December 17, 2024

on devising pleasures

i’ve been thinking a lot about what makes a story into a story. what turns a series of sequential events—boring! random!—into a narrative, which is so un-random as to amount to a kind of conspiracy, where every casual moment and chance meeting has been arranged on purpose, by an invisible hand. i think that hand might be called plot, or maybe structure.

obviously this is the kind of shit i’m always thinking about, but it’s become more urgent this past year. maybe because, like everybody else, i’ve spent the year watching the power of weaponized fiction: a fascist propaganda machine so malignantly stupid it makes the Ministry of Truth look half-assed, which convinced approximately 77,237,942 Americans that white nationalism would make eggs cheaper.1 or maybe because writing is my job, and lately i seem to have forgotten how to do it.

i mean, i’ve still been writing, but i’ve managed to make the process as sluggish and miserable as possible. i’ve spent the last year dragging, doubting, second-, third- and fourth-guessing, cringing, crawling, backtracking, bitching; every page has been wrung out, rather than written. maybe i didn’t totally forget how to write, but i definitely forgot how to like it.

if you’re thinking “that sort of sounds like burnout babe,” the answer is: yeah, probably :(

but oh my god, how embarrassing! writing is the easiest job i’ve ever had, and i’ve had a lot of jobs (retail, housekeeping, fast food, ag, copywriting, adjuncting, childcare, etc). even among writers, my deal is a sweet one: i don’t have to put out a book a year; my husband is home full-time with the kids; i rarely work on weekends; i have a retirement account. i am, essentially, that meme of the crying woman asking god why he gives her the hardest battles, and god answering: i don’t. you are my weakest soldier. it’s a [novel] why are you crying.

and yet: i’m still crying, lol. i guess i’ve been writing or editing a book for six or seven years straight now, through the birth and babyhood of two kids who never slept, through a pandemic and the rebirth of nazism. i guess it requires a certain anxiety to write, at least for me; a quality of sustained and critical attention—is this really as good as i can make it?—that has left me lightly abraded, both over-sensitive and dull. i guess i’m tired.

sometime around april i started promising myself a break. but i still had a novel to revise and four new short stories to draft,2 so i started thinking about plot and structure as a way of manufacturing what used to come naturally. if i didn’t have homemade inspiration—if my own instinct for writing had become untrustworthy, obscure to me, essentially joyless—maybe store-bought would do.

as it turns out there are lots of people on the internet who are very eager to tell you what a story is, and how a story ought to be structured. there are blog posts and substacks and online workshops. there’s the seventeen steps of the hero’s journey and “save the cat” and a variety of downloadable worksheets based on both hero and cat. there’s a cottage industry of instagram reels where a hot white woman with an intense skin care regimen promises to tell you how she got a six-figure deal for her debut novel, comment HELP to learn the three biggest pacing mistakes you’re making in your book!

honestly, there’s a lot of good, basic advice swimming around in there. i do need to articulate the stakes, both personal and political, in the first chapter or so. i often fuck up the second act. i would sometimes like a hot woman to tell me what three pacing mistakes i’m making. if the advice sometimes feels a little mechanical, a little like a conveyor belt that transforms something ineffable and grand into something quantifiable and repeatable—and, critically, saleable—well, sure. it feels like work, because art is work.3

but also, simultaneously, i am sometimes overcome with the desire to print all this advice out just so i can burn it. it’s so rigid!! so boring!! it’s not even really about writing a good story, most of the time—it’s about writing something story-shaped, which adheres to a template that has been broadly successful in the industry for the last few decades. it can’t tell you what makes a story; it can only tell you how stories often go.

still, i watched the videos and skimmed the substacks. i re-read steering the craft. i waited, somewhat petulantly, for someone to tell me what a story is and how to write one.

i think the closest i got to an answer was john barth’s essay on “incremental perturbation,” which sounds like something you’d diagnose a woman with in 1911. he says that plot is the “incremental perturbation of an unstable homeostatic system,” which i think means a story is what happens when you say “things can’t go on like this” and then they don’t. it’s when you build a house badly, on purpose, and then knock it down. the house (the unstable homeostatic system) might seem quite stable at first—a tolerable or at least sustainable status quo. but with each storm or fire or midnight visitor (the incrementable perturbations of plot), you see the underlying flaws: there’s rot in the walls, animals in the attic, leaks in the roof, a family curse. it’s bound to collapse someday, but you’ll be surprised when it does; every good climax is an inevitable shock.

this definition is practical without being prescriptive. it helped me limp through a few of my short stories this year. i asked: “why can’t things go on like this?” and wrote down the answers; i built my bad houses and knocked them down.

it worked, to my delight! but it didn’t, quite, make the work delightful.

i’d never read any of sylvia townsend warner’s work until this year. i didn’t even really know who she was, although i think under pressure i might have shelved her next to virginia woolf (english? gay??). but in the last few weeks i’ve read a handful of her short stories, hundreds of her letters, and her 1926 debut: Lolly Willowes, or the Loving Huntsman.4

