I return from a trip to Florida over the long weekend with my high school friends to my writers' workshop. We were in Miami to celebrate our collective 30th birthdays, and hit all my favorite things to do in that town -- South Beach, rooftop pool, green juice at SunLife, Joe's Stone Crab, Mac's Club Deuce. We laughed a lot, which is exactly what I needed. Coming back to a subzero Chicago, I braced myself for post-party depression. The reality that the relationship that spanned my 20s was over, along with the decade itself, finally sinking in. Needless to say, it was not the most productive writing week of my life, but that didn't matter.
I was grateful to have my writers' workshop to look forward to. It finally felt like I was getting some momentum in my novel writing process again, and I loved setting aside a couple hours on my Wednesday night to talk about my work and the work of my classmates. To take this thing seriously, in the way my teacher's references are serious. Academic, even. Highly literary. He starts the class as he always does by asking us what our reading and writing lives were like this past week. I say that I read and reviewed David Ryan's new short story collection, Alligator (
For class this week, I turn in ten more pages of my own novel, which also takes place in that town. This week's excerpt picks up where last week's left off. My protagonist, Mila, just finished meeting with her thesis advisor, Rachel, at their favorite diner, Holiday's. Mila is dealing with serious writers' block, and Rachel's advice to her is to forget working on her novel, and instead just journal to get thoughts on the page. She goes to a coffee shop to get work done, and while there, contemplates her lifelong impulse to deprive herself of life's little pleasures as a result of her own self-loathing. As Mila looks around the coffee shop, it dawns on her how very alone she feels in the universe, as compared to all the people with families of their own around her. She decides to heed Rachel's advice and starts journaling her stream of consciousness, which focuses mainly on the fact that she really wants to have a child. We read her journal entry, which explains all the ways in which having a child would imbue her life with meaning.
I worry that I'm too verbose in this passage, and that, put simply, I have too much to say about each little passing moment in my piece. My teacher reassures me though. He tells me that this section I've turned in is more phenomenologically true than what I submitted the week before. Last time, he explained that my first person narrator knew too much. My challenge this week was to take knowledge away from Mila. This time, he says, the narrative voice is confident about the things that Mila directly experiences, but makes fewer commitments to the outside world. He describes my genre as 21st century female phenomenology. Again, it feels good to be described. To have my work carefully perceived and categorized, like so. "Have you been referencing Rachel Cusk?" My teacher asks. I hadn't. Had started Outline years ago, but never finished. "Oh, you know who else?" Says the sweet nerdy man from Toronto, in typical Toronto fashion. "Sheila Heti." I blush at the comparison, flattered to be sorted into the same subgenre as her. Yes, Sheila Heti. Love her, I tell him.
"Here, the strength of your fiction," my teacher says, "is the intensity of your protagonist's relationship to sensation. It's a series of encounters with people, with medication, with sex, with her own writing, with herself." I contemplate whether or not that intensity was really intentional. Maybe, I consider, it's a direct result of my feeling things more intensely than other people. Just last week, after listening to a podcast episode with wellness influencers Melissa Wood and Elizabeth Endres, I took an online quiz to see whether or not I too am a highly sensitive person. It turned up mostly positive, with a high likelihood that I was what they refer to as an HSP. How different could that really be from anyone else's experience of the world though? Who am I to say not everyone interfaces with the stimulae of everyday life with such intensity? Maybe it's a female thing. But no, the distractingly beautiful former beauty editor agrees. "I don't think I'd want to think so much about every single passing moment."
Embarrassingly enough, I have to google phenomenology. The internet tells me that it's a philosophical approach focused on subjective lived experience from the first-person perspective. It concerns itself with how experiences, emotions, ideas, and objects appear to consciousness versus objective reality. "What is the goal of your book?" My teacher asks. "Is it to understand the contours of Mila's consciousness, or is it to examine the gap between those contours and objective reality?" Without hesitation, I say that it's the former. I'm interested in Mila's subjective experience of the world. I'm affirmed that I'm on the right track, in that case. Happy that I have a clear answer ready to go, for that question. There's so much I still don't know, but at least I have clarity on my philosophical aim.
