A couple months ago I found myself alone in a Northern California beach town, walking the hills and talking into a recording app on my phone. None of my usual ways of writing were working anymore. Not the laptop or the overpriced word processor with no distractions and an e-ink screen. Pen and paper— my method of choice up until a few days before—didn’t feel free and easy like it once had. At night, when I played the dictations back in order to transcribe them, I heard mostly half-formed thoughts; fragments of dialogue; a word to slip in somewhere for mood; long, deep sighs; the crunch of my footsteps on gravel.

A dozen books into my career, I’m still figuring out how I work and what I need. For years I’ve been drawn to other writers’ routines and processes, scouring interviews for rituals, raising my hand at readings to ask writers how they do it. At my own readings, when asked, I give honest answers: A song playing on repeat. A candle. A quick walk when I’m stuck. Keeping books I love within reach, turning to a random page for inspiration. All of these things have worked for me at one time or another, still do work for me a lot of the time. When they don’t, I tell myself I need a day of writing in bed, or a clear desk, or a dedicated room in my apartment, or an office outside of my home. I’ve tried all of these. They’ve all been right; they’ve all failed me. It depends on the day.

And then, sometimes, when I least expect it, there are the rare, exquisite, ecstatic experiences of writing, when the story bursts out, and I struggle to type as fast as I need to, afraid the sentences are going to fly out of my grasp.

Here’s the story of one of those times:

It was 2020, the era of staying home, and after many years of publishing young adult novels, I had just finished writing my first novel for adults. For months, all time not spent with my wife and daughter was time spent writing. My clear desk and my songs on repeat and my candles and my tea and my slippers and my closed door kept me afloat. And my characters did, too—the restaurants they went to, the people they fell in love with, their moments of growth and stagnation, their small wounds and pleasures. And then I was finished with them, for a time, and I turned my focus to long walks with my daughter.

We had only just moved to our duplex in San Francisco three days before the shelter in place orders. We barely knew our new neighborhood yet; these walks were our introduction. I emerged after months spent in a room to secret staircases cut into hillsides; views of the downtown skyline surprising us around a corner; a chicken named Lady Gaga who lived at the edge of a front yard a couple blocks away. My daughter and I walked and walked and, together, we fell in love with the place we lived now. Each colorful Victorian. Each empty park and playground. Each person we passed, waving from a safe distance.

It was strange, wandering our neighborhood’s streets and finding them so quiet and empty. We felt the absence of people and noise and life. All the shops had “closed” signs in their windows. At the little park with cherry trees and a stone bench overlooking Twin Peaks and the downtown skyline and the very top of the Golden Gate Bridge, we imagined a pair of dogs playing. One was a little white fluffball, the other a golden retriever. We ran through dozens of names for our imaginary dog friends, settled on Daisy and Danny. And who were their owners? We picked names for them, too. The thimble-sized pink house around the corner belonged to one of the men, and the other man lived up the street in the blue apartment building with the palm tree, and as the months went on and our stories grew, the men we made up fell in love and got married. We lay on the grass and imagined the wedding (a fiasco, I’m afraid) and then I sat up.

“This should be a book,” I said.

My daughter agreed.

We rushed home and I grabbed the laptop, perched at the edge of the bed, and began. It was effortless, joyful. Time became a blur. It didn’t matter where I was. Music could be playing or not playing. I didn’t need any of it. I didn’t know what I was writing. Was is it a short story or was it a novel? A single book or a series? It didn’t matter.

I wrote with the feeling of my daughter’s hand in mine as we explored our neighborhood streets. With the expansiveness of time on days when nothing was expected of us. Maybe most of all, I wrote from a place of wanting. Here we’d been, living downstairs from our dear friend who we couldn’t be with, new neighbors all around us who we hadn’t yet met. I wrote remembering all the apartments I’d lived in throughout my life. The teenager who babysat me by our shared pool when I was a little kid. The old woman with the tremor, holding her hands out for a plate of my mother’s scones. When I was in grad school, my wife and I lived across from a man who’d knock on our back door with bowls of matzo ball soup and under an opera singer who’d practice late at night, piano keys plinking, a high soprano. Downstairs to the left were a poet and attorney who kept their bed in the living room so the office could have a door. To the right was a traveling coffee saleswoman whose tabby cat we looked after whenever she was on the road.

I wanted that kind of life back, breathing the same air as the neighbors, moving casually from one apartment to another, footsteps always above or below or right past the door on the landing. I wanted my daughter to have that kind of life—who knew if or when we’d have it again?—and so I put a girl like her into the book, gave the girl a set of keys, established that she’d lived in the big, pink, Victorian apartment building for her entire life—nine whole years—and knew its inner workings, its residents, its quirks, its sounds.

I finished the book, named it The Apartment House on Poppy Hill, decided it was, in fact, the first in a series. Who could have imagined?  An entire book, written in just a few electric days. A gift, to work that way.

And yet—here’s this other novel I’ve been working on, the one I sighed over in my voice memos and couldn’t get down. After a stretch of floundering months something broke open and now I know what I’m doing. Hard-won clarity is a gift, too. Because I’ve spent years immersed in this book I’m writing now, it’s real to me in a new and distinct way, as though its characters are sitting on my living room sofa as I write this, drinking whiskey and listening to records and shaking their heads and laughing. Timing in publishing is forever dissonant. You work on a book and then you wait, sometimes for a very long time, and it comes out when you’re deep in another project, and you’re reminded of how strange and wonderful a thing it is to write a book, how unfamiliar each time. Right now, for me, it’s pen and paper, coffee, and a song.

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The Apartment House on Poppy Hill by Nina LaCour, illustrated by Sònia Albert, is available from Chronicle Books.

She has become my Mary. This is something I’ve repeated in interviews since my novel about the teenage years of Mary Shelley was first published (in 2021 in The Netherlands, where I’m from). And I meant it too, although at the time I hadn’t really considered it before. But it rang true.

I never set out to write a historical novel. I never felt particularly attracted to writing a novel about something that—more or les—actually happened. I love fiction, by which I mean pure fiction. I believe it can tell us more about the truth than a depiction of true events can. But what happens if you create a story about someone who actually existed?

When I started writing Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein I sometimes felt burdened by the truth, or “truth” as we think we know it. And we do know a lot about Mary Shelley’s life. She kept a journal for most of it, and wrote countless letters to friends and family while others wrote about her as well. All these journals and letters have remained preserved for over two centuries; biographers can paint a rather detailed picture of her life. Still, Shelley is hard to know. As was custom in those days—the beginning of the nineteenth century—people were not, at least on paper, very forthcoming about their emotions. So we know what she did and liked, whom she met and knew, where she went and stayed, what she read and which plays she attended, but we only get tiny hints of her true feelings in all this.

When her baby girl dies, just weeks after being born, Shelley, then seventeen years old, notes in her journal: ‘Find my baby dead. Send for Hogg [a friend]. Talk. A miserable day.’ A week later she writes: ‘Stay at home; net, and think of my little dead baby. This is foolish, I suppose: yet, whenever I am left alone to my own thoughts, and do not read to divert them, they always come back to the same point—that I was a mother, and am so no longer.’ And that’s about it.

And when annoyed with her stepsister Claire Clairmont, for always being there, getting it on with Mary’s free-loving-poet-husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, she alludes to it and seems very hesitant to express her true emotions.

So, if we know so little about her inner life, are we free to imagine it? It took me half a novel to get there, but I would say we are. And we should. It is our job, as human beings, to create truthful art, and by that I mean art that comes from deep within. It is our job to create, whatever monsters may be born from it. We can and should make anything from anything, from nothing even, without thinking twice. Just as long as you feel you are telling the truth within you.

Is this Mary I have written the real Mary Shelley? Well, yes and no. I think bits and pieces of her are quite accurate. I was thorough in my research, so that most of what I have written about her stay at Lake Geneva in 1816, more or less occurred the way I described it. But aren’t we all elusive, to a certain extent? Hidden even from ourselves? When we imagine ourselves at the center of a hypothetical, a contrived scenario, can we confidently predict how we’d react, how we’d feel? It depends on so many things and one day is never the same as the next.

While we know a lot about Mary’s life, there are still important pieces missing. As frustrating as that might seem to a historian, for a novelist it is a treasure trove, for we work with a different kind of truth. The facts as we know them are these: in 1812 and again in 1813, when Mary Shelley was 14 and 15 years old (and still called Mary Godwin), she travelled to Dundee, Scotland to get away from her stepmother and to seek clean air to recover from a skin ailment. We know that she stayed with the Baxter family, acquaintances of her father. There she met 17-year-old Isabella, and they felt attracted to each other, at least emotionally. It has been suggested that their relationship may have been more than just platonic and this idea struck a chord with me. In my story, this—again—rang true.

