Behind the Story: Smoking Section

Welcome to Behind the Story, number two, -- a ‘behind the scenes’ series of blog posts that give you the inside scoop on my the stories and other written works I’ve had published. I’ll be starting with the oldest and moving forward through time.

Smoking Section, published by the Eunoia Review in November 2011
(Read Here) 

I love this story. This incarnation that was published was written my sophomore year of college, in the first week or two. I remember just typing away at the idea, sentence by sentence in a very careful way but in a relatively short time frame. Again, this never ended up in class but was shared with my classmate writing group.

My first, earlier incarnation of this story -- and I say incarnation rather than draft because it was so different -- was written in my senior year of high school. The inspiration was twofold. One is obvious in the text of the story. It was around that time that a lot legislation was being passed banning smoking in restaurants and bars, and those laws inspired a lot of public debate. So that was the surrounding political debate. Two, a particular plot point in one episode of Boy Meets World. (It was a Mr. Feeny story line.)  

So that is where it came from. It is truly interesting to see how disparte inspiration can be taken and reformed into something new. I hope the reader picks up what the characters are actually arguing about when they are arguing about new smoking laws.

The reason I love this story so much is because I felt once I completed it that I had been able to execute my vision for the story. We creative types often have standards higher than our abilities at any given moment, and this was a point in time they met.