Here is a rather typical method I’ve used. Most query letters contain three or four paragraphs, and you’ll want to keep it to no more than a page, single spaced. [Please note: I’ve inserted additional comments in brackets.] 

First Paragraph 

There are one of two ways to approach the first paragraph. You can keep it simple by stating the name of your work, the genre, and why you are querying this particular agent or editor. For example, here is what I used for How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences. 

Dear _, [and be sure to include the name of a specific editor or agent, spelled correctly] 

Thank you for taking the time to talk with me about How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences at the recent AWP conference. My hope is that you’ll find it to be a good fit for the University of Nebraska Press’s American Lives Series. 

Or if you don’t have a personal connection with an agent or editor, you can simply begin by saying, “I am querying you because_.” [Study the website of each editor or agent. Determine what you think they’re looking for and include that here. In other words, do they seem interested in books on the same topic as yours?] 

Other opening paragraphs can have more of what’s called a “hook,” or what I call a “seduction.” Here is one I found on the Agent Query website for the nonfiction book Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster by Jon Krakauer. 

On assignment for Outside Magazine to report on the growing commercialization of the mountain, Krakauer, an accomplished climber, went to the Himalayas as a client of Rob Hall, the most respected high-altitude guide in the world, and barely made it back alive from the deadliest season in the history of Everest. 

I could have used more of a hook or a seduction for How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences by saying something like “Don’t want to die? Read this book!” And I might have used some thing like that if I’d queried an agent since New York publishing is more “into” eye-catching taglines than university presses. Which is to say you need to tailor your query to the audience—the agent, editor, or publisher—you’re contacting. 

Second Paragraph 

The second paragraph of your query letter is a mini-synopsis of the book and should be under two hundred words. In it you want to introduce yourself as narrator (that is, not the “real” you but the “you” on the page) and address the major conflict or the nature of the narrator’s journey. You can also include the types of obstacles standing in the way of a successfully completed quest. 

Here is the mini-synopsis I wrote for How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences. 

In this book of thematically linked essays, the narrator explores the taboo subject of death. While several pieces use gallows humor as a way to deflect, Silverman also directly confronts her fears of the ultimate unknown. Her fear stems in part from a sexual assault she hid for years. This experience attests to a fact many women know all too well, that death and sex are intimately tied—not in some philosophical way but in everyday life. As this baby boomer grows, from childhood to adulthood, she explores other origins surrounding her fear of death—as well as her goal of surviving it. Her quest is, by turns, realistic and fantastical, worldly and other-worldly. The odyssey begins with the narrator dubbing herself “Miss Route 17,” while cruising New Jersey’s industrial-strength landscape. Along the way, she survives everything from a piano teacher who stifles her natural talent to a faux heart attack to various maladies that afflict us as we age. Her more internal journey to live forever finds the narrator hoarding memories as well as archaic words, which she uses as talismans against the darkness, overcoming and transforming death through language, memory, and metaphor. 

You will be able to find many other examples on the web. See, for example, the Agent Query website.

Third Paragraph 

The third paragraph focuses on your biographical information. Keep it short and related only to your writing credentials, such as journals in which you’ve published, awards you’ve won, where you received a degree, with whom you studied, and such. Here you can also mention any expertise in the area in which you’re writing, if appropriate. 

Fourth Paragraph 

In the final paragraph, thank the agent or editor for their time and consideration. If, on their website, they’ve asked, say, to include the first ten pages of your manuscript, mention that you’ve done so. Some agents or editors also want to see an attached proposal. Be sure to read all the guidelines carefully. Some are even very specific about what you should include in the “subject” line of the email. 

That’s it. Submit. You can’t get published if you don’t try.

Excerpted from Acetylene Torch Songs. Copyright © 2024, Sue William Silverman. Reproduced by permission of The University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved.

The post How to Write a Query Letter  appeared first on Electric Literature.

When I start a book from scratch, not one page is typed. There are just a few ideas kicking around in my head, some handwritten notes. Usually there’s this sort of vaguely plump feeling in my brain whenever I think about the characters, where they are, mixed with this hazy notion of their conflicts, external and internal both. I think: How the hell am I going to do this again? Go from zero to hundreds of pages.

But I’ve learned to transform the nerves into enthusiasm for the most part. My approach is: “I get to write a novel” versus “I have to write a novel.” And I think about what I desire. What kind of stories I want to tell, what voices I want to give life to in the world.

You may be starting a new project, too. Now might be a good time ask yourself why you want to write it, and what kind of writer you want to be.

And there may be some of you who are trying to finish long-term projects. Dusting off drafts that have been sitting in drawers or trying to push through to the end of something you’ve been toiling on for years. This book can feel heavy in your mind. There are all kinds of feelings already attached to this work from your personal history. You may be thinking to yourself: Why haven’t I finished this already? 

Don’t talk yourself out of it. Ask yourself instead: why do I want to finish it?

Whatever happened before this moment is irrelevant. We tear off our clothes and race down the sand to the icy cold water. We embrace the sting. To show ourselves we can. We start anew on our work, together. We just have to try. 

I believe in you. You can do this. Now let’s begin.

What Do the Words Do for You?

The words do so many different things for people. If your writing is for comfort, let it comfort you. If your writing is for process, let it be for process. If your writing is to change your life or even the world, let that change roll. If your words are a war cry, for the love of God, please howl.

I know what the words do for me: for an hour or two, when I write, it’s a place I can go to feel safe. It has always worked that way, ever since I was a child. The safety of a sentence. The sensation when I push and play with the words is the purest I will ever feel. The calm space of my mind. I curl up in it. I love when sentences nudge up against each other, when I notice a word out of place and then put it in its correct spot. I can nearly hear a click when I slot it into place. I love making a sentence more powerful, more dramatic or moving or sad, and I love when I make a sentence quiet enough that I can almost hear the sound of my own breath. More than anything, I love when a sentence makes me laugh. 

The words light up on the page, showing me what to do, where they want to go. They have always been my best friends in the world. All I need is for a few of them to show up. To soothe me.

Yes, yes, it is different for everyone—but we are all still here together. I can only speak of my particular intimacy and hope to connect with you. That’s what writing is: our particular intimacies. I offer up the idea of the safety of a sentence for you right now, the possibility of a place to put yourself, to put your heart. A place to rest for a while from these feverish days. 

Today, before you begin your writing, ask yourself: what do the words do for you?

Make a Choice 

We often wonder how to know if we’re making the right choice creatively when there are so many possibilities. I understand fear. I understand caution. But at some point, we must shake off the indecision and just move forward with our work. Choose your project. Choose your sentences. Choose your ideas. Choose your ending. It’s your trip and no one else’s.

If your biggest dream was to write for television, you wouldn’t say things like, “I should really write a television pilot.” Instead you would say, “I am writing a television pilot,” and you would get up an hour earlier every day to work and you would lock yourself in your house on the weekends, also to work, and you would read those television writing books and you would buy that impossible software program and you would join a writing group or make friends with someone else who wanted to write for television and you would swap scripts and give each other feedback and go out and get drunk one night and toast each other for being brilliant (and maybe there would be some sort of awkward sexual chemistry between you but that’s your business and not mine) and then you would try and find an agent and then who knows what happens next? But this would be you in fact doing enough to try and achieve this goal.

But what if you don’t do it? Are you the kind of person who lives your life mired in regrets or are you the kind of person who makes your decisions and moves on with them? Can you see the fact that you are not doing these things as choices you are making, to make room for the things you can and want to do? The people doing all the things you want to be doing, for the most part, no one is doing the work for them, no one is handing it to them on a plate. 

Certainly, some of them have generational wealth or connections or are over-achievers, but most of them are worker bees like the rest of us, buzzing about the giant hive of creativity. We cannot envy them for trying. We should look to them as role models, instead.

If you want something, do what it takes to get it. If you decide not to pursue a path, accept your choices.

Valuing Your Creativity 

It’s important to value your creative self and what it can give you. I don’t think you can be your best without that. We love our friends, we love our family, our partners, too: there is a system of mutual support there. We need these relationships to be healthy and whole. But to feel fulfilled we also need our relationship to be healthy with our creative self. We do this by paying attention to the conscious choices we make to benefit our ideas and artistic output, and what we gain from producing our work. We won’t be as happy as we could be without engaging with that side of ourselves.

I am always excited about witnessing how the creative mind works, both in myself and in my peers. How it solves problems even when we aren’t even necessarily thinking about them. And how it operates beyond our conscious control to give us what we need. It is intimate, the relationship we have with our creative self. It is purely for us and no one else.

Your creative self is comprised of your brain, your heart, and your time. To protect your creativity, you must tend to them all.

The creative self looks out for us—if we look out for it. If we do our work, invest our time in ourselves and our art and our imagination, keep our mind clear for stretches of time just to rest it, balance ourselves between blankness and stimulation, get enough sleep, read, write, think. If we honor that thing that provides us with so much, it just might help us out one day. After the rain stops, it shows up. Quietly slips a solution to a plot problem into your head, for example, and cracks open the narrative of your book. Makes us feel good and sunny and proud and able to communicate with the world.

Are you caring for yourself, the deep, intimate creative self? Are you giving it the nurturing it deserves? The goal is to always be getting closer to the creative self. 

Respecting your creativity is respecting yourself.

Excerpted from 1000 WORDS: A Writer’s Guide to Staying Creative, Focused, and Productive All Year Round. Copyright © 2024, Jami Attenberg. Reproduced by permission of Simon Element, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved.

The post This Year, Ask Yourself What Kind of Writer You Want to Be appeared first on Electric Literature.

Brutalistically gray and unassuming, the science museum watches over its surrounding homes and greets my partner and I on our daily walks. This is why I notice immediately when the sign shows up, overnight. Small and vague, planted right by the entrance. All I can make out are the words “Orchid Show.” There are no dates listed, so I’m not sure if it happened already, if it’s happening now, or if it’s happening in the near future. But it has an attractive air of mystery that pulls at me—freshly out of graduate school and trying to figure this life thing out, trying to find something to care about. I’m desperate for, as cliche and literal it is, a sign. For the universe to come around and smack me in the face with something important, worthy. And this cipher, flimsy on a white board and metal legs, has a luring specificity.

Upon returning to our apartment, my partner, Jonny, looks up the information. “Orchid Show, Rochester” is the only search term we can think of to return the result we want. What comes up are various orchid societies, one from the Genesee Region of New York and one encompassing the entire country: the American Orchid Society. It turns out this year marks the latter’s 47th annual show, complete with lecture talks, orchid sales, and living art pieces created and cared for by members of the local chapter. In essence, it’s a carnival for the flower’s most dedicated followers.

The show’s last day is Sunday, and Jonny goes with me under the pretense that we’ll only stay if it’s free. Who are we—two broke, recent graduates—to spend any amount of money on something so silly? We pull open the heavy glass doors.

