Flannery O’Connor wrote in “The Nature and Aim of Fiction” that most people who write “are more interested in being a writer than in writing. They are interested in seeing their names at the top of something printed, it matters not what.” This, I realized once I’d been kicked in the face with the fact of my being neither here nor there, neither fish nor fowl, neither good enough to be in the M.F.A. program nor bad enough to get kicked out, was who I was: one of the people in the slushpile, wanting only to be heard, to see my name in print. …

[But] that winter I picked up a copy of Raymond Carver’s short-story collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.

A copy of that book remains on my desk to this day, as I write this. That’s how much of an impact those stories had on me. … [H]e also taught me in a way I had never been taught before.

That winter, I read these stories of his, and saw real people in real circumstances, the author nowhere in sight. This may sound dumb, but before that, once I’d started to write my own stories, I thought a story was about the author’s abilities to put words together, the author’s insight into the human condition, the author’s talent.

I thought a short story was a showcase for the author.

Me: R. Bretley Lott.

But here, here were stories about people in dire circumstances. Real people, starkly rendered, clearly and cleanly rendered, people who were dealing, whether they knew it or ignored it, with matters of life and death.

And nowhere, nowhere could you find the author. There were only these people, and how they would or wouldn’t play the hand they’d been dealt.

In my stories, the author—me—served more as a ringmaster calling attention with a megaphone to the people I was writing about, rather than serving simply, as Carver did, as the conduit through which the story passed.

Scales fell from my eyes.

That winter break, because of this series of events—the reading of hundreds of lousy stories [in my M.F.A. program], the solid and stone-cold rejection of my own by a professor who told me that it remained to be seen whether or not I was worth the space I took up in his classroom, and these crystalline stories—I did two things: first, I stopped sending stories out, ceased seeking publication altogether; and second, I sat down and wrote what I consider my first short story.

It was a story that began in truth, in an incident from my childhood back in Southern California, an incident that involved my older brother, Brad, and me and our babysitter, Charlotte. It began in what really happened, and then departed, took off on its own to arrive at a place I hadn’t imagined it might until I arrived there.

That is, the story told me what it was going to do. I was only along for the ride, merely writing down what I saw happening as it was happening.

I was, finally, humbled by the story.

—Bret Lott

Transcribed by me from pages 126–128 of my paperback copy of Before We Get Started: A Practical Memoir of the Writer’s Life, © 2005, Ballantine Books.

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