Hullo friends 🍵💘
A few weeks ago I was in conversation with my publishers about my collection’s table of contents. We had about 26 stories to choose from. In the original draft I sent them I included 12, all of them previously published or forthcoming, that I thought represented my strongest work, plus two that I’d put in for personal reasons. That was back in January 2019, and in the year following we had some back-and-forth about including original material. (I’m pleased to share that the final TOC has 13 stories, three of them previously unpublished!)
This isn’t the story about how we eventually landed on what we included (tradeoffs occurred!); this is about how reading through all of one’s stories makes you realize there are certain things you come back to, over and over.
When I first thought of pulling together a short story collection, I didn’t realize it would mean having to inspect my stories as a Body of Work. I started noticing some of my habits—imagine me curling my toes, going, oh my god, you did *that* again? Or seriously, why are all your protagonists like this? Or stop ending things like that!!
Something that I’ve often tried to push against as a creator is this idea of being one-note. I remember a Filipino poet once mentioning the same old figurative, how it’s important to break out of it in one’s work, but how that’s so difficult. As an extremely multifandom fic author, I’ve always prided myself on being adaptable to different storytelling methods, settings, styles—but that’s when I’m playing with other people’s canon. When it comes to inventing things wholesale from my brain, there are certain elements that come much more naturally to me. And nowhere was that more obvious than when I was trying to figure out what my TOC should look like.
Despite my initial cringing, though, in the last two or so years, I’ve come to appreciate an idea that’s given me a great deal of comfort: we can’t really choose what we write about.
Of course, on a mechanical level, we have agency over which projects we prioritize. We get to say whether we will write that slashfic novella instead of moving any book projects forward (cough). We can even to an extent control specific craft elements, like the plot or characters or the broader story we choose to pursue.
However, I do increasingly believe in this idea that we can’t choose what we genuinely love, or are deeply interested in. Those things belong mostly to the parts of our writer-self we can’t control. What makes your heart skip a beat, or tremble in fear; what you find sexy, or abhorrent. What ideas you could spend an eternity turning over and over in your hands. What questions power your work: the ones you can look at point-blank and be unable to answer; the ones you still can’t bear to phrase accurately, for fear of what that might do to you.
There’s a surface-level about that we can dictate; but as for the guts of our writing, its black and brooding hearts, I’m not sure we truly get a say.
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Why is this comforting to me? Why does it feel so freeing?
I think recognizing that it’s not actually a choice allows me to just take these themes and obsessions for what they are—so that I can then embrace them. Give them some plant food so they keep growing, making deeper roots in me. The inevitability has been helpful. It feels like a kindness to myself, when so much of writing often feels like resistance. Ah, yes. For no clearcut reason and through no fault of mine, I am deeply in love with narratives where a human and a monster become friends, possibly even roommates, and talk about pain and survival and what exactly makes them different from each other. Well, there we go, self. Be free, and write that story. Again, if you must. Just—try to do something interesting with it.
It also gives me space to process things. I don’t have to think too hard about them all by my lonesome; instead I get to let my characters hash it out. When I look at the publication history of my stories, some very obvious patterns emerge. From 2008-2014 I was writing almost always about grief and loss. There’d been a lot of death in my family over a compressed period of time, and then I immigrated to the US—a loss of my known-life that I could not digest for several years. (At Clarion, I wrote a story about a recent immigrant, which was the only piece that ever made me cry during critique. Not because someone was harsh, but because something they observed about the main character made me realize something I’d been keeping from myself, and that recognition—while painful to face—was so necessary.)
2013-2016 I wrote a lot about kids post-college and what that does to friendships, and careers, and life plans. Because, surprise! I’d finally stopped being a student!
2017 I did not write at all because I was in a Hole (real life things, mostly), which is a story for another time. Anyway I managed to crawl out of that Hole in 2018, but I was very rusty and blinking in the sunlight. For an extended moment I was deeply unsure of what to write about.
What saved me were the notes I’d scribbled away during the time I couldn’t write, the little ideas that could maybe, possibly, grow into something more. Like the one about Red and the Wolf. (You can read Nico Silang ask me explicitly about the monsterf*cking genre in this interview.) Or the one about the moon-swallowing monster. Or the one about the witch boy in San Francisco, which I had daydreamed about during my morning commute on the 38, chugging along Geary Boulevard, listening to Nico Yaryan sing and if it’s voodoo that you’ve given me, how do I know it isn’t kind?
