(Photo by Sebastien Boguszewicz via unsplash.com)
When I wrote The Algebra of Snow, I was working from a short story I had written quite a bit earlier, while I was living in a log cabin in the wilds of Virginia (yes, there are wilds in Virginia) and nursing a broken heart. In the short story I had explored loss–loss of my beloved boyfriend, at the time. But I knew there was a bigger loss underneath that, one that had haunted me for a long time. So when I decided to use the short story as the basis for a novel, it was because I had a sense that there was something more there–something novel-sized.
I studied the way Virginia Woolf took the material from her short story “Mrs Dalloway on Bond Street” and transformed it into her wondrous novel Mrs Dalloway. What she did was to take a relatively superficial story about a wealthy woman shopping one day juxtaposed with the tragedy of a WWI vet who was losing his mind from what we now call PTSD and gone deeper, looking for the connection between the two. In so doing, she took Mrs Dalloway down a dark path of her past, her family, her love for a childhood friend who had died, her fretted relationship with her husband. In that tangle was a deep sympathy for the veteran who killed himself, a man she never knew.
I felt that Woolf had gone spelunking in the story, digging deeper and deeper into the caves beneath the surface of the story to find the complex and interwoven material of the novel. And so I did the same. Taking a page or two at a time, I looked deeper under the events of my short story to see if there was another story, a history. And there was. Many caves–many deep dark caves. Caves of her distant father, her battle axe grandmother, and, finally, her beloved, lost mother. And then there were caves that opened in the present moment–the loss of a child, the loss of a dog, the loss of a friendly neighbor. The loss of her husband, of course. And very nearly the loss of her mind.
I remember on the hot summer days in graduate school in Houston when I was writing the novel that I would go so deep into the book that I felt cold–and it wasn’t high-functioning air conditioning, either, believe me. I remember weeping. I remember feeling haunted, lost, gone underground like Ceres in search her beloved Demeter. Wondering if I would come out or like Demeter be lost to the underworld forever.
I remember asking myself again and again: can you make this worse? Is there something more intense you are avoiding? Are you denying your own pain or Amelia’s?
It wasn’t a pretty sight, me deliberately wracking myself in the interest of a good book. But it was do-able.
It was do-able mostly because I was in a community of people who were doing the same thing—fellow graduate students who were going deep for the good stuff, taking risks, asking the hard questions of themselves and each other–Have you gotten what there is to get here? Have you made it what it needs to be?
Or are you staying on the surface, denying the truth, the intensity? Are you making this story stay in the daylight when it wants to go all the way into the dark and come out the other side?
It is probably no mistake that Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones, was a fellow grad student there. Where are the bones buried? Who still wants to speak?
These are the questions that I press on myself, and I press them on writers I work with. Can you go deeper? Can you make this worse? As you are able, can you take this deeper?
But we must always remember to come back out. The absolute key is to surround ourself with fellowship. No journey like this should be contemplated alone.
And we must exercise radical self-care. It is crucial to create rituals of descent and ascent–calling someone before you dive, calling again afterward. Remembering that the use of coloring books or coloring nails or going to warm tropical locations or liberal applications of epsom salt baths and salted caramel chocolate are not luxuries but necessities of this hard work.
Because the only thing harder than doing this is denying it, not telling the truth. As hard as it is to write, it is so vastly much harder not to.
Well, this certainly speaks to me!