This speech was written during a period when William Maxwell was discouraged over what he felt was a lack of public encouragement and he had thought that he might give up writing and just be an editor. In a journal he wrote,

I do not ever want to write again. I want checks to come in and requests for reprint and translation rights from every country under the sun….

The two subjects I have are both highly introspective and lacking in action—the man without confidence, the man who doubts his capacity to love. They are probably the same subject….

Who will I take as a model, as a clue to subject matter. Not Flaubert, because I don’t want it to be cold. Not Conrad, because it has to be not adventurous. The hero must be forty, and not trail along behind me. Wells, Joyce, Dostoievsky? It should have an action, and not begin with a character or a psychological difficulty….

The speech consists of notes that Maxwell had been keeping for a piece of writing and a companion text that he wrote almost entirely on the train to Massachusetts. The section of instructions—”Begin with the…”—are the part that was written beforehand. By the time the train had arrived, he had finished the speech and decided that he liked writing too much to give up.

–Alec Wilkinson

*

A speech delivered at Smith College on March 4, 1955.

One of the standard themes of Chinese painting is the spring festival on the river. I’m sure many of you have seen some version of it. There is one in the Metropolitan Museum. It has three themes woven together: the river, which comes down from the upper right, and the road along the river, and the people on the riverbanks.

As the scroll unwinds, there is, first, the early-morning mist on the rice fields and some boys who cannot go to the May Day festival because they have to watch their goats. Then there is a country house, and several people starting out for the city, and a farmer letting water into a field by means of a water wheel, and then more people and buildings—all kinds of people all going toward the city for the festival. And along the riverbank there are various entertainers—a magician, a female tightrope walker, several fortune-tellers, a phrenologist, a man selling spirit money, a man selling patent medicine, a storyteller.

I prefer to think that it is with this group—the shoddy entertainers earning their living by the riverbank on May Day—that Mr. Bellow, Mr. Gill, Miss Chase, on the platform, Mr. Ralph Ellison and Mrs. Kazin, in the audience, and I, properly speaking, belong. Writers—narrative writers—are people who perform tricks.

Before I came up here, I took various books down from the shelf and picked out some examples of the kind of thing I mean. Here is one:

“I have just returned this morning from a visit to my landlord—the solitary neighbor that I shall be troubled with….”

One of two things—there will be more neighbors turning up than the narrator expects, or else he will very much wish that they had. And the reader is caught; he cannot go away until he finds out which of his two guesses is correct. This is, of course, a trick.

Here is another: “None of them knew the color of the sky….” Why not? Because they are at sea, pulling at the oars in an open boat; and so are you.

Here is another trick: “Call me Ishmael….” A pair of eyes looking into your eyes. A face. A voice. You have entered into a personal relationship with a stranger, who will perhaps make demands on you, extraordinary personal demands; who will perhaps insist that you love him; who perhaps will love you in a way that is upsetting and uncomfortable.

Here is another trick: “Thirty or forty years ago, in one of those gray towns along the Burlington railroad, which are so much grayer today than they were then, there was a house well known from Omaha to Denver for its hospitality and for a certain charm of atmosphere.”

A door opens slowly in front of you, and you cannot see who is opening it but, like a sleepwalker, you have to go in. Another trick: “It was said that a new person had appeared on the seafront—a lady with a dog….”

The narrator appears to be, in some way, underprivileged, socially. She perhaps has an invalid father that she has to take care of, and so she cannot walk along the promenade as often as she would like. Perhaps she is not asked many places. And so she has not actually set eyes on this interesting new person that everyone is talking about. She is therefore all the more interested. And meanwhile, surprisingly, the reader cannot forget the lady, or the dog, or the seafront.

Here is another trick: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife….”

An attitude of mind, this time. A way of looking at people that is ironical, shrewd, faintly derisive, and that suggests that every other kind of writing is a trick (this is a special trick, in itself ) and that this book is going to be about life as it really is, not some fabrication of the author’s.

So far as I can see, there is no legitimate sleight of hand involved in practicing the arts of painting, sculpture, and music. They appear to have had their origin in religion, and they are fundamentally serious. In writing—in all writing but especially in narrative writing—you are continually being taken in. The reader, skeptical, experienced, with many demands on his time and many ways of enjoying his leisure, is asked to believe in people he knows don’t exist, to be present at scenes that never occurred, to be amused or moved or instructed just as he would be in real life, only the life exists in somebody else’s imagination.

If, as Mr. T. S. Eliot says, humankind cannot bear very much reality, then that would account for their turning to the charlatans operating along the riverbank—to the fortune-teller, the phrenologist, the man selling spirit money, the storyteller. Or there may be a different explanation; it may be that what humankind cannot bear directly it can bear indirectly, from a safe distance.

The writer has everything in common with the vaudeville magician except this: The writer must be taken in by his own tricks. Otherwise, the audience will begin to yawn and snicker. Having practiced more or less incessantly for five, ten, fifteen, or twenty years, knowing that the trunk has a false bottom and the opera hat a false top, with the white doves in a cage ready to be handed to him from the wings and his clothing full of unusual, deep pockets containing odd playing cards and colored scarves knotted together and not knotted together and the American flag, he must begin by pleasing himself.

His mouth must be the first mouth that drops open in surprise, in wonder, as (presto chango!) this character’s heartache is dragged squirming from his inside coat pocket, and that character’s future has become his past while he was not looking.

With his cuffs turned back, to show that there is no possibility of deception being practiced on the reader, the writer invokes a time: He offers the reader a wheat field on a hot day in July, and a flying machine, and a little boy with his hand in his father’s. He has been brought to the wheat field to see a flying machine go up. They stand, waiting, in a crowd of people. It is a time when you couldn’t be sure, as you can now, that a flying machine would go up.

Hot, tired, and uncomfortable, the little boy wishes they could go home. The wheat field is like an oven. The flying machine does not go up.

The writer will invoke a particular place: With a cardinal and a tourist home and a stretch of green grass and this and that, he will make Richmond, Virginia. He uses words to invoke his version of the Forest of Arden.

If he is a good novelist, you can lean against his trees; they will not give way. If he is a bad novelist, you probably shouldn’t. Ideally, you ought to be able to shake them until an apple falls on your head. (The apple of understanding.)

The novelist has tricks of detail. For example, there is Turgenev’s hunting dog, in A Sportsman’s Notebook. The sportsman, tired after a day’s shooting, has accepted a ride in a peasant’s cart, and is grateful for it. His dog is not. Aware of how foolish he must look as he is being lifted into the cart, the unhappy dog smiles to cover his embarrassment.

There is the shop of the live fish, toward the beginning of Malraux’s Man’s Fate. A conspirator goes late at night to a street of pet shops in Shanghai and knocks on the door of a dealer in live fish. They are both involved in a plot to assassinate someone. The only light in the shop is a candle; the fish are asleep in phosphorescent bowls. As the hour that the assassination will be attempted is mentioned, the water on the surface of the bowls begins to stir feebly. The carp, awakened by the sound of voices, begin to swim round and round, and my hair stands on end.

These tricks of detail are not important; they have nothing to do with the plot or the idea of either piece of writing. They are merely exercises in literary virtuosity, but nevertheless in themselves so wonderful that to overlook them is to miss half the pleasure of the performance.

There is also a more general sleight of hand—tricks that involve the whole work, tricks of construction. Nothing that happens in Elizabeth Bowen’s The House in Paris, none of the characters, is, for me, as interesting as the way in which the whole thing is put together. From that all the best effects, the real beauty of the book, derive.

And finally there are the tricks that involve the projection of human character. In the last book that I have read, Ann Birstein’s novel, The Troublemaker, there is a girl named Rhoda, who would in some places, at certain periods of the world’s history, be considered beautiful, but who is too large to be regarded as beautiful right now. It is time for her to be courted, to be loved—high time, in fact. And she has a suitor, a young man who stops in to see her on his way to the movies alone.

There is also a fatality about the timing of these visits; he always comes just when she has washed her hair. She is presented to the reader with a bath towel around her wet head, her hair in pins, in her kimono, sitting on the couch in the living room, silent, while her parents make conversation with the suitor. All her hopes of appearing to advantage lie shattered on the carpet at her feet. She is inconsolable but dignified, a figure of supportable pathos. In the midst of feeling sorry for her you burst out laughing. The laughter is not unkind.

These forms of prestidigitation, these surprises, may not any of them be what makes a novel great, but unless it has some of them, I do not care whether a novel is great or not; I cannot read it.

It would help if you would give what I am now about to read to you only half your attention. It doesn’t require any more than that, and if you listen only now and then, you will see better what I am driving at.

Begin with breakfast and the tipping problem.

Begin with the stealing of the marmalade dish and the breakfast tray still there.

The marmalade dish, shaped like a shell, is put on the cabin class breakfast tray by mistake, this once. It belongs in first class.

Begin with the gate between first and second class.

Begin with the obliging steward unlocking the gate for them.

The gate, and finding their friends who are traveling first class, on the glassed-in deck.

The gate leads to the stealing of the marmalade dish.

If you begin with the breakfast tray, then—no, begin with the gate and finding their friends.

And their friends’ little boy, who had talked to Bernard Baruch and asked Robert Sherwood for his autograph.

The couple in cabin class have first-class accommodations for the return voyage, which the girl thinks they are going to exchange, and the man secretly hopes they will not be able to.

But they have no proper clothes. They cannot dress for dinner if they do return first class.

Their friend traveling first class on the way over has brought only one evening dress, which she has to wear night after night.

Her husband tried to get cabin-class accommodations and couldn’t.

This is a lie, perhaps.

They can afford the luxury of traveling first class but disapprove of it.

They prefer to live more modestly than they need to.

They refuse to let themselves enjoy, let alone be swept off their feet by, the splendor and space.

But they are pleased that their little boy, aged nine, has struck up a friendship with Bernard Baruch and Robert Sherwood.

They were afraid he would be bored on the voyage.

Also, they themselves would never have dared approach either of these eminent figures, and are amazed that they have begotten a child with courage.

The girl is aware that her husband has a love of luxury and is enjoying the splendor and space they haven’t paid for. On their way back to the barrier, they encounter Ber-

nard Baruch.

His smile comes to rest on them, like the beam from a lighthouse, and then after a few seconds passes on.