Beyond that, we don’t know much of her stay in Scotland. The journal entries over that period have gone missing. Were they lost? Destroyed? And if so, by who? It made me wonder and highlighted the gaps in history I wanted to fill in with my own imagination. A writer of fiction must be free. I truly believe that in every sense of the word. There is no such thing as limiting yourself when writing. If so, you’re not doing it right. You should drag every inch of truth within yourself to the paper, because it is your story, whomever you are writing about. And if you are doing it well, it tells a different truth. But a truth nonetheless.

It doesn’t matter if I portrayed Mary Shelley exactly as she was, if that’s even possible. As a novelist I could have written that Shelley was a murderess, a thief or a wizard, if that’s what it took to convey my truth. If I do my job well, it will ring true. And isn’t that the beauty of fiction? The beauty of writing as well as reading? To be able to open up worlds beyond our own. To imagine a life other than your own. Reading fiction will not only make you smarter and more empathetic, it will also transform you, bit by bit, book by book.

Does that mean that this book has no ‘historical facts’ at all? Au contraire. The fun thing, I think, is that it’s a jumble of true events and fiction, of accurate depictions and imagination. A bit, I would like to think, as Shelley herself would have liked it. Because she knew like no other that imagination takes us further, raises us higher. Imagination gets us to the truth of life.

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Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein by Anne Eekhout, translated from the Dutch by Laura Watkinson, is available from HarperVia.

“All lives are interesting; no one life is more interesting than another.” “I simply followed events as they occurred from day to day, keeping track of conversations and things observed.” “One of the hardest things in the world is to describe what happened next.” There is the voice of Mavis Gallant: unblinkingly attentive and keen-eyed, making little of herself and much of others, tracking every nuance of human behavior, wise, dry, funny, and subtle.

One of the fascinating monsters she writes about in these essays (and she never flinches from monsters), the journalist and diarist Paul Léautaud, was asked why he went to observe his dreadful father’s deathbed. He replied, spelling it out: “Cu-ri-o-si-té.” Gallant’s own Cu-ri-o- si-té, as a novelist, short-story writer, diarist, critic, and reporter, is omnivorous. And it is never more acute than when writing about her adopted country and its people. From her mid-twenties a naturalized Parisian and Francophile, she was also a Canadian-born outsider. As one of her admirers and fellow-Francophiles Anita Brookner put it in a 1988 article in the Observer: “For those who cannot live in Paris she is an essential witness.” Much of Gallant’s writing life was taken up with sending “translations” of French affairs to readers of the New York Times Book Review, the New York Review of Books, and The New Yorker, which was also—thanks to the legendary editor William Maxwell—the home for her marvellous short stories. Like Edith Wharton or Janet Flanner, both of whom Gallant admired, she was an impeccable transcriber of French life for North American readers. She did this with the true fiction writer’s combination of deep feeling and estrangement, and out of a lifelong compulsion to turn lived experience into memorable sentences. In the preface to her Selected Stories, she cites with wry fellow feeling the response of another exile-in-France, Samuel Beckett, on being asked “a hopeless question from a Paris newspaper—‘Why do you write?’” He said, “It was all he was good for: ‘Bon qu’a ça.’”

The longest piece in Paris Notebooks (which dates from the 1960s to the 1980s and was first published in 1986) is the diary she kept during the “événements” of May ’68, the huge students and workers revolution that started in Paris, spread all over the country, changed everyone’s lives, and was over within seven weeks. This account is written without what she calls “the irony of hindsight” or the “confused collective memory” that subsequently settled into French consciousness, making a “soixante-huitard” into “a nostalgic bourgeois” and, frequently, “a colossal bore, to whom, one feels, nothing else has ever happened.” Gallant is reporting from the thick of things, clinging on to a traffic island as a sea of flag-waving students and workers bear down on her, her eyes smarting from tear gas leaking down into the Métro, sitting through the hectic and repetitive political debates in the occupied Sorbonne, glued day and night to the news reports, filled like everyone else with exhilaration, admiration (“How brave these kids are now!”), fear, bewilderment, and exhaustion. She tells us exactly how it felt to be there. It is bitterly cold. The “speaking clock” is on strike; in the “well-to-do suburbs” “they are stealing gas from each other’s cars”; the trees of Paris are being cut down; there is panic-buying and hoarding, and the streets are full of leaflets, smashed signs, broken grilles, wrecked traffic lights, and rubbish:

Garbage piled on curb of Rue de Sèvres. Cluster of pedestrians staring at something. Five plastic bags, each holding a kilo of peeled new potatoes rotting in the sun. Hoarder evidently didn’t know that peeled potatoes in plastic bags rot quickly, have to be used almost the day you buy them. Five kilos!

Through this exact, close-range lens, all the big stories emerge, including the atrocious police violence, the shifting politics of left and right, the clash between generations, the suspense as to the outcome, and the sudden end. What was it all for, what did people want, she keeps asking and being asked. Even long afterward, she still finds something noble and “poignant” in the answer: “Quelque chose de propre.” Something decent.

That mixture of emotion and detachment colors all the writing, notably in her report on a scandal that electrified France at the end of 1968 and which, as she shows us, is unintelligible without the context of the “événements,” of the French judicial system, French prison conditions, French psychiatric practice, and French attitudes to women. The shocking and tragic story of Gabrielle Russier, an emotionally immature thirty-year-old divorced schoolteacher and mother of two, who had an affair with her nineteen-year-old student, was punitively treated by the boy’s Communist parents and by the law, was sent to prison and committed suicide, is analysed with forensic care. Gallant presents the case in all its moral and social complexity, without passing judgment on the protagonists, but with strong words for a society where, intellectually, socially, and professionally, women are respected and accepted, but where in law, “women never have the last word.”

You can feel Gallant itching to turn the Russier case into a novel or a short story, with the mysteries and perversities of human relationships at its heart. Every so often she opens it out: “The question of what people see in each other still defies analysis.” “Even the most selfless and indulgent parents will seldom grant [their children] the right to a private life without a struggle.” “One of the lessons of literature . . . is the hopeless folly of trying to separate lovers by force.”

That experienced, ironical tone marks her fiction, which anyone coming to Gallant for the first time with the collection should certainly go on to read. It’s the voice of a writer for whom nothing is alien and everything is possible. Her stories, like her essays, pay calm attention to extreme and often cruel events, peculiar types, irrational acts, loss and grief, “love, hate and desire.” Her fictional characters are émigrés, war-survivors, refugees, divorcées, orphans, the homeless and the emotionally displaced, people “in transit” (the title of one of her collections) or who have “jumped out of a social enclosure.” She herself is a kind of displaced person of the imagination, with an uncanny ability to make herself at home in other minds, and to ingest the lives of others as forms of “information.”

That is what makes her accounts of the challenging, notable personalities she writes about here so compelling. Her brief, masterly pieces on Giraudoux, Yourcenar, Nabokov, de Beauvoir, Malraux, Céline, Colette, Simenon, and the wonderfully repulsive journalist and diarist Paul Léautaud are brilliantly poised between satire and inwardness, objectivity and fascination. She knows her French cultural icons like the back of her hand—“I am devoted to Giraudoux’s writing in the way that some people are Gaullists or vegetarians”—and she is irresistibly sharp on their strangeness and peculiarities. Here she is on Yourcenar’s fictional women: “the dismal ranks of scolds, harpies, frigid spouses, sluts, slatterns, humorless fanatics and avaricious know-nothings who people her work.” Here on de Beauvoir’s last volume of autobiography: “She is tired of everything and especially of us, her readers.” Here on Céline’s xenophobia: “He seems torn apart by an inner grenade of spleen.” And here on the dangerousness of Léautaud: “He was not a lovable old grump, a mixture of The Misanthrope and Father Christmas, but a literary snapping turtle who bit to wound.”

In her nonfiction, as in her stories, she is at her wittiest when writing about her adopted country’s prejudices, snobberies, customs, and “social enclosures.” “You can’t ask for a divorce at lunch. It has to be done by mail,” says one Parisian to another in the story “Rue de Lille.” Another, an art dealer (in “Speck’s Idea”), has his premises in the Faubourg Saint-Germain: “The building had long before been cut up into dirty, decaying apartments, whose spiteful, quarrelsome, and avaricious tenants were forgiven every failing . . . for the sake of being the Count of this and the Prince of that.” In the essays, we find these wonderful examples of knowing, amused satire on Parisian customs: “It must be borne in mind that no turn of phrase in French conversation is ever meant as a joke.” “They [the children] observe one another with the brief, prudent, Parisian appraisal that takes in the unknown without acknowledging it.” “A British dinner table of total strangers will spend a lively evening listening to one another’s accents; in France, the guests perform a kind of whooping crane courtship dance as they try to establish, without asking directly, which guest is a graduate of which elite school.” “It is distressing, at [Brasserie] Lipp to be sent upstairs. It means you have missed the dead-on tone of temperate confidence required for getting a table on the ground floor. (The food is the same.)”

