Calling Back...

The Art of Returning to the Beloved Well

Q.

When your later stories seem to call back to earlier ones somehow, to what extent is that intentional versus, let's say, emergent?

Examples from Liberation Day that motivated my question:

1. "The Semplica-Girl Diaries" and "Liberation Day." Do you view those two stories in the same way as "The Snow Storm" and "Master and Man", or is it more like "vulnerable people being exploited/dehumanized in the name of aspirational consumerism" is a topic big enough to afford many different explorations?

2. "Escape from Spiderhead" and "Liberation Day." Are you broadly interested in the question of how technology might interact with our view of and ability to describe the world, or do you mainly find this to be a useful device to allow your narrators to (plausibly) borrow some of the hypertrophic noticing/describing/feeling muscles that you yourself seem to possess?

3. "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline" and "Ghoul." Do you think that theme parks are somehow uniquely helpful for understanding the American experiment (or some better thesis), or is it more important that they offer the right mix of power dynamics and corporate absurdity to let you get into the kinds of voices that you enjoy writing?

In other words, when your stories "echo" in some way, in general is it because you're consciously re-attempting something you're not yet satisfied with, or is it simply that certain premises/devices/settings tend to be fruitful for you in terms of craft?

Thanks so much for all your time and thoughtfulness.

A.

What an interesting and well-supported question. Thanks for it. 

In brief, to use your terminology, these choices are definitely “emergent.”  I feel that something in the earlier story – the voice, or some moral question – is still operative in me; I can still “do” that voice, and want to (I’m still excited by it). Or maybe the moral turf is still loamy – it still feels rich.

If I’m being frank — and this is true for every one of my stories…my mind imagines a setting, or I cough up a little bit of voice, and when I consider continuing in that vein, I feel: “Oooh, yeah: that could be fun.”

I never think, “I want to write about this or that political idea, and I should therefore use this or that mode.” 

Basically, my feeling is that to get anything surprising or exciting or transcendent to happen in a work of fiction, we need to come at it from a place of bounty, or overflow.  And maybe there are not an infinite number of such places in one person’s subconscious.  There might just be a few.

So, we have to feel free to go back to the same well again and again. 

I’m seeking: whatever feels full/fun/abundant.  And if my mind swerves into the direction of an approach I’ve tried before, that’s no problem; I just resolve to differentiate the two projects, so that the new one will be a development of, or an advancement beyond, the first.  

I want the two final stories each to stand on its own, as a valid use of that core mode.

Think of two siblings who, though coming from the same basic DNA, evolve into two different but wonderful adults.

I’ll try to be more specific, keyed to your sub-questions:

1. "The Semplica-Girl Diaries" and "Liberation Day." Do you view those two stories in the same way as "The Snow Storm" and "Master and Man", or is it more like "vulnerable people being exploited/dehumanized in the name of aspirational consumerism" is a topic big enough to afford many different explorations?

What’s in common here is the notion of poor or disadvantaged people being purchased and put on display by the rich. I first “found” that idea with “The Semplica Girl Diaries.” Then, a few years ago, I was writing a screenplay for that story and just got excited all over again about the idea of this idea, of someone being put on display for the amusement of another — and nobody feeling particularly outraged about it. I felt that this idea hadn’t been exhausted by “The Semplica Girl Diaries.”

One of the thrills of having a book out: foreign covers. This is the Swedish cover for “Liberation Day,” forthcoming there in 2023.

And, in truth, I was well into writing “Liberation Day” before I even realized it had that connection with the earlier story. Once I became aware of it, my reaction was something like, “Huh, O.K, fine with me.”  Or, you know: “Does the surface resemblance between the two stories make me want to ‘sacrifice’ the current story to avoid being accused of repeating myself?”  And my answer was, “No, no way, I’m having too much fun, and anyone reading these two stories closely enough is going to see, when I’m done, that they diverge in essential ways.” The both can stand on their own.

(I suppose, at some deeper level, I might even be thinking: “Likely, only a handful of my stories will last at all into the future. Probably none, actually. But maybe one of these two - which came out of the same energy — will turn out to have something that will make it last longer. And, at that time, nobody will care that it had a sibling that bore a resemblance to it.” ) :)

I’ve often thought that any writer has certain “sweet spots” – voices or attitudes or topics that just, for whatever reason, open up to her.  Given that any talent is finite, part of the writer’s job is to go back into certain rich veins and rework them. 

The only responsibility, in my mind, is to make sure that the new take on the material offers something fresh.