They discover that they are not the only ones who have been exploring.

Their table companions have all found the gate.

When the steward unlocked the gate for the man and the girl, he let loose a flood.

The entire cabin class has spread out in both directions, into tourist as well as first class.

Begin with the stealing of the marmalade dish.

The man is ashamed of his conscientiousness but worried about the stewardess.

Will she have to pay for the missing marmalade dish?

How many people? Three English, two Americans cabin class. Three Americans first class.

Then the morning on deck.

The breakfast tray still there, accusing them, before they go up to lunch.

The Orkney Islands in the afternoon.

The movie, which is shown to cabin class in the afternoon, to first class in the evening.

The breakfast tray still in the corridor outside their cabin when they go to join their friends in first class in the bar before dinner.

With her tongue loosened by liquor, the girl confesses her crime.

They go down to the cabin after dinner, and the tray is gone.

In the evening the coast of France, lights, a lighthouse.

The boat as immorality.

The three sets of people.

Begin in the late afternoon with the sighting of the English islands.

Begin with the stealing of the marmalade dish.

No, begin with the gate.

Then the stealing of the marmalade dish.

Then the luncheon table with the discovery that other passengers have been exploring and found the gate between first and second class.

Then the tray accusing them. What do they feel about stealing?

When has the man stolen something he wanted as badly as the girl wanted that marmalade dish for an ashtray?

From his mother’s purse, when he was six years old. The stewardess looks like his mother.

Ergo, he is uneasy.

They call on their friends in first class one more time, to say goodbye, and as they go back to second class, the girl sees, as clearly as if she had been present, that some time during the day her husband has managed to slip away from her and meet the stewardess and pay for the marmalade dish she stole.

And that is why the breakfast tray disappeared.

He will not allow himself, even on shipboard, the splendor and space of an immoral act.

He had to go behind her back and do the proper thing.

A writer struggling—unsuccessfully, as it turned out; the story was never written—to change a pitcher of water into a pitcher of wine.

In The Listener for January 27th, 1955, there is a brief but wonderfully accurate description of a similar attempt carried off successfully:

Yesterday morning I was in despair. You know that bloody book which Dadie and Leonard extort, drop by drop from my breast? Fiction, or some title to that effect. I couldn’t screw a word from me; and at last dropped my head in my hands, dipped my pen in the ink, and wrote these words, as if automatically, on a clean sheet: Orlando, a Biography. No sooner had I done this than my body was flooded with rapture and my brain with ideas. I wrote rapidly till twelve….

It is safe to assume on that wonderful (for us as well as her) morning, the writer took out this word and put in that and paused only long enough to admire the effect; she took on that morning or others like it—the very words out of this character’s mouth in order to give them, unscrupulously, to that character; she annulled marriages and brought dead people back to life when she felt the inconvenience of having to do without them. She cut out the whole last part of the scene she had been working on so happily and feverishly for most of the morning because she saw suddenly that it went past the real effect into something that was just writing.

Just writing is when the novelist’s hand is not quicker than the reader’s eye. She persuaded, she struggled with, she beguiled this or that character that she had made up out of whole cloth (or almost) to speak his mind, to open his heart. Day after day, she wrote till twelve, employing tricks no magician had ever achieved before, and using admirably many that they had, until, after some sixty pages, something quite serious happened.

Orlando changed sex—that is, she exchanged the mind of a man for the mind of a woman; this trick was only partly successful—and what had started out as a novel became a brilliant, slaphappy essay. It would have been a great pity—it would have been a real loss if this particular book had never been written; even so, it is disappointing. I am in no position to say what happened, but it seems probable from the writer’s diary—fortunately, she kept one—that there were too many interruptions; too many friends invited themselves and their husbands and dogs and children for the weekend.

Though the writer may from time to time entertain paranoiac suspicions about critics and book reviewers, about his publisher, and even about the reading public, the truth is that he has no enemy but interruption. The man from Porlock has put an end to more masterpieces than the Turks—was it the Turks?—did when they set fire to the library at Alexandria. Also, odd as it may seem, every writer has a man from Porlock inside him who gladly and gratefully connives to bring about these interruptions.

If the writer’s attention wanders for a second or two, his characters stand and wait politely for it to return to them. If it doesn’t return fairly soon, their feelings are hurt and they refuse to say what is on their minds or in their hearts. They may even turn and go away, without explaining or leaving a farewell note or a forwarding address where they can be reached.

But let us suppose that owing to one happy circumstance and another, including the writer’s wife, he has a good morning; he has been deeply attentive to the performers and the performance. Suppose that—because this is common practice, I believe—he begins by making a few changes here and there, because what is behind him, all the scenes that come before the scene he is now working on, must be perfect, before he can tackle what lies ahead.

(This is the most dangerous of all the tricks in the repertoire, and probably it would be wiser if he omitted it from his performance: it is the illusion of illusions, and all a dream. And tomorrow morning, with a clearer head, making a fresh start, he will change back the changes, with one small insert that makes all the difference.)

But to continue: Since this is very close work, watch-mender’s work, really, this attentiveness, requiring a magnifying glass screwed to his eye and resulting in poor posture, there will probably be, somewhere at the back of his mind, a useful corrective vision, something childlike and simple that represents the task as a whole. He will perhaps see the material of his short story as a pond, into which a stone is tossed, sending out a circular ripple; and then a second stone is tossed into the pond, sending out a second circular ripple that is inside the first and that ultimately overtakes it; and then a third stone; and a fourth; and so on.

Or he will see himself crossing a long level plain, chapter after chapter, toward the mountains on the horizon. If there were no mountains, there would be no novel; but they are still a long way away—those scenes of excitement, of the utmost drama, so strange, so sad, that will write themselves; and meanwhile, all the knowledge, all the art, all the imagination at his command will be needed to cover this day’s march on perfectly level ground.

As a result of too long and too intense concentration, the novelist sooner or later begins to act peculiarly. During the genesis of his book, particularly, he talks to himself in the street; he smiles knowingly at animals and birds; he offers Adam the apple, for Eve, and with a half involuntary movement of his right arm imitates the writhing of the snake that nobody knows about yet. He spends the greater part of the days of his creation in his bathrobe and slippers, unshaven, his hair uncombed, drinking water to clear his brain, and hardly distinguishable from an inmate in an asylum.

Like many such unfortunate people, he has delusions of grandeur. With the cherubim sitting row on row among the constellations, the seraphim in the more expensive seats in the primum mobile, waiting, ready, willing to be astonished, to be taken in, the novelist, still in his bathrobe and slippers, with his cuffs rolled back, says Let there be (after who knows how much practice beforehand)….Let there be (and is just as delighted as the angels and the reader and everybody else when there actually is) Light.

Not always, of course. Sometimes it doesn’t work. But say that it does work. Then there is light, the greater light to rule the daytime of the novel, and the lesser light to rule the night scenes, breakfast and dinner, one day, and the gathering together of now this and now that group of characters to make a lively scene, grass, trees, apple trees in bloom, adequate provision for sea monsters if they turn up in a figure of speech, birds, cattle, and creeping things, and finally and especially man—male and female, Anna and Count Vronsky, Emma and Mr. Knightly.

There is not only all this, there are certain aesthetic effects that haven’t been arrived at accidentally; the universe of the novel is beautiful, if it is beautiful, by virtue of the novelist’s intention that it should be.

Say that the performance is successful; say that he has reached the place where an old, old woman, who was once strong and active and handsome, grows frail and weak, grows smaller and smaller, grows partly senile, and toward the end cannot get up out of bed and even refuses to go on feeding herself, and finally, well cared for, still in her own house with her own things around her, dies, and on a cold day in January the funeral service is read over her casket, and she is buried….Then what? Well, perhaps the relatives, returning to the old home after the funeral, or going to the lawyer’s office, for the reading of the will.

In dying, the old woman took something with her, and therefore the performance has, temporarily at least, come to a standstill. Partly out of fatigue, perhaps, partly out of uncertainty about what happens next, the novelist suddenly finds it impossible to believe in the illusions that have so completely held his attention up till now. Suddenly it won’t do. It might work out for some other novel but not this one.

Defeated for the moment, unarmed, restless, he goes outdoors in his bathrobe, discovers that the morning is more beautiful than he had any idea—full spring, with the real apple trees just coming into bloom, and the sky the color of the blue that you find in the sky of the West Indies, and the neighbors’ dogs enjoying themselves, and the neighbor’s little boy having to be fished out of the brook, and the grass needing cutting—he goes outside thinking that a brief turn in the shrubbery will clear his mind and set him off on a new track.

But it doesn’t. He comes in poorer than before, and ready to give not only this morning’s work but the whole thing up as a bad job, ill advised, too slight. The book that was going to live, to be read after he is dead and gone, will not even be written, let alone published. It was an illusion.

So it was. So it is. But fortunately we don’t need to go into all that because, just as he was about to give up and go put his trousers on, he has thought of something. He has had another idea. It might even be more accurate to say another idea has him. Something so simple and brief that you might hear it from the person sitting next to you on a train; something that would take a paragraph to tell in a letter….Where is her diamond ring? What has happened to her furs?

Mistrust and suspicion are followed by brutal disclosures. The disclosure of who kept after her until she changed her will and then who, finding out about this, got her to make a new will, eight months before she died.

The letters back and forth between the relatives hint at undisclosed revelations, at things that cannot be put in a letter. But if they cannot be put in a letter, how else can they be disclosed safely? Not at all, perhaps. Perhaps they can never be disclosed. There is no reason to suspect the old woman’s housekeeper. On the other hand, if it was not a member of the family who walked off with certain unspecified things without waiting to find out which of the rightful heirs wanted what, surely it could have been put in a letter.

Unless, of course, the novelist does not yet know the answer himself. Eventually, of course, he is going to have to let the cat—this cat and all sorts of other cats—out of the bag. If he does not know, at this point, it means that a blessing has descended on him, and the characters have taken things in their own hands. From now on, he is out of it, a recorder simply of what happens, whose business is with the innocent as well as with the guilty. There are other pressures than greed. Jealousy alone can turn one sister against the other, and both against the man who is universally loved and admired, and who used, when they were little girls, to walk up and down with one of them on each of his size-12 shoes.