As these examples show, Mavis Gallant is an unerring stylist. I might have spent the whole of this introduction rejoicing in the Frenchness of her aphorisms: “She was a quarrelsome pessimist, as women are apt to become when married to philandering optimists.” “The truth remains that every artist causes absent-minded destruction and that a writer totally unselfish would never get anything done.” And she hates bad writing. Her bête noire is the mangling of language that comes from over-literal translations from French to English, comprehensively described in one example as “a kind of bogus English that lurches from careless to pretentious to incomprehensible to barely literate.” She is suspicious of style that doesn’t ring true to what fiction, she thinks, is fundamentally about, which is “that something is taking place and that nothing lasts”: “A loose, a wavering, a slipshod, an affected, a false way of transmitting even a fragment of this leaves the reader suspicious.” Her sympathies go out to fine writers who live their life in a foreign language, like Nabokov or Yourcenar: “Writers who choose domicile in a foreign place . . . usually treat their native language like a delicate timepiece, making certain it runs exactly and that no dust gets inside.” In the ’68 diary, she is offended by a student who is tearing down a flag attached to a poster for an exhibition at the Louvre. “Ce n’est pas élégant,” she bursts out at him. Gallant is never anything but.

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Excerpted from Paris Notebooks: Essays & Reviews by Mavis Gallant. Copyright © 2023 by Hermione Lee. Excerpted with the permission of Godine.

“I hate endings. Just detest them,” said Sam Shepard in an interview with The Paris Review. “Beginnings are definitely the most exciting, middles are perplexing and endings are a disaster.”

Shepard is hardly alone in his aversion. For writers working in all mediums, ending a work can be the most challenging aspect of the writing process. Sure, there are outliers—Toni Morrison purportedly said: “I always know the ending; that’s where I start”—but for many of us, finding that conclusive beat is slippery, maddening, even disastrous.

As a writer and teacher of fiction, I can attest that few fiction workshops pass without the utterance of an ending-related critique. What’s more, those critiques tend to fall into one of two categories. The first: “This ending wasn’t satisfying.” And the second: “This ending wasn’t earned.” In other words: either a story’s ending was a letdown—given what the story seemed to promise—or the big swings taken by a story’s ending are not justified by what happens earlier.

So what’s a writer to do?

To start, maybe turn a critical eye upon those critiques themselves. Do we really want a story to satisfy? To earn? Recently, I sat on a panel with Dantiel W. Moniz, who pointed out that this language smacks of consumer capitalism. She’s more interested in pursuing endings with “resonance.” This feels like a better framework to me as well. Resonance is a way to talk about the music of a work of fiction, as well as the multitude of ways a piece might impact a reader.

My guess is that most writers (or perhaps the ones reading Lit Hub) are not working toward the goal of customer satisfaction. We’re trying to make art. We’re trying to disturb, or subvert, or illuminate, or render a literary experience so vibratingly transcendent that it resonates inside a reader long after the last page.

Okay, so what’s an anticapitalist writer to do?

I’ve been on a mission to find an answer, which is why I recently turned to the greatest source of wisdom and truth: Twitter. I wanted to get a sense of what made an ending especially compelling, so I asked the people of the internet to share their favorite endings in fiction. Responses poured in.

Middlemarch came up a number of times. So did a lot of Cormac McCarthy. On the ending of One Hundred Years of Solitude, one responder wrote: “It felt explosive the first time I read it, like I had been eaten up by the story myself.” This tracked with the intensely emotional way many people talked about their relationships to favorite endings. “I cried at the end,” people said; “I was wrecked”; “I had to lie down.” One person noted that a set of novel endings had pulled them out of a deep depression.

Powerful endings often elicit powerful emotions. Got it. But how can this (fairly obvious) observation help us as writers flailing around in the morass of an unfinished story or novel?

After reading through people’s favorite endings, I can say that a pattern did emerge. For all the complexity of pulling together the threads of a fictional narrative at the end of a piece, emotional impact was often created by an author’s manipulation of one particular craft element—an element so foundational that is often overlooked.

I’m talking about time.

All fiction operates along a narrative timeline. Whether or not the fictional work is written chronologically, there is an intrinsic sequence of events that exists in the universe of the story—and at the end of a piece, an author must decide where along that timeline they’d like a work to conclude. That decision has the potential to unlock a final beat of meaning and emotion for a reader. To put this another way: by being intentional about time at the end of a work, an author can create pattern, contrast, connection; they can generate resonance.

What form might such a temporal decision take? I’d argue that there are three major moves one can make at the end of a work of fiction:

• Flash back (the ending takes a retrospective turn)
• Stay in the present (the ending maintains linear chronological motion)
• Flash forward (the ending gestures to a future beyond the events depicted in the story)

Below, you’ll find a series of novel and story endings that have been categorized in these temporal terms. These examples demonstrate different “exit strategies” for creating resonance at the end of a work of fiction. I’ve tried to use well-loved works—both classic and contemporary—to minimize “spoilers.” But I’m talking about endings, so obviously proceed at your own risk.

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Endings that flash backwards:

“Bullet in the Brain” by Tobias Wolff (back to the way beginning)
“The bullet is already in the brain; it won’t be outrun forever… But for now Anders can still make time. Time for the shadows to lengthen on the grass, time for the tethered dog to bark at the flying ball, time for the boy in right field to smack his sweat-blackened mitt and softly chant, They is, they is, they is.”

At the end of “Bullet in the Brain,” we know that Anders is going to die—but the story doesn’t end with his demise in a bank after getting on the nerves of a bank robber. Instead, we end in a memory. Not just any memory, either: a memory that gestures to the origins of Anders’s love of language. This shift to the past connects early events in Anders’s life to the very last: getting shot in the head for his semantic snickering. This ending also offers a gentler portrait of a person who is otherwise pretty unpleasant—and that contrast creates resonance.

 Real Life by Brandon Taylor (back to the beginning)
“They finally appeared, his fated friends, four or five people, coming toward him on the sidewalk…Wallace was giddy, almost sick with excitement, to be in this place, among these people… Someone wanted to make a toast… To life, they said, imbuing those words with all their hope and their desires for the future. Their laughter rang through the night and through the trees, and on the shore they had left behind, people were eating dinner and laughing and crying and going about things as they always had and always would.”

The last chapter in Real Life takes readers to a scene that precedes everything that has already occurred in the novel—namely, Wallace’s miserable time studying biochemistry at a Midwestern university, where aggressions both micro and macro are unleashed upon him by the community and his supposed friends. As readers, we know what is going to happen to Wallace. This makes the ending note of Wallace’s innocent expectation all the more poignant.

 The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka (back to the middle/end)
“One last memory. By the time you finish your third novel she has not spoken in more than a year… You give her a copy of your book and watch her slowly leaf through the pages… And when she gets to your face, she stares into your eyes with wonder. She does this loop again…And every time, when she gets to your face, she looks as if she is about to speak.”

 As The Swimmers explicitly states, it is a novel that ends with a memory. A middle aged author visits her mother, Alice, who is nearing the end of her life in a care facility for dementia. At this point in the novel, we know that Alice will—has—died. The ending loops us back in time, offering a moment of grace, as well as a resonant sense of suspension that captures an important symbolic touchstone in the book: swimming laps in a pool, over and over.

 “Lockwood” by Bryan Washington (back to the near-end)
“The morning before, Roberto’d shown me this crease on my palms. When you folded them a certain way, your hands looked like a star…Then he cupped his hands between us, asked if I’d found the milagro in mine.

I couldn’t see shit, just the outline of his shadow, but we squeezed our palms together and I called it amazing anyways.”

 “Lockwood” follows the brief and clandestine relationship between the narrator and his next door neighbor Roberto. The story ends when Roberto’s struggling family must flee Houston, and after the narrator’s family does nothing to help. The story’s final move—to return to a moment of intimacy just before Roberto’s departure—offers a moment of togetherness for the two young men, as well as the sweetness of a white lie that balances the sadness of the situation.