Lolly Willowes is the story of laura willowes, a spinster who spends most of her life politely suffocating beneath the weight of early-twentieth-century social mores. she’s content, mostly—except when the weather turns. every autumn a disquiet “arose out of the ground with the smell of dead leaves: it followed her through the darkening streets; it confronted her in the look of the risen moon. ‘now, now!’ it said to her, and no more.” she regards this yearning as a seasonal condition, like allergies, and does her best to ignore it.

until she sees a spray of beech branches in a shop, which are so beautiful and wild that she has no choice but to flee into the woods, sell her soul to the devil, and take up witchcraft and (implied) lesbianism. whomst among us et cetera.5

it’s one of those books so perfect it makes you annoyed at all the years you wasted not reading it; it gave me the kind of illicit delight i associate with licking the marmalade spoon, or pilfering the kids’ halloween candy. it also—i couldn’t help but notice—adheres to almost none of the contemporary advice about plot or structure.

the first fifty pages are basically a family genealogy; laura doesn’t even leave london until halfway through the book, and she doesn’t meet satan until the last couple of pages. sylvia townsend warner does not give a single gay shit about the hero’s journey.

my point here isn’t to say “wow, publishing norms have changed huh,” although they have, or “wow, i guess the rules don’t matter,” although they don’t, or even “wow, the 21^st century has fried our attention spans and damaged our ability to tell the difference between what is good and what is easily consumable”—although it has. my point is that it’s a wonderful book, written exactly as it had to be.

if we didn’t spend so long trudging through laura’s ordinary life, it wouldn’t feel so good when she runs. if we didn’t spend so long walking the woods, growing ever-wilder, sinking deliciously into fantasy, it wouldn’t have felt so natural to have a frank conversation with satan. it’s slow, sure, but it isn’t the pace that keeps you reading—it’s the tiny, piercing turns of phrase (after her mother dies, lolly only cries when a pair of gardening gloves “repeated to her the shape of her mother’s hands.”) it’s the moments of superfluous, indulgent beauty (oh, the way she describes the changing of seasons!!), and acerbic humor (lolly decides she can’t forgive her relatives for they way they’ve treated her, because once she started she’d have to forgive “society, the law, the church, the history of europe, the old testament, the bank of england, and a half a dozen other useful props of civilization.”). it’s all the things which have nothing to do with the shape of the novel—what john updike referred to, dickishly, as her “irrelevancies”6—but have everything to do with how it feels to read it.

it's joy.

barth came up with “incremental perturbation” as a bit of a joke—to put writing advice in the sterile, mechanical language that the corporate world uses to talk about labor. it works because (again) writing is labor, and often very mechanical.

the only thing missing is the joy of it. surprise, delight, pleasure, indulgence, revelry, good jokes, a sense of wonder. a critical, constant affection for words and for the world they describe.

i think to write well (and to like writing well) you need both barth and warner. to understand it as work (practical, intentional), and as witchcraft (thrilling, inscrutable). i think plot and structure are useful in the way that maps are useful on long walks—they can show you the elevation and mileage, but they can’t show you the view; they show you where you’re going, but they can’t show you why.

i think chasing that why—joy—is how we write novels, and also how we get through the day, and also, fwiw, how we survive fascism.

when lolly willowes came out, it was a bestseller, and sylvia townsend warner became a celebrated member of the hip (queer) literary scene. but that was the 20s. by the 40s, the cultural tide had turned. MI5 was reading all her mail; she was sued for libel (false) and accused of being a communist (true). at one point her editor was mailing her canned food; by the time she died, very few of her books were still in print.

and yet: she kept working. both as an artist (she published seven novels, over a hundred stories in the new yorker, a biography of t.h. white, a translation of proust, and more than 1,000 letters to her friends),7 and as an activist (she was in spain in 1937, fighting fascists, and she was still fighting fascists in the 60s, when she wrote essays protesting the vietnam war.)

and she kept loving and being loved by valentine ackland, her wife of almost forty years, who she referred to as her light and her gravity. in 1930, at the very beginning of themselves, valentine wrote to sylvia: a month seems an intolerably long time, but i shall spend it in devising pleasures for you. and you will come to taste them?

it’s everything a love letter should be, of course—infectious, young, earnest, a little uncertain, a little dirty—but it also strikes me as a pretty good slogan.

here’s to another year of devising pleasures for each other; here’s to another year of tasting them.

news

i have a short story coming out from amazon soon! it’s called “the knight and the butcherbird” and it’s where i put all my feelings about cancer and the end of the world and also, crucially, the 1985 high fantasy film, ladyhawke. amazon’s copy calls it a dark fairy tale set in post-apocalyptic appalachia and that sounds right.

soon i’ll get to tell you more about Tor October 2025 Title to Be Announced—until then, i think it was very cool and chill of chappell roan to release a teaser trailer for it (kidding)(sort of).

further reading

• i know i personally stopped reading post-election autopsies, because they either made me sad or lividly angry, but i’ve gone back to sarah thankam mathews’ essay, every day is all there is, several times.

• if you’re an author or illustrator looking for something you can lend your time toward in the coming years, which will feel both communal and practical, can i recommend authors against book bans?