The New Yorker
I like to write only the very beginnings of only the shortest of stories. I then send them to my friends, quickly adding that this is the beginning of a story from The New Yorker. They are quick to notice the wit and skill that must have gone into the writing of such a story. After all, The New Yorker only produces stories written with such wit and skill. I have been doing this now for several years.
I can't entirely remember when I decided that The New Yorker was the only publication in which I was destined to find my name. I do know that I associate it with the name Salinger. According to my memory, he had tried for nearly ten years to get a story published in the magazine before he was finally accepted. There was no other magazine for him. And so there would be no other magazine for me. This was my singular prologue to my writing, and my response to every invitation for inferior student publication.
Thus, I donned the costume of the Quixote archetype, with The New Yorker as my windmill. Every new "Fiction" piece was more laughable than the last. Every introduction to one of my stories more genius. On my desk was a countdown to ten years. Smaller attacks - submissions of poetry - were fended off by the giant without even a glance in my direction. Soon, Salinger was not enough inspiration. Gore Vidal had a book published at nineteen. On my nineteenth birthday I felt vindication (though I'd not even begun a novel). As my twentieth birthday approached, I began to reach a point of crisis.
Would it have been smart to take a deep breath and reacquaint myself with The Catcher in the Rye? Probably. Instead I began another intense series of short beginnings to short stories. It started as a warmup, a supposed prelude to my magnum opus. Unfortunately, I had no opus. I had beginnings. And this was the only thing I knew how to do. Several years into the Salinger goal-time and all I'd managed to learn was beginnings. What about middles? What about ends? The mere thought of climaxes and turning points was laughable. Suddenly Nick Hornby was on my shoulder, whispering that "only people of a certain disposition are frightened of never being published in The New Yorker before their twentieth birthday." And I was of that disposition.
Things would only get worse from here, I thought. Fear would turn to complacency. Soon enough, I would become one of "those people." I would become one of the almost-shaven, twenty-six year old men in a crowded subway station heading back from a pointless job to a loveless marriage. I would become some hobbyist hack sitting at a vintage typewriter, contributing editor to the "Dreamcatcher Poetry Zine." Ten thousand empty pages later I would be seventy-six, relaying the only sad story I knew to my grandchildren; but they would only hear a senile old man asking them what they thought of this beginning to this story from The New Yorker.