Endings that end in the present:

Bridge by Evan S. Connell (the inescapable present)
“Having tried all four doors she began to understand that until she could attract someone’s attention she was trapped. She pressed the horn, but there was not a sound… Finally she took the keys from the ignition and began tapping on the window, and she called to anyone who might be listening, “Hello? Hello out there?”

But no one answered, unless it was the falling snow.”

 In Mrs. Bridge, we follow the life and times of an upper-middle class housewife in the mid-twentieth century. She is trapped by conventions, manners, expectations. The novel’s ending, in which we leave Mrs. Bridge imprisoned in her old Lincoln in the garage, could come across as jarringly abrupt—but the palpable stuckness of the moment resonates as a summative symbol for the novel. Mrs. Bridge has been stuck her entire life; there’s a strange catharsis in having her realize her predicament, at least in a literal sense.

 “The Husband Stitch” by Carmen Maria Machado (the decisive present)
“‘Do you want to untie the ribbon?’ I ask him. ‘After these many years, is that what you want of me?’

…My weight shifts, and with it, gravity seizes me. My husband’s face falls away, and then I see the ceiling, and the wall behind me. As my lopped head tips backward off my neck and rolls off the bed, I feel as lonely as I have ever been.”

Machado’s short story reimagines the urban legend “The Girl with the Green Ribbon” and, like in the original tale, the story ends with the narrator’s head falling off. Ending in the narrative present works, in part, because spooky urban legends are generally told chronologically—and sometimes end with a jump scare. In Machado’s story, the final moment is in some ways a small triumph—the narrator has proven why she could never remove her green ribbon—but mostly it’s a decapitative defeat, and this simultaneous import creates resonance.

 “Fable” by Charles Yu (a present between the past and future)
“His lunch hour was over. The man got up to leave. On his way out the door, he said, See you next week, and the therapist said, Maybe. He turned to look at her.

She said, Let’s see where you go from here.

The man went down the hall, relieved himself, washed his hands, splashed water on his face. As he stepped back out into the hallway, that was when he saw it…In the carpet, the faintest outline.

A trail.

Where did it lead? Was it a way out? Or a way in?

And the man said to himself, All right, then, maybe she’s right. If this is where your story starts, then so be it.”

In a similar vein to “The Husband Stitch,” Yu’s “Fable” borrows from the form of fables and fairy tales by ending in the present. The protagonist has finished a therapy session in which he has used allegory to process his struggles as a father of a child with special needs. The story concludes with a glimpse of the protagonist discovering that new possibilities may await him. The present moment is thus a hinge between processing the past and facing the future. It’s not happy ever after, but it is a chance for greater happiness.

 “Pioneer” by Lydia Conklin (an epiphanic present)
“Really, the end of the simulation was just the beginning. Coco knew that now. Not even Ms. Harper could help her. She pulled away and turned to face the yellow field, the milkweed, the curved path of cones. The sun was a low white hole in the sky. She would go on her journey now. She would set off.”

The ending of “Pioneer” makes its relationship to time conspicuous: the end is “just the beginning.” Like in “Fable,” the ending marks a shift between the protagonist’s past and future. Coco has endured an Oregon Trail reenactment, rejecting her gendered assignment despite the social costs (she chooses to be an ox, rather than a matriarch). There’s a sense of allegory here, as well as an epiphany about what the future holds. In this way, the narrative resonantly ends in a manner that feels both expansive and conclusive.

 Endings that flash forward into the future:

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (zooming forward with an epilogue)
“Being a partial transcript of the proceedings of the Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies, held as part of the International Historical Association Convention, which took place at the University of Denay, Nunavit, on June 25, 2195… As all historians know, the past is a great darkness…Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come… Are there any questions?”

Atwood ends her novel with a transcript from an academic conference taking place a few hundred years in the future from the rest of the novel. The transcript reveals that the story of Offred trying to survive in the patriarchal dystopia of Gilead is the product of confessional tapes discovered in a locker in Bangor, Maine. This future vantage serves to answer potential questions we might have about the trajectory of Gileadean society, as well as Offred’s fate. Whatever optimism this glimpse of the future might grant, however, is tempered by the chilling moral relativism of the male professor giving the talk. Thus, The Handmaid’s Tale’s move into the future offers both solace and an unsettling sense that patriarchal oppression might persists.

 Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam (a potential future)
“She’d go back. She’d probably been missed, already, and felt a little guilty over not leaving a note…Maybe her parents would cry over what they didn’t know and what they did…Maybe Ruth would empty the dishwasher and G. H. would take out the garbage, and maybe the day would truly begin, and if the rest of it…was unclear, so be it. If they didn’t know how it would end—with night, with more terrible noise from the top of Olympus, with bombs, with disease, with blood, with happiness, with deer or something else watching them from the darkened woods—well, wasn’t that true of every day?”

Leave the World Behind keeps readers turning pages by dangling mysterious unknowns throughout the novel. By the end, many questions remain unanswered, so it seems fitting that the novel gestures mostly toward potentialities. Here, we are offered a vision of the possible future via both small domestic details and earth shattering events. Tragedy is likely to be an ongoing occurrence for the novel’s characters, but the positioning of this potential future leaves space for hope. The best and the worst of what’s to come is, after all, a “maybe.”

“Manzanos” by Kirstin Valdez Quade (a desired and anticipated future)
“If I could time my death, I would time it thus: exactly fifteen seconds after my grandfather. I would like to die in my sleep, but I must be certain I outlive him. I will lay my ear against his thin chest, listen to the silence beneath his lumped sternum, and then, when I am sure, it will be my turn…

In a moment my grandfather will pat me again, and his hand will stay there, resting on mine. I’ll look down, run a finger along the veins knotted and bruised under his thin brown skin. I wait for his touch. But for now we watch the horses separately, sitting as still as we know how.”

Technically, the last line of “Manzanos” returns to the present moment, but the main thrust of this ending is toward a desired and then an anticipated future. The story’s protagonist, Ofelia, wishes to die right after her grandfather. Odds are good that she won’t—and yet, by suggesting how that death might happen, the story captures her doomed conviction. Moreover, by following Ofelia’s death wish with a near-future vision of grandfatherly hand-patting, we end on a more likely future moment: one that is freighted with Ofelia’s awareness of her grandfather’s love.

“Burn” by Morgan Talty (a multiverse of futures)
“I kept going, wondering, Hair or pot first? Pot made the most sense…No. I’d grab Fellis’s hair from the swamp on my way home. With Fellis on his unmade bed, me on a torn beanbag in the corner, each of us with a tall boy and the pot smoke hazing gray the room, we’d keep poking and squeezing the hair, waiting for it to dry, waiting to burn it.”

 “Burn” ends with a choice. Our narrator can first collect Fellis’s recently severed hair, or purchase pot. By describing the likely experience of pursuing each option, the story opens into the multiverse. The beauty of Talty’s ending is that even when the narrator ultimately elects to get the pot first, we know that he may not follow through. There are so many other possibilities—so many ways for things to go wrong—and this lends resonance to the seeming definitiveness of his choice.

*

How does one end an essay on endings?

Maybe, by taking one’s own advice. Thus, I offer you three endings to this essay using three different temporal moves. You can decide which one resonates the most.

Flashback
Before writing this essay, I spent a while thinking about what endings mean in the context of real life. I thought about the end of relationships, the end of my twenties, the end of living in one city and then another, the end of sixth grade, the end of my one-time favorite show Even Stevens, the end of liking bubblegum flavored ice cream. Life is a constant stream of endings—and so often we don’t realize their significance until it’s too late. Perhaps that’s why fiction so often looks backward, why characters lose themselves to memory, why a novel might end not with a vision of sailing into the future but rather in a floundering boat “borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Staying in the present
So there you have it: my theory on endings. I’m not the first person to have one (According to Jeanette Winterson: “There are only three possible endings…revenge, tragedy or forgiveness. That’s it.”) and I likely won’t be the last. But I hope that you’ve found something useful in this essay. And if not, well, now we’re done (mic drop).

Flashforward
What will happen now, with this essay on endings finally finished? Well, the writer may stand up and stretch. She might pet her cat, then walk outside into a bright spring afternoon. Maybe she’ll see a patch of purple crocuses, a little stand of yellow daffodils newly blooming after a long damp winter under a gray midwestern sky. Maybe she’ll remember that nothing really ends, it just goes back to the beginning.

________________________

Allegra Hyde’s The Last Catastrophe is available now from Vintage.

The following keynote address was given by Ayad Akhtar at last night’s Whiting Awards Ceremony. See the 2023 Whiting Awards recipients here.

