by Violet Woolf marks a literary anniversary year, submits a short story to a prize she’s entered unsuccessfully three times running, and reckons with what it means to love writers whose endings you’d have written differently
This year marks fifty years since Agatha Christie died, and I’ve spent an embarrassing portion of my week rereading her instead of doing anything remotely productive, including the one with the ending I still, decades after first reading it as a teenager, haven’t fully forgiven her for. I won’t name it here, some things stay unnamed out of genuine respect for anyone who hasn’t read it yet, but I will say that reaching the final page again this week produced exactly the same outraged, delighted gasp it produced the first time, which is either a testament to her genuine skill or evidence I’ve learned absolutely nothing in the intervening years.
What This Anniversary Year Has Actually Made Me Think About
It’s also a hundred and fifty years since Jack London was born, a rather different writer entirely, and I find myself thinking about the strange coincidence of these two anniversaries landing in the same calendar year, one writer built on tight, controlled plotting where every clue matters, the other built on raw, sprawling physical experience where the plot often feels almost incidental to the sheer visceral force of the writing itself. I don’t think I could choose between them if genuinely forced to. I suspect that says something honest about what I actually want from fiction, both the puzzle and the punch, depending entirely on my mood that particular evening.
What I’ve Actually Been Doing With My Own Writing This Week
I submitted a short story to the London Magazine’s prize again this year, my fourth attempt, having been unsuccessful the previous three times running, a track record I mention here not for sympathy but because I think there’s something worth examining in continuing to submit to the same prize repeatedly despite repeated rejection. This year’s judging panel includes Camilla Grudova, whose own work I genuinely admire, which made the submission feel simultaneously more exciting and considerably more nerve-wracking than the previous three attempts.
Why I Think I Keep Submitting Despite The Previous Rejections
I think it’s genuinely less about winning at this point and more about the discipline the deadline forces on me, a concrete date by which a story has to actually exist in finished, submittable form rather than languishing indefinitely in the drawer of half-abandoned drafts everyone who writes seriously seems to accumulate. Three rejections haven’t dampened that specific usefulness of the process even as they’ve done something more complicated to my general confidence.
What This Particular Year’s Story Was Actually About
A woman clearing out her late mother’s books, deciding which ones to keep and which to donate, and discovering annotations in the margins that reveal a version of her mother she’d never fully known while the woman was alive. I wrote it, if I’m honest, partly as a way of processing my own mother’s actual bookshelf, which I inherited two years ago and still haven’t fully sorted through, several boxes still sitting in my hallway exactly where the movers left them.
How Rereading Christie And London This Same Week Actually Shaped That Story
I think both writers taught me something I tried to apply directly, Christie’s insistence that every small detail eventually matters, that nothing in a story is genuinely incidental if you’re paying proper attention, and London’s willingness to let raw feeling simply overwhelm tidy structure when the moment actually calls for it. My mother’s marginalia felt like it deserved both instincts simultaneously, the careful clue-following attention to what she’d actually underlined and starred, and the honest, structurally messy grief of realising how much of her I still don’t understand even now.
What I’m Actually Hoping For, Realistically, From This Fourth Submission
Not necessarily winning, though obviously I wouldn’t say no. Mostly just the story existing properly in the world beyond my own hallway boxes, having been read by at least the judges even if it goes no further than that. I think that’s genuinely enough some years. This might be one of those years. I won’t know until the shortlist announcement, and until then I’m going to keep rereading Christie’s ending I still haven’t forgiven, and Jack London’s sentences that still knock the wind out of me, and try to let both keep teaching me whatever they’re each still trying to teach.
What I Actually Found In One Of Those Hallway Boxes Last Night
I opened one, finally, after writing most of this entry, and found my mother’s own copy of the Christie I won’t name, her handwriting in the margin near the final chapter, just two words, underlined twice. I won’t repeat them here either. Some things belong to the actual box, not the diary entry written about it. But I understood, reading them, exactly why that ending had lodged itself so permanently in both of us, mother and daughter, decades apart, equally undone by the same page.
What That Actually Means For The Story I’ve Just Submitted
I think I’ll write another one about that discovery specifically, next year’s submission perhaps, my fifth attempt regardless of how this fourth one lands. The boxes in my hallway, it turns out, aren’t finished giving me things to write about. Neither, apparently, are the writers who taught me how.
