Whitey By The Numbers

Just before the holiday, Cold Caller published my short story Whitey's Elephant, a tale told in the form of a wiretap transcript, where a band of dim-witted wiseguys fall out over a Christmas white elephant gift exchange. I touched on the origins and evolution of the story in my accompanying Cold Caller interview, but for a deeper dive, more forensic elements of the story's creation follow below.

The story took just shy of twelve hours to complete, spread over ten working sessions, mostly in the spring and summer of 2024.

Some notes from my records:

5/22/24

Researched gangster transcripts, names, rules of the gift game. Been thinking of it for months. Blocked out characters and their conflicts, the gifts they might bring.

5/23

Woke up at 4:00 AM, started writing on time but moped for hours, zero progress, then blasted out the entire first draft in two bursts. I think something is missing but I will let it sit. Works as a gimmick story and maybe that’s enough. About 2K words.

My notes several times reference Whitey as a "gimmick story," and looking back on it, I was being unfair. I was frustrated I couldn't touch a deep theme or land a great ending and by diminishing the writing in this way I created emotional distance from a story that wasn't working. There's nothing wrong with gimmicks! Destiny was a pure gimmick story and it was published by Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. A story is a story and you need to make them as great as you can, whatever their lane.

5/28

Added 300 words but I’m not sure it makes it better. Trying to play the theme notes louder. Might need to walk away for a bit.

6/15

Tried to work in a theme of family. The ending still isn’t landing, let it sit overnight, maybe longer.

7/16

Still isn’t landing but I changed the arc; now Sonny is wrong-footed by Whitey’s unexpected generosity, tries to walk back his plan, but it’s too late. Those emotional beats are better than the generational conflict thing I was trying to do … but I still don’t have my ending.

7/18

It’s imperfect but it holds together. I think I’m ready to make peace with it.

7/24

I’m calling it done.

(It wasn't done).

3/10/25

And with Whitey back it was time for another read, another cut at that ending that I knew didn’t land, and a fresh submission.

In this final iteration I hit on the leitmotif of Whitey and Hump saying to each other, "It's not where you start, it's where you end up." This provided the narrative string tying the beginning and end of the story together, turning the ending into a landing spot, rather than the abrupt conclusion of a transcript.

4/21

SOLD! to Cold Caller!

The lessons I take from the above are twofold.

First, endings are hard, and as much as you are bursting to begin a story, you really (really) need to know how it's going to end before you set out. (I lost weeks -- maybe months -- questing for an ending to No One Will Believe You.) By knowing your ending I mean more than incident -- I mean style, tone, and your last line, as well. These things can change by the time you get to the end of your story, but I must have an ending penciled before I get to the finish line. Otherwise I've built a bridge to nowhere.

The second lesson is that stories take time. I set this one aside several times, for weeks or months, and I didn't really figure out my ending until after I'd received a rejection notice. I get antsy if I don't have a story in submission someplace, and so far I've managed to time things pretty well, having a new story ready to go out once every three or four months — but if it isn't ready, it isn't ready. If you can't tell yourself that, the market will.