And I love them.
Hello, I’m Josh Malerman. And I’m a Prolific.
It’s a word that comes under some fire, and the common dismissals go like this: If you write so much, how can any one book or song be truly meaningful to you? Or: It sounds like you’re more interested in having finished a book than you are the actual book itself. Or, this: With all your stuff, I don’t know where to begin. But what the Prolific understands, deeply, is that you can start anywhere in a Prolific’s catalog and work your way in either direction from there. For us, that’s a thrilling prospect, and it’s not unlike “prospecting” insomuch as, either way you dig, toward the earlier work or along the path of what followed, you’re always looking for similar gold. What the Prolific cherishes above all things is not the singular work of art but the canon. The oeuvre. The arc of a creative mind unable to stop itself, the waves created by endless ideas. Have I mentioned that the Prolific believes anything he or she does, at any time, is a snapshot of the whole? That to wait years between projects is akin to having misplaced a thousand photographs from an era that, in hindsight, was much cooler than it felt at the time?
Who wants to miss out on those photos, that time?
I bring this up here for a reason.
The rough draft for Bird Box was written in a twenty-six-day frenzy in October of the year 2006. At the time, and certainly when I started it, it was only the next story to be written. I had the image of a blindfolded mother, two blindfolded children, navigating a river. Nothing more. Where were they going? What were they fleeing? Why couldn’t they…look? All these questions were answered as I went; what began as a possiblity became blood, sweat, and fears, and it’s the closest I’ve ever come to reading a book as I wrote it. And the spirit of such a thing, the idea that I ought to write every day, to get the story done, to add another book to the growing stack of drafts in my office, was unquestionably born of the philosophy of the Prolific. Like the band Guided by Voices and people like Alfred Hitchcock, there was a sense that to stop, to slow down, to (gasp) wait for inspiration, was the equivalent of creative death. You can easily picture the imagination standing on the edge of a cliff, alone, eyeing the abyss below, weighing whether or not to leap. Because the Prolific knows, above all things, that the artist can’t be expected to know which of his or her works are the good ones, which might resonate with other people, and certainly not which idea would be done best when plucked from the field of growing conceits.
Nothing scares the Prolific more than an Idea Graveyard. Not even the ones for the bodies.
So why not write…everything?
In this spirit, Bird Box was begun. She was finished within a storm of songs, tours, shows, and a thousand conversations that, had they been recorded, I might’ve slapped titles on them and described each as small works of their own. Following Bird Box, I simply wrote the next book, a complex 600-pager called Bring Me the Map. But while I was working on Map, and as The High Strung began that next tour, I started getting reactions from the friends and family to whom I’d sent Bird Box.
This is where the acknowledgments come in.
Can you imagine how many people there are to thank, those who encouraged and helped, over the fourteen years between the rough draft of Bird Box and releasing the final, official version of Malorie?
In a word (and, not so coincidentally the title of a High Strung song): legion.
I’ll start with Mom, Debbie Sullivan, who read Bird Box at a dog trial in Indiana and called to tell me there was something to the then 113,000 words that were not broken up into chapters, were not indented, and were written entirely in italics. She liked it. My stepdad, Dave, called me, too. My friend Matt Sekedat, too. My sister-in-law Alissa. I printed the book up for my friend/landlady June Huchingson, gave it to her at night, and found her finished by morning. Her reaction remains vivid with me today.
To these early readers, I scream thank you. For, if it weren’t for a handful reading Malorie’s story in its earliest incarnation, I might not have pointed to it when, later, I met Ryan Lewis and Candace Lake, a managing duo who had read Goblin but knew we ought to begin with something other than a collection of novellas. It was by way of Ryan and Candace, along with the help of the brilliant lawyer Wayne Alexander, that I rewrote Bird Box in a significant way in the year 2010. I chopped the story in half, gutted what felt like repetition, broke the story into chapters, indented the paragraphs, and removed the italics that had, until then, essentially laminated the story in what felt like a dreamlike hue. Ryan, Candace, and Wayne shopped the book to agent Kristin Nelson, whose website, at the time, said she wasn’t interested in horror. And suddenly, it seemed, the book, and myself, had a team. From there, Kristin shopped Bird Box, it was picked up in 2012, I rewrote the book once more entirely from scratch (one of the benefits of being a Prolific is the gumption to write the same book a second time), Universal Studios bought the film rights, and the book was published in 2014. And so began, for me, Malorie’s story occupying a larger place in my life than I could have ever predicted.
Thank you Candace, Ryan, Wayne, Kristin, and Lee Boudreaux, who edited Bird Box and who must’ve been able to tell I’d never worked in a professional landscape before but had the heart not to tell me so at the time.
