Then I dropped the flashlight and went splashing down into the water.
It poured into my boots, stinky and freezing, seeping around my toes. My pajama bottoms were heavy, and the flannel stuck to my legs. I flailed across to him, kneeling in the ditch so it sloshed around us, washing over my thighs. Under me, the ground was muddy, soft with silt and rotten leaves.
His eyes were open, empty in the moonlight. It seemed impossible how even with my nose six inches from his, he couldn’t see me.
“He won’t come back to you,” the girl said behind me, and she sounded almost sorry. “It’s too late now.”
“I read it,” I said in a breathless rush. “I read the sad parts and the happy ones and the everyday things and the ugly stuff—all of it, it’s all your best parts. Please, you don’t have to do this.”
“He does,” the green-haired girl said, gentle—so gentle. “He’ll freeze to death in the creek and everyone will understand. He had to, because he lost his friend and his family ignores him and his teachers think he’s not worth their time. When they find his body in the morning, no one will wonder. After all, he left his confession with the girl who was never going to love him back.”
Evan lay in the water, blue-lipped and still. I could smell the alcohol on his breath. His eyes were wide, staring past me.
Above me, the green-haired girl was laughing, a damp, desolate sound. “Don’t you see? This is my place, and once a person gets here, you’re not saving them from anything. He chose this.”
I didn’t answer. She sounded so sure of it, so confident, and it seemed to me that she might be an expert on ugly things, on shame and grief and giving up. But she didn’t know me at all.
Maybe it was easy to drown if you were empty and alone, if no one was there to help you. The water would fill you up and then the other things, the bad things, would stop, no room for anything else. But for her to think I would just stand there and watch it was too stupid. With a deep, shuddering breath, like I was about to dive, I reached for Evan.
“Don’t,” the girl said, and for the first time, her voice was the voice of something awful, coming from everywhere, from the ditch and the leafless trees and the low, empty sky.
I grabbed hold of Evan’s jacket, fumbling in the water, feeling around for his hand.
“Don’t,” she shouted. “You had your chance, but this is my place, and now he’s mine too!”
The water was rising, pitching and heaving, splashing over Evan’s face. With my hands clenched tight on the collar of his jacket, I leaned back and pulled hard against his weight, dragging him toward me through the shallows, his body bumping over the rocks.
“He’s not yours anymore!” Now the girl’s voice was a broken fan belt, a whirling saw. She screamed it, the sound carving through the night.
Evan lay limp and heavy against my knees, blinking like he was trying to focus as the water roiled and foamed around us. People didn’t belong to other people, they just picked who they wanted to stand next to.
I kissed him, and his face between my palms was freezing, but his mouth was warm like his hands had been the day I chose him.
Behind me, the girl was wailing now, howling and shrieking, making a sound like wind around the corners of a house.
I kissed him hard, like I was breathing for him, not minding the sharp, boozy taste or the way our teeth knocked together, only caring that there in the dirty little stream, he was kissing me back, reaching for me with wet, trembling hands, pulling me against him.
Jane is so up-front about everything. She always does exactly what she wants.
He pressed his mouth against my ear, shivering in my arms. My name sounded fierce and choked when he said it, and I had finally stopped waiting for him.
VII. THE LIFEGUARD
Ideas are tricky. They change like a virus or a coastline. They can dominate your thoughts for years, then settle into a corner to gather dust, and when you finally come back to them, they don’t always look like themselves. The shape of them can drift away or fall apart, but that doesn’t mean they’re broken. Ideas don’t soften or decay with time, they just grow more complicated.
Even though the stories I’ve showed you don’t look much like each other, in the jumbled attic of my head they’re all still kind of the same thing. I know that realistically, that rationally, they share only a few common elements. Still, they are all stories about sadness and water.
It took so many versions to reach “The Drowning Place.” Some I wrote down, and some I only dreamed of. Some were just drifting thoughts that crossed my mind and disappeared again.
I’ve written a lot of stories, and people sometimes ask if they’re about me. They’re not.
The stories I write are essentially pretend—math problems, object lessons. They solve puzzles or attempt to answer questions, and while the questions are mine, the stories themselves are purely speculation, told through the lens of someone else.
For a long time I thought that it was somehow cheating for novelists to write about their own lives. I’m not sure why I was so convinced of this—just that it seemed egomaniacal or lazy, or at least responsible for a lot of interminable books we had to read in school, about English professors who fall in ugly suburban lust with their graduate TAs and have sexy middle-aged adventures of the existential kind and talk about how relentlessly banal everything is. (Okay, that part is probably totally true.)
You don’t need to know about the green-haired girl with graceful hands and a face like a mermaid. You only need to know that writing can be a messy, chaotic process. It steals things from real life and then changes them. You don’t need to know the truth behind the fiction, but I have this nagging little want to tell you anyway. Sometimes, telling a thing can be a way of proving it’s important.
When I was fifteen, I knew a girl with long green hair and a face like a mermaid. She was older than me, and taller, with oval fingernails, pink as seashells, and the clearest, most colorless skin. She had a vintage leather jacket and sang in a punk band, and she was nice.