“Okay, we’ll just look around,” I tell him. Internally, I’m cursing myself for not knowing about this event earlier, thinking I could have pitched coverage of it to my local newspaper. Already, in my head, I know I can’t turn away. Already, I’m experiencing each moment through the lens of how it would work in a story.

There are more people smushed into the tiny welcome room than I expected. And on the far side, there’s a row of meticulously styled orchid arrangements, all assembled by members of the local society. One is built of a hollow rod of bamboo with an oval cut out in the middle through which water and pussy willows build up and over the smooth edge. Another is impossibly delicate, the mere whisper of an orchid cradled in the black circular vase’s arch. “That one looks like your purse,” Jonny tells me. If the entrance fee means more of this, I’m inclined to pay it.

In 1998, Susan Orlean published The Orchid Thief, her tour-de-force journalistic memoir (though I don’t think she’d ever refer to it as such) following the orchid obsession that was tearing through Florida, leading more than one individual to the brink of criminality. Orlean centers the story on John Laroche, a man possessed by an indescribable desire to capture and appropriate the ghost orchid, Polyrrhiza lindenii. He is driven by greed, but also a lilting intelligence. A man who claims to know everything, and, to some degree, just might. He is quick to obsess, and even quicker to slash his stash once the passion is gone; by the time Orlean encounters him, he’s already abandoned similar fascinations with turtles and ice-age fossils.

At the start of the memoir, Orlean has left her home in New York for Florida, unsure if Laroche will even agree to speak with her. The project was triggered by a newspaper article she stumbled upon, but really, she’s chasing an impulse, letting the story build around her. The article outlined Laroche’s trouble: how he, and a group of Indigenous Seminole people, were arrested for attempted poaching of ghost orchids in the Fakahatchee, a protected Florida state park. Members of the Seminole Tribe were let off with a warning, having successfully argued their right to the land. Laroche was not.

Much like Orlean, I’ve always been drawn to passionate people. It’s in my nature to wonder how those with obsessive interests find themselves at the point of no return. Like Orlean, I’m perpetually curious, scanning constantly for meaning. Like the collectors, I’m hunting for fulfillment, convinced it’s right across the road, if only I’m tenacious enough to claim it.

The first exhibit we see in the science museum is a photograph display titled “Orchids That Don’t Bloom for Shows,” which features images taken throughout the year by one individual on their cell phone. Certain photos bear a ribbon already. What they’re marking, I don’t yet know. Just steps from us, the real orchids are putting on a show, blue and red and white ribbons pinned along their terracotta chests. These flowers are scored on tangible things, like color and strength and petal shape.

The main event is down the hall, inside a miniature auditorium. Up on the stage, two women work diligently to repot purchased orchids behind a rickety plastic folding table. On the floor, sneakers squeak against the freshly waxed wood. There are at least four vendors here, their bodies encased by an array of plants at varying levels of growth. Around them, a jungle erupts, countless displays of orchids, from impossibly small flowers that snake up curving stems to individual beasts the size of my hand. They are pink and red and yellow and purple and orange and white. Some look like spiders with spindly petals, others look murderous with great big chins to catch bugs. Small black plaques identify their Latin names and astonishing price tags. At one show, Orlean discovered a display containing nearly forty thousand dollars’ worth of orchids.

A man near the entrance to the auditorium wears a U.S. Navy lanyard and says he’s been collecting since the 60s. His first job as a teenager involved moving giant pots of orchids, the kind of terracotta behemoths that line the front walks of impressive mansions. “It’s a lifetime obsession,” he tells me.

Another collector wears a chambray shirt embroidered with a pink orchid above the chest pocket. He sells orchids that smell like chocolate and raspberries and I overhear him telling a woman, “It’s my therapy. Something that keeps me occupied, where I’m always learning.”

In the middle of the room, a man dressed in all black dissociates in front of his life’s work. I rouse him from another dimension by asking how he got started. “I saw my first orchid in a Buffalo store window 35 years ago,” he says. “I had never seen one before but I was transfixed.” His display is heavy with blue first-place ribbons.

Orlean asks a collector what it is about orchids that “seduced humans so completely that they were compelled to steal them and workshop them and try to breed new and specific kinds of them and then be willing to wait nearly a decade for one of them to flower?” Orlean doesn’t describe how the collector formulated his response. If he faltered, if he felt attacked by the intensity of her observational interest. But she does tell us what he responded: “Mystery, beauty, unknowability, I suppose. Besides, I think the real reason is that life has no meaning. I mean, no obvious meaning.”

As writers, all we do is search for and make meaning from the mundane. We are sensitive to overheard conversations, to the passing of coffee from employee to customer. Moments that fester and form inside us until, one day, they burst forth demanding to be made into something new. We craft, constantly. It’s an obsession, all this meaning-making. A sort of high that we are constantly chasing. Just like Laroche, I suspect we are also hoping that some form of success (money or meaning or, ideally, both) waits at the other end.

It’s easy—for me, at least—to slip into a mindset of ransacking, rather than excavating. Like Laroche breaking into Fakahatchee because his obsession was powerful enough to support a belief that he was entitled to disrupt the natural order, writers risk falling into the habit of living for a story, rather than writing in congruence to living. I’ve already begun to recognize this pattern in myself. Where my decision-making process for attending an event, confronting old friends—really anything—has been reduced to asking myself: “Would I be able to write about this?” Often, it feels like lying. Like falsifying the impulse behind memoir and art. My end goal has switched from gaining a deeper understanding of myself and the world around me to calculating how much I can produce, publish, craft.

In The Orchid Thief, Orlean never sees a ghost orchid in person. In a traditional story, in a story built on the author’s meticulous plan to craft the perfect plot, seeing it would be the crescendo moment. Where everything that’s been building over hundreds of pages finally explodes in relief. The moment she comes face-to-face with the fragility of beauty, the cause for so much treachery and loss and obsession.

But Orlean’s book is not a novel. When she attends her final orchid show, a sort of peace washes over her as she realizes the ghost orchid won’t be there: “It was a relief to have no hope because then I had no fear; looking for something you want is a comfort in the clutter of the universe, but knowing you don’t have to look means you can’t be disappointed.”

What would happen if I stopped searching for the story in every turn signal, every stranger passing on the street, every minute shiver of the trees? What if I stopped fabricating intention and metaphor where there is neither? What if a sign outside the local science museum was just a sign, promoting an event, without outsized metaphorical significance? What if I just walked away, as Orlean does at the end of The Orchid Thief, without the perfect ending?

My first essays were purer. I didn’t know what they were going to become as I wrote them: the decaying deer carcass I found in the woods; the extra pigmentation that made itself at home on my face; my need for validation that morphed into inappropriate bonds with English teachers. I lived my experiences as they happened, and only later twisted them into something charged. Those stories feel more real and palpable than anything I’ve since forced into existence. They have heart and complexity, overlapping themes and invisible threads that I later wrangled apart and put back together again. That doesn’t happen when you decide what a story will become before it happens.

At the Orchid Show, I bump into an older woman holding a clipboard. She’s two heads shorter than me. I ask if she has a booth and she tells me no, she doesn’t. “I’m a society member,” she says. “I do the judging.”

I ask her what she thinks it is about orchids that attract so many people, that make her job necessary in the first place.

“They’re a special flower,” she says.

To her, it’s that simple.

She tells me that some of the vendors have green houses where they force orchids to stay in bloom all year in order to bring them to shows like this. In nature, an orchid blooms for six to ten weeks. But first place ribbons guarantee revenue and, like most obsessions, disruption of the natural order is the price.

Orchid pollination is a delicate dance, she explains, because some flowers have the ability to self-pollinate—if they get impatient, if their environment isn’t exactly perfect, they don’t wait around for moths or butterflies or birds to deliver that elusive pollen.

As the woman speaks, my first thought is that this kind of efficiency might be a good thing. Less work for everyone involved, a self-reliance that keeps the species going. It’s impressive that beauty can be made authentically, without force or artifice.

But, of course, it’s not that easy.

Self-pollinated orchids, the woman tells me, only bloom for a single day.

The post Twisting My Life Into a Story Sacrificed My Ability to Live It appeared first on Electric Literature.

My publisher’s sales portal updates in massive tranches every few (or two) weeks, so naturally I check it every day. And here was an update—in fact, a huge leap, with total unit sales topping 10,000 for the very first time. I fumbled around in my Gmail, found my book contract, punched the numbers into my phone calculator, did the math. Then, to be 100 percent sure, I had a Wall-Street-whiz friend check my homework. 

I’d done it. I’d earned out. In less than two years, if barely. 

And all it had cost me was incalculable time and energy, weekends with my family, the opportunity to finesse and sell another book. Truly, I’d busted my ass. Hustled. Worked every connection. Taken what I learned during 12 years’ hard labor in corporate marketing and applied it. Hired a PR person, too. When my nonfiction debut came out in September of 2021, I did dozens of podcast interviews on shows large and small, popular and obscure, and placed excerpts or companion pieces everywhere from Literary Hub to the Wall Street Journal to this website right here. I also gave talks anywhere they’d have me: major museums, universities, writers’ conferences, fan cons, Zoom-based book clubs, libraries—even the reception hall of a pretty country church where, nibbling cookies after the event, a sweet older woman squeezed my hand and told me God had worked through me to write this book, making me wonder ever since if she’s read it and still thinks so. Likewise, I experimented with Amazon ads, and worked with my publisher to arrange e-book promotions. One Kindle Daily Deal that my editor spearheaded led to over 300 sales. Deeply discounted, they nonetheless counted, and even better, the promo spiked hardcover sales.

This was how I beat the odds to sell circa 11,000 books in 23 months, “earning out” my modest $20,000 advance. Depending on the stats you’re looking at, 98 percent of traditionally published books don’t sell more than 5,000 copies their first year in print. Much less their second year in print. Much less their third—you get the idea. By the same token, depending on your stats, only 25 or 30 percent of traditionally published books ever earn out, moving into the black for the publisher and ensuring you, the author, will begin receiving royalties. 

It’s possible to earn out lots of different ways, with a mix of foreign-rights sales, e-book sales, audiobook sales, yada yada, but hardcovers tend to get you there quickest. At least this was true with my situation and my sales breakdown. Via all that hustling I scooped up a grim $1.80 of income per book, rising to $2.25 per book after the first 5,000. A breadcrumb trail, if that—Alexa, what’s smaller than a breadcrumb?—I’d been going down for nearly two years.  

The pall of the parking deck was nothing compared to these realizations, to the mood that came over me in my milk-spattered, stroller-choked SUV, hands sweating as I cupped my phone and stared until the numbers blurred together, a black soup of digital digits. Could it really be true that absolutely nothing happens when you earn out? That you in fact have to figure it out for yourself that you have earned out? I mean, isn’t earning out like a way bigger deal than that? 