Still, no self-respecting Prolific will slow down his or her pace just for having experienced some level of success with a single book or song. He or she is constantly looking for windows, a partially open door, feeling for the breeze of a hole in the wall where a story might get in.
But what happened in the case of Malorie was, one got out.
In chopping Bird Box up, I’d removed a thread of the novel that no longer fit. Or to put it better: The book would’ve remained twice as long upon publication had I not removed a certain idea that, after time, I started to consider as its own novel. But before deciding whether or not to do something about that, Netflix bought the film rights from Universal and, really, any plans I had, the list of what should be written next and what could be a book and what wasn’t, were blown apart, jumbled, and sunk, as if something like a tidal wave had come through the keyhole of my office door. Because, at the conclusion of watching the movie for the first time, I leaned over to my fiancée, Allison, and asked, “What happens to Malorie now?”
Thank you to the producers of the movie: Chris Morgan, Ainsley Davies, Scott Stuber, and Dylan Clark, for getting me to that place. And thank you Michael Clear for bringing the book to the producers to begin with. Thank you to Netflix and the movie’s crew and to the friends I made on set, especially, but not limited to, members of the cast: Happy Anderson, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Julian Edwards, Vivian Lyra Blair, and the amazing David Dastmalchian.
Thank you Susanne Bier and Eric Heisserer.
And thank you (with a bow) to Sandra Bullock, for showing me what Malorie might look like outside my head.
And so…from Malorie to Malorie, fourteen years after first writing her into a rough draft, finding myself infused with the same ardor I held then, renting out the same space I once called home, June’s place, the desk I’d written the rough draft of Bird Box at, the third floor of a gorgeous home in Detroit’s Boston-Edison district, letting myself in every morning, heading upstairs, writing Malorie, and writing about Malorie and Tom and Olympia with the experience of a Prolific who had traveled through dozens of stories (novels, songs, movies), only to bring it all back to her, back to the character who had meant so much to me long before she was introduced to the world.
Malorie.
And in doing so, in understanding that there was ample room to tell more of her story without touching the original book in any significant way, I realized, completely, that any follow-up to Bird Box couldn’t be about another man or woman who had dealt with the creatures in their own way, couldn’t be about the world at large, but had to center on Malorie herself; Bird Box wasn’t an apocalyptic story as much as it wa
s the tale of one woman’s reaction to the world gone dark.
Bird Box, in any form, will always be Malorie’s story.
Del Rey Books gave me the chance to write about her again.
The conversations I had with editor Tricia Narwani were immeasurable; fuel enough to carry me through the “out to sea” weeks that occur during every rewrite, when you’re not convinced you’re gonna reach the other end of things, but you always do.
To all those at Del Rey who worked on Malorie, thank you so:
Tricia Narwani
Scott Shannon
Keith Clayton
Alex Larned
Julie Leung
Ashleigh Heaton
David Moench
Mary Moates
David Stevenson
Aaron Blank
Nancy Delia
Erich Schoeneweiss
Edwin Vazquez
Rebecca Maines
There were other factors, other moments along the way, outside the realm of notes: For this I thank Allison Laakko and Kristin Nelson. Allison is the one who brought up how, due to the tracks, a train might be the safest mode of travel in a world gone dark. We talked about how one might work, so long as the tracks were clear and nobody nefarious was on board….
And Kristin gave me key direction when she reminded me that, despite having the spirit of a Prolific, and therefore the natural inclination to never return to the scene of the magic, it was not only okay for Malorie to resemble Bird Box in spirit but that maybe it should.
To Allison, to Kristin, to all, thank you.
To Dave Simmer, always, thank you.
And so you see, the power of a rough draft is not only in having outlined what you wish to do, it’s not only about the potential therein: The first draft can be magic, no matter how “right” or “wrong” it felt while writing it, if you choose to look at it this way, a snapshot of who you were when you wrote it, whether you were inspired or not, and how you can later look at that photo and say:
Ah, yes, that was me just prior to meeting all these people to thank, all these incredible people, both real and imagined.
JOSH MALERMAN
MICHIGAN, 2020
BY JOSH MALERMAN
Bird Box
Black Mad Wheel
Goblin
Unbury Carol
Inspection
Malorie
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JOSH MALERMAN is a New York Times bestselling author and one of two singer-songwriters for the rock band The High Strung. His debut novel, Bird Box, is the inspiration for the hit Netflix film of the same name. His other novels include Unbury Carol and Inspection. Malerman lives in Michigan with his fiancée, the artist-musician Allison Laakko.
Joshmalerman.com
Facebook.com/JoshMalerman
Twitter: @JoshMalerman
Instagram: @joshmalerman
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