Two Weeks Before
I’m going to enter that short story competition even if I’ve never written anything before, and I’m going to win.
And after I’ve won I’m going to see my story anthologised, and once it’s been anthologised I’m going to be asked for more, stories that is, which will be published in Granta, The Paris Review and The New Yorker, and once they’ve been published they are going to be collected in a book, which will be received with praise that will be printed on the back of the paperback (of course there’ll be a paperback), praise using words like ‘assured’, ‘groundbreaking’, ‘breathtaking’, and ‘minor masterpiece’.
And once I’ve won an award or two, I’ll go away and write a novel funded by something like MacArthur or Guggenheim, a novel which will not only please the critics but the general public as well, leading me to being named the ‘voice of a generation’, and I will win more awards just as my subsequent novels will too.
I’ll be the most admired, imitated, influential and respected novelist of my generation, my immortality secured by a magnum opus of breathtaking scope and ambition, a flawed masterpiece that will live forever.
It can’t be too hard. I’ve read The Oxford Book of Short Stories and The Oxford Book of American Short Stories. I’ve read Hawthorne and Poe and James and Conrad and Mansfield and Pritchett and Cheever and Carver and Munro. I know the form. I know about twists in the tale and epiphanies. I have a first in English Literature from an ancient university. I’ve read the Canon. I subscribe to The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, Granta, The Paris Review, The Believer, McSweeney’s. I’ve visited the graves of Eliot and Wilde, and attended workshops and seminars and lectures on the craft and development of the modern short story.
I can’t lose.
Two Seconds After
I lost.
Stephen Mander is originally from Liverpool in the UK, but has lived and worked in Japan, Australia, Hungary, Slovakia, Syria and Vietnam. He currently lives in Jordan.
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