Yes, yes, and no. 

Here’s what happens when you earn out: Nothing. No one throws beads, confetti, nada. No one even notices. They’re busy. They’ve moved on. They’re not neurotically checking the sales portal or pathologically over-working to try to make those figures tick up, up, up. Which only makes sense, of course. My little book was everything to me, and a blip, a rounding error to everyone else. Which is why I cried that humid, gloomy afternoon in my car, realizing that, hard as I tried, I’d gotten it all wrong. 

It may be rare to earn out, but that doesn’t mean earning out should be the goal. I sought to move copies obsessively, nigh compulsively, because I don’t like feeling as if I owe anyone money. That I haven’t earned my keep. What I missed was, given the modest nature of my advance, the sales number required to earn out was modest, too. 

Had I really worked so hard for such an irrelevant result? Had I really sacrificed all that time—time I could’ve dedicated to my family, to writing, or to, I don’t know, some new and theoretically more rewarding pursuit—to appease a misguided sense of guilt? Or worse, my ego? 

Yeah.

The still more devastating reality—the one that’s even harder to face, which is saying something—is how everything’s just as difficult as it always was during those naïve early days when I was a young, hungry, ambitious, unpublished author lusting after the dream. Writing is not easier. Publishing is not easier. No one’s chasing me down for book #2. Readers, friends, and frenemies ask, but it’s not as if the Big 5 have circled me, barking. I’d thought, hoped, that if I showed I could make a fairly niche title successful, then I’d look better when shopping the next idea, something grander and splashier. But earning out hasn’t made finishing new proposals any easier, which I assume is why I haven’t actually finished a new one, not really finished, not to a salable level. Earning out hasn’t refined the drafts of a novel (labeled, variously and nonsensically, “V1,” “Not_final,” and “Sept23”) that litter my desktop, either. And the commercial realities of the marketplace remain just as difficult. Ditto my pitiful perch within it. 

I didn’t shatter my advance with record-breaking sales. I didn’t go on late-night television shows. I didn’t become a household name. I just became one of the 25 to 30 percent of authors who do earn out their advances, and who still remain nobodies, midlist maybes, yesterday’s “some personal news” tweets. Of all the hardships that characterize the writing life, I’m not ashamed to say this one has hit me the hardest. I’d always thought writers were full of shit when they said publishing a book doesn’t change your life. Now I know what they mean. It feels so great to publish a book—it was the crack-high I’d heard about—and that joy doesn’t go away, but it does fade, receding in the rearview. Whereas the shitty part of being an artist thing does not. Like Geoff Dyer said, being an artist means struggling to be an artist. Forever. I’m learning this lesson the hard way because, hahaha, it turns out the hard way is all there is! And man, I hate that, too.

That we always look to the next thing is a given. Ink drying on our first book deal, we start scanning for the second. Receiving one prize, we plunk right down by the mental phone to await the next, necessarily a bigger one. This is natural and uncontroversial and a sign of our perennially flowering hopes for our work. Earning out or not won’t change it. Hell, even becoming a household name probably wouldn’t change it.

In the end, we’re all still struggling artists, whether pros or amateurs, overwriters or underwriters, stoics or self-dramatizers: beating on, pursuing the impossible dream, starting from scratch every time, goddamn it.

The post My Book Earned Out in Two Years and Nothing Happened appeared first on Electric Literature.

I felt a sense of pointlessness in not being invigorated by writing, but churning out essays from necessity. Moreover, reading authors of color often had much to do with examining necessary, but heavy texts relating to the violence of their time. Studying slave narratives like Mary Prince were illuminating, but exhausting. The recommendation of Dumas excited me, and in looking for a copy to read, I came to find that his works were almost impossible to come by in print. Copies of his short story collections were few and far between, and expensive. They were not stocked in any library in my city, and they were not available in any local bookstores. Finally, I was able to access a PDF through my school’s online database. 

Thalia opens with a breathless meditation on a past remembered and cherished, the reader held so close alongside the narrator’s grief and denial it almost feels claustrophobic:

“Somehow I heard the snow begin to fall even before it began its slow feathery descent. I thought of the sweater of wool you made for me. I was sitting upon the damp tree where we always sit, the tree with the notches carved from the first limb down to the roots. You know the tree, the tree where I wrote to you and you cried. And afterwards the tree broke the silence of winter that year, and shook away the fist of ice that paralyzed it. Remember how my knife bit into the bark and the tree bled, and you sang warm verses? The same tree I sat beneath, and I heard the wind, hoarse from barking all winter, but cold and ruthless. Maybe it was the wind that told me the snow was going to fall. I cannot say, for I was listening to your voice. Everywhere I turned I saw you, and whenever I reached to touch you the touch of passion told me the truth, that you were gone and I must bring you back. Thalia, every moment you were gone has been like time racing backwards into a darkness I care not to try to remember.” 

What follows is six pages spanning the narrator’s journey through a night out with the aforementioned Thalia’s brother, in which he regularly speaks in asides to Thalia (to himself, to the reader), asking her about their life together, what she remembers. The scenes become increasingly surreal, time-bending, and distorted, his reality shaky and unclear. Speeches that could be real or imagined, delivered like sermons, concerning ideas of God, evil, love, and power draw the reader into a cramped bar, along the wintery streets, and finally, by the sea. At one point, the unnamed narrator takes his watch to a watchmaker who tells him that it is broken, and that he will need a new one. He replies, “Yes, this one runs too fast or too slow.” The watchmaker says: “No, it does not run at all.” 

I knew immediately what my friend meant about the writing being special. It wasn’t only that I hadn’t read anything like it, but that it was so emotionally dense, delicate, and all-encompassing, strung together in six pages that felt at once brief, but also like an eternity between each paragraph. 

Thalia lives within a collection of short stories called Echo Tree, and later would be selected as the winner for the Black Scholar literary competition by James Baldwin. His short stories, along with his poetry, vary in genre and theme, sometimes veering into the gothic, romantic, and mythological. He was influenced heavily by jazz (he once studied alongside artist and philosopher Sun Ra), gospel, African American history, Christianity, and the supernatural. His writing was a genuine universe, in every sense of the word. 

Beyond being transfixed by Thalia and searching for more of his work, I could only wonder how I had never once heard of him. In all my time at university, I’d never even read his name in a reference. In my last semester, I spoke briefly with a professor who was instructing my course on romanticism. We talked about the things we were reading outside of class, and I mentioned Dumas, to which he replied something to the effect of, “Oh yes. I’ve not read much, but there’s some very good work there.” 

As time went on, I began to feel more and more like I had come across the precious metals left by a ghost that nobody had collected, because everyone had forgotten. It does not take long in looking into Henry Dumas to discover more about him, and though what is available is scarce, his murder remains the great specter hovering between each line of text. It is clear and definitive that he died, and that he was shot. Everything else remains faded, far away. His death, shrouded in mystery and senseless violence, leaves his ephemeral life behind like a faint, tragic question in the world. While unclear, his murder is referred to by many, as it is the necessary fact in speaking of his life. The events of the day are colored by a different shade in each mention, creating the uncanny collage of a spirit snuffed out too early. Toni Morrison spoke of his murder after taking it upon herself to posthumously release his works: “A young black man, Henry Dumas, went through a turnstile at a New York City subway station. A transit cop shot him in the chest and killed him. Circumstances surrounding his death remain unclear. Before that happened, however, he had written some of the most beautiful, moving and profound poetry and fiction that I have ever in my life read.” Another source states simply: “At the age of 33, Dumas was shot and killed by a New York City Transit policeman in a case of mistaken identity.” 

Dumas was born in Sweet Home, Arkansas. The Encyclopedia of Arkansas states:

“Dumas was shot and killed by a New York Transit policeman. Details surrounding his death remain sketchy and controversial; some evidence suggests that this shooting was a case of mistaken identity, while other evidence suggests that Dumas’s behavior led the officer to believe that Dumas was reaching for a weapon. Regardless of the exact circumstances, Dumas’s tragic, early death serves as a reminder of the capricious state of black men in American society during the 1960s and beyond.” 

Visible Man, a book about Dumas written by Jeffrey B. Leak contains the most detailed information on his life, upbringing, relationships, writing, and death that I’ve come across. Yet, the confusion around his fate remains:

“On May 23, days after [a] wedding, a white transit patrolman shot Dumas after attempting to intervene in an altercation between Dumas and at least one other person on a Harlem subway platform. Accounts vary about the number of people involved, but it appears that Dumas was involved in a conflict with one person, and given the way in which the conflict evidently escalated, other people who were there felt in peril. The circumstances of the shooting were unclear, and after the passage of nearly five decades, many questions cannot be answered.” 

Many questions cannot be answered. A case of mistaken identity. Maybe the feeling that there was violence on the horizon, though Dumas was unarmed at the time of his death, the threat of him necessitated his shooting. This story is an old one, and it was passed down by another, and it runs underneath our days today, with each loss misremembered, forgotten. These instances hold hands across time. In Henry Dumas, we have the ability to look inside him, to examine his heart long after he died. It’s not nearly enough, but it is a gift. Others were not and will not have this afforded to them. It brings to mind other cases where marginalized people with singular, unique, creative voices are damned by who they are, and what they do. What do we lose when we discard these people with so much to give, because we don’t want it, don’t understand it? 

I think specifically of Jordan Neely. In an uncomfortable parallel, he was murdered by another civilian on New York City transit. Dumas was 33 at his time of death; Jordan Neely was 30. Neely was homeless, and spent much of his time on the subways, dancing and notably impersonating Michael Jackson, for money. It seems that performance was once a means for him to keep himself, and his spirit, alive. He lived nowhere, but was on the subway getting by. His mental health was deteriorating. He could not afford to live. Neely’s experience is not unlike many others in the city who are unhoused, struggling to live, and are increasingly seen as inherently problematic, strung out, and violent. According to journalist Juan Alberto Vazquez, who recorded part of Neely’s last moments before being choked to death by Daniel Penny, Neely had said: “I’m tired already, don’t care if I go to jail and get locked up. I’m ready to die.” Daniel Penny took it upon himself to bring this death about. He felt he was protecting the public from Neely’s erratic behavior. According to the New York Times, witnesses saw Neely shouting at passengers, but there was no indication that he physically attacked anyone. 

One woman gave a quote about the incident stating that the man who murdered Neely was a hero, that justice had been served. About Neely, she said: “I feel sorry for the man, but he was acting threatening.” In Jordan Neely’s death, the same conflicting sentiments we see with Henry Dumas’ shooting occur. 