Illustration for “The Semplica Girl Diaries,” done by the magnificent Martin Ansin, that ran with the original publication of the story in 2012.

There might be a parallel in guitar playing.  Certain keys come alive for certain players.  It’s not that they have a sense of what, say, the key of D, with the E tuned down to D, “means,” or is “about.”  It’s just productive for them – when they compose in that key, good things start happening – more choices present to them, let’s say, or maybe the sound that results is itself germinative: hearing that sound gives the player a sense of what to do next in the piece. 

2. "Escape from Spiderhead" and "Liberation Day." Are you broadly interested in the question of how technology might interact with our view of and ability to describe the world, or do you mainly find this to be a useful device to allow your narrators to (plausibly) borrow some of the hypertrophic noticing/describing/feeling muscles that you yourself seem to possess?

Of the two choices you offer above, the second is perfectly put and right on the money; I do, indeed, try to “allow my narrators to (plausibly) borrow some of the hypertrophic noticing/describing/feeling muscles that I myself seem to possess.” 

That is: I try to construct the story so that it gives me a chance to do certain things that I like to do and can do with some swagger/panache/power/originality.

In both stories, I take a certain baseline, less articulate, voice and then elevate that voice (through drugs in the one case and a tech stimuli in the other), sometimes to comic effect and/or to expand the range of the story – to get it to investigate deeper things.

But maybe the opposition you propose really isn’t an opposition.  (The answer to both parts of your question is “yes.”

The use of drugs to make voice is fun for me, but/and it does, also, of course, come out of a baseline “interest in how technology interacts with our ability to describe the world.”

“What excites us” and “what we’re good at” and “what we’re interested in” might all refer to the same thing, in other words.

Both of these stories are located on a philosophical idea that’s always been interesting to me, concerning the subjective nature of experience.  If I have a flu, the world sucks. I win a prize, the world is perfect.  Manipulate the brain (as in those two stories) one’s experience changes.  It’s literally a different world out there.  What does this say about free will and choice and all of that, and what does it say, in a larger sense, about who and what we are? 

3. "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline" and "Ghoul." Do you think that theme parks are somehow uniquely helpful for understanding the American experiment (or some better thesis), or is it more important that they offer the right mix of power dynamics and corporate absurdity to let you get into the kinds of voices that you enjoy writing?

Here the connection is simple: I had just recorded “CivilWarLand” for an audiobook. I’d expected to be “over” the voice of that ancient (circa 1990s) book, but no: that voice, I found, was still speaking to me and present in me. As I was recording, I found myself getting excited by that voice all over again and, in a weird way, “admiring” it — feeling, “Wow, the guy who wrote this was both 1) on to something, and 2) kind of out of his mind, in a cool way.”

So, when I got home, I set myself the challenge of trying to use that voice again.  And I found that 1) I could still “do” it, easily and with real pleasure and 2) the result sounded different from the voices I’d used in that earlier collection and 3) was letting me/helping me say new things – things that I didn’t know that I was thinking.

There’s a certain feeling when I’ve found a good voice: it makes “writing” and “thinking” the same exact task. 

I’m thinking in these new-sounding sentences, which are “new-sounding” because they are trying so hard to be true. And, they are true, because they are trying so hard to sound new.

The voice is not a tidy construct but a sluice for ideas I am just now discovering; it becomes a means to an end, the end being to think at my highest level, or, maybe, “see” at my highest level. 

The language is making the world of the story from scratch; it’s leading me into that world and, at the same time, as the language does its thing, I am discovering new esthetic preferences – that is, moments of “micro-choosing” are presenting themselves, because the voice is arising right in front of me and is, so to speak, “under construction,” in real time.

It's hard to explain but, for me, this is the whole essence of the thing, finding and spending time in this state of language discovery – it’s what draws me back to writing again and again., that sense of newness, of discovering a fictive reality by way of language. 

Weirdly, it always makes me feel young again - it makes me feel the way I feel when it first happened for me, that’s true — but it also makes all of the mental detritus that constitutes “oldness” fall away. The world is not overhung with the dead branches of things I’ve already decided.

This doesn’t happen for me if I have a “goal” of writing in a certain pre-determined or pre-vetted voice – if I’m “trying” to sound a certain way. 

This might sound paradoxical – above, I said I was “trying” to sound like myself in that earlier book.  But it’s more that I was giving myself permission to access the part of the brain that had created the earlier voice.  I was letting myself go there, or go back there – not  trying to mimic that voice, but putting myself in the mindset out of which it had originally come. 

