by R J Dent

Simon Dorn sat at his desk and opened the brown envelope.

          His fingers lifted the flap and he pulled the five folded A4 pages out, opened them and looked at the top sheet. Beneath the company banner, the short letter read:

Dear Mr Dorn

Thank you for sending an example of your work to Story Board. Although we found it to be well-written, interesting and thought-provoking, it is, unfortunately, not the type of story we are looking to publish at present.

Good luck in placing your work elsewhere.

Yours Sincerely E. Slaughter

Elaine Slaughter.

Editor.

          Dorn dropped the letter into the overflowing plastic box by the side of his office chair. He held his short story, Driftwood Hunting On Brighton Beach in his hands and reread it, looking for the flaws the magazine editor had obviously found in it. Eventually he found one sentence that was a little unclear. He switched on his word processor, found the story file, opened it and scrolled down to the offending sentence – then stopped.

          No! There was a specific reason – integral to the story – for that particular sentence being the way it was. It was deliberate. If he changed it, it would mean that the story content would not match the story form for a couple of lines. This was not permissible.

          Writing fiction was a very fine art.

          Dorn sat thinking for a few seconds, then opened a new file on the processor. He looked at the empty screen and thought about the letter he’d just received. The magazine clearly didn’t want ‘interesting, well-written and thought-provoking’ short stories. What did it want? The opposite?

          The opposite of interesting was dull.

          The opposite of well-written was badly-written.

          The opposite of thought-provoking was uninspiring.

          Could he write a dull, badly-written, uninspiring story? He could try.

          What was the subject matter of the dullest story in the world? The story of someone’s failure through inertia, that was what.