Damaging ideas about the homeless are often perpetuated by those who claim to (and perhaps truly believe themselves to) possess genuine sympathy for their plight. The underlying sentiment in a statement that starts with: “I feel sorry for him, but….” is often one of blame, disgust, and misunderstanding. There is an implication, a silent belief, that a person like Neely’s circumstances are created and worsened by himself and his choices, and everyday that he struggles is a choice to make life unlivable for himself, and potentially, anyone who encounters him. He was not the kind of homeless person who you can avert your eyes from going up the escalator in the subway, mutter a quick and quiet “no, sorry”, and be done with on the day he died. That day, he made them feel more involved. When pertaining to such a vulnerable population, words like “uncomfortable” and “frightening” are powerful weapons. Bystanders such as those who were interviewed after Neely’s murder do not often challenge their inherent discomfort around the homeless. The homeless have no history and no future once they leave their line of vision. They are able to rationalize why their discomfort should be assuaged, even if this results in violence, when it comes to them. It is easier to transform Jordan Neely from a person to a threat—a non-human entity who existed in a moment only to instill fear, and then be eradicated. It is easier to do this than to investigate his humanity. 

Jordan Neely’s mother was murdered by her boyfriend when he was 14 years old. She was choked to death in her home, where Neely had been asleep in another room. Her body was found stuffed inside of a suitcase. The prosecution stated that the time it would have taken her to die from the strangulation was anywhere from 1 to 3 minutes. Witness reports of Neely’s choking death vary, with some claiming it went on for up to 15 minutes. Daniel Penny alleges that the interaction was about 5 minutes. His mother’s murder, coupled with its dark parallel to his own, is an enormous tragedy to process. Moses Harper, a friend of Neely’s, wrote of the enduring pain of Neely’s loss in an essay for The Marshall Project. The pair bonded over their shared love of dance, and particularly, of Michael Jackson tributes. Harper helped Neely pursue the craft more seriously. Their shared creativity was a lifeline for both of them: 

“I don’t know about all of the ways that Jordan was trying to escape his pain, but perhaps the biggest one was performing. When he was Michael, moving his body, he could forget about his life. He was beautiful to watch. He had a gift, and I really appreciated watching him make it safe for a crowd to engage and dance. Being an artist, being a creator is how I decompress, too. I am a survivor of childhood physical and emotional abuse. And even though I have been through all these horrible things, I knew there had to be something else for my life.” 

There had to be something else. It is clear that Jordan Neely desired something else, something that could make existing manageable, even pleasurable. But he didn’t have the tools. Addiction, homelessness, and the loneliness of survival in the city can make even the attempt to reach for such tools an insurmountable task. But of course he wanted more, that’s why he danced.

That’s why he was shouting on the train that he was tired and hungry. 

In this pursuit of life, the thread between Neely and Dumas becomes more vivid. I think of what more for them. In Dumas’ case, we can parse out more of that would-be life. We do not have this luxury with Neely. Dumas had opportunities Neely did not; an education, housing, a career. Toni Morrison stated that in his life, Dumas “had completed work, the quality and quantity of which are almost never achieved in several lifetimes.” For Jordan Neely, we have only the suggestion of a creative future. 

Through Dumas’ writing, a more fleshed out portrait of the man comes into focus. We are able to analyze and connect with his ideas, his style, his influences. Moreover, Dumas’ works have been published posthumously, and while not widely known, they continue to exist – I found him. How could I ever have come across Jordan Neely, if not through his brutal murder, and the subsequent discourse inspired by it? We were only lucky to have something more to salvage with Henry Dumas. 

The overall shape of their lives were different, sometimes starkly so. But the ways in which they mirror each other; their creativity, expression, the salvation they took in their respective mediums, are closely related. The ways in which they die are, too. In some ways, they represent two ends of a spectrum. Henry Dumas’ education and career may have adhered more closely to acceptable societal standards, whereas Neely’s life was high-risk and vulnerable, but this would not save him. They would both be failed by the same structures. 

People agree or disagree that Jordan Neely seemed threatening, people can acknowledge that it was a tragedy or that it was a solemn necessity, but in the noise his humanity, like Dumas’, and like many before him, begins to shift. The granular details, whether or not something seemed

to be, move to the forefront in rationalizing his death. Many cannot accept the reality that white supremacy champions the senseless deaths of Black people, and encourages the lines in each predicament to be blurred. 

Many cannot accept that we live in its home. In reflecting on them both, I feel the need to mourn the life, the potential, and the art. I mourn that we lost the potential to have Jordan Neely live to see his life play out. There are many structural influences that may have made that impossible regardless, but there is hope in imagining the ability to create the future that could have seen him dance longer, safer, touch more people’s lives, have a home, know peace, be a creative person in New York City. I mourn Henry Dumas’ short body of work, and the lengths to which it might have grown. These things that get passed down through generations, that help marginalized people make sense of the world through the talents and gifts of those before them. I mourn that in these deaths, everything, it seems, becomes lost.

The post When Innocent Black People Die, I Mourn The Life, The Potential, And The Art appeared first on Electric Literature.

I wrote my paper for the panel mostly in the very early morning, after my daughter’s 4am feeding, when she latched onto me like a hungry animal after a long stretch of sleep. I’d stay up after lying her gently back in bed, so gently the process took about ten minutes, and sit on a faux black leather Ikea couch to try and finish my dissertation. I was still teaching in the evenings and weekends when my partner was home from his full-time job and able to watch our daughter. I pumped milk at 8pm in a dirty locker room at the City University of New York’s technical college, City Tech, and collapsed into co-sleep upon returning home.

I was tired, but this was a career-making panel—the Shakespeare Association of America’s Next Generation Plenary, featuring work by the next generation of Shakespeare scholars. A committee selected papers via blind review out of almost one hundred. The first time I attended this panel, years earlier, I knew I could do it. And I did, but as my voice shook and I willed my breasts not to leak, my body reminded me I was not supposed to be away from my daughter.

The talk went well. After, I cried while pumping in my hotel room. The woman I shared it with—a colleague with no children—walked in on me. I still remember her face, a mixture of pity and disgust.

I was at my parents’ house, sitting across from my mother, when I first heard the news that Joe Jonas had filed for divorce from Sophie Turner. My mother announced it, looking up from her phone, and we all gasped—long-time Jonas Brothers fans. Joe used to be my favorite. Nick, my little sister’s, Kevin, my mom’s. I went to one of their concerts years ago and haven’t felt that kind of electricity since. The uncontainable, desirous screams of thousands of young girls rung in my ears for days after.

I looked up the headlines for myself, in utter disbelief. TMZ broke the story, reporting that the couple was headed for divorce and that, for months, they had been experiencing “serious problems” in their marriage. As for why, sources told TMZ that Jonas had been caring for the couple’s daughters “pretty much all the time” over the past three months. Subsequent articles claimed that part of the reason for the divorce was that Turner “likes to party” while Jonas “likes to stay at home.” The source also claimed divorce was a “last resort” for Jonas. 

Rage spread through my body as I realized the insinuation behind these articles. I’ve become an expert in bad mothers over the past few years, designing and teaching a college course on the topic. I, myself, am also a bad mother: I work, and I dare to enjoy it; I leave my child with her father for extended amounts of time. Like Edna in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, I tend to my daughter in an “uneven, impulsive way”—struggling to play with her, to look up from my phone when she calls for me. 

When reading the headlines about Turner, I thought about how “partying” signals, in part, unbridled sexuality—and how maternal sexuality has long been demonized in narratives from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet to Kristen Arnett’s With Teeth. I thought about how, in 2022, Turner told Elle UK, “I miss England so much… for my mental health, I have to be around my friends and family… I’m slowly dragging my husband back,” and how Euripides’ Medea, a foreigner, is betrayed and banished by her husband. I thought about all the artist-mothers, from Edna in Chopin’s The Awakening to the mother in Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch, to Mia in Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere, that have struggled to marry their desire to create art with the intensive mothering our patriarchal society demands. 

Generations of bad mothers have taught me that, no matter what Turner may or may not have been caught doing on a Ring camera, the dictates of motherhood are painful—violent, even—to bear. Sophie Turner has privileges many mothers cannot even imagine and yet even she cannot escape these narratives, cannot measure up to what patriarchy deems a good, successful mother. As a rich, white woman, she certainly had the opportunity to be seen as a good mother (unlike, Black mothers, for example, who, too often, do not even have the luxury of being presumed good mothers, and who must contend with a whole set of different myths). That Turner did not make use of her endless resources to fully devote herself to her daughters makes her even more villainous in the public eye. 

The weight of these expectations, to erase oneself and sacrifice everything for your children, is crushing.

As the titular character sometimes thinks in Nightbitch, “I imagine abandoning my family, abandoning this entire life.” “It’s all on me,” she laments—“every part of it.”

Later, in a group text with me and my sister, my mother reiterated the headlines: Turner was too young to get married, she said. Turner was trying to make up for her lost youth partying, she said. I’m glad the girls are with Joe’s people, she said. In my opinion, she said, mothers shouldn’t be away from their children for more than five days—if they’re under five.

I felt like I’d been slapped. Surely, my mother remembered all of my trips to conferences, all of my invited talks, that one month I traveled twice and my partner sat me down and told me it was really hard on my daughter, really hard on the family.

“Are you saying I’m a bad mother?” I asked her.

“Were you ever away from her for more than five days?” she responded.

About to type back, I remember how my mother had to put me in daycare when I was six weeks old. It’s where I became attached to my baby blanket, the transitional object I fell asleep with until I was twenty-six years old. One time, a worker at my daycare told my mother I was walking along the other cribs, holding onto the bars, stealing blankets from the other babies. One time, they told her nonchalantly that I cried all day.

As the story goes, my mother quit her job before she’d have to go back after my sister was born. My father didn’t know how they were going to make it. My mother promised she would use cloth diapers, figure it out. She did figure it out, and proceeded to stay home with her four children, as she wanted, while my father’s career flourished, supporting him along the way. She was always home to bring us something to school we forgot, to drive us to band practice, theater, other appointments. She was always there for us when we needed her. 

My daughter won’t experience this, me being on call all hours of the day, and it pains me. 

Perhaps this is why I nastily said to my mother, “as your daughters know, some of us can’t up and quit their jobs when they want to.” My sister, a lawyer, and I are both the breadwinners of our families.

“Do you think I wasn’t scared to death?” she responded, then swiftly said, “This is just a fight about celebrity gossip. I’m done.”

A few days after the news of Turner and Jonas’s divorce broke, Jonas was spotted out to breakfast with the couple’s children. “Joe Jonas is spending time with his girls,” People reported. A convenient sighting, to say the least. At Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, Jonas addressed the crowd before singing “Hesitate,” a song he wrote inspired by his love for Turner: “It’s been a crazy week. I just want to say, if you don’t hear it from these lips, don’t believe it. Okay?”

As the news continued to roll in, I read that Jonas pressured Turner to attend events postpartum, one source saying he “forced” her while she was struggling after giving birth. Sources report she didn’t want to leave her home, didn’t want to be photographed at events, but, still, she attended them with him. At another, that Jonas attended alone, he “complained” that Sophie was MIA, “felt she needed to get out more.”