*

I had two very powerful mentors in the theater in my early twenties—Andre Gregory, who you may not know as one of America’s great avant-garde theater directors, but as the character of Andre in the movie My Dinner with Andre—a movie that is, in large part, about my other mentor, Jerzy Grotowski, the Polish theater director, widely acknowledged as one of the great artists of the twentieth century. Being around Grotowski was quite an experience.

To witness up close and personal his truly extraordinary combination of intellectual rigor, historic talent, and absolute commitment—well, it set a bar for what was humanly possible for the dreaming, aspiring 23-year-old that I was then. In reflecting on his influence, his example, it was Andre Gregory, my other mentor, who would articulate what he thought was Grotowski’s most exceptional and unusual creative quality. His ability to clear the slate, to go tabula rasa, to forget what he’d done before, to ignore what others had come to admire, and in some cases worship, and to begin again, to step out into the unknown guided only by a sense of his own urgent curiosity.

In short, Andre believed that Grotowski had accomplished what he had by shedding any lingering attachment to those accomplishments, and this, Andre believed, allowed Grotowski to remain connected to the sources of his own creativity in the face of ever-mounting expectation. Even to the point of walking away from the theater all together. He would open a center in the middle of Tuscany and work for years, devoted to research into ancient performing techniques, research he felt was the deepest expression of the interests he’d evinced and pursued his entire career.

For his part, Andre admired this quality he said he’d never fully been able to emulate. “It’s hard,” Andre said, “when you realize that they like you. It’s hard because you don’t want to lose that.”

*

To be here tonight, to have arrived where you have, means that you have some idea of what you’re up to. You already have a developed sense of your own connection to the sources of your creativity. You may have already had the tensile strength of those bonds tested by expectation, success and failure, but it’s safe to say, even if you have, there will be more challenges, hopefully bigger challenges, ahead. And yes, Andre was right.

Approbation, acceptance, being understood—It’s wonderful to experience that, and terrifying potentially to lose it. Fear of losing access to the atmosphere, to the environment of success, once you’ve been there—that’s a real fear, and it can be damagingly motivating. Damaging, that is, to the joy or pain, to the vulnerability, that feeds the need, that feeds the messy, often unreasonable love at the heart of the creative spark.

*

In Personism: A Manifesto, the inimitable New York poet Frank O’Hara writes:

“I don’t even like rhythm, assonance, all that stuff. If someone’s chasing you down the street with a knife, you run… If you’re going to buy a pair of jeans you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you. Measure and other technical apparatus. There’s nothing metaphysical about it. You just go on your nerve.”

Nerve on the one hand, metaphysics on the other. But in writing about Boris Pasternak that same year, O’Hara would connect the two. Sensitivity to life, to the artist’s sense of life, to her desires for it, from it, her nerve through it, her affinities with it, he would call conscience. Not conscience as we generally think of it—a moral conscience say, but conscience as “individual perception of life.” An individuality that stands in opposition to the demands of society. He writes:

“Poetry does not collaborate with society but with life.”

Individual perception, the nerve to write poems tight enough to get the blood moving, a high-mindedness in service of fleeing the knife fight. Conscience does not collaborate with society, but expresses the individuality that defines an artist’s nerve. We may use different words—but know what O’Hara’s talking about, that thing that can’t be quantified, the sense of uniqueness and presence we feel when confronted with a voice, a way of seeing, an individuality, yes, that always feels new when we encounter it, an originality, and which is what all ten of you here tonight possess in abundance.

Preserving the conditions of that individuality, of your artistic conscience, as O’Hara puts it—and I love that way of thinking about it, for it implies something almost autonomous, like the Greek notion of a daimon, or personal genius—; preserving and maintaining your connection to this whatever-we-want-to-call-it, that’s what’s paramount. Allowing it to continue to lead you where it will, often in opposition to the agreed-upon, ever-changing, furies and celebrations you find on your iPhones; in opposition to the expectations of your agent or editor—or of the reading public that has finally welcomed you.

In some cases you will not intend to be in opposition; you will have simply followed your own sense of things, more or less blindly, hoping that, by doing what you want to do, need to do, it will result in something they will want and need, too. Sometimes you’ll be right. Sometimes you won’t.

And while I would be loathe to suggest, in most cases, that there is ever a truly bright line between polarities as interconnected as self and world, or the individual and society, in the case of your own rich, roiling, elusive, dare I say, sacred connection to what feeds you artistically—in this case, I want to say, if there isn’t a line there yet, draw one.

Protect the indefensible interests, the prurient preoccupations, the misapprehensions, your refusals of reality; know that in the matter of making art it is often right to get it wrong, and on careful reconsideration, to get it wrong again; that doubt, not certainty, is a surer route to the kind of knowledge most useful to you as an artist; that it’s often contradiction—and the more irreconcilable the better—that signals proximity to the bedrock of your peculiar magic.

Your contradictions. Innate and acquired. These are the central conundrums, not to be solved, but to be used, mined, rough bounty to be guarded, even when, or especially when, those contradictions perplex others, and make no sense to you. Above all, trust your affinities; guard them even as they are subject to the pitiless interrogation of the times in which you live and write. For the insistent inclination of your affinity is a lamp sometimes too easily dimmed.

My breath still catches when I think about the first time I received comments back from my editor on an initial draft of the first chapters of my book, Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom.

Ellen and William Craft escaped slavery in audacious disguise: Ellen impersonated a wealthy white disabled man, or “master,” while her husband William acted the part of her “slave.” I had opened the book with I thought was the emotional epicenter of the story: the moment when William loses his younger sister, as she is sold away from him on an auction block. I had discovered more in the archives than I ever thought possible and this moment, years before William’s own journey of self-emancipation with Ellen, to me, seemed the best place to begin.

My editor sent me six pages of commentary. Clearly, she opened, in words that I have learned by heart, I had done a “staggering amount of research.” But I had buried the characters.  What I had created, as she vividly expressed, was a “scholarly tomb.”

Early in my journey with the Crafts, the historian Eric Foner had offered me this precious advice: “Don’t let the details overwhelm the story.” I had obviously failed to follow it. With all those staggering details getting in the way, Dawn concluded, quite simply, that I would have to start all over. And as I did, I revisited everything I thought I knew about writing, turning to other areas of experience, above all, music.

Once upon a time, before this book, I was an outliner, a faithful follower of recipes, to begin with another metaphor. My process was clear: bury myself in the archives. Fill pages, notecards, until I found the key moments upon which a story turned. Those would become the steps in my recipe, which I would then execute, line by line. With the recipe I had crafted in my book proposal now declared useless, I was left with a room full of ingredients, which I had no idea how to cook. And what Dawn was telling me was to cook as my family did—with feeling.

I should note that I come from a family of gifted, spirited cooks. My mother, my father, my brother, all have “the hand” as Koreans say—a hand that knows how to cook with feeling. Add a little here, taste, improvise. Let the ingredients tell you what they need. Not so me. I have learned to turn out serviceable meals, but not by any kind of magic. Give me a recipe, thank you, every time—the more precise the better. None of this “How to Cook Everything” stuff for me. In the end, though, it’s another activity beloved by my family—music—that helped me feel my way out.

When I was in middle school, about thirteen years old, there was a piece I desperately wanted to play: Frederic Chopin’s Fantasie Impromptu. It was wild and dizzyingly fast—a horse untamed, unbridled. I asked my teacher, Wha Kyung Byun,  if I could play it. Sure, she said, if you can learn the beat.

I soon found that what made for that rollicking, almost uncontrollable sound and feeling was that the left hand and right hand played beats against each other: three against four. Try tapping triplets with your left hand, three notes per beat, like: “strawberry strawberry strawberry.” Then, to the same beat, tap sixteenth notes with your right, four notes per beat, like “watermelon, watermelon, watermelon.” Now try tapping those strawberries and watermelons at the same time. For the middle school me, the task seemed impossible.

I was not above cheating. I asked my mother (a concert pianist) if she would tap out the beats so I could listen and learn—which is to say, copy. She refused. “You just have to feel it,” she said. I could not.

Finally, Ms. Byun said, I’ll give you one week, and if you can’t figure out, we’re going to have to move on. The solution, she told me, was not just to play one hand at a time and mash the parts together, but to listen for their moments of convergence.

I spent every spare moment tapping everything I could. My knees. Walls. Chairs, holding onto that shared moment, when 3 and 4 came together. And then, all of a sudden, it did. Reader, I felt it! I found my beat!

Decades later, as I faced my broken writing, my ripped apart recipe, my boring score, it’s the remembrance of this moment that became my deliverance. My editor told me that I could not start with all that back story, the past about the Crafts, as important as it was. Instead, I needed to move with the central action of the story as the present, then layer in the past. How to do this, when there was so much past to tell, and when so much of the past informed the present?

