THOSE OF you who know something about my work will realize that even then, when you have taken every precaution against wasting your time, when everything is organized, and, according to the rules, there is nothing left for you but produce a perfect story, you often produce nothing of the kind. My own evidence for that comes from a story I once wrote called ‘First Confession’. It is a story about a little boy who goes to confession for the first time and confesses that he had planned to kill his grandmother. I wrote the story twenty-five years ago, and it was published and I was paid for it. I should have been happy, but I was not. No sooner did I begin to re-read the story than I knew I had missed the point. It was too spread out in time.
Many years later a selection of my stories was being published, and I re-wrote the story, concentrating it into an hour. This again was published, and became so popular that I made more money out of it than I’d ever made out of a story before. You’d think that at least would have satisfied me. It didn’t.
Years later, I took that story and re-wrote it in the first person because I realized it was one of those stories where it was more important to say ‘I planned to kill my grandmother’ than to say ‘Jackie planned to kill his grandmother’. And since then, you will be glad to know, whenever I wake up at four in the morning and think of my sins, I do not any longer think of the crime I committed against Jackie in describing his first confession. The story is as finished as it is ever going to be, and, to end on a note of confidence, I would wish you to believe that if you work hard at a story over a period of twenty-five or thirty years, there is a reasonable chance that at last you will get it right.
(1959 radio broadcast)