In the most recent development, Turner has sued Jonas, demanding their children return to England—the filing said he was withholding their passports and that Turner learned of the divorce through the media. 

My sister sent me a video of Joe Jonas celebrating his birthday on tour, posted about a month before he filed for divorce. “It’s all about me today. It’s all about me,” he tells the crowd.

As People reports, Sophie Turner is also back at work. In images captured since news of the divorce broke, the edges of her body and face are angular, her eyes narrowed, her lips curled up in a pained, almost smile. In one image, her back—covered in a white-web, a temporary tattoo—faces the camera. She clasps her phone in one hand, facing a forest, her right leg lifted as if to step forward.

It’s a vision that reminds me of Edna in The Awakening swimming out to sea, trying to escape. Unlike Edna, though, I hope Turner turns around and swims back. I hope she feels an iota of freedom being away, being free to create art—and that she relishes it. But I know she is also in pain, even if it is only because the narratives that working mothers are bad mothers live in our own heads as much as they reside in headlines. I hope she’s surrounded by family and friends that will tell her she deserves it all, even if all doesn’t feel quite like what we were promised. I hope her daughters grow up knowing they can be anything, because they watched their mother do it—claim herself, her time, in the face of everything.

I know that there is so much distance between Turner and I, but I feel close to her. I feel a need to protect her. I want to hold her hand and hug her and cry with her and tell her that I get it, that she has it so much worse than I do, that she is subject to a million women who feel they have a right to judge her, to argue that her daughters deserve better. 

I want to go out with her and dance as if we never became subject to the scrutiny that accompanies motherhood.

“I think you have doubts within yourself that make you defend Sophie,” my mother texted me, towards the end of our fight. She’s right. Still, there has been an explosion of feminist coverage pushing back on the insinuations in the media’s coverage of this divorce, that Turner is a bad mother. I hope she sees these pieces; they certainly have helped me.

I’m writing this piece at 4AM as my daughter sleeps. Many mornings when I get up early to work, however, she gets up with me. I give her an iPad and she watches videos where parents play with their children as I type away and try to block out the sounds of better, more involved parents than I. My partner usually comes downstairs after waking up a bit later and raises his eyebrows, “How long has she been up?” I usually give him a withering glance. This is our routine.

Last night, as my daughter’s eyes grew heavy, I put my phone on the lowest brightness and typed some of this piece, with one hand, into my notes app. Her skull pressed against me, I felt her breathing grow slower against my side, the fuzz from her unicorn lovey tickling my cheek. I raised my arm painfully, slowly, and lifted myself up, ready to go downstairs and type on my computer. Her eyes popped open—“Mommy?” she said, looking at me with betrayal.

“I’m here baby.” I responded, thinking about the dance so many of us do, daily, in order to have it all.

The post In Defense of Sophie Turner, It’s Nearly Impossible to Be a “Good Mother” appeared first on Electric Literature.

David and I didn’t see each other much during high school, mostly because neither of us drove. But we talked almost daily, and when we turned eighteen, we were suddenly making the fortnightly pilgrimage together a few times a month. David was simultaneously a stranger and a brother; for years he was the only real friend I had who also loved reading. He introduced me to the dense brilliance of Gene Wolfe, while I can proudly claim introducing him to Borges. Whenever there was a lull in conversation during those first few car rides, we turned back to books. In describing an author, we’d look for metaphor in our shared native language, that of THPS’s online community. At first, this was a kind of joke. I’d say something like, “You see that new video by team tRM? Very Jonathan Franzen. Masterfully crafted, ambitious in its scope, but who gives a shit?” And David: “That video by Nonsense was really ahead of its time, holy shit. This is our Moby Dick. People are going to be watching this fifteen years from now, I swear.” (He was right.) For a long time, I thought that this was simply how David and I had learned to bond. But as I became older and grew more serious about writing, I realized my love for reading and THPS came from the same place, exercised the same muscle. The tiny subcommunity of THPS that David and I both belonged to taught me how to read like a writer, to appreciate decisions made and not made. It gave me a working language to talk about craft in. Above all, it introduced me to the joys and frustrations of practicing art. Without that community, I doubt I would have become a writer. 

THPS could not have become an art without its community, and even though THPS1 and 2 were wildly popular, it wasn’t until the release of the game’s third installment, which had an online feature, that a serious community started to form. There were various mini-games you could choose from while playing online, and “Trick Attack,” which awards you points for doing tricks, remains the most popular. To rack up a high score, you need to string together a “combo” of tricks. Here’s what this looks like: You grind an actionable part of the landscape, manual (the skateboard equivalent of a wheelie) to get to a quarterpipe, and so on. If you’re able to maintain a combo after the time runs out on the session, you’re allowed to keep skating until your combo ends. On THPS3, you played a Trick Attack, the game ended, and then the host of the virtual room started another. It got old fast, and the underwhelming size of the online community reflected this.

Not long after THPS went online, hardcore players grew tired of the endless Trick Attacks. Rather than following repetitive “robot” lines guaranteeing maximum points and easy balance—and thus “winning” a game devoid of incentives—these same players started prioritizing artful trick usage and general elegance. Early language surrounding this phenomenon varied, but a common term—improvisation, “prov” for short—concretized. Players started making videos and posting them to new, community-run forums whose domain names were paid for by one of the handful of players older than eighteen: Bens0nn, Nacho, Cio. The zeitgeist was changing, expedited by the release of Tony Hawk’s Underground (THUG), the first game in the series that allowed you to observe players still holding combos after the time in the session expired. The “best” players were no longer on the Trick Attack leaderboards. They were those who, for one reason or another, were uniquely watchable after your own combo had ended. 

Tournaments with judges, each with her own, wholly subjective idea about what prov should constitute, were held regularly. Some of these tournaments are permanently embedded in prov’s collective memory. There are 15-year-long running jokes about so-and-so being robbed, about clandestine arrangements between players and judges. The community has since moved from a constellation of forums to Discord, and in that migration, countless videos fell through the cracks. KC and Diz’s first transfer video, once canon, is thought to be unrecoverable, and Brazbox’s hard drive, the greatest collection of videos by any one player, bit the dust. Despite these losses, the community has a strong sense of history.

Slowly, these Trick Attack sessions stopped being win-lose mini-games and instead became the most convenient way for prov players to show off. In a prov lobby, nobody cared in the slightest about winning, and the repeated matches literally became pointless. This is why casual players were so flummoxed at watching a combo stretch on for minutes at a time when that player had already won, and why it was so difficult for me to explain prov to my friends. It was like trying to explain the nuances of a sport without being able to agree on its basic rules. But to call prov a type of sport, or an eSport, even, would be misguided. Prov is purely expressive, there’s no winning or losing. A real-world parallel might be capoeira, that mesmerizing Afro-Brazilian martial art that is, at its core, an art. As soon as players stopped trying to win Trick Attack games, THPS prov became something more than a game. 

To say that multiplayer THPS became pointless is not a condemnation. Real-life skateboarding is similarly pointless, answering only to internal and perpetually morphing conventions. Curt Lindgren (or Rodney Mullen, depending on whom you ask) came along and kickflipped, something hitherto absent from skateboarding’s collective imagination. Like skateboarding, all innovation within the closed system of THPS’s laws and physics is fair game. Strapping a board to your thigh with an exercise band and skipping around erratically in public is not yet part of what falls under the umbrella of skateboarding, but it could be—skateboarding is mutable in a way that a sport like basketball is not. JM Coetzee’s words about the modern conception of the novel in his genre-bending book Elizabeth Costello make for an apt comparison here: “When it entered the languages of Europe, [the word novel] had the vaguest of meanings: it meant the form of writing that was formless, that had no rules, that made up its own rules as it went along.” Prov was similarly disinterested in defining its own parameters. While this was initially an oversight—the result of a bunch of teens not knowing what they had stumbled upon—this looseness and openness toward aesthetic change has become one of prov’s defining characteristics.

In chaotic and horizontal fashion, THPS prov continued to evolve. Early prov prized “style”—the use of certain skateboarding tricks in harmonious, agreed-upon patterns—as more important than interesting decision-making or originality. There was a Platonic ideal, and the best provers perfectly adhered to canonical trick usage. This early philosophy of prov was a harmonious, total system, but there was little room for innovation. Players seen as having particularly novel or unconventional trick usage—see Jens, who resembles a whirling dervish with his dizzying, maximalist playstyle—were understood to merely be better at representing Perfect Trick Usage in its totality. It was mimetic rather than creative, akin to early landscape painting.

As the years have gone on, opinions on how to evaluate prov players have only become more fragmented and nuanced. Some think that “flow” is among the highest indicators of a skilled prover. In this philosophy, a player’s ability to gracefully maneuver through all of a map without losing momentum is prized. Each map is its own “complete library” to borrow Jorge Luis Borges’s idea, replete with endless permutations and potential decisions. 

Flow is prioritized in the videos of early prodigies like Ksk and Gonzo, whose playstyles would seem risk-averse if judged by today’s standards. On the opposite end of the ideological spectrum, some players value unpredictable movement above all else. Silent, whose Downtown and East LA video holds a special place in my heart, is probably the most important name here. His willingness to change direction and break a combo for spontaneity’s sake pushed the boundaries of prov and marked a major turning point. Even though he hasn’t played seriously in years, you can see his influence in contemporary videos. At any given point in prov’s history, public opinion has favored either flow or unpredictability to varying degrees. A flow-oriented player is likely more skilled at keeping a combo after a Trick Attack session expires because, ostensibly, they’re taking fewer risks. Likewise, flow-oriented players are consistent, and they often perform well in tournaments. A recent history of winners—Konek in the famed i5 tournament, which I judged in 2020, Voyage in the tLTourney—bears this out. In my opinion, the best players synthesize both polarities of these philosophies, carrying combos into deep waters while making daring, innovative choices.

Within this question of flow versus unpredictability, there are more unresolved issues. Do you value large, difficult stunts pulled off during runs, or are you instead attuned to the small, interesting decisions made at every turn? Particularly bombastic players might incorporate stunts called “transfers” into their runs. It’s a slippery term, but I’d define the transfer as a unique move that gets a player from one part of the map to another in a creative way—exploiting a ramp with glitchy physics to grind an impossibly high scaffolding, for example. The community’s tolerance of incorporating transfers into prov runs depends on what’s trending. It’s a question of subtle economy vs. absolute vitality: do you prefer, for example, the restrained quietude of Marilynne Robinson’s writing, or the maximalist intensity of Thomas Bernhard’s? 