In the end I’m still about monsters and people, family and friendships. Women who are girls (I love authors who capture this truthfully, like Kelly Link and Sofia Samatar). Bumbling through life. There’s still grief—there will always be grief—but my heart and mind also wanted to expand into different themes, like queer identity and millennial ennui. Is it thematic to always want a scene where characters look into each other’s eyes, and have to say Deep Awkward Things? Mayhap. (I actually wrote the same story twice, in two very different ways, in 2018. I didn’t realize until I’d sold them. If you’ve read my recent work and want to take a gander at what I’m referring to, feel free to. 😉)
I don’t get to choose what lights me up as a writer. What I should do, though, is give justice to these obsessions, and bring to bear all the care and craft I can muster so that the stories come alive in the right way.
I took this chaotic image at the Team Lab Exhibit in the Fukuoka Castle Ruins this past winter, when I traveled to Japan with one of my best friends. (Little did we know how precious this trip would be, just a few weeks later!) Those colored balls were these big installations that you could bump into or embrace or pat, and they would randomly change colors. The awkward analogy is the whole you-don’t-get-to-choose thing: your egg could be red, or blue, and that’s just what you get. Image: a forest and several multi-colored sphere-like objects in the foreground, with Fukuoka City in the background. The colors are neon pink, bright purple, and blue-green.
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Just because the choice isn’t deliberate doesn’t mean we can’t inspect it. I don’t think you can be too conscious of these things while actively drafting, but you can give it breathing space alongside all the other story-things you’re trying to wrangle. So much of my process the past year has been thinking more clearly and specifically about what I’m trying to do with a story. Which of my usual-culprit-jams is hanging out here, naturally? Okay—and what does it mean for this to be that story?
Here are some other smart folks on this topic:
Charlie Jane Anders, The Unexamined Story Is Not Worth Writing:
I’ve gotten to the point where half the joy of writing comes from intentionality—and that means I endlessly interrogate what this story is about, and why I’m spending all this time writing this, instead of something else.
These days, I feel like my best stories are the ones where I had a clear idea in my own head of what I was exploring.
Garth Greenwell, in an interview on Cleanness:
I don’t know where desire comes from. I don’t know how much of it is hardwired and how much of it is derived from our culture or what we’re taught. But I think about what it feels like. And one of the things that fascinates me about desire—and especially about desire in art—[is that] once we have an object of desire, then there’s a plot.
(An aside: I recently took Garth’s class on style in writing offered at the Shipman Agency, and it shattered my mind to pieces in a very good way. If/when it gets offered again, I would highly recommend it.)
Elizabeth Knox, on Continuing:
It’s the existence of all my concordances that have determined my mode of operation as a writer, how I like to take a thing, or more often several things, with the charge of a mythical legacy, and use them to my own purposes. Because they are attractive to me and I want to pick them up and handle them. Because they are meaningful to me and I want to get into conversation with them. Because they are comforting to me and I want to slip them under my pillow when I sleep.
(This is also an excellent essay that answers the question, why keep writing.)
You love what you love; if you open yourself up to it, it’ll probably love you back. Godspeed out there, friends.
This newsletter’s title comes from Candor by Anne Carson. Read the whole thing here.
News and things
I am pleased to report that since last newsletter I have been able to tentatively approach the draft again. More on that when I don’t feel like I’m cupping hands over this teensy guttering candle flame of a wip. Much love to everyone in the mud—I’m not quite out yet, but getting there, and you will too.
If you are a bookseller and happen to be reading this, Never Have I Ever is now on Edelweiss! How nervewracking! I am told that paper arcs will be making their way out into the world sometime in the next few weeks, too.
Later this year I’ll be writing a few nuts-and-bolts-ish newsletters about publishing short fiction and putting together a collection. If you have any specific questions about either of these topics, let me know! I’d love to try and answer them. (I owe this idea to Zen Cho, whose publishing journey entries I devoured in 2015. Here’s her one about short story collections. I am absolutely stoked to know that Small Beer Press will be reprinting Spirits Abroad next year, as it’s one of my favorite collections.)
Take care of yourself next week! Again, if you haven’t yet—please vote! 🙏
Here are the multi-colored eggs again. That’s me in front of them. Image: a silhouette against more spheres. This time they’re blue, yellow, and green.
Thanks as always for reading! If you liked this post, feel free to share it with others, or sign up if you haven’t yet. I hope you find some joy in leaning into what your heart yearns to write about, regardless of what you think or want. 😂 If you have questions for this newsletter, I’d love to answer them—you can submit them here.