A Short Interview w/ David Williamson
"Bonus material" for Williamson's short story, "Pain Is What the Patient Says It Is," published on Tuesday, 1/9.
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A quick note on submissions: going to reopen in February or March. Probably the latter, tbh.
Short Story, Long features long short stories, each paired with original art, published every other week. In between stories, we feature some kind of “bonus material” for each — an interview with the author, outtakes or trivia about the story, etc. The stories are always going to be available for all, for free, with the “bonus material” saved for subscribers only. Paid subscriptions help pay writers and artists.
Read “Pain Is What the Patient Says It Is” now if you haven’t already!
Aaron Burch: I'm kinda always curious where stories came from and what the seeds of idea were. Can you tell me a little about the genesis for this story?
I keep a list in my Notes app of titles or lines that eventually develop into full stories (or something like full stories). “Pain is what the patient says it is” was a line I had floating around my head but didn’t have a story to fit it. It’s a paraphrase of a quote from Margo McCaffery, a famous nurse I referenced in the story. When I first heard this quote, I thought it was a fantastic truth statement. Pain has no universal metric, but rather is something highly personal to the one who suffers. Also, I just loved how the line sounded.
The actual content of the story was a convergence of two disparate interests of mine. I love hospitals. I love being in them. I’ve often believed that I’d enjoy working in a hospital and have even done quite a bit of research around what it would take to go to nursing school or medical school or start a new career in a clinical setting. All things I’m very unlikely to do at this point in my life. In this way, the story is feverish kind of fantasy for me.
I’m also fascinated by high-church rituals, sacramentalism, the mass, etc. As many hospitals were founded by religious institutions, I found a natural convergence of the two ideas. Somewhere along the way, the body stuff and the map and the made-up countries snuck in there.
The first drafts of this story were pretty unhinged. Almost as if the events could be taking place in an alternate reality. Not quite sci-fi or magical realism, but something close to it. I brought the language more down to earth, but I think there’s a weirdness that still peaks through when I read it.
So interesting. The last author I just interviewed, Todd Robert Petersen, also answered by saying "This story had two co-inception moments." Makes me think there's a good recipe for a story there. ONE idea or genesis or whatever might not have anywhere to go, or be too one-note, or whatever. Combine two different interests and mash them together and you're starting to get somewhere interesting.
ALSO interesting in that the map and body stuff came in so late! I guess just because they're how the story starts, but they so feel like they were probably there from the beginning, maybe even the genesis of the story!
Can you talk some about the first drafts being "pretty unhinged"? How/when did you know the story needed to be pulled back? I'm often curious about revision, and how and when we understand what the story wants to do and how we figure out how to steer into that.
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