Debates about the place of transfers in prov are contentious, but in the end, the question is about the extent to which prov must truly be improvised. Some think that doing a logistically difficult maneuver during a run is the pinnacle of improvisational skill, while others think it is lazy lip-service to the real art of improvisation and, if it seems like a player has planned a particularly interesting move in advance, those observing might voice their displeasure with the player’s brazen disregard for true improvisation. Some players are now polarizing because their playstyles are so transfer-heavy—so glitzy and showy—that many think it can no longer be called improvisation. There’s a delicate balancing act here between doing interesting things during runs, but not having them be so interesting that they’re obviously premeditated. I feel this same tension when watching a dance like samba or forró; I’m captivated by how dancers are simultaneously capable of technical mastery and utter nonchalance in real-time.

Discussions about the true nature of improvisation aren’t unique to THPS. When I started regularly playing the game, debates about freestyle rapping in hip-hop were at their height, and freestyle purists would flock to the internet, indignant that, in a freestyle cipher, their favorite rapper had recycled lines from an earlier session. The more moderate camp argued that part of a freestyle rapper’s genius is her ability to seamlessly stitch together disparate elements or verses, a skill  closer to collage than divine inspiration. Maybe jazz is the best comparison: successful improvisation requires a fantastically broad skill base and understanding of the art to begin with. Some take issue with how far away from true improvisation certain players are, but nobody doubts their raw ability. I would not be surprised if this playstyle returns to fashion one day.

It is, I’ll admit, unsurprising that formal THPS criticism among provers has never quite taken off in the way I hoped for. When trying to articulate to other critics in the community why I find a particular player special, I’m often forced to resort to the same vague language used to describe a writer’s unique “voice.” “They have a unique ______; they play in a way that is distinct and wholly their own.” Among the most unique players, their “voice” (or whatever word you’d like to use) is like a watermark permanently stamped on their skateboarder’s forehead. Even if an innovative player assumes a different alias and created skateboarder, it’s entirely possible she might be recognized by other provers. Every so often a prov phenom comes from nowhere, and just like fans and journalists alike pored through the syntax of notable Italian authors to unearth Elena Ferrante’s identity, the prov community might perform a close reading of this new prodigy’s playstyle to confirm that they aren’t, in fact, an already-established player in disguise. We have, too, our own outsider artists, provers who, partially disconnected from the community’s influence, make increasingly bizarre and innovative videos that have little in common with the contemporary canon. Many of these outsider artists come from countries without a strong tradition of English-language education. This fact has hindered the players in some ways, but it has also allowed them to flourish without the anxiety of influence, to borrow a phrase from the literary critic Harold Bloom.

To a novice prover, videos of notable early players—the aforementioned Ksk and Gonzo—might seem banal in the same way that a casual movie-watcher might find Citizen Kane boring. If their playstyle seems unremarkable now, this is because players who came after them have already digested and internalized the way they changed the game, and that foundational link has been lost. There was a before them and an after; they have permanently changed the trajectory of our little art. “I like the way he plays” is neither insightful nor meaningful, so I’ll borrow from Roland Barthes and his words on photography instead. Like a photograph, a certain player’s prov either punctures me or it doesn’t. I am sometimes unable to describe certain aspects of prov in the same way that, as someone chiefly interested in prose, I feel incapable of saying anything intelligent about a poem or painting. “I like the way it makes me feel” is my lone recourse.

I’m also unable to explain why I was considered an innovative THAW prover, but nothing more than average on earlier installments like THUG and THUG2. In the maps of these earlier games—Moscow, Berlin, Manhattan, Barcelona—I feel unsure of myself, far from THAW, far from Los Angeles’s great sprawl. The games are basically the same, save minor differences in physics, map design, and balance meters. But maybe the reasons were sentimental: I am from Southern California, and so the opportunity to prov right under the Hollywood sign or grind the rails on the Santa Monica Pier or Downtown’s famed Alameda ledge remains a deeply personal affair. Or maybe it’s a question of translation, maybe I find myself mediocre at earlier games in the series for the same reasons I find the Brazilian author Clarice Lispector beautiful in Portuguese but saccharine in English despite diligent, faithful translations of her work. But this isn’t a perfect metaphor, as THUG was actually released before THAW. Perhaps, as Borges says, the original is unfaithful to the translation.

Years removed from having seriously played any other video game, I still feel the same sense of exhilaration starting a Trick Attack prov run as when I start a creative essay. In both instances, I have no idea where I’ll end up, no idea what art I will have arrived at. Neither will live up to the Edenic, idealized expectation I have before starting, but I will have at least done something new. I thought seriously about the craft elements of improv before I did so with literature, and without THPS, I doubt I would have ever started writing. Prov gave me a critical vocabulary for thinking about the importance of imitation; it helped me identify one artist’s influence on another. It helped me appreciate the nebulous qualities of a work—voice, mood, tone—that, while anathema to writing 100 students everywhere, make close reading worth the effort. Whether video games are art is an old discussion that I’m not particularly interested in; the question is so broad that it’s meaningless. Prov is an art, and there is meaning in total dedication to an art. Even a minor one.

The post On the Accidental Art of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater appeared first on Electric Literature.

“We had had a friendly, ordinary conversation, just as we usually had. Their voices were the same as always—there was no hint, until I opened the swinging doors and found the living room empty, that the whole conversation, at least their side of it, had been invented by my brain.”

Sacks’ description of his drug-induced hallucination is very similar to my own experience with non-drug-related delusions in that mine, like his, feel completely ordinary. Even when they bring me to my knees with humiliation, or send me spiraling into grandiose conspiracies, they still feel unnervingly solid. What is missing in my moments of delusion is not a sense of realism, but that sliver of logic signaling that what is happening is highly unlikely. That little seed of doubt that says, this might only make sense to you.

Here’s an example. In 2016, I went to the grocery store by myself, without my two young children. In the frozen foods aisle, I ran into a neighbor of mine—let’s call him Adam—who I was not close with, but who I had known for many years. I smiled at him, and then, feeling bolstered by my temporarily childless status, decided to try out some small talk. Just the other day, I had walked my two small dogs by Adam’s house. They, as usual, had behaved abhorrently, barking and lunging at his younger but better-trained golden retriever. Upon seeing Adam in the store, I said something like, “I’m sorry about my dogs!”

Let it be known that I am not good at small talk, because I am always anxious that I am taking up too much time, saying something useless or painfully cliche. So, sometimes in my haste to say something—anything at all!—I don’t add enough context.

Adam looked at me like he had never before seen me in his life, smiled politely, and kept walking up the aisle. Looking back, it is clear to me that he simply did not know why I was talking about my dogs, because I had failed to provide any backstory. I might even have come on so strongly with my non sequitur that Adam assumed that I was speaking to someone behind him. But in the moment, none of this occurred to me. I froze and my mind scrambled to provide an explanation for why this friendly moment had gone unexpectedly awry. A twin! said my agitated mind. Adam had an identical twin that lived in the same town and everyone knew this but me. I had been speaking to both Adam and his twin for years, thinking they were the same person. No wonder the guy in the frozen food aisle had no idea what I was talking about; he wasn’t who I thought he was. My limbs went cold with embarrassment and panic: How many times had I made a fool of myself this way? How many other neighbors with twins were out there? I drove home in dizzy despair, already planning the ways I might flee my hometown in shame. 

I have experienced many similar delusions, brought on by stress, anxiety, and the absolute drudgery and isolation that is stay-at-home motherhood. Thankfully, they were only ever dangerous, in the end, to my pride. Each delusion was completely different from the last, save for that electric feeling of this all makes sense, even when some distant ozone layer of awareness suspected that something logically alternative was taking place.

When David Bowie’s new album came out, I became obsessed with the song “Blackstar.” I was sure there was a message in it for me, dropped into the lyrics as they were written, but also the lyrics as they existed phonetically. Like the transparent pages of a graph laid together, I was sure that there was a personal epiphany at the intersection of these two elements. For example: Bowie says the word “villa,” but (and this is possibly only significant to the American ear) pronounces it “villar.” In this grain of discrepancy, I found multitudes of possibilities. I found that I could sink hours into the ecstatic mystery of it. I forgot to eat, I woke up early already piecing together new conspiracies. I hid pages of illegible notes—anagrams that I had discovered in the chorus, and potential numerical codes—in the kitchen drawers where my husband would not find them.

In the first draft of my debut novel In the Lobby of the Dream Hotel, I attempted to draw from my experience. Portia, a young stay-at-home mom diagnosed with bipolar disorder, is captivated by a song by the deceased rock star Alby Porter. She listens to his song in her kitchen, on repeat, forgetting all her household duties, so focused is she on one lyric: “E, are we still drowning?” In the first version of this scene, I pulled directly from my own thoughts and feelings about Bowie’s “Blackstar.” I thought it was working wonderfully; after all, I had so much experience with manic and obsessive thinking—why not put it to some use?

But my editor pushed back. She thought Portia’s fixation made her seem too crazy. The logic of the delusion was lost on her, and she feared it would be lost on the reader as well.

Oh, I thought. And the still very inexperienced author inside of me wanted to cry, “That’s how it happened!” But, as any seasoned writer knows, how it happened has never granted anyone immunity.

Dreams are notoriously difficult to write about because they are most interesting, maybe only interesting, to the dreamer—because the dreamer does not need to be convinced of them. In retelling the dream, the dreamer must work extra hard to make it matter to their audience, to create relevance. It’s almost impossible. And yet, so many of us still try.

I feel that the same can be said of fiction in its infantile stages, which is why my editor was not convinced about the scene that was closely tied to my David Bowie delusions. Delusions are dreams. They are made-up stories that tickle our own sense of self-importance—even the most negative scenarios. For example, what was I really believing when I thought that everyone knew about Adam’s identical twin, but that I was significant enough for an entire town to want to keep a secret from me?

My approach to writing fiction, even when adhering to the laws of realism, is highly delusional. I follow feral impulses and soggy emotional flailings, as if trying to catch a fish with my bare hands in murky water. I follow connections the way a manic person experiences “clanging;” words are linked not by meaning but by sound or feel. For me, whether I am in a clinically delusional state or not, this makes writing easier. If I waited for the meaning of words to arrive whenever I sat down to write, I would never get anything done, so I rely on swells of significance, putting characters and situations together based solely on their wordless magnetism, and on my own illogical and highly suspect internal leanings. Sometimes, this approach is not enough to carry an entire novel, but most of the time it is the only way for me to begin and to persevere—by defying the gravity of certain questions, mainly: “What’s the point?” Or: “Why bother?” It is a delusion from the very beginning to pick up a pen and create something new, thinking that our own private dreams are interesting enough to implore others to work at understanding them.

Still, however valid my editor’s concerns, I kept the part in my novel about Portia’s obsession with the rock star, only I made it more palatable, so as not to force the reader to tread water in my cloudy dream reasoning. The personal thrill of my experiences alone was not enough to support the narrative, so I connected Portia’s mania more closely to her creative desires, treating it as a manifestation of her longing for greatness. It is a writer’s job to strain the story as it’s written. If we do not, then not only are we delusional, but we also risk narcissism.

