On reading, and returning to fiction

Art in a crisis

First, some announcements:

You can register here for my self-paced virtual seminar, The Researched Memoir, offered via Storystudio. It has lots of practical advice and insights gleaned via my own processes of researching and writing.

On Saturday, October 4, I’ll be teaching a two-hour virtual seminar called Memoir for the Apocalypse. You can register here via Corporeal Writing. We will talk and write and think about how writing memoir (or any kind of writing) is a good use of your time, even when things are very, very bad.

The Dry Season has been out in the world for almost four months. Thank you to everyone who has read it, shared it, written about it, and written to me about it. You can still get personalized signed copies from my local bookstore, here.

A previous essay I published here, that was republished by Autostraddle, Nothing is Gayer than My Love for Women’s Basketball was selected by Hanif Abdurraqib for The Year’s Best Sports Writing, which you can order here. Just in time for the WNBA playoffs!

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I read a lot. I always have. I read all manner of nonfiction books: essay collections, memoirs, long-form journalism, weirdo lyric nonfictions, and biographies. But fiction has been the great love of my reading life. Novels in particular. I read widely and erratically and often stop midway through a book if it’s not working for me. My ideal reading experience is that of losing myself in a big beautiful novel with a well-executed plot, lots of reversals, and gorgeous sentences. I like brainy books with lots of heart and sex. I like mysteries, but have pretty specialized tastes within that. Because I travel so much and like to read in the dark at night, I read more e-books than paper books. I listen to audiobooks almost every day. I often reread books I love) (I am currently rereading Kayla Rae Whitaker’s wonderful debut novel, The Animators.)

Like many voracious child readers, I craved escape. I depended upon the relief of fiction’s transportation to places other than my own life and consciousness. As an adult writer, I have likewise depended upon the transportive capacity of writing, which is much harder work than reading, but has other lasting positive consequences. Mostly, I have written nonfiction. I recently published my fifth book of nonfiction. After each of these books, I intended to write a novel. Once, I did. Then, I showed it to the wrong reader at the wrong time and got discouraged long enough that another nonfiction book usurped my attention and I never returned to that novel.

I don’t put much stock in genre. But, as it comes with a set of expectations in a reader, so it does in a writer, and those expectations can either facilitate or impede the work one needs to make. Through these five books, my own expectations for nonfiction have best served the work I needed to make. More specifically, the constraints of nonfiction enabled that work. Now, this has changed. I have gone back to fiction.

I am writing two novels. I first conceived of both of them as nonfiction books. This made sense to me, because one was based on my own experience, and one on the life of an actual person. I thought the former would be a book-length essay, the latter a kind of mixed-form biography. But they didn’t rise to my intentions. That is, when I imagined my subjects inside these shapes, I couldn’t find their pulses. I could not locate my drive. Though I was obsessed by both subjects, I simply did not feel excited to write those nonfiction books. So, I asked myself why I wanted to write about these subjects. (I will save those reasons for another essay.) Then, I asked myself how the process of nonfiction writing would address those reasons. I couldn’t say. Then, I asked myself how fiction might address those reasons. I immediately saw how the imaginative possibilities of fiction would facilitate my work.

For me, writing fiction and nonfiction feel substantively different. I was on a panel recently with Catherine Lacey—one of our great contemporary novelists, who has just written her first memoir (The Mobius Book, a book that is half memoir, half novel)—and she said that fiction writing is working with your deep unconscious, allowing yourself to be guided by intentions that you are not consciously aware of. This tracks for me. It is also true of nonfiction, in my experience—there are always big surprises, and I am never writing about the thing I think I am. But, it is certainly more so in fiction.

One only ever partially knows one’s reasons for writing a book. Even when we think we know all of our reasons, we are usually wrong. There are always surprises. We write to find out our reasons for writing. Our craft is both the method and the outcome. For whatever reason, writing in the relative dark of my own unconscious is helpful for these two projects. It makes sense to me that building a world with my imagination is the right work right now.

I have gotten to the hardest part of a first draft. There’s about 20% of the draft left to write, and the going is rough. This has been true for every book I have written. By the time I am 80% of the way through, I am tired. The honeymoon is over. The options are slim. I start to look back at what I have written and think: What is this book even about? How is it 200 pages and seemingly about nothing? It stops feeling alive to me. I begin to question everything.

Sometimes, in much earlier phases of writing a first draft, the failure to find a pulse in the work means it is dead. That I should give up on it or change my plan drastically. That is not what it means when I am 80% through a book draft. Jami Attenberg wrote recently in her great newsletter, Craft Talk: “If you’re halfway through something, don’t stop until you finish.” This tracks with my experience, and even more when your 80% of the way through something. The thing to do when this feeling strikes is to plow ahead. Stick to my plan. Get to the end of the draft.

Sometimes, I need to take a break. Not a long break, but long enough that my brain starts gurgling with thoughts about the book again. Maybe a few days or a week. But mostly, I need to simply keep going. When I finish the first draft, I take a longer break. A month or six weeks, sometimes more. I must forget about the book, so that I can come to it new. Best if I work on something completely different during that break. Here, writing two novels will be useful. I will turn toward the other book when I finish the first draft of this one.

So much of keeping going in writing is finding people to remind you of the things you already know, over and over. That’s one of the many necessary functions of creative community: mirroring what we know to be true but struggle to hold consistently inside of us. It is always easier to see in another’s practice the value of keeping on despite crises of faith or inspiration. It is easier to see the path forward when you are not the one on it. This is obviously analogous to all forms of community and intimate relationships. Part of the function of relationships is that we benefit from shared custody of the truth, so no one of us has to hold it every minute of every day, which is impossible.

My conversations with friends have been serving this function. We keep saying to each other things like: “We are not the first to go through this; many have had to figure out how to live under all sorts of fascist and oppressive conditions, in the face of atrocity, and they still made art and love, did good work, took care of their families, ate snacks, and experienced a full range of emotions.” You know. You are trading these reminders and others with your own beloveds.

Reading these days feels like it did when I was a kid. Big, frightening shit is afoot and I have very little control over any of it. I frequently need to turn my consciousness off so that I can rest, and then face what needs to be done. Engaging with art is one of the best ways to do this. Making art is, too. It can be tempting to dismiss these activities as too indirect a response to global or national or even personal calamity. Still, when I read and write what my heart tells me, I find myself more able to face what scares me. I become more able to hold and help others. It is simply a fact of my constitution that I must feed my own spirit in order to nurture others, whether it is through activism, mentorship, or any other means.

This is one of the more disorganized essays I’ve written here. Part of why I started this newsletter is because I wanted a space for more disorganized thoughts, thoughts that seem important to share despite not meeting the standards to which I hold my finished art. Like living, writing a book is messy for most of the process. It is impossible to be sure that it will eventually become the thing you’ve envisioned. Sometimes, it doesn’t. Often, it becomes something better. Showing up for the process requires enormous amounts of sustained faith. I don’t cultivate faith because I trust that everything will turn out how I want. I cultivate faith because it makes me a better, more useful person. When I can’t muster that faith, I ask for help. When I don’t know what to do next, I read a book.