From First Word to Publication: MFA Fiction Alumnus Aubyn Keefe Shares How She Wrote and Published Her Short Story, "You Bought a Chair"

I never planned to publish “You Bought a Chair.” I never even intended to finish it. But there I was, a few hours from workshop deadline, scrambling to submit something for my classmates’ review. I felt like I was taking the easy way out—cobbling an end onto something I had already started from a random prompt, more of an exercise than anything else: Could I tell a good story in the second person?

In truth the deadline was helping, shoving the rest of the toothpaste from the tube. There was no big mystery to the ending. The story is about putting together a chair. Once the chair is whole, the story is done. Not exactly astrophysics. I just needed to get it down in time for class.

I looked at the clock on the stove and came to the decision to write the rest as simply as I could. I wasn’t adding phrases I thought were clever or words I thought were funny. No summarizing for the reader or waxing on the setting. I was trying to be as much of a journalist about it as possible. State the news and end when you’re out of information. I ended up with a full arc, but it still felt too rough to workshop.

It was shocking, then, that the draft of this story got a significantly warmer response from my classmates than any I had submitted so far. What I saw as simple, they read as unencumbered. What I worried was a nonsensical setup—a back-and-forth between building furniture and navigating what the character can’t control—they read as having at least some merit. When they posed questions, it wasn’t because they didn’t understand the point. They were able to see what needed elaboration better than I could ever have guessed on my own. I remember leaving that workshop feeling not only validated, but also eager to answer every question they asked within the text.

Writing short stories can feel like building a website, a polished façade with a back end full of mapping intricacies that make it functional and interesting in a very short amount of time. What I learned in writing this one, though, was something I find myself emphasizing again and again to writers I’m editing: There comes a time in a story when you have no choice but to test the mechanisms you’ve already put in place. You’ve set up your truths. You’ve created rules for your characters. When it felt like I was zipping through the end, I wasn’t truly letting go of any of these controls. I was just watching the natural result emerge.

Something about this made the stakes feel lower than normal—in the best way—when I submitted a revised version to journals. I had already learned from it, so the point of the original exercise and my ego were satisfied. The whole Submittable process was infinitely more navigable with a story that had a bit of confidence behind it. Again, no astrophysics here: The more naturally I grasped the levers of the story, the easier it was to check the boxes that would lead me to the right publication.

When Half and One accepted, I jumped, fell and broke a chair.

No, that didn’t happen. But it would have made a better ending.