When I returned home from the grocery store that night in 2016, I asked my husband, sheepishly, if our neighbor Adam had a twin brother.

“Not that I know of,” my husband said.

By then, reality was starting to seep in, my panic loosening its chokehold. “Okay,” I said shakily. But in my heart, I knew that even if I could accept it, I wouldn’t ever believe it. Not fully.

Now, seven years later, and with the clarity of mind to look back and understand that my anxiety was bad enough to cause me to draw conclusions that were not there, there is a part of me that still believes in Adam’s twin, still believes that David Bowie is trying to make contact. Without that belief, I would no longer be able to find stories within myself. And without the stories, and the inflated sense of importance they deliver to my brain, I would not have the courage to write. I would let self-doubt and bewilderment take hold, and the words would fall away with nothing to connect them, no intuitive serum to deliver them. And, in a way, there would be no honesty. What I lack when it comes to the logical or the rational, I have made up for in the mastery of suspending disbelief, of listening to the hidden magnetism of delusion. Fiction requires some amount of reality to capture the reader’s belief, but sustained belief has also always demanded a certain dose of madness. Like Oliver Sacks’ hallucination, which his unhindered subconscious brought to him wholly and involuntarily, there is power in the stories that take hold against the force of reality. The stories that, for better or worse, we cannot shake loose until we have tried to convince the world of them.

The post Fiction Is a Hallucination, Packaged for Public Consumption appeared first on Electric Literature.

My boyfriend and I were tourists in this land of adulthood. And like a tourist, or a writer, I hoped to glean some light calamity—say, a dispute over lawn mowing—that I’d spin into fiction from a safe remove. At 23, I was primed for narrative. I was earning my M.F.A. in Fiction and captivated by the subtle, domestic oddity of stories by Raymond Carver and Ann Beattie. The kinds of stories that say, Sure, there are driveways and drinking on the patio, but something is wrong here, something is off. As writer Dan Chaon describes Carver’s fiction, it’s a kind of ghost story in which the ghost fails to appear.

As a young writer, I wanted that eeriness, or so I thought, as we bumped bare legs beneath the surface. The hot tub, bare flesh, neighbors, drinking, sleeping kids inside—all of it was ripe for story. Like a tourist—or a writer—I would capture that ghost.

So when the neighbors began talking about the funeral for their teenage daughter, held days before, my mind cleaved into two parts: sympathizing, and recording. Or, maybe it’s more like this: my writer’s mind listened, gathering storyable details, while my human heart grieved—and then, as my heart will do upon hearing about parents mourning dead children, my heart hardened so my mind could do its work. 

The story I ended up writing, “When Tom and Georgia Come Over to Swim,” was about neighbors in a hot tub talking about their young, newly dead daughter, chattering about constellations when what they’re enduring is unspeakable. It was a ghost story where the ghost appeared in ballet shoes, backpacks, an autopsy report tucked in a routine stack of mail.

The story won me a program scholarship, and years later, found publication. Readers praised the story’s “authentic” details. 

And of course they were, because I’d stolen them.

I celebrated my success, but inside, I clenched. I’d never told the real “Tom and Georgia” I’d mined their tragedy for fiction. What if they found out? 

The story follows the perspective of Pauline, a mother struggling to comfort her grieving neighbors, whose life path once looked like her future. Georgia’s loss makes Pauline feel grotesque. She yearns for familiar conversation as the neighbors recount coroner’s findings and outfits for trips that never will be taken. 

At 23, I was unmarried and about to break up with my no-count boyfriend. I wouldn’t have children or a mortgage for another decade. My short story was definitely fiction. But whenever I thought about the real neighbors suffering real loss, I felt guilty. All my Carver-esque pretensions shriveled to ghoulishness. 

Then, one day, the real “Tom and Georgia” read my story. 

And they sent me a letter about it.

It’s common knowledge that you should never tell secrets to writers. 

Actually, you don’t need to utter a word. We’re just as content to hear your cousin gripe about your Prius, or imagine you’re the dolt who, according to our med school friend, tried weird sex stuff and ended up in traction. Several legends, including one about Raymond Carver, tell of writers competing for the same juicy, real-life tidbit.

When it comes to story—old, new, repressed, overheard, uncovered, expressed, distant, or in-progress—writers are gossips, colonizers, appropriators, vacuums, tornadoes, Great Devouring Beasts, the Borg: absorbing facts and anecdotes at diner counters, combat training, even at the deathbed of a loved one. Once we’ve gathered, we repurpose. So, maybe it’s more like writers are swallows, wasps, termites, crows: scavengers who pluck dog hair pufflets from the lawn, and dirt from ancient ruins, all to craft a kind of nest—a living, and shared, space. 

It’s a nifty skill. But does it make you lose your soul? 

It’s one thing to harvest your own experience for story. I love the way Ayelet Waldman puts it in her harrowing essay “Rocketship.” Waldman recounts the turning point in her pregnancy when her very loved, very wanted baby tested positive for a rare genetic condition: “And I think, ‘A person really does fall onto the ground screaming… Remember that.’… A writer stands at a distance and watches her heart break.” 

Waldman studies her anguish with writerly detachment, repurposing agony into material. And who wouldn’t want distance from their own split heart? To shrink overwhelming pain into something as small as words on a page? 

This is what I, and lots of writers, do. Some of my worst experiences have generated fiction: my anorexia at age 12; my ex-husband’s violence and stalking; anxieties over caretaking and alcoholism. One of my current projects is a memoir about the death of my 13-year-old brother when I was four years old. 

Here’s the thing: I’m authorizing myself to write these stories for an audience, even now. I’ve chosen to tell you I had a brother—something I’ve not even shared with my own children, not yet. But you, Reader, will learn exactly what I want you to know about me, and whether I call it truth or fiction, when I want you to know it—and not a moment before.

It’s a privilege to be the swallow, the tornado, the gossip—to hold the power of selection, and selectivity. 

But what about other people’s experiences that we repurpose—people who might show up at our yard sales? How do we respond when these actual people (and not our characters) realize that their bright strands of hope and hopelessness are, to us, really great material to weave through splendid nests? 

It took thirty years and a gossipy headline to remind me of that letter.

The headline: a woman suspected she was, in part, the subject of a New Yorker short story that went viral. Unique details from her life, and a relationship with a boyfriend, were on the published page. The piece was presented as fiction, and yet, she recognized fragments of her truth. She was afraid to confront the story’s writer until one day, outraged, she did. And, it turned out, she was right. 

Alexis Nowicki’s essay about this confrontation is the kind of literary drama that makes Thursday Twitter scrolling—frankly—awesome. Nowicki reveals that in her teens, she dated a much-older man, Charles, renamed “Robert” in the New Yorker story: “So much of the central dynamic in the story rang true to me: Charles’ cryptic communication style; the way I had to work to impress him; the joke rapport we created between our cats early on.” But unlike the real Charles, “Robert” becomes creepy, mean, pathetic. This is important to know. These were real people who lived these lives, she asserts, and they were neither as anxious nor as sinister as depicted in fiction. Yet those impressions will endure. In closing her piece, Nowicki eulogizes two losses: the death of her former boyfriend, Charles, eternally fictionalized into a predator; and the loneliness of being one of the few who knew him to be otherwise.

But Nowicki’s purpose in writing about the real-life experiences that inspired another writer’s fiction is less revelatory than redemptive. In fact, this essay also does something stunning. At one point, Nowicki questions her lived experience: 

“Had Charles actually been pathetic and exploitative, and I simply hadn’t understood it because I, like [the character] Margot, was young and naïve? Had he become vengeful and possessive after we broke up, but I’d just blocked it out in order to move on with my life?” 

How much of this fiction is accurate about my reality? That’s an unusual question from a person whose life has been written (in part) into fiction. I’ve never seen it asked before. Instead of denial or a screed, Nowicki engages a character created from her experiences and wonders, Was the writer onto something? 

She doesn’t have to do this at all, let alone in her own essay. It’s a remarkable gesture of compassion.

Back on Twitter, responses split predictably. Non-Writer Twitter seemed appalled that writers take details from actual humans, living and dead. Writer Twitter couldn’t stomach such piety, such naïveté: Well what do you expect? they asked. Stealing is what writers do! The swallow steals without permission—but swallows gonna swallow. 

All valid reactions, but also, rather simplistic. 

Because Nowicki hadn’t issued a prohibition against mining real lives, even her own life, for fiction. She’d simply shown one set of consequences when writers do. 

Facing these consequences, for some, is a central anxiety. And to be crass, our ambivalence generates even more material. As David Sedaris writes in “Repeat After Me”:

“‘Oh come on,’ I said. ‘The story’s really funny, and, I mean, it’s not like you’re going to do anything with it.’

Your life, your privacy, your bottomless sorrow — it’s not like you’re going to do anything with it. Is this the brother I always was, or the brother I have become?”

And Toni Cade Bambara makes the inevitable laughable in “A Sort of Preface” to Gorilla, My Love:

“It does no good to write autobiographical fiction cause the minute the book hits the stand here comes your mama screamin how could you and sighin death where is thy sting and she snatches you up out your bed to grill you about what was going down back there in Brooklyn when she was working three jobs and trying to improve the quality of your life and come to find on page 49 that you were messin around with that nasty boy up the block and breaks into sobs and quite naturally your family strolls in all sleepy-eyed to catch the floor show at 5:00 A.M. but as far as your mama is concerned, it is nineteen-forty-and-something and you ain’t too grown to have your ass whipped…

So I deal in straight-up fiction myself, cause I value my family and friends, and mostly cause I lie a lot anyway.”

Imagining the aftermath of our creative decisions—our necessary swallowing of human experience—is uncomfortable. Our responses seem to range from self-inhibiting to flinching to screw-you-buddy to N/A. 

For a group so trained on imagining outcomes and endings, you’d think we’d be better prepared. 

In the early ‘90s, my no-count boyfriend’s sister loved my story, so she gave a copy to the real Tom and Georgia and they sent me a letter. 

Already, I’d worried in all ways: I worried they might read the story—but vaguely, someday, like after I’d won the Pulitzer. I worried when they had it. I worried when I opened their letter.

But for all that worrying, I’d never asked their permission. I wouldn’t do so now.

Asking permission could have invited others to tell their story instead of the one I imagined. A dynamic could open, perhaps a collaboration. Collaboration is a lovely word, but it belies an artistic turf war: an exchange with expectations I’d honor someone else’s feelings, their need to get it right. These are timeworn concerns, calling into question how inspiration fuels process and notions of the individual, self-isolating artist. 

With a story sourced from another person’s grief, the stakes are higher, sharper. I feared the worst: they’d hate me. They’d sue me. They’d call me a graverobber. They’d call me exploitative. They’d be right. 

But for the writer I was in my early 20s, there was another fear I couldn’t yet articulate. I worried that by asking permission, I’d make them talk about their child’s death—something I knew, from experience, to be the hardest thing to speak, and the hardest thing to hear.