Things that everybody knows but nobody has ever come right out and said will be said now. Ancient grievances will be aired. Everybody’s character, including that of the dead woman, is going to suffer damage from too much handling. The terrible damaging facts of that earlier will must all come out. The family, as a family, is done for, done to death by what turns out in the end to be a surprisingly little amount of money, considering how much love was sacrificed to it.

And their loss, if the novelist really is a novelist, will be our gain.

For it turns out that this old woman—eighty-three she was, with a bad heart, dreadful blood pressure, a caricature of herself, alone and lonely—knew what would happen and didn’t care; didn’t try to stop it; saw that it had begun under her nose while she was still conscious; saw that she was the victim of the doctor who kept her alive long after her will to live had gone; saw the threads of will, of consciousness, slip through her fingers; let them go; gathered them in again; left instructions that she knew would not be followed; tried to make provisions when it was all but too late; and then delayed some more, while she remembered, in snatches, old deprivations, an unwise early marriage, the absence of children; and slept; and woke to remember more—this old woman, who woke on her last day cheerful, fully conscious, ready for whatever came (it turned out to be her sponge bath)—who was somehow a symbol (though this is better left unsaid), an example, an instance, a proof of something, and whose last words were—But I mustn’t spoil the story for you.

At twelve o’clock, the novelist, looking green from fatigue (also from not having shaved), emerges from his narrative dream at last with something in his hand he wants somebody to listen to. His wife will have to stop what she is doing and think of a card, any card; or be sawed in half again and again until the act is letter-perfect. She alone knows when he is, and when he is not, writing like himself. This is an illusion, sustained by love, and this she also knows but keeps to herself.

It would only upset him if he were told. If he has no wife, he may even go to bed that night without ever having shaved, brushed his teeth, or put his trousers on. And if he is invited out, he will destroy the dinner party by getting up and putting on his hat and coat at quarter of ten, causing the other guests to signal to one another, and the hostess to make a mental note never to ask him again. In any case, literary prestidigitation is tiring and requires lots of sleep.

And when the writer is in bed with the light out, he tosses. Far from dropping off to sleep and trusting to the fact that he did get home and into bed by ten o’clock after all, he thinks of something, and the light beside his bed goes on long enough for him to write down five words that may or may not mean a great deal to him in the morning. The light may go on and off several times before his steady breathing indicates that he is asleep.

And while he is asleep he may dream—he may dream that he had a dream in which the whole meaning of what he is trying to do in the novel is brilliantly revealed to him. Just so the dog asleep on the hearthrug dreams; you can see, by the faint jerking movement of his four legs, that he is after a rabbit.

The novelist’s rabbit is the truth—about life, about human character, about himself and therefore by extension, it is to be hoped, about other people. He is convinced that this is all knowable, can be described, can be recorded, by a person sufficiently dedicated to describing and recording, can be caught in a net of narration.

He is encouraged by the example of other writers—Turgenev, say, with his particular trick of spreading out his arms like a great bird and taking off, leaving the earth and soaring high above the final scenes; or D. H. Lawrence, with his marvelous ability to make people who are only words on a page actually reach out with their hands and love one another; or Virginia Woolf, with her delight in fireworks, in a pig’s skull with a scarf wrapped around it; or E. M. Forster, with his fastidious preference for what a good many very nice people wish were not so.

But what, seriously, was accomplished by these writers or can the abstract dummy novelist I have been describing hope to accomplish? Not life, of course; not the real thing; not children and roses; but only a facsimile that is called literature. To achieve this facsimile the writer has, more or less, to renounce his birthright to reality, and few people have a better idea of what it is—of its rewards and satisfactions, or of what to do with a whole long day.

What’s in it for him? The hope of immortality? The chances are not good enough to interest a sensible person. Money? Well, money is not money any more. Fame? For the young, who are in danger always of being ignored, of being overlooked at the party, perhaps, but no one over the age of forty who is in his right mind would want to be famous. It would interfere with his work, with his family life.

Why then should the successful manipulation of illusions be everything to a writer? Why does he bother to make up stories and novels? If you ask him, you will probably get any number of answers, none of them straightforward. You might as well ask a sailor why it is that he has chosen to spend his life at sea.

______________________________

Excerpted from The Writer as Illusionist: Uncollected & Unpublished Work by William Maxwell. Copyright © 1955 by William Maxwell. Introduction Copyright © 2024 by Alec Wilkinson. Excerpted with the permission of Godine.

Sometimes it starts with a single image. Mine was a guy in an old-fashioned diving suit walking along the bottom of a river, pulling another guy seated in a bathtub on the river’s surface. The image came to me unbidden, and it was weird enough to leave a lasting impression. So I filed it away in the catalog of weird impressions that writers (this one anyway) keep for future reference, and promptly forgot all about it.

Years ago, while visiting the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, I encountered a series of paintings that seemed to me to be a kind of perfect marriage between the beautiful and the grotesque. The portraits were distorted to the point of caricature, the landscapes as if caught up in hurricanes, still lifes of slaughtered animals that seemed to be refusing to give up their souls. I was awed by their energy, spellbound by their visionary sensibility and their ferocious storms of color. They were the work of Chaim Soutine, an artist I had not previously been aware of. In his book Shocking Paris, about a circle of immigrant artists in the early 20th century known as the School of Paris, Stanley Meisler described Soutine as an unwashed, unlearned, misanthropic, practically barbaric genius from an impoverished East European shtetl. The book recounted something of his tumultuous exploits among the bohemians of the Montparnasse art scene, back when Paris was the capital of the cultural universe. It was a time and place that fired my imagination, and Soutine, the consummate misfit, struck me as a character after my own heart, and ready-made for translating from real life into fiction.

I wanted urgently to tell his story, but not as a factual biography—rather as a tale informed by the sort of fabulous dimension that such a savage character deserved, and that I felt only a novel could endow. Nor did I think the story should be confined to a strictly linear narrative; it should be as fluid and mercurial as the figures in Chaim’s paintings. In them he subverted ordinary reality and ignored the bounds of naturalism, conferring his people, places, and things with an aura of timelessness. I would aspire to that same quality in relating his story. It was at that point in my thinking that an odd thing happened: the image of the guy in the diving suit resurfaced in my mind, and this time I identified him as the artist Chaim Soutine. He was, I imagined, trudging along the bottom of the River Seine, hauling a bathtub in which his friend and mentor Amedeo Modigliani sat happily afloat.

I imagined that Modi, as he was known to his friends—Modi, the handsome and cultured prince of the bohemians, diametrical opposite of his grungy pal Soutine—had organized a boat race. The major artists of the day (and also, as it turned out, of the modern era) would construct a fleet of makeshift crafts to sail in competition on the Seine. The event would be a grand diversion from the hardships of daily life in Paris during the First World War. And Modi would give his own vessel, a smut-blighted porcelain bathtub, a secret advantage; for he had persuaded the young Soutine to overcome his hydrophobia and pull the tub from below the surface of the river.

So the boat race would be the frame for my book. Chaim’s underwater odyssey would provide the natural setting in which he could recall the entire arc of his life. But how recall things that have yet to happen? The year was 1917 and Chaim would not die (painfully, I’m afraid, of a perforated ulcer) until 1943. The dilemma stirred an echo in my mind: an amateur folklorist, I remembered the Jewish folk legend of the angel of forgetfulness, which Chaim would also have heard in his shtetl childhood. In the legend the angel that watches over the child in the womb reveals to it—along with the history of the world from beginning to end—the whole of the life the child will live. Then, upon birth, for reasons known only in heaven, the angel tweaks the child under the nose (hence the indentation called the filtrum) and the newborn forgets everything they have learned. It occurred to me that Chaim in the scaphandre, the diving suit, with its umbilical connection to a portable respirator dragged along the riverbank by a hired boatman, was much like that child in the womb. In the scaphandre he becomes both witness to and participant in his own revealed experience from birth to death. But in keeping with the protean nature of time in Chaim’s submarine element, the narrative should unfold in a seemingly haphazard fashion; scenes would transpire according to their aesthetic and dramatic import rather than in chronological order. That way a reader would have the impression that everything in Chaim’s life (including his death) is happening at once. This was my hope at any rate: that all would be perceived as taking place on a single spring day in the midst of a zany artists’ regatta, while the planet reeled from a bloody war that would transform history.

At the end of the book, just after Chaim has suffered his own cruel demise, he is yanked from the Seine by a triumphant Modigliani. He’s released from the confinement of the diving suit, informed that he is responsible for Modi’s victory in the boat race, and reintroduced to the world at large. The scene gives the sense, again hopefully, of a virtual rebirth. And like the newborn child tapped under the nose by the angel, Chaim has forgotten all he’s seen and endured at the bottom of the river. Unconscious of but deepened by the breadth of experience he’s confronted in the scaphandre, Chaim is free to shape his own future; he is poised to commence afresh the tragi-comic saga of his extraordinary life.

Looking back, it strikes me that writing a novel is finally a haphazard affair. You take an image here, a passion there, a fixation, an obsession, a memory, distill it all in the alchemical alembic of your imagination, and hope—that word again—that the end result is, if not the philosopher’s stone, at least some kind of enchantment, a compelling story. So now you know something about how novels get written, or anyway somewhat fanciful novels like mine. The book is called, incidentally, The Village Idiot.

____________________________

The Village Idiot by Steve Stern is available now via Melville House. 

Translated by Lizzie Davis, a translator, a writer, and an editor at Coffee House Press.

For Tatiana Andia

 I am tending a garden. Though it would be fair to say I’m writing about the tending of a garden. And if someone were to say that I’m writing a garden, that would also be true. The garden is not the forest, the forest is actually down below, at the end of the steep slope that abridges our small piece of land, but it’s important to slightly accentuate the artificial character of my garden. Though I also don’t want to exaggerate that difference, to create a kind of French garden, geometric, with its military syntax; my intention, if you’ll allow me to stretch the metonymy, is to write a prologue to the forest, a footnote that can mimic certain gestures, certain scenes arisen from the body of the text, and at the same time form an overstory sufficiently dense for birds to come and feed there. So we planted a wide variety of fruit trees that are now, for the most part, just fistfuls of stunted sticks. The idea is that, within a few years, when everything has grown, the garden will feel like a continuation of the forest, although I’m not at all interested in the forest swallowing my garden, no. The garden, which should be at once open and closed, is not the forest and is to a certain degree its limit. I would like for all of this to be a human paraphrasis, a comment, a gloss of the forest.