The past was in the left hand, the triplets, playing its own kind of tune. The present was in the right, the movement of the Crafts’ journey unfolding in time. What I realized as I remembered my piano lesson was that the stories of the past and present had to run not one before the other, but simultaneously—that it’s that simultaneity that would give the narrative vigor, speed. How to fold one into the other? Find those moments of convergence, the moments when past became present, when the present requires the past. And when I found those beats, the narrative began to move.

The music lessons, once I began to listen for them, unfolded one after another. A dear family friend, Ozzie Nagler, passed on this note from his flamenco guitar teacher: “You don’t have to fill in all the spaces.” Which is to say that the rests can be as important as the notes. I taped this note to my window.

There, too, taped below it, is Stephen Sondheim’s advice to Lin Manuel Miranda, recounted in a dazzling interview with Terry Gross: Rhythm demands variety. Change up the pace. I tested the rhythm of every line, every chapter of my book, by reading my words aloud.

In this way, I began to conceive of my book as an orchestral score, a double concerto, so to speak, in which the Crafts’ melody, provided so richly in their own 1860 narrative, sings over, with and against many other voices, both harmonious and dissonant—notes of both past and present, played to the same beat, converging and, at last, becoming far more than three against four: an open score that is ready to read.

I’ve always loved experimental writing—in fact, it’s my favorite type of work. From books like Multiple Choice by Alejandro Zambra, which is written in the form of a Chilean aptitude test, and Why Did I Ever by Mary Robison, a novel in over 500 fragments, to Carmen Maria Machado’s masterpiece novella, Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order SVU, experimental work never ceases to inspire and delight me.

When I read Jenny Boully’s The Body: An Essay, which is an entire book comprised of footnotes to an invisible text, I think my brain exploded. Of course, everyone who picks up a book interprets it differently, but Boully takes it to the extreme—every reader must imagine and interact with a text that isn’t there (but also is?). And one of my earliest inspirations, Elizabeth Crane, has a story in her collection, Turf, called “Justin Bieber’s Hair in a Box,” which is, well, what it sounds like. I first heard her read it at the LA Festival of Books years ago, and I thought, Wait, you can do that?

But what, exactly, are we referring to when we talk about experimental writing? Honestly, I find that it can be difficult, if not impossible, to define it, but like many things in life, we often know experimental work when we see it. In short, experimental writing breaks literary conventions. But before we can understand what breaks conventions, we have to first define conventional, which gets a little messy. It’s important to note that what I mean by “conventional” is based on a Western lens of narrative, which Matthew Salesses does a magnificent job of interrogating and upending in his book, Craft in the Real World.

Some literary conventions according to Western standards include:

Ensure that there’s tension
Action must move the story forward
Protagonists should be active in pursuit of their desires and goals
Write a beginning, middle, and end
Include rising action, climax, and falling action
Format the writing to look “normal” on the page, i.e. the piece is broken up into conventional sentences and paragraphs
Don’t insert yourself into the story
Don’t break the fourth wall

There are many, many more but this isn’t an essay on conventional Western writing, so let’s dive into it.

Experimental writing tends to use unusual forms to tell a story or communicate an emotion or metaphor. The best thing about experimental work is that there aren’t any hard and fast rules—it’s an expansive, freeing process. As much as I love work that falls within the typical boundaries of genre and expectations, it can sometimes make me feel suffocated or stifled. Sometimes knowing that I have room to play with structure and style can put me in a more relaxed mood, which often translates to more interesting and strangely delightful work. Sitting down to write an experimental piece is when I am most likely to surprise myself.

Using inventive forms and styles to tell stories isn’t about doing what’s never been done before—it’s about stretching the limits of storytelling. It’s about giving a big middle finger to the restrictions you put on yourself. But before you can do that, it’s wise to familiarize yourself with the experimental work that’s already out there, with the writers who innovate and inspire.

There are many “types” of experimental literature, a few of which I’ve outlined below:

Unconventional structure: Think maps, recipes, crossword puzzles, lists, etc. You notice that it’s going to be an unconventional piece before you even read the first word. (Vagabond Mannequin by K.B. Carle which K.B. uses a crossword puzzle)

Retellings: Think the retelling of a fairytale, the reimagining of a film, or alternate readings or viewings. (Alternate reading of Wuthering Heights by Tanis Franco, which was in Best American Experimental Writing 2018)

Pieces that revise a current text or medium: Think erasure poetry, transforming an original text into a word search, or creating a physical design, such as a window. (Hotel Almighty by Sarah J Sloat is a book of erasure poetry using Stephen King’s Misery as the source text)

Point of view: Think Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi, much of which is written in first-person plural.

Using various types of technology: Think Jock Party by Jennifer Wortman, which is a collaboration with Predictive Text.

Mixed media: Think literature that uses visual art, photographs, artifacts, documents, and advertisements. Guestbook by Leanne Shapton is an eerie, uncanny short story collection that integrates photography and watercolors into the narrative.

Voice as experimentation: This one may be more subjective than the others but I personally think that voice can be experimental, that you know it when you read it because something is unique or interesting about it. Star Babies by Elizabeth Crane uses repetition to create and propel the story in a hypnotizing way.

Having a structure in mind before you get started experimenting can be very helpful for providing you with a template or framework in which to tell your story. A template can be very freeing and offer space for free-associating because you already have a basic outline for the piece, which means you can go wild within those constraints.

But once you set out to write your experimental piece, there are some things you may want to keep in mind. And while I know that I said there are no rules when it comes to experimental writing, I do have some general guidelines I follow:

Don’t forget to play and delight in your work.

Write the piece with confidence and authority—authority can go a long way in building reader trust and investment.

Lean into the experiment or metaphor—if you’re going to do it, then really do it.

Be willing to fail. Then fail again and again.

Edit, edit, edit. Even messy, out-of-this-world pieces need to be tight and controlled, within their mess, if that makes sense. A good editor will know the difference when they see it.

The structure needs to enhance the content. Or, in other words, the form must follow the function.

This last guideline more or less means that the form of your piece should relate to the intended purpose or function. Put another way: the experimental form should relate to and enhance the themes and narrative—not distract from it. For example, if you wanted to write a piece in the form of map directions, you may want to consider the ways in which the protagonist is lost or attempting to find their way (however literal or abstract this may be).

Likewise, if you were considering writing a piece in the form of a receipt, you might want to consider what the protagonist has bought, felt like they had to buy (can’t buy me love?), or inherited.

When I began writing my debut novel, I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself, I didn’t set out to write an experimental novel, but I knew I was writing a story about grief and shame, two of the most traumatic and complicated experiences we can have in life. As I tried to write about my main character Kris’s grief after her wife, Beau, dies during childbirth, I found myself drawn first to fragments, which seemed like a more fitting way to capture her equally fragmented state of mind. Among these fragments, other elements started to appear—first, pop quizzes and lists, then on occasion, game instructions and word searches.

This was especially true when the grief and pain felt too overwhelming for me to continue writing about. I’ve found that using experimental forms can not only grant me access to complicated, difficult emotions but also provide some much-needed breathing room for the reader, even a playfulness. Experimenting can create some distance between the reader and the piece so they are able to continue engaging with the work, even during heavy, painful moments.

Form follows function in my novel for many reasons, one being that the pop quizzes link back to Beau, who was a teacher, and whose piles of graded tests and papers continue to occupy space in the home she and Kris shared. It’s this connection that makes these types of interjections less random and more deliberate. Beau occupies nearly all of Kris’ mental and emotional space, especially early on in the novel when her grief is still fresh, so it makes sense, on some level, for her thoughts to take this form.

Plus, I wanted to challenge Kris’ beliefs and assumptions about grief, shame, identity, parenthood, and love. And these quizzes allowed me to confront and question her throughout her journey, although unlike a typical pop quiz, which has correct answers, Kris’ quizzes often don’t, not only complicating her understanding of these themes, of how to move through the world as she knows it, but also forcing the readers to participate, to make their own choices. To even possibly reveal themselves to themselves.

__________________________________

I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself by Marisa Crane is available from Catapult Books.

You know that feeling when you’ve stacked a pyramid of chairs and made it up in sight of the pinnacle, and you feel that little wobble underfoot? Okay, maybe you’ve never done that; I haven’t. But in 1997, I had won two national awards and an NEA fellowship. I’d hung out with the more and less famous at places like Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. I had landed a tenured job at a prestigious college in upstate New York. My forthcoming novel, The Misconceiver, was the second in a two-book contract with Simon & Schuster. It boasted a gorgeous cover, solid blurbs, and a story no one had yet had the nerve to tell.

