Isabel Fontes

Rejection still stings. I wish I could say I’ve reached some enlightened stage where I receive a “not for us” and serenely make a cup of coffee, but I haven’t. I’m disappointed, I question the story, and sometimes I question myself. But perhaps the disappointment is mostly for the story itself — because if I’ve sent it out, it’s because I believe in it and believe it has value. After that, it becomes almost a little fight between me and the world to find the place where it belongs.

Sometimes I’ll also send it to a friend and ask for feedback.

What keeps me going is knowing that rejection is one editor’s decision about one piece at one particular moment; it isn’t a verdict on the work, and certainly not on the writer. I’ve learned that a story can be rejected several times before finding exactly the right home. So I allow myself the disappointment, but I don’t allow it the final word.

I’m not sure I ever know. I can always find one more sentence to question, one more word to move, one more reason not to let a story go. At some point, though, I have to ask myself whether I’m still making it better or simply making it different. That’s usually my sign.

Quite often, once I’ve finished a story, I check the grammar, make the small corrections, close the document and send it straight away. Then I try not to look at it again. I know myself well enough to know that if I do, creativity will return and suddenly I’ll want to give a character another life, change a movement in the story, or discover a possibility that wasn’t there five minutes earlier. A story can become a constant work in progress if I let it.

There comes a point when too much editing can make a story lose something — its instinct, perhaps, or the thing that made me want to write it in the first place. So sometimes sending it out is my way of saying: this is the story now. For about five minutes afterwards, I still wonder whether I should have waited, whether I could have worked on it a little longer. Then another story begins forming in my head, and the doubt disappears. By then, I have new characters to worry about.

One of my favourite lines is from my short story “Blood”: “I haven’t slept for eight days.” I love it because there is so much mystery in such a simple sentence. It could take me anywhere — it could become a love story, a mystery, something dark, even something funny. The sentence doesn’t decide the genre for me. It just makes me curious: why hasn’t this person slept for eight days? What happened? And from there, a story can begin.

That’s actually how many stories start for me. Small, disconnected sentences come into my head, and I write them down, sometimes with absolutely no idea what I’m going to do with them. I might return to one much later, and suddenly there’s a character, a situation, a whole story growing from that single line. “I haven’t slept for eight days” was one of those.

I’m also very fond of the character who grew out of it. She is deeply ambiguous — capable of holding satisfaction and guilt at the same time, while finding her own way of justifying choices that are difficult to justify. I’m drawn to characters like that, because they resist being placed neatly into categories of good or bad. “Blood” is also very personal to me, which is perhaps another reason I remain particularly attached to both the character and the story.

“Blood” is one of the short stories in my Portuguese-language collection Vidas em Silêncio. I’ve since translated it into English, but, strangely enough, that version hasn’t been published yet. The right opportunity hasn’t appeared, so for now, “Blood” is still looking for its home in English. If you are interested in reading more of my published stories or staying up to date with my work, you can find information through my social media profiles.

I’ve never consciously been inspired by other writers or by books I’ve read. Perhaps they have influenced me in ways I don’t recognise. Still, inspiration, for me, has always come from what is around me: conversations I overhear, small gestures, people, places, my travels, things I discover, and sometimes something so ordinary that nobody else seems to notice it. Everything within me and everything within my orbit can become material for a story.

That hasn’t really changed, although I have. With age, I feel that the poet I once was gave birth to a narrator, a storyteller, and I love navigating that territory and creating within it. Sometimes I write from the inside out; sometimes from the outside in. A feeling can lead me towards the world, or something I observe in the world can lead me back into myself.

So what’s inspiring me right now? Probably the same thing that always has: everything around me. I’m just looking at it with different eyes.

A good story should leave room for the reader.

Bold. Welcoming. Unconventional. Curious. Human.