A while ago, I read that garden comes from an Old English word, geard, which simply means closed space. And the same goes for the word paradise, which comes from the Greek word παράδεισος, which comes, in turn, from the old Persian word pairidaeza, which connotes a walled-in area, enclosed land. Paradise, then, would be defined not by what lies within it, but by what delimits it: human will, artifice, is there from the start, in the naming of these strange places. The garden appears only when apart from the rest of the world, and it doesn’t surprise me that it’s associated with property, privilege, even luxury.

It’s obvious that there are few metaphorical rungs between that kind of haven and a tax haven, but I don’t believe all etymological paths lead to capitalism, either. The garden is not necessarily, fatally, a property, a luxury good, as is demonstrated by many of the places campesinos create in this region.

Just kilometers from here, for example, there’s a restaurant we go to on weekends for sancocho de gallina, a true microcosm of tropical beauty and bliss. The place is very modest, with different spaces for dining outside, bamboo tables, vinyl tablecloths, and it’s run entirely by a small and prosperous matriarchy. Surrounded by dragonflies, one freely descends a sloping coffee field, with flowering guamos and heliconia and mountain immortelles, and gradually, in the middle of all that, a small ranch comes into view, where a campfire is burning, and a rabbit hutch with a zinc roof, and a seedbed with thirty-something species of succulents, banana, yucca, terraces of herbs both aromatic and medicinal, little chickens, fat and healthy, all the way to the gentle stream at the bottom of the ravine. I’d say the main effect of a garden like that one is not to delimit a property but to fabricate a singular experience of time.

The garden, in effect, grabs hold of external time, time subjected to the radiation of the present, and isolates a portion until it is denaturalized, just as literature does. Exactly as I’m trying to do now, as I write. I’d like to construct a small space, an abstract surface that cancels and also comments on what’s happening on the outside. At this point, maybe I could distract myself from my mission and allow the visitor to glimpse my rage hidden among all this underbrush.

After all, I’m writing this garden in Valle del Cauca, one of those regions punished to an unspeakable degree by the war on drugs, the farcical and tragic and bloody war launched by the U.S. government to exercise control over our country and fill the pockets of the bankers who launder narcotrafficking money in Panama, the Cayman Islands, Andorra, or any other tax haven. I could also create a catalog of the atrocities, the immeasurable devastation, environmental and social, that stupid imperial war has provoked in this area. And if I don’t, it’s because the task would take up too much space and I’d rather not distract myself talking about sad things. My garden, therefore, grows at the foot of a small forest that, by a mixture of chance occurrences, has survived decades of violence. My garden prospers in the middle of a region marked by horror, and that enrages me, fills me with resentment. And even so, this small semantic bubble manages to translate the feelings of pain into something else, which doesn’t yet have a name. Social time, here, modulates its rhythms, it runs through the measure of death, charges it with ample rests where if we’re lucky, a bird might perch and sing.

Any garden is, deep down, a proposed republic, utopia. The politics of the garden, the garden of politics. We’re aware that war could return at any moment, at the whim of economic forces, or as the express wish of a politician or so-called venturer. For as long as I can remember, war comes and goes in this region, so I’m going to take advantage of this small breathing space to reclaim the right of all Colombians to imagine and write gardens, not game preserves for the sons of the rich, nor VIP lounges that privilege the selfish hedonism of a select few: I’m thinking of gardens enclosed in invisible punctuation marks, where the meaning of a future for everyone is tended. Gardens that can reorder the syntax of global destruction; a naïve fantasy, maybe, but what form of writing isn’t?

Gardens, unlike museums, don’t intimidate their visitors, nor do they overwhelm them with their art, and that’s because here, art tends toward the invisible. In a decade or two, the gardener’s hand would cease to be noticed almost completely, and yet the small capsule of singular rhythms would already be created. Here, in this small parenthesis, a small group of friends who love one another can talk for hours, as long it takes, tangling and untangling social time until the sun sets and the birds who come to visit compel us to keep a long silence. I want a garden for my friends, for you, friend, a garden where it’s possible to contemplate how the thread of death passes into the eye of the needle that stiches life.

I hope we can. I hope they let us.

___________________________

The Devil of the Provinces by Juan Cárdenas, translated by Lizzie Davis, is available now via Coffee House Press.

I’m sitting in my office, a converted garage in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in the waning September light, with Lou, the small gray cat, on my lap, while Chelsea is out with a friend. I’ve just come inside from removing three dead baby mice from our shed. Their mother appears to have abandoned them, and though I tried, naïvely, to revive them—with tortilla chips, with carrot shavings, with oat milk in a syringe—they didn’t make it.

My editor, Naomi, has asked me to write an author’s note for my new book, Thin Skin, which I’ve chosen to call a preface, because I like the sound of it better. The preface is meant to tell you what connects the five essays for me, to give the reader a plan, a sense of direction.

I wanted the book to open with something soft, some easy ground to land on. I wanted to begin with a funny anecdote, relevant to our times but not too taxing. I wanted to ease us all into it, the idea of our utter physical enmeshment with every other being on the planet. I wanted to let the bottom of our bounded individuality fall away beneath us slowly, almost imperceptibly. Instead, this book begins in the free fall of reality: the material fact of our exposure to nuclear and industrial waste, and our political and cultural willingness to wasteland entire human communities and ecosystems. Note that my impulse here is to apologize.

The first essay is “Thin Skin,” a corporeal account of how thin the membrane is between each of us and one another, between each of us and the world outside. I want it to be clear from the outset that there is no “outside,” that the world is a part of our cellular makeup, that we impact it with every tiny choice we make. My thinking for the book began with an essay called “The Toomuchness,” which took five years to write. It was inspired by the clothes moths that had infested our closet, which I saw as a metaphor made literal, the ultimate intersection of capitalism’s excess and human mortality. I couldn’t look away.

I began to see what I now think of as literalized metaphors for my entanglement, my complicity, all over my life: in my dermatological diagnosis of “thin skin,” in my friends’ having babies as the world burned, in the crystals cropping up everywhere to heal us of something, in my own sense of vulnerability and my desire to feel safe. I began to question the idea of myself as a being in need of protection, indeed as something that could be protected. Nothing can protect us: just look at the mice.

It struck me as I wrote that I was utterly vulnerable to every other person, every other creature on Earth, and they were also vulnerable to me. Writing under lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic only made this more obvious and inescapable. As I wrote, I began to seek other ways of understanding the self that might be more useful than this shivering, weak thing we must shore up against the world.

At times I thought of these essays as a way to document coping mechanisms for capitalism: all the things that I do, that many of us do already, to cope with a broken and violent system. At other times I longed for a way to burn it all down and start again. What would it mean to imagine alternatives to our limited narratives about family, love, labor, longing, pleasure, safety, and legacy?

As I thought and read about these intersecting ideas, I grounded the essays in the present conditions of my life, yet each one took me farther back in time—to the makeshift lives of queer women in the 1950s; to the construction of our ideas about work and white femininity during the early days of U.S. colonization and slavery; to the witch hunts in Europe, a point of origin for our dysfunctional healthcare system and the ongoing pressure on women to caretake. I love essays because they can go anywhere, can incorporate any body of knowledge, any question. Nothing is too big or too small.

My first book, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, was, at least formally, one of those light, airy books full of blank space with tiny paragraph-long chapters, whittled away and pared down to the fewest possible words. But these essays were longer. I chose inexhaustible subjects. My editor kept asking me questions in the margins that I had to think about for months before knowing how to proceed. The essays only got longer, more complex, and more layered.

I panicked internally at this: aren’t readers too overwhelmed and distracted to read long-form essays? Isn’t that what the Internet has wrought? What the hell was I doing, taking up so much space, writing 20,000-word essays, longer than any magazine would consider, longer than most people would spend at a single sitting?

But now, as the book begins to circulate in the world, I see my impulse was to dive deep, to immerse myself in research and writing and big questions. I began these essays at a writing residency in 2018. I continued writing them through a global pandemic, through the reversal of Roe, through losing my mom, my grandma, and my aunt. Was the writing a form of escape? Of cordoning myself off from the world?

Yet it all went into the book. If anything, I only got closer to these losses through research and writing. I escaped into the heart of it all. What I want, what I crave, is an immersive reading experience. In an age of clicks and headlines and takes and think pieces that come out mere hours after an event, I want slow, long looks.

So that’s what I wrote. And I was comforted, in a way, to have a place to go each morning. To return, over and over, to these questions. On the other side of the book, I feel I am emerging from a dark cave, some underworld.

In writing these pieces, I saw myself as source material—not as a character, not as the story, but as one vehicle among many for probing the ideas that most torment or entice me, that keep me up at night. To be thin-skinned is to feel keenly, to perceive things that might go unseen, unnoticed, that others might prefer not to notice. The essays contain many people’s voices other than my own, some of whom express a sensitivity, an ability to feel and sense this profound permeability with others.

Writing can be a mode of perception, a sensitivity to the world. This book is about the joys and perils of our dissolving boundaries: the physical boundary of our skin as it absorbs chemicals, the emotional border where real fear meets cultivated violence, the obscured line from our desires to our material things, the ever-more-fluid overlap between self and work, and the imaginative realm beyond our prescribed expectations for a full life and toward expanded ideas of personhood, meaning, and purpose.

______________________________

Thin Skin by Jenn Shapland is available via Pantheon.

In September of 2020, I started working more regularly at my local library, and not exactly on purpose. It was a tumultuous time: the world was reeling from COVID-related chaos, illness, and death, and our country was beginning to reckon, finally, with racially motivated murders by police. In the midst of this, I had my own private, puny sorrow—one that hardly mattered in the grand scheme of things, but wrecked me all the same: I’d written a second novel that no one wanted to publish.

I knew rejection well by then, of course, having been a writer all my life, but because this failure followed a successfully published first novel, it pierced my thickened skin. I was told by numerous well-meaning writer friends that books failed to sell all the time, even books by writers I knew and revered. That gave me some comfort, but still, I suffered, and became insufferable, even to myself.

