A Note for You, If You’re Having A Bad Day
My Dear Friend,
For most of the past week, I’ve been waking up early to have an affair.
“Early” is 5:00, and I’ve never been able to do anything every morning at 5:00. For a while, I was doing Morning Pages, and Julia Cameron says to get up at 5:00 (or maybe 5:30, I can’t remember), but when you’re 25, that gives you way too much time. You’re supposed to do your morning pages for like 20 minutes, which means that you’re done by 5:20, and it’s another three hours before anyone else your age is awake. I also tried doing yoga at 5:00, but my body was like, “BITCH WHAT IS THIS? ARE YOU SERIOUSLY SUGGESTING THAT RATHER THAN SLEEPING IN THE WARM BED 20 FEET AWAY I SHOULD BE HOLDING A HORRIBLE LUNGE AND ‘FOCUSING ON MY BREATH’? THAT’S GONNA BE A BIG ‘HELL NO, FUCK YOU,’ MA’AM!” So that didn’t last, either.
But this is different. I’m so into this affair that I wake up in the middle of the night wishing for it to be 5 so I can have my precious hour-and-a-half tryst. Now that I have a baby, that early morning hour is different than it was. It used to be just another hour in a day full of hours that I had relative control over. No longer. Now, there are three total hours of the day where I have autonomy: the hour and a half before T wakes up, and the hour and a half after she goes to bed. And in that latter hour and a half, I’m not sure how anyone does anything other than watch TV. It’s actually the only time in the whole day when I feel safe drawing on my iPad, because my daughter has broken not one, not two, but three Apple Pencils by trying to eat them.
You were not born yesterday, so you know that I’m not having an actual affair with a human person, because this is a public newsletter, and I’d be asking to get caught. You might be rolling your eyes a little bit, like, “Ugh, why does she call it ‘an affair’ when she means something mundane, like eating a pile of eggs or reading magazines or something? Just call it what it is. I didn’t come here for this writerly nonsense.” But “affair” is the only word. It feels like cheating on someone, what I’m doing. I really went back and forth about whether or not to tell you, because I didn’t want to ruin the secret. But you and I are close, and this is the main thing that’s on my mind every morning and every night; I think about it when I’m walking my daughter to daycare, or driving through afternoon traffic, or frying tofu. So here it is: I’m writing a novel.
It feels like an affair because this is not the kind of writer I am. I write newsletters and regular letters; journalistic profiles and essays about polyamory. Sometimes, maybe, I write comics – but that’s just another way of writing nonfiction; and sometimes, maybe, I write poetry — when I have an idea that’s a little too big for nonfiction and needs to ride the English language like it was a giant bird. But I never write fiction.
I used to write it, when I was young. Did you? In first grade, when I started feeling like I was out of place, I disappeared into a never-ending story I was writing about two abandoned-hotel-dwelling orphans named Fern and Greenie. (Can you tell that their dead parents were into plants?) I put my own problems into their world — my best friend stopped talking to me suddenly; everyone started calling me fat; no one chose me for their kickball team and I had to sit on the bench with the gym teacher — and they’d get magically solved. I filled more than 100 spiral-bound notebooks (seriously) with this non-story, and it was all I ever wanted to do.
In middle school, I kept up the practice, but I changed the story. Now, my characters all sat at a gate in an airport, waiting to get to New York. I was so excited about my own future in New York1, and I could see a lot of paths for myself there; I split them into twelve different characters and let them ruminate on their futures. I used academic Blue Books, because they were in infinite supply at my professorial parents’ house. Book after book after book after book — and nothing ever really happened. Things in my actual life had gotten worse — I’d made new friends, but they’d also dumped me; I was fatter2; my own dad benched me at every basketball game — and the story showed up for me. It gave me a future to live inside.
Then, in college, I took a fiction writing class, and I learned I wasn’t very good at writing fiction. The professor told me, and so did the other students. I didn’t write plot well (you could have told me that too, I bet). And there were other problems, but I don’t remember them, because I guess I’m the kind of student who doesn’t love a challenge. I love to be told I’m good at something but that there are some improvements I can make. This is the only kind of teaching that interests me, but it’s not the only kind of teaching that works. Unfortunately, my college fiction teacher killed my fiction writing organ. I didn’t write fiction again until this year.
Motivation interests me, by the way. I’m curious: what works for you? My own pedagogical philosophy is that you have to find the thing that will make the student continue to practice. Continuing to practice is the only way to improve at anything, and it’s also difficult to do. Novelty wears off. My friend Jill, to whom I send my writing work first, always calls me the next day to shower me with compliments. This and only this makes me want to keep writing. Then I’ll send my manuscripts off to, say, my agent3, and while she is nice, she is also trying to sell my work, so she has critical feedback to give me, too. I am shocked at how terrible I am at receiving it. I pout and translate her (always useful, largely gentle, generally correct) criticisms into, “You are bad at this. I can’t believe I have had to read this hogwash. You are the kind of writer whose imaginary inner voice uses the word ‘hogwash’ and that in and of itself is a problem. You should quit.” What is this about? It doesn’t serve me, and furthermore, I know that any good writer or artist is supposed to be totally horny for critical feedback, like, Oooh, yeah baby, hit me again, that does it for me. FURTHERMORE, people don’t offer critical feedback to pieces they don’t think have potential. That’s the whole point: this has a future, let me help guide it to its ultimate form.
