Santa's Eyes

Short fiction for the holidays ... and a lesson about publishing your stories.

In the spirit of the season, I’m sharing the first short story I ever published. It was inspired by a real-life, front-lawn Santa Claus who used to dress up for the neighborhood kids in a small Central Coast California town. The story was published in a local newspaper that used to publish stories submitted by members of SLO NightWriters, our local writing organization.

After you’ve read the story, I have some notes below for those of you who are writers.

Writers:

My heart was in the right place when I wrote this story. It was inspired by a real life event, but I fictionalized it and added characters and a plot. I’m not sure I would write this story at all today, but if I did, it would be very different.

I wrote this story a year before I went back to school and began studying creative writing, so it’s a good example of where I was at before I started studying writing formally. It’s also a good example of why writers shouldn’t publish too soon. This story isn’t well-written, but it’s out there, on the internet, whether I like it or not.

Although the stories for the newspaper were lightly vetted, and I worked with an editor, I’ve never really considered this my first short story publication, because anyone from SLO NightWriters could easily get published, so the vetting was minimal. In other words, I was proud of it at the time, but I also knew the story was published as a result of an agreement between SLO NightWriters, which wanted to publish their members’ work, and the newspaper, which was looking to support local writers and, let’s face it, for free content. It’s unlikely anyone would have published it otherwise.

First of all, some of my friends who read it didn’t even realize it was fiction. That’s partly the fault of the newspaper—readers aren’t really expecting to see fiction in a newspaper, so I think they should have designated the section as fiction. But it’s on me, too. I didn’t ground the reader well enough, in many ways. I didn’t clue them in to the fact that it was a short story. It was written in first person, and I actually had people come up to me after reading it and say, “I didn’t know you had a special needs sister.”

The first-person protagonist is a 12-year-old boy, but I clearly didn’t do a good job of grounding readers in that either. I could have signaled to the reader early on and more strongly that the protagonist was a young boy, and they would have immediately known it was fiction. ZZ Packer is a master of doing this kind of thing, if you want to study up.

The characterizations and descriptions in the story are minimal and, worse, stereotypical. I’m embarrassed by them.

The plot is thin, cliché, and overly sentimental/didactic.

There are some details in the story I still enjoy, like characterizing Misty as being a fan of Santa Claus the way other teenage girls are fans of boy bands. But overall, this is early work and it shows.

Still, it does make me smile thinking of the real-life Santa sitting in his lawn chair under sunny California skies, so there’s that.

Happy holidays!