So, maybe each of us has a few such “hot zones” in his or her head – places to go reliably, from which to get something interesting to happen in our prose.  And we don’t have, you know, a thousand of these.  I don’t, anyway. 

And it took me a long time to find, for example, that “CivilWarLand” voice.  As I’ve talked about here before, I had to burn through a lot of false voices to get there, and so, as a result of all that searching, it seems fair to expect that that voice would have some deep relation to who I am, and to the way I see the world.

If a crisis makes us suddenly become very honest about something, we might expect that that place is foundational to who we are, and might find ourselves that future crises will lead us back there along the same path.

Another way of saying this, to use a corny baseball metaphor, is that I think I’m a bit like a pitcher with a limited repertoire of pitches – just a fastball, a curve, and change-up, let’s say.  So I have to keep using these pitches, trying to make them better within their own limitations. 

Somehow, I feel this as a sign of maturity: the acceptance of one’s limitations and a resolve to work energetically and quirkily, and in a slightly ornery spirit, within them…

Within 3), you asked, “Do you think that theme parks are somehow uniquely helpful for understanding the American experiment (or some better thesis), or is it more important that they offer the right mix of power dynamics and corporate absurdity to let you get into the kinds of voices that you enjoy writing?

Again – it’s the latter but with a twist: if I write in a voice I like doing, that keeps me from knowing too well what the aim of the story is.  Early on, setting a story in a theme park was a way of breaking myself of the “imitate Hemingway” habit, without totally denying it.  I could strive to be stoic and write in simple objective sentences and all of that, but if the story was set in, say, a Civil War theme park, all of that become comic instead of somber. 

I still find that I get usefully distracted from petty thematic concerns and reductive thinking by the sheer fun of doing a certain voice - trying to stay in that voice, while expanding. And while I’m busy with that, the story tends to take on a will of its own, in terms of its plot and theme and all of that.

So yes, overall: as you put it, “certain premises/devices/settings tend to be fruitful…in terms of craft.”  “Fruitful” is a word I really like in this context.  If I go there, there’ll be plenty to work with.  There’ll be a sense of bounty and overflow that will sweep me out of my small, reductive, advance idea of what my story is about. 

All of this comes back to a point I know I’ve been making a lot lately: I find that I have to really trust that the magic comes, when it comes, via the intuitive and spontaneous; there is not much value, for me, in having a reductive, conceptual approach or method.  It really does come down to what I do at-speed, for fun, reacting to what I’ve already done. 

All complexity and value and any moral-ethical import comes out of that moment of, let’s call it, “choosing in a spirit of fun.”  

But I also want to reiterate that all of the above is just my take on things.  I’m trying to let you behind the curtain of my individual mode of being creative.  It’s a weird mode, developed over many years, and its real purpose is to accommodate and exploit my strange, particular mind. (Ditto: your approach is designed to exploit your strange, particular mind.)

The value of what I’ve written above, if there’s any, is that you, reading it, might find that it agrees with some aspect of your method, and feel emboldened.  Or, you might find that you draw a blank – it doesn’t seem true for you, or useful.  In which case, it might have the paradoxical effect of affirming whatever it is you’re doing. 

Imagine a kind of town doofus, who goes out into the square and pronounces how he feels about the day.  It’s pouring rain, say, and he says, “I love the feel of the sun on my face.”  A listener thinks: “Wait, is that true?  Do I agree?  Is this a sunny day?”  And, in that deliberation, the listener’s view gets clarified.  Likewise, if the doofus says, “Sure is raining out here,” the listener’s endorsement of that statement – her feeling of that view resonating with her own – is of value.

That’s really all we’re doing here.  (Consider me that doofus, that instigator of debate.) I have zero interest in being an authority or trying to develop some overarching theory of fiction. 

I just want to write it better.  And I find that the investigations we’re doing here have the effect of lighting a fire under me – they make me more curious and ambitious, they remind me that, in the end, making a piece of art is very difficult, and takes all that we have – the rational, yes, but also the part of us that knows how to get into trouble, and the part that yearns for mystery, and is willing to out beyond the safe and habitual and easily justified to get it: the part that says, “Method? What’s that? No, I don’t want one.”

For those of you who are still just free subscribers, join us behind the paywall before Sunday, when we’ll be starting a discussion of my story “CommComm.” My goal is to be as frank as I can about how that story actually got written, down to the line level.