And yet I am a baby and I want everyone to fawn over me and everything I do, metaphorically and actually. This is unattractive, but nevertheless true.
I guess I write all that to say that it’s not my college fiction professor’s fault that he held me to a college-level writing standard. I easily could have thought, “Well, whatever, I’ll keep showing up, and I bet I’ll get better.” But instead I threw in the towel and became a first grade teacher with a blog. I didn’t take a blog-writing class, so no one was there to tell me I didn’t have what it took to write a blog, and so my blog-writing got better, and now here you are, reading this letter from me, that I probably would not be writing had a college blog-writing professor told me I was using too many adverbs and came up with super-saccharine conclusions. (Which I assume one would have, given the chance.) But I’ve been reading a lot of fiction lately, and it’s such a dreamy departure from the problem-and-solution nonfiction books I usually read, and the memoirs full of deleted scenes, and the essays about hummingbirds or shoebill storks or types of sparrows or parrots or chickens or other birds. One morning, I decided maybe I’d wake up and, you know, just write a little bit of a novel.
I opened a blank Google doc and started a story about a woman at a standup comedy open mic night — a scene I know very well from my real life of sometimes being a woman at a standup comedy open mic night. I have not written much about doing standup comedy for a lot of reasons, but I think about it often. I say “a lot of reasons,” but there is really mostly only one reason: too many other people are involved. Too many other people I’d have to reach out to and ask if I was remembering something right; too many people I don’t want to reach out to because things ended badly between us; too many people who still don’t know what they did when they were blackout drunk and I was sober. I named the woman in my Google Doc Joanne, because I’d just read an article in Real Simple Magazine written by a Joanne, and I don’t know any actual Joannes (I don’t think?). I started writing at 5 a.m., and was going to go for an hour, but it was hard to stop. The childhood spell re-cast itself: I fell into the world I was inventing, and it felt like exactly the place I most wanted to be.
When I was a child, I wrote fiction so that I could think about the future. I wanted things for myself, and I was impatient. I knew a Grownup Sophie could solve Child Sophie’s problems, and I wanted to inhabit a place where that was possible. Now, I’m writing fiction so I can think more clearly about the past. The characters go into scenes that resemble ones I know, and they react in all kinds of different ways: they react like I reacted, or they react totally differently. They free themselves, or they get themselves into worse trouble. I can explore all the possibilities of what might have happened if I had turned the corner on the other side of the room. It feels like being in the kind of therapy where you get to draw or play with toys. (I guess this is just art therapy? Or play therapy? IDK, it’s way more fun than therapy, though.) Isn’t there some quote about how fiction tells the truth better than nonfiction does?
For the most part, I don’t have grand fantasies about publishing this novel. I’m enjoying being in its world, and letting parts of myself unspool that have been tightly wound and knotted up because it felt too dangerous to write them down. Now I’m writing them down, but I have plausible deniability. “It’s made up,” I can say. “None of it is real.” What I mean is, No one but me will know how much of it is real.
The other thing that I’ve always loved about writing fiction is describing food I wish I could eat. You know?
I’m curious to hear what you do with your darkest corners. Do you bury them? Tell your confidants? Do you write these things down? Do you include secret codes? Do you anonymously post to Reddit boards or come up with songs? Do you paint abstract paintings about them? Tell me — tell us — if you want. And if you’re looking for an outlet for your secrets, might I suggest a Google doc where you tell the story of a girl named Joanne, doing something you never thought would end up on paper.
Love,
Sophie
This Week In Sophie
Cartoon:
Sammi and I have a cartoon in the April 24 & May 1 issue of The New Yorker Magazine! It looks like this:
Event:
If you live in Chicago, mark your calendars! I’m interviewing Tove Danovich about her excellent (EXCELLENT!)
(EGG-CELLENT!?!?!?!?!?!?!) new book about chickens, “Under the Henfluence” at Women & Children first! It’s on May 11 in person, and you can register for the event here.
I only very briefly lived in New York in actuality, but it counts.
It isn’t that I SHOULD have been upset about being fat; it’s that I WAS. It was 1997, and Friends was still on. I was supposed to be upset back then. To be clear: being fat is not a problem, and it is not a bad thing in any way, shape, or form.
Who is the literal best, and I want that to be clear. She is funny and smart and nice and generous with her time and it is one of the happiest strokes of luck of my whole life that I somehow met her. (Her name is Mackenzie Brady Watson and she works at Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency, which I tell you so you don’t feel like you have to Google it.)
Congratulations, Sophie! This is fantastic and I'm sure it will be wonderful. Can't wait to read it. (And, if you -- like me -- get to the point when you're no longer in love with it and absolutely despise it, please remember that's a natural part of the process, and you will soon fall in love again.) xo
Dear Sophie,
I am super excited to read about all of this!
I love this:
“No one but me will know how much of it is real.”
And to answer some of your questions:
I’m curious to hear what you do with your darkest corners. Do you bury them?
Rarely. (Or I try not to.)
Tell your confidants?
Always. (Or I try to!)
Do you write these things down?
Often!
Do you include secret codes?
I don’t think so.
Do you anonymously post to Reddit boards or come up with songs?
Songs!
Do you paint abstract paintings about them?
Songs!
Thank you for asking and thank you for sharing!
Love
Myq