Adam O'Fallon Price, "The Lottery"

It’s December 14. Adam O’Fallon Price, author of The Hotel Neversink, answered the skill-testing question with time to spare.

How would you describe your story?

ADAM O’FALLON PRICE: “The Lottery” began as a Twitter joke in my mind, about how insanely stupid it would be to write a short story called “The Lottery,” about winning the actual lottery. Anyway, that’s what it’s about—the weirdly nightmarish experience I imagine winning the lottery might be under the right (or wrong) circumstances.

When did you write it, and how did the writing process compare to your other work?

AOP: I initially wrote it maybe three years ago, and when H&O contacted me about SSAC 10, I dusted it off and tried it on them. But I’d revised it several times in the interim. That’s my usual writing process: draft a story and revise it, set it aside, forget about it for 6 months to several years, rediscover it, revise more, (hopefully) publish. The only difference being that my stories don’t usually begin as notional Twitter jokes.

What kind of research went into this story?

AOP: Very little. I think I maybe looked up the different ways a lottery winner can claim their prize? I generally don’t care about “getting things right” in fiction, as long as it passes a basic smell test.

What, to you, makes the short story a special form? What can it do that other kinds of writing can’t?

AOP: It’s a perfectable/perfected form vs. novels, which is inherent unperfectable/unperfected. There is no perfect novel, but there are like 1000 perfect short stories. A related aspect of this is that the short story can give a reader an entire complete dramatic arc in an amount of space they can hold in their head at one time.

Where should people go to learn more about you and your work?

AOP: My website has a mostly up-to-date list of publications, should a person want to read one of my short stories. My two novels are available for purchase in most of the usual places.

What’s the best gift you've ever been given?

AOP: I don't know about “best” necessarily, but the $200 Seagull acoustic my parents gave me for my 15th birthday is certainly the gift that was the most lifechanging and that I got the most use out of.

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