I told myself I would never write another book again—much less sell one—and that our family would lose our hard-won house, have to leave town, and move in with my husband’s parents, who lived on the opposite coast. My toxic internal voice told me I’d ruined everything with this failure of mine—and I firmly believed it.

Around this time, my supervisor at the library called to ask if I’d be willing to take on more hours. Some staff members were—understandably—concerned about returning to public-facing work, so she needed others to step in. In my previous life, I would have hesitated over losing precious writing hours, but now I gave a quick, emphatic yes, and began working more often.

It was a relief to step out of my house, and out of my wallowing state of mind, to walk to work along the path to town. While I noticed sparrows and starlings in the trees, and the bright sparkle of the sun-dappled river, I felt an instant uplift at the prospect of frequent work: I would be distracted from my troubles, I would make some much-needed money, and I would serve the public, who were greatly in need.

We were one of only a few institutions open to the public at the time; it was us, the hospitals, and grocery stores. I was glad to have what felt like a noble purpose; to be of use. Who needed writing anyway, in this tumbledown world? I tried to put it out of my mind.

I worked at the Reference Desk, and mostly answered phone calls, as many patrons were still wary of coming in person. Of the calls we received, very few were actually reference-related, but I’d already grown accustomed to that.

There was Breakfast Man, for instance, who called every Friday with an order: two eggs over easy, a side of bacon, hash browns, and lightly buttered toast. I would say, “Coming right up,” and we’d chuckle together before he asked me to look up a phone number for him. Car Show Man wanted me to read him the schedule of upcoming car shows in the area. Alternately, he had me search for obscure 1950s memorabilia, and once he had me track down a place where he could buy Dr. Brown’s Celery Soda in town (I sought the soda out myself and tried it. It was surprisingly good, at least for the first few sips).

Another regular, who came in person, brought images on her phone: stock photos of funny cats and dogs, a random shot of a ceiling light fixture, pictures of Disney princesses. She had me arrange these in a careful collage before printing them—in color, of course. I took more pride in that work than I probably should have, but it felt good, after my own creative failure, to create something for someone else, something they cared about, however random the content seemed.

There were some patrons I only encountered once: the woman with impaired vision who called me a “doll baby” after I helped her scan and send two documents; the man who became belligerent when I said he couldn’t sell DVDs to the library, only donate them; the elderly patron who asked if I thought it was safe for him to get a flu shot despite the burning pains in his arms and legs.

I felt invigorated by these encounters—even the troubling ones—which gave me windows into others’ lives, and taught me, slowly, how I might help them. Not help them in big, permanent ways—that was largely beyond our scope at the library. But even helping in small ways was crucial, especially then; a little tech assistance, kind attention, and temporary shelter could go quite a long way.

I came late to the library world, after working as an adjunct instructor of creative writing, literature, and composition for more than a decade, as many writers do. In my forties, I made the practical (or slightly more practical) decision to get my MLIS degree. Once I had that degree in hand, though, and had begun part-time work, I quickly found I wasn’t prepared for the real library at all.

In graduate school, we’d discussed the importance of digital equity, the value of highlighting banned books, and the need to ask guiding reference questions—all crucial components of library work—but we hadn’t discussed, say, what to do when asked for medical advice, or how to maintain your sanity while endlessly answering the same set of questions from a patron who worried that his public computer had been infected by a (make-believe) virus.

I’d been playing make-believe myself, though, imagining librarianship through the mist of what I remembered from childhood, when I’d spent Saturday afternoons with my divorced dad at our local branch in Richmond, Virginia. While he browsed books in the general collection, I would sit peacefully reading at a picture-book-covered table in the children’s room under the benevolent gaze of Mrs. Knottingham, the children’s librarian.

So when I thought of being a librarian, I imagined myself as a kind of Mrs. Knottingham, in a place of peace and devotion to the written word. The library is still that place, of course, but it is also a refuge for the lost, the displaced, the desperately lonely, and the mentally unstable. In the fall of 2020, I felt especially driven to serve this community—for reasons that were altruistic and self-serving at once.

That was when Glasses Woman first called. Her questions threw me: “How do eyeglasses work? How do they make you see?” Her voice was trembling; she told me she was scared. Scared of glasses? I wondered. I told her I didn’t know how glasses worked, but Google taught me enough to explain the basic mechanics: how the lenses bend light and bring it to the exact spot on the retina that allows you to see.

Glasses Woman wasn’t reassured by this, though. “So the light comes in through the lens?” she asked, sounding stunned. “It just…comes in through the lens like that?” I did my best to sound confident when I said yes. Still, she said the thought of glasses gave her anxiety attacks.

“I think too much,” she told me, a condition I understood.

“Think about something else,” I said. “Take some deep breaths and think about something that doesn’t upset you.”

I heard her ragged inhale and exhale, and found myself breathing with her. “That’s right,” I said. “Just breathe.”

I was channeling the soothing presence of Andy, the instructor on my meditation app, and even though I had the distinct sensation of not knowing what I was doing, I felt that I was, indeed, doing something, which was better than being at home, doing nothing, helping no one, least of all myself.

She told me she felt better. She thanked me. We hung up. I felt lighter, as if I’d accomplished something that might, I imagined, have more value in the world than that old, discarded writing habit of mine.

It wasn’t as though I’d cured her, though; she continued to call. After a while, she moved from glasses to fax machines: How do they send messages back and forth? I explained what I knew, and told her that no one uses fax machines anymore, so why should she be afraid of them? They were practically defunct.

That seemed to please her, and she hung up, temporarily satisfied. She soon switched to financial systems: How do checks work? If I write my son a birthday check and he cashes it, where does the bank get the money from?

Next came a fixation on how water and sewage move through a building. Then she returned to eyesight, but this time with a focus on the eye itself. Each of the topics she called about “scared” her; many of our conversations ended with me leading an impromptu meditation/breathing session that left me feeling better myself. It wasn’t that I pitied her or looked down on her from some height; I felt in need of soothing, too.

“I’m crazy,” she’d told me during that first call, and would tell me again during every call that followed. I always told her she wasn’t crazy, but what I wanted to say back instead was “I’m crazy, too,” because I felt plenty crazy myself: unable to write; full of bitterness, disappointment, and self-doubt; and trapped with everyone else inside Pandemic World.

I recognized, of course, that Glasses Woman was genuinely mentally ill—not temporarily unstable, as I was. But however temporary my own mental state was, it acted as a leveling force. And Glasses Woman and I, however different our circumstances, both sought relief from our troubles at the same place: the library.

As the weeks passed, I felt my suffering begin to lessen. I was meant to do this, I realized. I was destined to help this clueless patron scan a hundred plus pages for the IRS; I was made for empathizing with this woman anxiously awaiting the results of her medical tests. I was a bookish bartender, and some patrons began to seek me out during my shifts.

I went home feeling gratified. Maybe I didn’t need writing after all. Maybe I’d overestimated its value, its central role in my life. I could do this instead: throw myself into public service, let my writing ambitions drop away, forget what I’d done for pleasure, fulfillment, and connection since the moment I could hold a pen.

This new worldview worked for a while. But then, inevitably—and almost inadvertently—I started to write. Once, after talking to Glasses Woman, I reached for my pen and scribbled down something she said: The money comes from nowhere, goes everywhere. Then, I started jotting down notes when I spoke to anyone remotely interesting.

Soon, I was bringing a small notebook to work. It was surprising and not surprising all at once; the pleasure I’d found in my work at the library had eased my despair to the point that I could return to a fundamental truth: I loved to write. I needed to write. It helped me process the world, and tolerate living in it.

I started by writing without purpose or plan, but before long I knew I was writing a novel. I didn’t write it at work, the way my character in the novel I was writing did; I wrote at home, in the mornings as I’d always done. And then I’d go to work, and be outward-facing, approachable, and connected to real people. I’d fill up with that, and then I was ready to immerse myself again in an imagined world.

This back-and-forth became a feedback loop of the best kind, and the novel progressed quickly. Within months, I was sharing the draft with my agent and first readers; by the following spring, the novel had sold. It should be no surprise that How Can I Help You, my official second novel, turned out to be library-centered, with a “failed novelist” at its heart.

Glasses Woman still calls. In recent months, she’s become increasingly desperate; during one four-hour Sunday shift a few weeks ago, I spoke to her nine different times. Like other staff members, I’ve tried to direct her toward more professional assistance: to county social workers, or the new national 988 number for mental health crises.

But she balks at these; she doesn’t want that kind of help. She says the last time she had “that” kind of help, she ended up locked in a mental hospital, neglected in a narrow room for hours on end. So we go on answering her calls, looking up the mechanics of this or that household item, learning new things we generally don’t want or need to know. I admit that I’ve grown impatient with her. Despite knowing how mental illness works, I keep expecting her to move on—the way I have, since working through my own crisis.

It’s an unreasonable response, so I don’t let it show; I make an effort to be kind, and to answer her repetitive questions as best as I can. It’s my job, after all, and I even think of it as a way of thanking the library, of paying back my debt of gratitude. I also still genuinely want to help her—despite my own ineptitude and the scant resources at hand.

When she called the other day, and I’d exhausted all of my usual answers and Googled information, I tried a new tack: I told her to go outside and walk around. “I tried,” she told me when she called next, an hour or so later. “But I got dizzy and scared, so I had to come back in and lie down.”

It was sad that she couldn’t escape her apartment even for a short walk, yet I felt a slight stirring at her words. I could picture her outside, walking haltingly into the bright day, blinking at the sun, inhaling the fresh air and seeing flowers in bloom under a blue sky. That wasn’t at all how it looked, I’m sure; for Glasses Woman, the experience was scary, a failure, something not to be repeated. But the newly revitalized writer in me couldn’t resist turning it into something else: a pivotal moment. A little story of hope.

______________________________

How Can I Help You by Laura Sims is available via G. P. Putnam’s Sons.

I’m wary of those writers who tell me, with absolute certainty, that all I need to do is make a decision. They are referring to the book I’m trying to write, a novel that does not know where it’s going, or what it’s about. A novel, I say, or the novel—because it seems its own singular thing, and as if it has (almost, in a way) its own consciousness, which it is my job to deduce and come to know. This other type of writer, the one in favor of decision making, refers to their own project as “my book.”