Once, on a warm, cloudless night in June, I was sitting alone on a stone retaining wall, counting the tiles on a big ceramic planter. She came across the sidewalk to me and tucked a blue jay feather into my hair and said, “This feather is magic. You can use it to fly you away when you’re sad. You can use it to escape.”
She really did say this. Or at least something very close. I was still deep in my phase of documenting everything and this is the way I have it written down.
I don’t think she talked this way all the time, or at least I don’t remember it, but she had a strange, precise way of shaping her words, like everything had a tremendous weight, or else like she was from a different planet. The green-haired girl in the story shares this tendency— not out of awkwardness or pretention, but because she really is too far from human to talk any other way.
I was a little in awe of her before that, but more after. She was pretty and peculiar-looking, shy and ferocious—a mass of contradictions. She screamed along to the radio and smoked filterless cigarettes, but she had a beautiful singing voice.
When she offered me the feather, I was slightly bewildered. It surprised me to learn that I was someone who looked sad, or like I needed to escape. At fifteen I was strange, silent and socially disinclined, indifferent to boys or fashion or music that had come out within the last four years, but I read a lot. I knew enough about communication to understand that maybe she was telling me about things that she needed.
I’ve always been able to escape rather effortlessly by retreating straight into my head.
It was funny to me, a little, that people would think I was sad when I wasn’t, but the mistake seemed largely unimportant. It seemed far more important, suddenly, that the same people might think she wasn’t sad when she really was.
The feather was streaky blue, flecked with white and gray, and I took it home with me. I sat out on the deck for a long time, turning the feather over and over in my hands. I
understood that she had invited me somewhere with her, and also, it was a place I couldn’t get to.
It’s important to say that she is not the green-haired girl in my story. She was very much the opposite, always kind when she could help it, but she told me once that she wanted to be fierce. To be the kind of girl who thunders.
The first time I tried to type this, I typed water instead.
To me, this is the truest, realest magic of writing—that she could wind up in my story, not as herself, but as something fierce and wicked, at the ending I must have been headed to all along. It’s the place where all my earlier versions—the failed attempts, with their barely explored existential horrors—still show through.
In the most basic terms, the final scenes of “The Drowning Place” and “By Drowning” are about the same—a pair of mirror images, where one story is about alienation, the other about connection. Here, instead of bleak Cora, we have warm, heroic Jane, and instead of the ghost of the unfortunate Adam, we have real, breathing Evan. In the simplest sense, it was always going to come back to drowning.
Even now, there are certain things to remember. Sometimes a drowner doesn’t look like they are drowning. They don’t splash or struggle. Instead, their eyes slide out of focus. When you’re drowning, you go quiet. You sink. Air stops getting to your brain.
I spent so stupid-long trying to figure out this story, when all the time, the one that wanted to be told was simple. I thought I was writing about the boys at my aunt’s house, but that story isn’t mine. It happened near me, but no matter how I tried to tell it, the words were wrong (not what I meant at all). I had a whole prolific history of my own to draw on. I’d spent years recording, thinking, cataloging, but I was always missing the most crucial detail, which is the day at the pool. My story is the happy one. My story is the lifeguard.
Because water is insidious and sinking is effortless, but in the end, it all comes back to being saved.
If I had to make a list of things that stayed the same between the two stories you just saw, it would look like this:
1) A boy drowns in a creek
2) The narrator finds his body
3) There’s a kiss at the end that represents every thematic decision that the story has already been making.
VIII. THE ENDLESS OCEAN
There’s a story I’ve been telling my whole life. It changes in the telling and the retelling, but never actually resolves itself.
When I sit down to write, ideas roll in like a tide, washing over each other. Sometimes it takes a while for them to come into focus. The answers to all my questions and my existential dilemmas are there, but distant—always floating somewhere just beyond the breakers. I’ve learned to wait.
This is not the last story I’ll ever write about drowning.
Here is the thing about ideas: they grow and change. They go racing out into the deepest parts of your subconscious and circle back again. Memory is fluid, and time is a vast, looping thing I still don’t really understand. I’m always squinting, trying to see farther. Always trying to wipe a thin film of fog off the mirror.
There are moments in the sea-chamber of my brain that never seem to end, and I know that’s not the truth. Time isn’t static; it’s quantifiable. It moves from minute to minute, but even now, I can’t shake the feeling that some part of me is still back where it started, drifting at the bottom of that far-off pool, waiting to surface.
I close my eyes and hold my breath. I fold my hands and sink. And in the long, airless moment before the interruption—before the lifeguard reaches down—time stops. Ideas come in swirling eddies, radiating, making endless rings of possibility. In a moment, the real world will intrude again and I’ll rise from the cement depths, blinking in the sunlight.
Until then, I float. I wait. It reminds me of a dream I have sometimes, blue and shadow below, blue and light above.
I’m never scared until I wake up.