I’ve lived forever not wanting to hear, or talk, about my own deep losses, instead imagining them in fiction. I’ve stood at a distance watching my own heart break. I’m fairly good at it. I’ve mostly shut my ears for my entire life, despite the fact that my brother’s best storytellers, my parents, are still living and full of memories to share. 

Just like the parents of a teenage girl riding her bike through an intersection one blinding summer evening. 

Just like “Tom and Georgia.”

Their letter to me is long-buried, but I wouldn’t quote it here anyway. Here’s what I will share:

The parents of a much-loved child saw their grief take shape in my story. They appreciated my care in rendering it. They were, in a small way, grateful to have their daughter’s life and death recorded. Now, there was a place where a piece of her story, and their story, would always live.

Their words read like forgiveness. Now, I see they were also a guidepost, a way forward in grief and listening. A gesture of connection, recognition, and understanding. An acknowledgment of all the ghosts we carry, even those we may not be ready, or able, to articulate. 

Imagining the consequences of our choices as writers, we want to steel ourselves for battle. Prepare for lawsuits. Deflect. Hide. Champion our noble pursuits. Wave our banners. Deprecate ourselves as greedy junkmen. Apologize for our swaths.

But what if we also imagined meeting consequence with compassion? What if we acknowledged our role in someone’s pain? What if we just listened? We have those options, too. 

Sometimes, our readers just have to show us how. 

The post I Stole My Neighbors’ Tragedy To Write a Short Story appeared first on Electric Literature.

“Where do we go?” I demanded. “When we go under, where do we go?”

He didn’t seem surprised to be accosted with this question. Instead, he moved closer to me. “Well, you are like a computer,” he said. He lifted an index finger and pressed it to the center of my forehead. “I’m just turning you OFF. I’m flipping a switch.”

I was furious. The answer was clever, but it meant nothing. It didn’t address my issue. It didn’t help me understand how he did what he did, or whether I was dying every time I went under.

Obviously, anesthesiology and writing are not the same. But novelists are also asked a similar question at every event, family gathering, therapy session, good date, or party: How did you write your novel? Over and over again. Writing a novel is wrapped in the same mystery, for most people, as going to the moon or going under anesthesia.

It’s not a question I can answer once or in one way—my relationship to writing changes as I get older, as I write more books. Some technical advice stays the same (i.e., the practices I cling to in order to finish the damn thing), but other, more existential questions fluctuate with time, my life experiences, and the political environment that encroaches on my existence. Still, here is my best crack at it: five easy steps for turning your suffering into a novel.

First You Must Suffer

It would help, for example, if your father has just died. Or, perhaps, you’ve just undergone an incredibly painful and traumatic spinal surgery. Both of my novels were directly fed by these two critical moments in life, times during which my understanding of the world around me was proven entirely wrong.

My new novel, Ripe, was written after my father died suddenly, an event that was followed shortly thereafter by the COVID-19 lockdown. My father was always telling me to write this novel—a novel about working in tech with lunatics. During the year I spent working in Silicon Valley, at the end of our phone calls, he would often say: Take notes on everything that is happening to you. One day you’re going to write a book about it and sell a million copies.

After he died, during lockdown, I was entirely alone with my grief. There was no looking away from it, there were no distractions, it was only me and the grief, which was six-foot-three, the height of my father, following me around, getting in my way, forcing guttural cries out of my body at all times of day. After a few weeks, I sat down and wrote the book he asked me to write. Ripe, even more so than my first novel, was born of grief and isolation, made in a moment in time that I’m not sure will ever happen again. But it was fuel inside of me, an agony I wanted to comprehend, make sense of, catalyze into something else, something useful, something he would be proud of.

Perhaps for some writers, like romance novelists, “Suffer” can be exchanged for “Fall in Love.” If you can write a novel without suffering, my hat is off to you. For me, the work is deeply driven by a desperation to understand the world around me.

Be Ruthless, Be Rude

We are raised (at least, I was) to be polite, kind, presentable. Often, the writing we want to do is the opposite. To write a great novel, you must be ruthless—ruthlessly honest about the people around you, the characters in your book, your perception of the world, your family, your coworkers, and, most of all, yourself.

Humanity is shown clearest in its ugliness. A character that is behaving terribly becomes suddenly understandable when you realize she is trying to have a child but cannot conceive. A depressed character might seem annoying on page one, until you realize she is pregnant and impoverished.

The writer Vidjis Hjorth has an excellent bit about this in one of her novels. Her character, who has herself just written a novel, is asked if the novel is real. The character responds that she is not interested in reality, but in the truth.

That distinction is an important way of securing freedom from the confines of what’s expected of us in our work. We have to be unconcerned about whether reality is reflected in the novel, and dedicated to ensuring our work is dealing in the sometimes beautiful, sometimes ugly truth of being human.

Outline, Outline, Outline

I believe strongly in two things at this stage in my career: plot and outlines. Early on, when I was young and stupid, I believed the artistic impulse that shot down from the heavens and into my body was all I needed. At the time, it felt true because when I was overtaken by that impulse, I would often write whole-cloth first drafts that only needed minor polishing. It felt like a higher power was driving the work. And that was beautiful. I thought that was the only way it was done.

As I got older, I realized that those flashes of brilliance cannot and will not sustain a career. Throughout my life as an artist, I’ve always had a full-time job. Almost all of my drafts have been written on nights and weekends, or during two-week vacations from work when I holed up in a cheap condo somewhere and wrote like an unshowered demented demon in yoga pants.

My point here is that my time for writing is limited. I do not have time to burn on work that I will ultimately throw out. Of course, during the editing process, pages will be cut and re-shaped, but I cannot make huge mistakes that will require gigantic rewrites—not without tanking both of my careers or spending the rest of my life on a book that will never see the light of day.

So, I have to plot. I’m experimental by nature; at first, I resisted plotting and thought I could just wing it. But the reality is, since the literal dawn of mankind, humans have been drawn to plot. From cave drawings to the Bible, we’ve been hungry for a story where something happens. The most basic plot structures are successful because they entertain their audiences.

Whenever I set out to write a novel, I grab a basic plot structure and mess with it a little bit. I love a good plot remix. I often point to “Parasite” as a great example of a movie that took a traditional plot structure and then put one part of it—the Rising Action—on steroids. Most of the movie is just an exercise in raising the stakes higher and higher and higher until the tension is near unbearable for the audience. And then the movie resolves.

I break each part of my outline down into specific scenes. This is important for me because if I had to figure out what I was writing every day that I sat down to write, I would lose my mind. Instead, once I’ve distilled the outline into scenes, I put each scene on an index card and add some details on the back.

At the end of all of this, I have a giant stack of index cards. Each day, I sit down and pull a card. That’s the scene I write for the day, and typically that gets me to between 1,000 and 3,000 words. The method works for me because my task is crystal clear, and focusing on individual scenes drives me to both compress them and make sure they end with a gut punch. (If you want more technical advice here, I write the scenes individually in Scrivener so I can move them around in their respective sections as needed. Scrivener gives me the flexibility to change things without an entire rewrite, especially between the first and second drafts.)

Let the Baby Be Ugly

Another reason people give me for being unable to finish their novels is that their first drafts suck. Well surprise! All of our first drafts suck.

When a baby is born, it comes out disgusting. It’s hideous, something right out of a nightmare: bloody, screaming, covered in goo and attached to its mother by a hideous cord. If it looked that way forever, I believe most of us would stop having children. But then the nurses take the baby away and get rid of the blood and put it in that white cloth, which suggests it is an angel and everyone coos (even if the baby actually remains very ugly).

My point is this: Your first draft is the ugly, bloody, screaming baby attached to you by a disgusting cord. And you’re sitting there, all torn up and crying and on drugs, waiting to come back to a reality in which the baby isn’t an ugly, bloody, screaming mess.

Your job, therefore, is to get the first draft out as quickly as possible—for a few reasons. The first is that while you are writing your first draft, your brain is opening up in a way that will not last forever. I had a friend who once told me that whenever you write a novel, a portal opens in your brain and once you get the first draft out, the portal closes and you can never get back to that place again. That’s been true in my experience—I fundamentally believe it is impossible to write the same book twice because I could never get back to where I was mentally when I wrote The Book of X and Ripe.

So getting the first draft out is like capturing lightning. During the first draft, I write almost every day. It typically takes one month if I’m not working my other job, and six months if I am working my other job. Here is where the discipline comes in: I write for one hour at night after work every day, and from nine to five on Saturday and Sunday, no exceptions. There is no special secret or trick here. There is only dedicating your time to your work and giving yourself permission to make an ugly first draft.

Too often, I hear writers asking about which publisher they should get or what their cover should look like when they don’t even have a first draft. And I always say this: If you don’t have a first draft, you don’t have shit. An idea for a novel without a first draft is just vaporware.

Edit Until Your Fingers Fall Off

The bulk of my work is in editing, or what I call “wiping the blood off of the ugly baby.” The reason it is so important to vomit up the first draft, no matter how bad it is, is that you can fix almost anything after it’s written. With a bad first draft, at least you have something to edit, refine, fix. With no first draft, you’re just a guy in a bar telling a woman about the book you almost wrote once. Sad.

Most of my first drafts take a few months to get down on paper. But the editing takes years. For both novels, I spent between three and five years editing them constantly, either by myself or with an agent, editor, or publisher. This part requires a totally different type of endurance from writing the first draft. It’s more mathematical, more methodical, more technical. Editing is another way of asking the question: How many times can you stare at the same page before you fire your friend/editor/agent/publisher? And the answer is: a shit-ton.

When you get worn down, when you want to give up, I’ve found it helpful to ask myself whether my favorite author would have stopped now. That’s usually enough to get me back at it—it’s hard to keep moping when you know Joan Didion and Sylvia Plath and Deborah Levy and Diane Williams kept going until it was right. It reminds you that this is part of the gauntlet.

And it is a gauntlet. The process of coming up with an idea and turning it into a first draft requires one type of endurance. The process of editing that work requires an entirely different type of endurance. And when it’s time for your novel to be sold and published . . . well, that’s a different essay. You’d have to ask that question at a different party altogether, because I don’t have the patience to answer both at once.

Writing a novel is impossible. I never thought I would do it. It is tantamount to building and solving a puzzle by yourself. It’s endlessly fascinating and humbling. It’s a process I will never master and that’s why I love it. If I’m lucky, I’ll have written five or six books by the time I’m dead. If I’m extremely lucky, two or three of those will be decent.

Maybe, like the anesthesiologist, my answers here aren’t good enough or clear enough. Maybe my thoughts here don’t entirely solve the mystery of writing. Maybe, when you ask me this annoying question at a party, I should lean over and tap your forehead: “Your brain is a computer. Just turn it on.”

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