Just One Thing with Nini Berndt

Nini Berndt’s flash “Wingdings” aches and yearns for something, tries to close a fist around what’s missing. Here she shares just one thing about the piece:

“I wrote the first draft of ‘Wingdings’ for a class in grad school eight years ago. I loved the form, the voice, the humor, the collective frustration and desire of this group of teens. But the ending wasn’t right. It stayed not quite right for many years, and I’d pull it out and tinker with it, do something completely different, cut, paste, rewrite. It was close, but not quite there. And then a few months ago I pulled it out again. It’s one of those pieces I would reread and say ‘Damn, I really like this. I really want this to work.’ And then it was just some slight tweaks, a couple of words, restructuring the breaks of last few lines, and it felt done. The rest of the story stayed almost exactly the way it was in the very first draft.

The shorter something is the more essential it is that every word is exactly right, every comma. That what is not on the page is doing as much work as what is. I was thrilled when the fabulous editors at Split Lip saw what I saw in this story. It’s special when you find your readers, the people who see your work the way you want it to be seen. Not everyone will get it. But trust those pieces that keep pulling at you. Keep tinkering.”