DOUBT
Brenna
Sometimes I think I’ve forgotten how to write. This used to scare me. The thing is, after a while, after I’d written enough stories, forgotten my skill set enough times, I noticed that it always seemed to hit at the exact same point—somewhere in the neighborhood of the second or third draft. Which, when you think about it, makes total sense, because it’s exactly the same principle as when you go to organize a closet. First you have to pull everything out and throw it on the floor, and for a while it looks way, way worse than before, and you think you’ve made a terrible mistake. But actually, you are making progress, and that’s why it’s important to remember this analogy. It reminds me that the mess is just my process, and once I put away the bolt of upholstery silk and the coyote bones and the weird old medical diagrams, everything will be fine again.
Maggie
I knew ever since I was a tiny, evil child that I wanted to be a professional author, and I knew that learning to write couldn’t be much different than learning to play a musical instrument: with enough practice anyone can pull it off eventually.
So I never doubted that I would be an author, even as rejection letters from publishers piled up around me. I was prepared to work for it. That was not where doubt creeps in.
No, doubt creeps in as I write a difficult rough draft, or as I plow through a seemingly endless revision. It’s not doubt that I won’t be a writer at the end of it all. It’s doubt that I can make this particular project look the way I want it to. It’s doubt that I can pull it off by my deadline. It’s doubt that I can ever write something as good as my last one. It’s doubt that it might turn out to be as hard to write as the one before that.
So what helps me through that? Writing more books. As I battle doubt in the first stages of a manuscript, there’s nothing like the knowledge that I had a hard time in the exact same place last time I wrote a novel. Experience tells me that even though I feel like it will never come together, it did last time, and the time before that. And when I can’t remember when I struggled before, my critique partners are quite able to jog my memory. Really, all kinds of writing problems are solved by this advice: “Great, now do it again.”
Tessa
Doubt seems like such a casual word for the crippling melting sensation that occasionally drops me out of my chair and onto the floor. My ego armor is solid enough that little dings and gentle attacks hardly register—I’m doing what I love, and I work hard at it, and I always keep in mind the long game and making sure I write with no regrets.
So the hits that do penetrate are the potentially mortal ones.
Those hits are usually about my ability to communicate this ineffable, swelling story in a way that anybody will not only understand, but connect with emotionally or spiritually or, better yet, both. I write because I want to change the world—affect how people view other people, how they understand themselves and the world. The weight of it crashes onto my shoulders when I’m struggling with a small diction problem or unsure whether to use this or that detail to describe the gender dynamics or if it will be more powerful if they kiss now or if maybe—maybe—I should burn fifty thousand words to the ground and start over with the roughened, ashy pieces. It’s a hard, heavy thing, changing the world; even though I chose it, sometimes the responsibility flattens me. All I can do is breathe on the floor, keep my bones intact, and eventually get back up and try again.
WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW
Tessa
I rejected this advice completely when I was a young writer, partly because it was everywhere and I am a contrary being, but mostly because it made no sense. My favorite books were all about dragons and fairies and witches, so unless the authors lived in way cooler places than me, they were not writing what they knew, either. But as I grew and practiced and learned better how to write stories readers connected with, I came back around to “write what you know” from a less rigid, youthful, literal perspective. Now, I think that despite it maybe being the most misunderstood piece of writing advice, it might also be the truest.
I don’t think it’s about what your brain knows, it’s about what your heart knows.
Write the story only you can tell because of your unique experiences and your unique dreams and your unique perspective regarding the human condition. Isn’t that what all stories are about in the end: us, our world, our dreams? What do you bring to this story? Write that. What does your understanding of how people interact and what people need and how people are good or terrible or impossible bring? That is what you know. Write that. Write it with true stories or war stories or stories that are entirely lies or stories about dragons. Go out and have adventures, meet people, learn new skills and new stories, then bring them home and reinvent them in your dreams and write that.
Brenna
I do not actually remember the first time I heard this—write what you know. I heard it a lot though, starting at about the same time I started actively searching for writing advice.
It can be a difficult rule to feel good about, especially when you’re still pretty new to writing. I alternated between being intimidated by it and annoyed by it, because for a long time, I thought I didn’t know anything. Instead, when I looked in all the various spaces of my brain where knowing goes, it seemed like I just had a lot of ideas about stuff. And if that was true—if I only had untested thoughts and if it was also true that I actually needed to know something first—how was I going to be able to write?
I decided, with possibly less trepidation than you’d think, that I would opt not to listen. In fact, I would only write about things I knew nothing about! Characters the exact opposite of me! Worlds that not only didn’t, but couldn’t exist!
Also, as it may have occurred to you by now, I was grossly misunderstanding the underlying purpose of the message. People who tell you to write what you know are not saying (at least, I don’t think they’re saying—individual results may vary) that you can only ever write about things that have personally happened to you. They’re really saying, hey, figure out your characters and your story-world, figure out the emotions that make someone act a certain way or choose a certain path. Understand. Don’t just throw something in there because it seems shallowly self-evident, or it makes the rest of the story easier to write. Empathize. Don’t just assume you know enough about something, go learn more. The thing is, sometimes we know things because they happened to us, but sometimes (more times, even?) we know things because we made an actual effort to understand them.
The Anatomy of Curiosity Page 22