My teacher hones in on the crux of this philosophical question with which my protagonist must wrestle: Mila is trying to do two things. She's trying to give birth, and she's trying to write. Is her hypervigilance creative and procreative for these processes, or is it smuggling? Truthfully, I could ask myself the same thing. Many of Mila's neuroticisms are a direct reflection of my own, just as I'm sure Cusk and Heti would say the same for their characters. As I move through the world, I aim to be a productive, generative, prosocial member of society. Do my hang-ups and anxieties hinder me from participating fully in the world around me? Maybe. But beyond that of the average person? That, I'm not totally sure. I've only ever been me. It's like the question Heti so straightforwardly asks: how should a person be? Mila's aside in the coffee shop, for example, about self-deprivation, comes directly from the pages of my life. That's something I do, constantly. Deprive myself. A behavior derived from a certain self-loathing quality. An undeservingness that I'm trying to shake, particularly as I try to manifest big things in my life, like Mila. Also, a novel. Also, a family, one day. Manifestation requires a deep subconscious deservingness. One that I'm trying to cultivate, in both of us. I'm adamant that Mila is not me; this is not autofiction. I've never done the things she does in this book -- but she is certainly my stand-in, since I already know the reader will make that basic assumption.
In his critique of all three of our submissions this week, my teacher seems to hone in on a single question: why write a novel? It begs another question, what exactly is a novel? "When fictionalizing, as an act, starts to congeal and get a sense of ending," my teacher explains, "that's when it becomes a novel." He recommends we all read The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, by Frank Kermode. The book centers on how writers create structure and meaning in order to impose order in an otherwise chaotic world. "A lot of what we're doing when we write initial drafts is creating the data for our worlds," my teacher explains. I imagine a big, wobbly mass of fiction, uncontained and overflowing. The challenge then, is to wrangle this world, and impose a narrative arc on our characters and their timeline in order to create meaning. A work that is incisive and specific, with something to say. For my work specifically, my teacher points out that "Mila can have infinite encounters with things. What should make it into the novel?" It's an excellent question. I could spend hundreds of pages just describing these encounters, just like my internal monologue does for mine as I move about the world.
What I need -- what all three of us need, apparently -- is rules. "The limits of your novel are the limits of your modality, or the limits of your ability to iterate within your own rules," my teacher says. "Bad novels don't have rules; they're boundaryless and random." I think back to Cat Person. To what makes that story work, which it does so well. It's tight, in its way. The narrator does not have omniscience, or godlike insight into the characters. They only know what the protagonist, Margot, knows or has insight into. Same with my narrator, I decide. Because my novel is written in first person, the narrator will be limited to Mila's own experience of the world around her. Here are my boundaries, within which I plan to play. I refuse to write a bad novel.
We critique the sweet nerdy man from Toronto's work last. For him, my teacher has the opposite criticism that he had for us girls -- me and the distractingly beautiful former beauty editor. The architecture of his novel feels quite sound, but the style feels laconic in a way that needs to go further. Either he must decide between clipped and minimal -- highly controlled -- or totally baroque, in order to build the world he so envisions. "Go for a walk and dictate this next chapter instead of writing," my teacher suggests to him. "Do you drink or do drugs?" My teacher asks. "Not anymore!" The sweet nerdy man from Toronto responds. I don't want to see him relapse for this class. Vaguely recall seeing something about sobriety on his Substack. So no getting high before dictation.
I think about the suggestion for myself though. Switching things up. Doing things differently. Maybe I should try that too -- dictating into a voice recorder rather than sitting down to write. Maybe that would shake some of Mila's verbosity -- some of her neuroticism -- and keep the plot moving forward. I wish, on some level, I could do that too for my own internal monologue. Shake my own personal narrator into a different dimension and free myself from some of the subconscious blocks standing between me and the things I most want out of life. When the narrator of your novel feels close to the narrator of your own consciousness, any critique of the writing is, on some level, a critique of your own thought processes. How am I holding myself back, right now? What is the point of writing all this? Of publishing some version of my inner dialogue on Substack, on Hobart, in novel form? Perhaps it is to impose some narrative structure, some order, on an otherwise chaotic and disorganized world. Perhaps this is my way of grappling with the anxiety. Of taking back some control, and making meaning -- a beginning, middle, and end -- of my experiences, which can feel so intense. Which are unending. Which can be infinite.
