Alicia Costello

Author’s Revision Account

For The Garage Sale | A Short, Sarcastic Masterpiece by Alicia Costello

            I couldn’t come up with a damn thing.  I spent many hours trying to figure out what to write for my short story, a medium I never before attempted, and only recently understood.  I decided to preface my assignment by reading a lot of published short stories.  There was a problem, however—I owned only one volume of short stories since they were my least favorite medium.  So I turned to Ryan, who loves short stories, and asked if I could borrow some stuff he wasn’t reading at the time.  He lent me three books which I read a couple stories out of each. 

            So then I began to force myself to come up with ideas.  I’d start with a first line, and write until that bored me.  I still couldn’t come up with anything, so I asked my friends to write me prompts to begin writing.  Those didn’t work either, but they did start me writing to a point I came up with the voice of Liz, my main character.

            Liz is the heart and soul of my story.  She’s a mixture of what I’ve been learning in Dr. Gorman’s Lit of Adolescence class and my own sarcasm turned up to 11.  She dehumanizes people (by not using their names, or, in the case of Susan, not using her proper title of Mom), she has an over-active imagination, a poet’s eye, and is a product of her materialist culture to a point.  It should be noted that Liz could not have been created if I hadn’t read Catcher in the Rye, which you all must go out and read TODAY if you haven’t.  Like Holden, Liz doesn’t do much, in fact, just rambles around a center for materialism (Liz: Garage sale, Holden: NYC) and is sarcastic all the way through it.  Like Catcher, the main character’s voice is the most important element in this short story.   Liz is the opposite of me (I love garage sales) and Susan is the opposite of my mother, who would rather spend her Saturday sleeping in then heading off to her favorite sports bar to share a friendly beer and buffalo wings with her friends.

            Right.  Revision.  So I wrote most of this story out on paper and transcribed it into the computer, making little revisions here and there, so that’s revision #1.  Revision #2 occurred by simply going over to edit, switch, changing, and polishing words and sentences.  I then took it to the Writing Center and had Veronica, a tutor and classmate, look at it.  She looked over it, laughed a lot because it was a lot more like her family, and made suggestions to expand the movie-idea episode.  She told me she loved the mother-daughter dialogue, which gave me a lot of encouragement because I think I’m terrible at dialogue.  Her edits here and there and my expansion of a couple of ideas was Revision #3.

 Then, I sent my paper in to be looked at by Charley, another Writing Center tutor who has written and published many short stories.  Her trained eye caught a few things like I originally had Bear Boy skulk back to his garage, and then a couple sentences later, Mother Bear kicks Bear Boy in the shin.  She was really helpful in pointing out inconsistencies like that.  At one point, my first person narration over-stepped its bounds of limited knowledge; she pointed that out as well. 

I fixed them, and then sent Revision #4 to Ryan Smith.  He said he felt nothing happened, which, if I remember, was his same complaint with Catcher in the Rye.  He also said he “didn’t really get it”.  I made some clarification spots in the text, and then brought it to its final revision, which you see today! 

            P.S. I used to own a duck phone.  And it used to quack instead of ring.  And we sold in it our garage sale three years ago. 

I also used this short story as the basis for an art project.  I took a lamp, painted it white, and wrote the story on it in Sharpie.  The lamp was so big I wrote it twice and had just started writing it for a third time and I ran out of room.