First-time novelists tend to do this: assert possession, lay claim to the object, as do writers of a certain bent—the ones who own the project sufficiently to impose decisions. I sometimes envy this. For such writers, a novel-in-progress exists as an accumulation of positive choices: it is this, and this, and this.

It took the loss of a draft manuscript to make me realize that I work in the opposite direction: by a process of elimination and outright destruction. I was in the midst of lockdown, there were two children to be home-schooled, I had university classes to teach and a book to edit. My computer was old and slow but we couldn’t afford a new one and in a harried attempt to free up space I rushed through, deleting what I assumed was old student work. I mistook the title of my own early draft for someone else’s project and wiped it clear off the system.

Normally methodical in my backups, there turned out to be an inexplicable glitch where the particular file with that document was nowhere to be found, although every other draft file of everything I had ever written was there. I wept for days. I searched and searched again. I phoned tech experts. Nothing. And so I started again. But I couldn’t re-create those scenes, although I knew what some of them were. Making the decision wasn’t just not enough, it was nowhere near. Scenes couldn’t be retrieved, re-built, re-worded.

The process might be more straight forward if I could just make one positive decision after another, but the result is writing that feels stunted—merely the sum of its parts. Starting again was starting anew, and this time it came with a far greater awareness of what that meant, and of how different that task was from laying out the pieces and putting them together. A task of de-creation, undoing, myriad forms of riddance.

To choose against, to write away from, to not know, to delete, to work by way of elimination, to write in opposition. To write what you don’t know, or towards what you want to know, or into what you can’t seem to figure out. This is the first instinct. The second is to set the parameters for the project by knowing what it is not (what it can’t be, what I don’t want it to be, what it seems not to want to be, what the instinct refuses to engage with).

It’s not a boy-girl story, not a sad-girl story, not an ironic story, not a  satire, not a quest, not a fantasy, not an epic, not a historical narrative, not a prose-poem, not a multi-generational saga, not a novel with a city in it, not a novel with boats or airplanes or trains or even many cars, not a wedding story or a funeral story, not a party story.

The process of creation is one of concentration, deduction, elimination: detective work in which likely suspects, likely players, are assessed and ruled out, or else tested further. There is an aesthetic inclination here too: to rid the writing of anything superfluous, to work as close to the bone as I can. Which means to find the bone, stripping everything else back. To delete and compress. Why can I not think about the positive shape—the thing it is? Wouldn’t this be easier?

Easier doesn’t mean more fun, or more compelling: the process evolves into its own puzzle, something like the thrill of the chase. There is a loosening of energy that comes with doing away with things, refusing, clearing the path. An alchemical process occurs by boiling the shit out of the soupy mess until it reduces to a near pure burst. I want a contract with no inclusions, no inherited aesthetic I must work around, a desire fueled by an acute awareness of the many things we are meant to be in our daily lives, and the many attributes a novel is expected to have—how we are obliged in a routine way to perform our positive attributes and strive to create a positive outline in the world, a positive experience on the page: a novel that is gripping or fun or moving, etc.

We are primed, in an uncomfortable way, to be always ready to say what it is “about,” long before we really know what the answer to this question is. In truth, the bulk of the time spent drafting a novel feels like floundering around in a dark building, running my hands over the walls to feel for a light switch: what even is this, where am I? The novelists’ creative energy hinges on the experience of un-classifiability, on the plunge into not-knowing. That not-knowing has a shape, marked out by all the refusals, the impossibilities, the choices that would be wrong choices were they to be followed though.

I start wide, work inwards: not that, this, not that, this, not that again: the sorting table of the mind. I am a single woman, multi-eyed ogre-faced spider of a search party, spread out to comb the long grass. Is this a clue? No. Is that a clue? Maybe. This, not that. Not that, this. Not that, not that, not that, no. In this way I start to create a stabilizing framework that allows for maximum states of not-knowing, the parameters of a form inside of which discovery can occur.

One layer of refusal starts to build on another. To say no to one thing—so as to get closer to the yes—means you must have said no to something before this: an endless wavering chain. We are told that is not how we should live: one should move towards the thing one wants, act in favor of something, lean in, go hard, etc. But given I don’t know what that something is, I do the prep-work. I clear the space. This is not an easy, polite tidying. It takes a slash and burn, a savage ground fire, a bulldozing. Rules for others. Refusals. A lock on the door, late meals, a chaotic house.

You clear the space once, then you clear it again, and every day you do the same thing. You clear the hour, the two hours, whatever time is there. You wear the noise-cancelling head-phones, you shoo people away. You say: Nothing else, even if there is nothing to say. You hold it open, like one of those caricatures trying to press the closing walls away from them. You make sure there is nothing so that there can be something.

And it doesn’t matter, if there was something there yesterday. The weather changes. Whole systems free fall in collapse. When you were a child you remember being fascinated by the backburning undertaken in the bush, ahead of each summer: how men would walk out into the wild in their orange suits lighting line after line of low burning fires, the flames glowing and flickering long into the night, marking out the space inside of which life was meant to go on, undestroyed, green and living.

If I were to try to break it down and classify the stages of destruction—the kind of destruction that means you eventually reduce the field of possibility until it becomes little more than a thin highwire along which you must walk—I would say it goes like this: You do away with the big things you do not want the work to be, or the things the work seems to refuse to be—questions of genre, time period, broad themes or subjects. You kill off the half-formed characters, the ones who linger in the margin without moving or feeling or evoking something  in others. You close your eyes and feel around in the dark space of the project: where am I, you ask?

You’re trying to make out a landscape in the fog and murk. Is it the coast? Is it a mountain range? Is that sound the hum of the city, or could that be the ocean? You set out into it, ready to correct and edit your hunches: This not that. That, not this.  You listen carefully for a sound to follow into the dark. Only you realize, after a time, that you have gone the wrong way. You have chosen the wrong adventure. You have hit a dead end.

This triggers a phase of mass deletion, the staring into space, the labelling of new documents, the cutting up pages and spreading them out paragraph by paragraph on the floor. You do the whole thing again. And maybe again. And maybe again.

A novel in progress is a cluttered, messy thing, at least in terms of how it exists in your head. And there are so many ways for that mess to be made, and it’s much harder to make it tidy and organized. A novel in progress, is by definition, a disorganized system: one that seems to resist its own reorganizing, that clings to its own redundant parts, that is comprised of an almost infinite variability of patterns. The chaos stakes are high. In the drafting process one moves from higher chaos and lower complexity, to higher complexity with lower chaos. Expel, delete, expel, delete. There is only so much control one can assert: in the early stages the reigns are held tight: there is the false belief in the power of “making the decision”—playing the author.

But once you are far enough inside the chaos, the energy of the work takes over. What cannot be there cannot be there. What must be there must be there. The only way towards this is through radical demolition.

Much of this is deliberate. But at a certain stage destruction of a different order occurs. At some point the wrecking ball comes; an involuntary given-by-the-universe kind of destruction that is forced upon you. The wrecking ball smashes its way through the artifice of whatever thing you’ve been diligently carving: the precarious structure built over a sinkhole, the delicate story, the well-crafted protagonist, the coherent narrative. The wrecking ball smashes through whatever you have been trying to write in order to cover over, or avoid, or find a detour around the stuff that keeps trying to push its way through and which you cannot—for whatever reason—see clearly.

The strange or unpredictable or unwieldy story, the story you were trying to write yourself away from, the story you didn’t want to have to wrangle with and understand, that you were afraid of because you thought you couldn’t understand. The wrecking ball swings through once, twice, three times. Demolition will be insisted on. The ground cleared by whatever devious means—mysteriously deleted files, mis-directions, a dream, an error, an accidental conversation, a lost notebook—so that the other thing might be written.

The landscape changes. The water table creeps up and rises through the surface, softening the ground, flooding the consciousness: destruction as a subtle, seeping, dissolving power in the making of a work, an unwilled experience.

The instinct is to destroy the impulse to destruction: to shut it down, to avoid what might register as self-sabotage. But sometimes it is the only way. You give in to whatever insists on being said until the long straight road of the work opens up before you and you put your foot to the pedal and tear through the strange clear landscape.

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The Anniversary by Stephanie Bishop is available via Grove Atlantic.

I have a dream writing space, which is like all the ones you see on Instagram: cozy wooden desks surrounded by books and a view of nature, secluded from the rest of the world, blessed with a desktop computer, a generous monitor, and an inspiring quote or two.

That’s the dream.

In reality, I’ve written all my novels on a laptop which I’ve trucked around from the kitchen table to my bed, to countless cafes and trains. My computer generally has thirty web browser tabs open at any given moment, and the imprints of a few hundred WiFi networks I’ve accessed over the years (which I should delete, but haven’t gotten around to doing).

It also functions as an entertainment center for my toddler, a call center and accounting system for me, and the repository of thousands of unnecessary photos and videos. It’s about as far as I can imagine from a sacred, secluded space of creation.

There is the dream of the writer’s life, and there is the reality. We may always want to escape from the world as writers, but the truth is, the work of writing is often embedded into our everyday lives—and inextricable from it, both in process and in theme. If we can create in and amongst mess and chaos, then we’re doing something right.

Here’s what I should remind myself: despite that very wide gap between the dream and the reality, I’ve still managed to conjure two and a half novels out of nothing. And that’s something to be celebrated, even though most of the time I’m grumbling about not having my own dedicated writing space.

Like many writers, my place of residence leaves much to be desired, thanks to the economic realities of this day and age.  As a forty-something, I have yet to own any property, and I only bought my first car two years ago (necessitated by having a baby).  Until the baby arrived, I could only afford sharing city apartments with roommates.

And now, with a three-year-old, there’s not enough rooms in the cottage we currently live in to dedicate one solely to my work and writing. Finding the time and especially the space to do creative work has been a challenge ever since I committed to the writing life a decade ago.

But you know what?  That’s fine.

Writing itself, I’ve found, is a remarkably versatile act and one that suits an unmoored life like mine. I’ve scribbled notes on napkins and the backs of receipts, and gradually nursed them into short stories and scenes from my novels. A great many more of those notes have gone unused or unread, but it’s the act of scribbling down—of sparking an idea, and respecting it enough to preserve it somehow—that is a promise to yourself as a writer: a statement that this idea is worthy of transforming into something more.

