. I decided I must accept this because life during a flood hits you like a barrage. It appears the judges understood that too.

Winners are grinners. How to be an Oscar nominee

Shortlisted is an odd place to be. I didn’t know what to say - how to be - about being shortlisted. I owed it to the people who supported me to tell them. I did not want to boast. But I was happy. Maybe I would win. Most likely I would not. I allowed hope but not expectation.

I thought of Oscar nominees in the moments preceding the announcing of the Academy Award, all smiles, cameras trained on them as they wait to hear if they’ve won, wanting it soooo badly, and preparing themselves for grace in the let-down. I pictured them in their seats looking up at the stage. And I could picture that scene because for a few days in 2002 I sat in the front stalls of the Dolby theatre (then the Kodak theatre) in Hollywood, the venue for the Academy Awards. Each day I would nominate which movie star’s seat I was sitting in before getting to the business of reporting on the American hospitality investment conference. One night we came back for a show by Joan Rivers.

I started to tell people about about the shortlisting, my friends and writing groups, and last of all on social media. There were two weeks between the shortlist announcement until the presentation. I was invited to the event and wanted to go. Very much. But a friend was flying in on a long-planned visit, and I was attending a birthday party. Of course I still thought about going. How often is one shortlisted in a national competition? But with short notice, flights were expensive.

Fear of failure and that bigger fear, of success

How could I prepare myself to lose? How could I prepare myself if I won? Back when I used to enter competitions, I took losses hard. Not in a bitter, envious, or resentful way but I so often came close. Three times my husband travelled to take up his place in residential mentorships. He got to write in peace for a week or two and enjoy writerly companionship in the evenings while I stayed home to look after the family. This time friends said they had a feeling I would win. Their belief in me was lovely but I did not let myself buy into it. I could not afford to. Nor could I afford to spend, even in my head, the cash prize that I was highly unlikely to win. I knew some of the other names on the shortlist, and the calibre of their writing. If my story won over theirs even I might call the judging into question.

We watched the ceremony on TV. The winning story was by Cate Kennedy, a fine short story writer, poet, memoirist and novelist. I’ve read Cate’s work in all but one of those genres and attended a workshop she taught. Cate is the kind of writer who always asks, ‘how’s your writing going?’ And she really wants to know.

My story The Flood will appear along with the 15 other shortlisted stories in The Furphy Anthology 2022 to be published in November. I will post links as soon as it’s ready.

Now it’s time to work on a new story that I hope is not about floods. What will it be?

The rescue - a happy ending.