Then came the wobble.

Late one night, just as the book launched, I came home to a letter from Eric Raymond, Simon & Schuster’s lawyer. He wished to speak with me as soon as possible. I was being sued for libel. Could I explain my use of the last name “Gwilliam” for a pastor mentioned in Against Gravity? I sat in the dark living room and felt the chairs wobble. According to my contract, I was on the hook for half the settlement of any lawsuit against me and Simon & Schuster, and we were being sued for a million dollars.

During the 10 years of writing Against Gravity, I had married, moved four times, held five different jobs, birthed two children, earned a PhD., and turned a story collection into a novel. One of those stories had emerged from a tiny local article about a church whose pastor was an Australian former boxer and ex-convict named Gwilliam. Had anyone asked me where I’d gotten the name, I would have said, “Oh, I have to change it!” But no one had asked, and by now I’d forgotten that I had not completely invented the hapless pastor. Who would have thought that he’d read my novel?

He hadn’t, as I learned when I called Eric Raymond. Rather, Rev. Gwilliam and his wife had divorced; Rev. Gwilliam, diagnosed with terminal cancer, had moved to Florida; Mrs. G had moved to within ten miles of the college. At the computer repair shop where she worked, a customer had spotted her nametag and said, “That’s an unusual name. I just read it in a novel!”

The suit was specious, Mr. Raymond told me. The fictional Pastor Gwilliam had no fictional wife. You cannot sue on behalf of someone else. Nothing in the novel defamed the character, and in any case it was fiction. Plus, he said cheerily, the pastor would die soon, and you cannot defame the dead. There was only one problem. It was the publisher’s policy not to distribute books by any author currently being sued.

“But I have a book just coming out.”

“It’ll take six months or so,” he said. “Tops.”

*

The idea for The Misconceiver had come to me in the shower, after reading the proofs for Against Gravity. At the center of that book had been a teenager so obese that no one could tell she was pregnant. It occurred to me that I wasn’t done with this subject; that, as a woman who had terminated two pregnancies and given birth twice, I had another story to tell. We had begun Bill Clinton’s second term, with a Republican-led Congress and postcards warning that Roe v. Wade, shored up four years earlier by Casey, was in peril. I was a judge’s daughter. I knew that rulings made their way slowly through the courts, with effects that rippled gradually across years. What would it mean, really, to lose the federally guaranteed right to abortion?

I got out of the shower with a voice in my head and began to write. The voice belonged to a young woman, Phoebe, who would be born at the millennium, whose mother would be killed by a bomb at her abortion clinic just before the 2006 Roe overturn. Five years later, with the right wing ascendant, Congress would pass the Human Life Amendment to the Constitution.

I dug into legal opinions in the library archives. Privacy, the lawyers wrote, was the weak point in Roe. Argue successfully that no such right exists in the Constitution, and not only abortion rights fall; so do rights to birth control, to sexual preference, to in vitro fertilization. Phoebe had grown up in this world, I realized as I wrote. Her older sister, arrested and imprisoned for performing abortions, would have died in custody. Her loyalty to family would come into direct conflict with the ethos of her world, where common wisdom held abortion to be murder, same-sex relations abhorrent, and Christianity the founding principle of her nation.

Then, as now, no one would want to say abortion. What would they say in the year 2026? At Yaddo, I looked up the word in the huge 1959 Webster’s and found four synonyms: mistake, misconception, monstrosity, and failure. By process of elimination, I had my title. What I didn’t have was the actual future. I predicted that technology would grow more invasive, with computers shrinking to pocket size; I called this device a minilap. I assumed electric vehicles would be common, phone calls face-to-face. I did not foresee Wi-Fi, same-sex marriage, the fall of the twin towers.

When The Misconceiver launched, it received glowing reviews—but bookstores had no books for six months, by which time readers had moved on. Within two years, the title was out of print. I bought 50 copies with my author discount; the rest were remaindered or pulped. Over the years, whenever the fragile status of Roe v. Wade came up, calls came to republish the book. I didn’t know how to move forward—revise the book to include the internet? Set it farther into the future?

Then came the June 2022 Dobbs decision.

I put my few books up on Amazon and started sending the proceeds to reproductive rights organizations; my local bookstore took some copies on consignment. Finally Ron Charles, book critic at the Washington Post, found the book after he had reviewed a raft of abortion-centered novels. In his newsletter, he wrote: “The Misconceiver is a startling novel in ways that highlight how unsurprising most pro-choice novels are. Ferriss isn’t interested in merely confirming our liberal ideals; she makes us work for them.”

My bookstore called; all the copies had sold within two hours—did I have more? Rare books dealers started buying up the remaindered British paperbacks for more than $200. In my house I found six copies, but Amazon had two dozen orders. I shut the account, apologized to everyone, and emailed the smartest, nimblest publishing house I knew of—Wandering Aengus, which would be bringing out my book of essays next year. “YES!” the publisher wrote back. “Let’s do this!”

Various hurdles remained. For starters, no manuscript existed. I had saved the novel to floppy disks, all of which were corrupted. I scanned my one remaining book and spent days correcting conversion errors. I was no longer tempted to revise; the original novel had its own integrity, and bloopers about technology paled in comparison to the depiction of a state of affairs whose future is nearer than what I forecast 25 years ago. Next, we needed a cover.

Fortunately, the original artist, Honi Werner, though she no longer designed book covers, was reachable and generously granted us the rights to her design, which I captured by way of an archival library’s high-res scanner. To signal the book’s attention to the Dobbsdecision’s effect on women of color, we complemented the design with a back cover featuring an image that eerily echoed the look of the front. It took endless calls to Amazon for their computer to retire the out-of-print editions in favor of the new publication, but now e-book and paperback have both appeared. And singer-songwriter Kat Eggleston, whose song “The Stranger” walks the same emotional tightrope as the book, agreed to let us use it for a book trailer.

For me, this journey has been a strange miracle—a professional tragedy, followed 25 years later by a political tragedy that has brought The Misconceiver back into print. All my author proceeds continue to go to the fight for reproductive rights. If the book lives on, my hope is that it will one day read like a dystopia that we managed, through grit and struggle, to avoid.

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The Misconceiver by Lucy Ferriss is available via Wandering Aengus Press.

When I was fourteen I started taking electric guitar lessons at a music shop in a strip mall in suburban Baltimore. The shop was called The Guitar Shop. Lessons took place in the back, in a small room that smelled of mildew and Parliament Lights. The guitar teacher appeared to be both young and old, with hair both long and short depending on which part of his head you were looking at.

His name was Joe, and he started me and each of my friends off by teaching us the main lick to Jimi Hendrix’s “Hey Joe,” though he clearly had never made the connection. He wore exclusively Pink Floyd and Dire Straits concert t-shirts, and at that time that meant he wore the same “Division Bell” and “Sultans of Swing” Ts to every lesson. The shirts also smelled of mildew and Parliament Lights.

Joe’s lessons consisted of an amalgam of far too loose and far too rigid advice in a combination that spun me around in circles, and set me back between three and eternity years from ever becoming a passable electric guitar player. I’d played violin and viola since I was four, and I could read music. Joe wanted me to unlearn everything I’d ever learned.

“Man, you gotta unlearn everything you’ve ever learned if you wanna ride with me,” he said, which is how I knew that was his philosophy. Mainly he wanted me to learn chords and licks through tablature—a series of dots on diagrams that would show you exactly where to put your fingers on the guitar’s frets—but he also wanted to talk in a very advanced way about scales.

“Man, I can teach you to do Dorian or Mixolydian scales and sound like Jimmy Page,” he said. For whatever reason all the guitar heroes of the moment were either named Joe or Jimmy. I told him I didn’t know what that meant, and he tried to show me by playing them very fast and in what seemed to me a different order each time, so that I understood what it meant even less.

“Man, we need to take a big step back,” he said. “Here’s all you really need to know about playing guitar, man,” he said. I waited while he played the moment for ultimate drama, swinging the section of his hair that was long back over his shoulder, and then he said something that would fuck me up for years:

“The truth is,” Joe said, pausing for effect, “all you gotta do it start on a note from the key you’re in, and land on a note from the key you’re in, and in between you can play fucking anything you want.”

While Joe stepped out back for a smoke, I pondered and then tried to employ his advice. I played a G chord, which took my fingers three to five seconds to grab. Then I… just kind of mashed the guitar, wailing like a dying cat, then slowly placed my fingers back into a G chord again.

It did not sound good.

But here’s the thing: it’s not that he was wrong. The trouble was that I knew what the key was, and I could start there and end there.