Different physical environments suit different parts of my writing process. Solo journeys on trains and buses are great for that initial flash of inspiration: simply staring out the window at passing landscapes seems to liberate my imagination. I find cafes, with their background chatter and readily available caffeine, are fertile places to nurse the first draft of any fiction project.

When I’m re-drafting and require absolute quiet, I’ll seek out the silence of a public library. (My third novel—still in progress—was written at various Orange County public libraries, while my partner and toddler were at storytime events.)

Time is much more of a premium now that I’m a mother, but when I’m in the final clean-up stages of a draft, I will steal away for forty-eight-hour writing retreats—usually to an Airbnb or a friend’s house when they’re on vacation. All I’ll do on these retreats is work, eat, sleep, and go for the occasional walk, but I find them to be incredibly productive.

Would I love a cloistered writing room where I can pin a fancy plot chart up onto my wall and stare at it?  Sure. Have I managed ok without one until now? Yes.

In an era of Instagrammable writing desks and thousand-dollar writing coaches, it helps to remember that someone like Charles Dickens literally wrote himself out of poverty by hand, with only paper, pen and ink, and a multitude of candles. I visited the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, Yorkshire, and stared at the single table where Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë all sat and penned their respective masterpieces: Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Agnes Grey, along with various other novels and poems. The lighting couldn’t have been very good back in the nineteenth century, during those cold Yorkshire winters.

And yet, these authors still did it.

So what am I even complaining about? I have a laptop, I have Scrivener and Word and a laser printer: I can create anything.  I tell myself, at least I’m not a sculptor. My art doesn’t demand a physical studio, a multitude of tools, and some very hard raw material in order to come into existence. In fact, as writers, we’re lucky how adaptable our art is.

As a full-time author, it is very easy to develop an anxiety over money, the luxuries it can buy, and one’s distinct lack of it. But if I could afford a home with a custom-made, well-appointed writing desk, I also wouldn’t have the life experience to write believably about the financial struggle of working on the lowest rung of the film industry. Or about inequalities of gender, race, and class, and how these elements of our identity—over which we have so little control—can ease or impede our journeys through the world.  This theme fueled both my novels to date, and  will infuse my future books, because it is very much a theme I’ve encountered in my own life.

I tell myself if stability—and a room of my own—were so essential to me, then I would have prioritized that by now. Instead, I’ve pursued a life of adventure and travel, of creative fulfillment and economic unpredictability. Some aspects of those adventures I would have gladly exchanged for a dedicated writing room and a regular salary. But mainly, it’s a trade-off I’ve been happy with: frugality and a dose of precarity, in exchange for variety and richness of perspective.

So yes, that dream writing space still taunts me. One day, I’ll sit down at a desk all my own, shut the door joyously behind me, and lose myself in a sacrosanct sphere of words and ideas. Walls all around me, no distractions. The words will flow in glorious silence.

But until then I’ll still keep tapping away at my laptop, surrounded by the messiness of life.

No matter what, I’ll still be able to write.

______________________________

Complicit by Winnie M. Li is available via Atria/Emily Bestler Books.

One of my moments of greatest relief as a writer—equal, perhaps, to the swell and crest of learning that my first novel would be published—was when, decades ago, my Intro to Creative Writing professor assigned Anne Lamott’s “Shitty First Drafts” and I arrived at this passage: “Very few writers…go about their business feeling dewy and thrilled. They do not type a few stiff warm-up sentences and then find themselves bounding along like huskies across the snow…. For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous.”

Before reading this, I had believed something was wrong with me. I loved writing; I knew I loved writing. But also, I hated writing. To put a finer point on it, I squirmed with discomfort at the act of putting words on the page. Often, the only way I could write was to curl into the fetal position in my desk chair and rock, clunking my forehead against my knees, until eventually, reluctantly, tremulously, I’d lift my hands to the keyboard and peck out a word.

It is a strange feeling to be both compelled to do something and repelled in the doing of that same thing. What relief to discover that other writers, published ones yet, felt the same way!

Writing is uncomfortable. After you face the vulnerability of drafting a manuscript, you listen to often-bracing critical feedback on that manuscript, after which you enter the dizzying, stymieing revision process, but then—thank all the stars in the sky—you’re done! Just kidding. You’re not nearly finished. Now you’re on to the slog of trying to publish the darned thing.

It is no wonder writers use the language of hurt to describe the process. I’ve had students tell me they want workshop to be “painful” and “brutal,” which I take to mean that they want us to be honest about their work. However, it is both interesting and unsurprising to me that they assume this candor must wound.

And this brings me back to my eighteen-year-old writer self, who seesawed like some tempestuous lover in a romantic comedy: I love writing! But I hate writing! But I love writing! Over two decades and four novels later, I am here to report back that writing is not any easier or more comfortable; however, I have discovered a useful trick.

I have learned that because writing is so often so difficult, hateful even, it is helpful to embrace the “I love writing” half of the litany. I have found it both creatively and emotionally beneficial to write toward what I love.

I wrote and published my first two novels with my teeth clenched and my fists balled. Writing was hard; this I knew well; and hey look at me; I was doing the hard thing. But then I wrote a novel that no one wanted, and at the same time my agent changed jobs. It felt like what I’d been working toward (in what I’ll freely admit was a charmed career) had disappeared in an instant. This would’ve been a fine time to proclaim, “I hate writing!”

And while it’s true that I did feel frustrated and dejected, the main thing I felt, after all the other feelings had dissipated, was love: Love for reading fiction, love for the challenge of writing fiction, and love for what arrives on the page. The month was December. I’d write a new story in the New Year, I decided, and I’d put everything I loved inside of it.

So I did that. I wrote a short story set in the near-future San Francisco about a woman who works as a glorified customer service rep, administering a technology that tells people what will make them happy, while her own teenage son is profoundly unhappy. And I filled the story with beloved things, including awkward office interactions, quirky futuristic technology, the places in relationships where sadness and happiness get muddled, and the morning light in San Francisco out in the avenues.

The story grew into what would become my third novel, Tell the Machine Goodnight, and as I wrote, I kept on stuffing it with more and more things I love, whether in fiction or in life: teenage detectives, an empathetic scream queen, a governess in a haunted house, also, monitor lizards. (Did you know? They can count!) The novel grew around these loves and it became the shape they wanted it to be, like a tree spangled with baubles and tinsel.

Tell the Machine Goodnight is about happiness, so it makes sense that it was written through and about things that make me happy. But listen to this: My new novel, My Murder, is about a woman, Lou, who was murdered and cloned and returned to her old life. In short, it’s about trauma. Once again, as I wrote, I filled the book with things that I love, this time things I love in mystery/thrillers: twisty plotlines, armchair detectives, deadpan humor, an alluring femme fatale, a charismatic serial killer, a prickly babysitter, and more.

I still had to force myself through many uncomfortable writing sessions, and I still had to look flinty eyed at my revisions. However, it turned out that what I’d found pleasing and joyous and fun in the manuscript, other people did, too. You know the workshop saying that if you were bored writing it, your reader will be bored reading it? I think the same concept applies if a writer is smitten. I mean, can’t you tell when you’re reading about something a writer loves?

Also, revising toward what I loved in the manuscript made these elements bigger and more developed parts of the story, and a lot of what wasn’t working in the novel simply fell away. Finally, writing about and into what I loved helped sustain me through the long, and yes sometimes painful, drafting and revision process.

How about you? What do you love, in fiction or in life? What do your readers say is strong, beautiful, or pleasing about your writing? What if for just one draft or just one revision you focused on only those things? What opportunities might open up in your story? What shape might your manuscript take? What would that process be like? What would it feel like?

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My Murder by Katie Williams is available via Riverhead.

Once a writer completes their final, final copy edits and the email comes from the publisher with the words “Final Draft” attached, you think that’s it. No more chances now. The surge of adrenalin that accompanies that moment of letting go is unsurpassed. What-ifs? crowd your mind: what if that sentence were tweaked a little, that image sharpened, that one edited, that section more fluid, that character a little more complex? What if it’s truly dreadful?

My first experience of picking up my debut novel Harvesting in book form and seeing my words in print filled me with a strange mortification, a shame instead of pride. Maybe that is my Irishness. Maybe it is being human. But for sure, it was excruciating and not because the novel was bad. It wasn’t. Critics said some very nice things; it won a prize but still that feeling niggled.

Imagine my surprise then, when my editor at Harper Via, who published my sophomore novel Bright Burning Things in 2021, asked to read Harvesting in early 2022, a full five years after its original publication in Ireland and France. It was thrilling and heart-stopping to think it might get republished, particularly since the motivation behind writing Harvesting was primarily to raise awareness about sex trafficking of minors inspired by my involvement in a campaign called Stop Sex Trafficking of Children and Young People, an ECPAT International initiative, spearheaded by the Body Shop and The Children’s Rights Alliance in Ireland.

The offer came through shortly after my editor finished reading it, as she felt moved and compelled to engage with the urgency of the topic, which unfortunately still has relevance today, perhaps even more so because of the mounting migrant crisis and the rising number of displaced children.

Although she fell in love with the novel and its two central characters, she very sensitively asked if I would be amenable to some editing notes? Yes, I would, unequivocally. Harvesting did not get any structural editing in its first iteration; what appeared on the page was an unmediated flow. The only changes to the text were tiny copy edits, at the level of the individual word choice. It was borne out of a visceral response to the stories I was privy to during the campaign and its initial conception was brutal and wounded and full of a bristling outrage at the injustices visited on these girls.

I liken the process of writing Harvesting to a feeling akin to possession; there was heat and fury on the page. I was haunted by firsthand testimonies provided by survivors in Ireland, and I was unable and unwilling to forget them. And so, I wrote, or their stories wrote me.  The characters of Nico, from Moldova and Sammy, from Ireland emerged from composites of many stories.

Undertaking to write about such a traumatic, triggering subject that I have no first-hand experience of was a huge responsibility, and I struggled with legitimacy, rightly so. I approached two frontline NGOs in this field, Ruhama in Dublin and CCF Moldova, alongside representatives from the Children’s Rights Alliance in Ireland and the Immigrant Council of Ireland to read the work and provide rigorous feedback.

Their resounding response was that a work of literary fiction like this, with its accurate and sensitive portrayal of young lives corrupted, could raise awareness and touch readers minds and hearts in a way no amount of investigative journalism can. This sentiment was mirrored exactly by the team at Harper via a full five years later.

