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I can see why you say the middle dragged a bit. Original, yes. I liked how she developed the symbolism.

Are you talking about the blurry picture of a hand? That's hardly a hostile and aggressive act, MG. Check out the story instead of the pic.

Hi Cons, thanks for the very kind words. We're trying. This forum is fairly new, and unfortunately much of it got blown away when some hackers got online. Things are coming back fast now though, glad to have you here.

Hey Margie, please don't suck all the meds up at once, there are other people here. Remember - sharing is good!

Hi Chivas, thanks for stopping in. I see from your interview you're more of a poet than a writer, but after reading Shrapnel I wonder if you missed your calling. Either that or your poetry must be in the Smithsonian. What have you done as a writer? What have you published? What's your favorite story? Feel free to put links up to any of your work on line. I'd like to see some more of your work!

At some point we have to put the story down and say it's done. From the sounds of things, you're not done yet though! <grin>

Right now, the surface story is about a man and his physical wounds received in a war. Underneath that layer, we see a story about a man and his emotional wounds received in a war. The symbolism of the shrapnel being those memories and experiences from the war that he doesn't want to write in his book because they will hurt emotionally to re-experience just as the metal shards hurt physically is a beautiful touch! War wounds make a great story, especially for guys! lol Humans empathize with others, and I can empathize with 'dad' in the story when I wince at his pain.

I'm going to go just a tiny bit off track now: I know what that kind of physical pain is like. In fact, there is a biological part of humans that is solely there so we might empathize with others, called mirror neurons. This story manages to push all the right buttons, just as you had mentioned in your interview:

Quote:

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It’s hard to know if a piece will touch another being. Sometimes, in the process of writing a certain passage, I experience what I’m writing about so strongly that I begin to cry—that tells me I’m onto something . . .

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If I overlook the human aspect of empathy and look at it scientifically, I believe what is occurring when we suddenly are touched by a passage in a story to the point of wanting to cry like this is that we have set off those mirror neurons and suddenly we 'feel' what it is like for that person. <End of tangent…>

Ok, I know you probably don't like the mirror neuron part. You can now forget that anything biological like that exists and you may go back to believing we empathize with others because we are loving, caring people. That works too, and it's not wrong, just a different way of looking at it.

I guess if you are serious about reworking this and are interested in some thoughts, I might suggest a slightly different direction. Have you ever read "There's a Man in the Habit of Hitting Me on the Head with an Umbrella" by Fernando Sorrentino? It's in The Greats section of this forum. It's a beautifully written story by a brilliant author. The reason I bring this up is because when I read that story, I not only empathize with the man being hit over the head with the umbrella, and I not only understand the symbolism of the man with the umbrella and the underlying layer, but perhaps most importantly, I see myself in that story. The story has a direct meaning to ME. I read that story and I not only laugh at the surrealistic nature of the story, but the symbolism of umbrella man is focused directly on my life. In this case, WE ALL have a "man hitting us over the head with an umbrella". That symbol represents all the crap we have to put up with during our life, whether it's a lousy job or a bi-polar spouse. Sorrentino uses that symbol to turn the story into a mirror that asks us what umbrella wielding gray suits we have in our own lives. (There's that 'mirror' term again!)

In Shrapnel, the underlying story is about a veteran's emotional struggle with a war. That isn't a mirror for me, I don't have an emotional struggle with a war, nor do most people. I can only feel his physical pain - and enjoy the symbolism. So the story is about someone else, and doesn't reflect anything in my own life. That's ok, it's wonderful as is.

What strikes me though is that many of us have a similar experience. We have something deep down, pushing up, trying to get out. That something might be a divorce, the loss of a parent or child in a custody battle, or some other emotional experience we suppress which isn't so grandiose. I think we all have something we'd like to get cut out, we all have a chunk of 'shrapnel' that might be just a bit too painful to extract and we suppress those feelings. If Shrapnel was rewritten in a way that put a mirror up to us and showed us our own life like Sorrentino did, it would have an even greater impact. If Shrapnel showed us a mirror of ourselves somehow, and put us in place of dad, I think this story would go up on the bookshelf with Kafka and Sorrentino.

I'll look forward to your responce,
Dave.