I have been writing short stories for decades, which is another way of saying I have spent a large portion of my life producing evidence that enthusiasm and achievement are not the same thing. The cruel part is that I have improved. The older I get, the better I write, and the better I write, the more my earlier work begins to look like juvenilia wearing a fake mustache.
Recently, I wrote a ghost story and morality tale called “The Ghost of Sid Briggs,” and to my surprise, it pleases me. That is rare. It made me think of the writers I revere most, especially John Cheever and Haruki Murakami, masters of the strange domestic wound, the moral haunting, the ordinary world with a trapdoor under it.
So I became hopeful that I could add my ghost story to my long list of stories I’ve written over the years. I thought: Maybe I have a dozen stories buried in my archives. Maybe I can exhume them, clean them off, tighten the sentences, give them a new spine, and assemble a collection worthy of my literary heroes.
Then I looked at the list. The verdict was swift and merciless. I did not have a dozen stories. I had only one that was the result of several rewrites over the last decade. I finally reached the point that it feels fully formed. I titled it “The Ghost Story of Sid Briggs.” It is a coming-of-age ghost story about a charismatic young bodybuilder and pathological liar whose life ends absurdly and tragically from a bee sting at a California lakeside beach. Narrated by a fellow young man who is both fascinated and repelled by Sid’s relentless self-mythologizing, the story explores male vanity, performance, fraudulence, and the seductive narcotic of reinvention. After Sid’s death, the narrator becomes haunted by recurring dreams in which Sid walks across a twilight lake to confess that, in his dying moments, he saw the life he might have lived had he abandoned narcissism and embraced love, family, humility, and spiritual truth. The ghostly visitation transforms Sid from beach peacock into cautionary prophet, warning the narrator against wasting life on performance and illusion. Decades later, the narrator continues to wrestle with Sid’s lesson through music, memory, and storytelling, realizing that some men are destroyed not by evil ambitions, but by the desperate need to become a dazzling fiction in the eyes of others.
This is the one story that meets my current standards. The rest are not dead, exactly, but they are certainly not fit for public life. They would require major reconstruction, literary surgery, perhaps a full identity transplant. Otherwise, back to the dustbin they go, where they can continue their quiet service as compost for better work.
The clarity over my literary work is sobering. My imagined collection collapsed into a single respectable survivor standing amid the wreckage, blinking in the light. I am not sitting on a hidden treasury of finished stories. I am sitting on a storage unit full of drafts, impulses, false starts, and prose-shaped weather systems. But at least I know the truth. Better that than the narcotic delusion of believing I possess a polished body of work when what I really have is a small literary junkyard with one decent house still standing.
My literary challenges made me think this morning about my piano compositions. All my best songs point toward some buried autobiographical story. They are not merely melodies; they are emotional crime scenes. Each one seems to contain a memory, a wound, a comic humiliation, a ghost with unfinished business. Perhaps that is the spine I have been missing. Perhaps the stories should grow out of the songs.
“The Ghost of Sid Briggs” began that way. It was first a piano piece, one I spent months composing, and the story emerged from it after many failed versions, false entrances, and narrative detours. The music held the emotional truth before the prose knew what to do with it.
I am reminded of the old saying: Life is short, and art is long. At sixty-four, after writing short stories since 1981, I have only one story worthy of a collection. One. If I work hard and avoid wasting too much time congratulating myself for my own seriousness, perhaps I will have three or four before I reach my expiration date.
This should depress me, and in some ways it does. But it also steadies me. I would rather possess one story that meets my standards than two dozen half-baked literary casseroles masquerading as finished work. A real story has architecture, pressure, mystery, and necessity. A failed story is often just a journal entry wearing a dinner jacket.
So yes, I am humbled by my limitations. But I am also oddly buoyed by the clarity. The standard is no longer vague. I can see it now. And if most of my work fails to meet it, good. At least I know where the mountain is.
Cinemorphosis 