To have the opportunity to revisit the same novel through the lens of distance and time was an extraordinary experience, a rare chance for me to address any lingering concerns. I remember at the time of its initial publication, some of my friends saying, but it is unrelentingly bleak, and my response was, well, of course it is. Now, I feel differently. Now, I believe in the need for light and nuance, in my personal life as well as in my work.

My initial drive to create this story remained unchanged: I wanted to give voice to victims of domestic and international trafficking in a way that would honor their humanity and uniqueness and thereby disrupt the accepted representation of these girls in print as faceless, nameless statistics, as objects of sensationalist othering. I wanted to bear witness from the inside out.

I chose a first-person, present tense dual narrative to fully embody my character’s beat-by-beat experiences as they fell into an unimaginable world of exploitation. I was determined not to look away and to create an immersive reading experience. None of this would be altered by the edits that were being suggested.

My editor gently probed. Although the world of the novel is concerned with the darkest corners of human existence, surely there are some characters, even peripheral ones, who show some concern, who are a counterbalance to the seam of trauma running through it? And perhaps, there could be even a note of hope at the end, for a character I initially felt had none?

I resonated fully with these notes and felt as if the characters were being breathed new life into, stoked into a kind of existence where perhaps they had known love, and would be in a better place to exist beyond the boundaries of their traumatic experience. A gift then—to revisit this explosive, emotive work, and approach it with a little more detachment and an eye to the craft of novel writing.

Again, there was no structural editing, the plot remained exactly as it was, but the world seemed richer, and more real, when populated by characters who offered a contrast to the brutality on the page. I introduced a concerned friend’s mother for Sammy, who tried but failed to save her before it was too late. I introduced a kind young shopkeeper in an off license who saw Sammy for the troubled young girl she was and showed sisterly concern rather than a lecherous interest as had been the case in the original. Likewise with a taxi driver, who wanted to help, and a male police officer, but Sammy escaped them all and plunged headlong into a world where, once she was in, there was no getting out.

Nico’s trajectory had been a little more balanced as she had a brother and mother who loved her dearly. Both girls had best friends in their previous lives, and this set them up well for forming an unlikely, though deep and sustaining friendship now. Sammy’s unconscious xenophobic biases were addressed in this version, and I felt nothing of her essence was lost by being fully sensitive to the reader in this regard.

Perhaps the biggest change lies in the title. From Harvesting to Cloud Girls. From the focus being on the horror of storing and collecting young lives, to Sammy and Nico finding solace in friendship, in nature, in dreams, in the clouds that shape-shift outside windows, to transcendence, to tiny instances of grace.

This reworked version of my novel has benefited from this refocusing, not in an unreal glossy Hollywoodization of the very real human suffering endured, rather in the acknowledgement of the need for light and shade, in any life, under any circumstance. I sincerely hope the moments of tenderness, humanity and humor that exist on the page can help the reader stay with the girls and love them in the way that I did. And still do.

__________________________________

Lisa Harding is the author of Cloud Girls, available now from Harpervia.

When I was a girl, I craved age and experience. Of course, I didn’t want to be old, but I wanted to write old—deeply, knowingly. At fifteen, I yearned to see inside people the way George Eliot did, and Chekhov, and Tolstoy. I remember reading a throwaway phrase in Tolstoy as he describes a character’s behavior—but as is the way of youth. Was Tolstoy writing about young Nicholas, or Natasha, or Petya running off to war? It didn’t matter. This narrator had seen it all, knowing and showing and gently indulging his own creations. How I wished I could write with such gravitas. How old did you have to be? Thirty?

That retrospective glance at human experience was what I admired—but in high school I did not have much to look back on. Youth was a difficult subject when I was young, and so I gravitated to stories of bitter academics and querulous old ladies. I patronized my elders, showing them up and showing them off, enjoying the inconsistencies I observed.

At seventeen I created Cecil Birnbaum, an orthodox Jew who does not believe in God. In my story “Variant Text” I described this observant atheist. “His friends find it contradictory and even hypocritical, but Cecil has always enjoyed the contradiction and still nurtures it.” Enjoying the contradiction. Could you really do that? Write about someone with a gorgeous crack down the middle? You could! I did! I delighted in my character, garrulous and middle aged, settled and unsettling.

In college I published my first stories about elderly Rose Markowitz. “The pain is what I can’t take,” she tells her sons, “and only the pills will do for the pain.” At twenty I was both sympathetic and satirical about old age. Of course, the young have troubles too—but that was a different story—one I was not ready to tell.

“The question is what kind of writer you’ll become,” said my late great Commentary editor Marion Magid. She would travel to Boston to see her daughter and write off the trip—meeting me to correct long paper galleys at Au Bon Pain in Harvard Square. Sardonic chain-smoking Marion would sit with me, an eager sophomore, and we would discuss commas and characters, aesthetics, and destiny.

“What will you turn out to be?” Marion mused. “Will you evolve, or keep going with the satire and end up like Dickens?”

Like Dickens? My ambitious ears pricked up. I loved Dickens! “What’s wrong with him?”

Oracular, Marion said, “You’ll see.”

This baffled me. My stories made my editor laugh out loud. Did she also want me to be Henry James? No way. I was too young and happy. After all, I was publishing in her magazine! I had achieved a certain notoriety on campus, even among the literati at The Advocate. Even at Dunster House where the Marxist resident tutor Noel Ignatiev said he put a paper bag over his head as he entered Out of Town News to purchase a copy of Commentary.

Ha, Victory!

But even then, I wanted to be more than funny. As is the way with youth, I began experimenting, testing other voices, longer forms. At twenty-one, I drafted an elegiac novel, Kaaterskill Falls. Ted Solotaroff, who edited Total Immersion, my first collection of stories, rejected my manuscript, asking, dismayed, “What happened to the sparkling Allegra Goodman I used to know?”

What happened? I was growing up, graduating, getting married, studying, traveling, having a baby. I published new stories, revised Kaaterskill Falls. and saw that book succeed. I raised four children, wrote five more novels—and finally got old enough to think about being young.

My fourth child inspired my new novel, Sam. I was already the mother of three bookish and well-behaved sons. Stubborn, yes. Difficult, sometimes—but if I turned my back for a minute, my boys were where I’d left them. Then I had a little girl. Miranda was never where I left her. In a house full of readers, Miranda despised quiet, and sitting around. When she was six and I couldn’t get a babysitter, I brought Miranda to a talk I was giving. “I hate books!” my daughter told the president of PEN New England.

What Miranda enjoyed was rearranging furniture. Cutting her own hair. (“I’m sorry,” her teacher told me. “She grabbed the scissors from the art table.”) Miranda climbed the walls, wedging herself inside doorframes. She drew on the walls, too.

Where did this child come from? This was the question my husband and I asked each other, but as I watched Miranda grow, I recognized her ambition and her energy. I remembered what it was like to race around and wonder why grownups were so slow.

When children are little, they run everywhere. They don’t walk from place to place. I wanted to write about what happens to that eagerness—particularly in girls. What becomes of the girl who wants to climb? I started with this question and a girl named Sam. But who was she? How would I tell her story?

When I first conceived of Sam, I was commuting an hour each way to the North Shore of Massachusetts where I drove my third son, Elijah, to high school. Our drive was a reverse commute, and it did not make sense for me to return home to Cambridge after drop-off. While my son was at school, I worked, and I walked. I spent time in the Beverly Library. I drove along the coast to Gloucester. I stood on the beach and looked at the ocean in all seasons and all lights. This place was not mine, but it belonged to Sam.

During the years Elijah and I drove to the North Shore, we listened to dozens of audio books, and because he was up for anything, and I believe the driver gets to choose, we played my favorites. Homer’s verses filled our car, the anger of Achilles, and the wine-dark sea. We heard the adventures of Don Quixote and D’Artagnan. We listened to Beowulf in heavy fog, and Moby Dick in sleet and snow. We logged miles with Jane Austen, Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Tolstoy. These were the heroes of my youth, the writers I had read and wondered at and carried in my bookbag.

Now I listened to their voices, sometimes funny, sometimes grand, sometimes witty, sometimes so sad they moved me to tears. As I listened, I thought about the voice of my own book. How would I convey Sam’s life? What words would I choose?

As so often when writing fiction, the voice chose me. I adopted Sam’s point of view and wrote from her consciousness, starting with the first line when she is seven. “There is a girl, and her name is Sam.”

I begin simply and as Sam grows up, my language becomes more complex. As timelapse photography shows seasons changing and flowers opening, I show how hope shades into sadness, and how discouragement shifts into determination. The novel matures with my protagonist.

The scary part was limiting myself to one girl’s point of view. As a reader I grew up on complexity and big plots. As a writer, I relish complexity as well. My novels Intuition and The Cookbook Collector and The Chalk Artist develop faceted situations and multiple perspectives. It felt radical to explore just one. In early drafts I augmented the plot, embellishing the narrative with more voices, more twists and turns. However, Sam resisted this. The book resisted. All that was good and true in the book belonged to Sam, all that was complex was hers as well.

One day, I wrote in my notes, This is the opening of her heart and mind. Isn’t that enough? I began to strip away everything that distracted from my character and her subtle evolution. As I did so, I embraced my subject—girlhood—and womanhood.

My novel is a portrait, not a landscape—but a portrait can contain multitudes. First love, heartbreak, loss, finding a vocation. These are my themes, and in Sam’s story I honor them. Mother, father, brother, teacher, lover, friend, these are the people in Sam’s life, and they are vivid characters, although we see them only through Sam’s eyes. Her point of view is limited, but the reader knows that—and knows more than she. Sam’s mother Courtney comes through, tough and loving, exhausted, bossy, ambitious for her child. Sam’s dad Mitchell reveals himself, wise and muddled, tragic, magic, funny. Growing up, Sam tries to make sense of her parents. And as a parent myself, I learned to make sense of her.

Oh fiction! I had to grow older to write about youth. I had to be a mother to write from a child’s point of view. I needed distance to write close up.

In the Jewish tradition, it’s said that to save a life is to save the entire world. I would add that to write one life is to create an entire world. This is what I learned as I wrote Sam. A small way to tell a larger story.

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Sam by Allegra Goodman is available now via The Dial Press.