But what to do in between?

That was the question at the very heart of making art. And man I was not making art. Luckily years later I became a proficient bluegrass mandolin player—it’s basically a combination of the skill sets from guitar and violin—and then came back to acoustic guitar, where I learned that if I actually played the notes I wanted throughout, I could play passably.

Which, I’d guess I’d have to say, is how to write a novel as well. But writing a novel is a little like inventing a guitar, inventing some scales, and then both sticking to them and straying from them. The thing I tend to find myself saying most in the workshop classroom to aspiring writers is: art is variation with repetition. Which in a way is a version of what Joe was trying to teach me.

What’s available to you as a novelist early on, then, is really just what you’ve read in novels before. It’s the guitar players named Jimmy or Joe you’ve known long enough to play their licks, to know what they sound like and then stray from them.

*

Which is a little simplistic. The truth is that by that time, by the time I was fourteen, I’d already read a good deal of Shakespeare, where the iambic pentameter that was being drilled into my young brain was something like the four-on-the-floor that I was trying to play over in those guitar lessons.

And if I’m being honest now, the lesson of messing around between landing on the root note of the scale that Joe taught me back then might have set me back a ways on guitar—but I carried it with me into the stories and novels that got me rolling. When I finally did learn to play those more straightforward scales of bluegrass guitar, I realized a lot of new things about what Joe was saying: you can’t play anything anything. Sometimes a good melodic line means stepping out with the notes—but sticking to a rhythm while playing the melody that the reader finds familiar.

I suspect that’s what one of my favorite writers, George Saunders, is doing most of the time. Take his short story “Spiderhead”: in the beginning of the story, our narrator, Jeff, is with another character called Abnesti. From the first moment in the story, we hear dialogue between them that we can’t quite parse. Here’s how the story starts:

“Drip on?” Abnesti said over the P.A.
“What’s in it?” I said.
“Hilarious,” he said.
“Acknowledge,” I said.
Abnesti used his remote. My MobiPak whirred.

It displaces us for a second. We know how to read dialogue. So even if we don’t yet know what “drip on” means to Jeff and Abnesti, we know how to, you know, read the scenes. It’s the key of G, the way the dialogue is set up—we just don’t yet know what the notes are. By the time we get three or four pages in we glean that Jeff is a prisoner in a futuristic, Clockwork Orange-esque situation where the “drip” that goes “on” is a psychotropic drug he’s forced to take, while giving overt approval by saying “acknowledge.”

In fact, that last short paragraph in the opening does kind of return to the key of G: Abnesti has a “remote,” and Jeff has a thing called a “MobiPak.” We’ll have to move up to the C in the chord progression to get all the way there, but we at least know what key we’re in.

The same thing feels true when playing those guitar licks. Even if it feels like you’re inventing something wholly new, like you just wrote the bass line to “Immigrant Song,” all of art is repetition with variation, I repeat. Once you’ve got that first bar or two of the bass line down—dun-duh-nah-nah-nah, dun-duh-nah-nah-nah—your audience already knows what to expect. They know when you’ve strayed from it.

This is exactly what Joan Didion means when she famously says that after a sentence or two you’re locked into a style for your whole book. You’ve already laid down that bass line. Your reader already knows what to expect. And after that breath it’s up to you to decide when to confirm those expectations, and when to vary them to keep the work alive.

*

I remember reading years ago about some neurological researchers who had used F-MRI technology to study how the brain works when we’re listening to music. They wanted to discover something seemingly small and idiosyncratic: what’s happening in our brains when that thing happens where you’re listening to a record you know well—say, Let It Be—and you begin to hear the next song after the one before it ends? That experience where you can hear that opening G lick John and Paul play together on “I Dig A Pony” right when “Two of Us” ends, but before “Pony” has started yet.

What they found was kind of mind-blowing—and says a lot about what makes writing a novel so hard. Rather than lighting up the part of the brain they would use to listen to music, it was actually the part of the brain that would be signaled to begin playing the next song, that lit up. And this was just as true with non-musicians as it was with musicians.

When we start to hear “I Dig a Pony” in the gap after “Two of Us” it’s not because we remember it like we’d remember a summer day—it’s because we’re getting ready to pick up a Hofner and play the bassline. As Saul Bellow says: a writer is a reader moved to emulation, but it would seem she might be moved to emulation just by reading. We’re all writers waiting to write.

*

There’s some similar research into how we listen to music that I find even more useful for us as we’re editing drafts of a story or a novel, though exactly how to employ it is a bit more complicated. Early on in the proliferation of moving from cassette tapes and vinyl to listening to music on CD’s and then compressed music via streaming services, researchers wanted to understand why we find the sound of those LPs so much more appealing than the compressed music we hear so frequently now. Part of it may be the pure nostalgia of that crackle of the needle hitting the record.

As Jaron Lanier details very thoroughly in You Are Not a Gadget, some of it is likely that MIDI technology, the technology that allows the ringtones on our phones to almost sound like real instruments but not quite, was “locked in” from an early period of the internet, though it is clearly inferior to other similar types of synthesized sound. We use it in our phones and computers not because it’s the best technology, but because it’s the technology we’ve always been using, and at some point it would simply be too hard to implement a better technology we’re not already using.

But neither of those things fully account for the fact that Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” simply sounds better on the original LP than it does on Spotify (I mean it sounds earth-shatteringly good anywhere). What they found was, to me, everything. Turns out that when a needle passes over the grooves of a record, even when the record is pristine, there are tiny, imperceptible gaps in the music we then hear. Moments when our ear isn’t fully hearing each thumping of the bass. Instead, our brains as listeners receiving that music are filling in the gaps from the patterns we know are being put down by the musicians. Our ears and eyes want to be more active participants in the art we hear or view or see.

So one question I like to ask writers in my classes is: how might we achieve that effect in our writing? What kinds of gaps need to be in a piece of writing to allow the reader not to feel they’re being fed synthetic prose music?

Mainly this is a rhetorical question, but I have come to believe that some of our work in editing on the line level can help achieve this effect. Going back into a draft and just cutting and cutting and cutting—sometimes not just to trim it back, but actually to cut past the quick. To make it bleed. To make a sentence reach a point where to be fully parse-able, it requires the participation of the reader in her mind. “The apparition of these faces: petals on wet, black bough”—the colon in that famous one-line Pound poem doesn’t really work just as a simile, just as a “like” or “as” that’s missing or has been elided. Our job as a reader is not just to let that colon be a fulcrum on which the two sides of the image balance, but to push a little on what words aren’t there.

I once heard Lydia Davis give a long talk about what might be her shortest short story. It’s called “PhD” and here’s the entirety of the story:

I thought I had a PhD.
But I do not have a PhD.

In her lecture, Davis talks about how she had pages of this story at one point. She’d heard about an ongoing controversy in South Korea, where PhDs were so important and academic jobs so desired that a number of prominent faculty members in Korean universities had been found to have falsified their CVs to appear as if they had more degrees than they actually had. But she found herself cutting and cutting and cutting prose until this was left.

This is an extreme version of such an edit, but I think it demonstrates well the vinyl-to-Spotify dilemma. It starts in G, and ends in G, and we walk away from reading those two lines with our heads brimming with all the notes Lydia Davis chose not to let us hear her play.

Image courtesy of the Harrison family.

To answer this question has put me into a sump, a well-pit, a quandary I haven’t visited in years. Here are a number of answers. My love of life is tentative so I write to ensure my survival. I try to write well so I won’t be caught shitting out of my mouth like a politician. To the old banality “Eat or die,” I add “Eat and write or die.” After writing I often read Brillat-Savarin, also cookbooks, on the toilet. Then I try to cook as well as I hope I write. After a nap, I write again, in the manner of an earthdiver swimming in the soil to understand the roots and tendrils of trees. I anchor myself to these circular life processes so as not to piss away my life on nonsense. I hunt and fish because it helps my writing. Novels and poems are the creeks and rivers coming out of my brain. I continue writing in bleak times to support my wife and daughters, my dogs and cats, to buy wine, whiskey, food. I write as an act of worship to creatures, landscapes, ideas that I admire, to commemorate the dead, to create new women to love. Just now while listening to the blizzard outside I poured a huge glass of Bordeaux. This is what I call fun! Rimbaud said, “Everything we are taught is false.” I believed him when I was eighteen and still do. Writers are mere goats who must see the world we live in but have never discovered. I write to continue becoming an unmapped river. It suits me like my skin.

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“Why I Write” is excerpted from The Search for the Genuine: Nonfiction 1970 – 2015 © 2022 by Jim Harrison. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved.