Sometimes there’s this small, stubborn, illogical part of you—a part that whispers how the thing that you escaped from can’t really be that dangerous. There are different stages to growing up, and I think one of them involves the realization that on a personal level, the universe is unpredictable, a tangle of atoms and nonbaryonic matter and chance. It’s hard to make peace with chaos, and so you just keep going over the basic series of events, just the facts, and telling yourself the world isn’t fatal. After all, it was touch and go for a minute, but everything ended well. After all, you didn’t die.
For weeks after my aunt found the bodies, I’d sit in my room and think about the particulars of the night—the order in which I had put my cousins to bed, the channels I’d flipped through before finding a horror movie. How fast my heart had beat and how empty the house had been, just me and Anthony Perkins. Me and two boys I had not been able to see or hear from where I sat, watching monsters in the dark.
There were two of them, but I was most concerned with the one who had died in the stream. I knew, in the tidiest, most logical part of my brain, that it wasn’t really the water that had killed him. After all, the air was freezing, the toxicology report was definitive, and his friend had been just as unlucky. Even if he hadn’t drowned, it probably would have happened anyway.
But he was the one I thought of when I thought about water, when I thought about winter. Because it wasn’t just the randomness of it, or even the fact that he was exactly my age and we would have gone to the same high school the next year. It wasn’t mortality that shook me. It was the creek. The fact that something could be sixteen inches deep and still have so much power. There was a wrongness to it, and I came back to it again and again.
For a long time, I thought that having the inclination to think about hard things and the words to write them down was the same as understanding them. But in this first attempt I still landed far off the mark. I came away thinking that it was somehow natural to feel guilty over a stranger—one who died near you, or someone famous who died so far away in personality and culture and geography that the only thing left was to feel bad that you didn’t notice him enough when he was alive. There is a strange, protective magic in the act of not being sad enough.
There are all kinds of books instructing you to write what you know. I think now that write what you know is another way of saying understand what you write.
I spent a lot of time trying to understand the story of the boys, opening different doors to see if they would get me to the place the answer lived. The second time I tried to tell it, everything was wrong. It starts off bad and just gets worse. Sometimes that’s what happens when you’re trying to figure out the answer to a problem, trying hard to understand it. The version that comes next is all the things I didn’t want to think about and still, it was the only thing I knew how to say.
IV. BY DROWNING
There was a foot of standing water in Cora Fletcher’s basement. When she touched the surface with her hand, it slopped against the walls, leaving a line of mineral deposit that crept up the cement.
The slow seepage had begun three days earlier, on the same morning she found Adam Clay’s body lying facedown in the municipal stream that ran behind her parents’ house.
The stream behind the house was shallow, too negligible to submerge anything so large as a person, but Adam had been wearing a gray jacket, and his hair was clotted with ice. In the January landscape, he was almost invisible. She saw his hand first, pale and resting half-closed against the bank. She stood over him in the bleached reeds, and the back of his neck was strangely bloodless. She knelt, touching his shoulder, then his curled fingers. The jacket was the one he wore every day, and ice had formed a fragile rim at the cuffs of his sleeves.
She was not a skittish girl. In the kitchen, she answered the police officer’s questions. The discovery, which had horrified her tender mother, only made Cora feel unsettled. The fact that she had been the one to find him was as impossible as his drowning in the first place.
Now there was a foot of water in the basement.
• • •
Since the morning of Adam’s body, Cora had been waking up.
The previous night she’d gotten out of bed just after two and found a flashlight. Standing halfway down the basement steps, she held the light so it sent shadows splashing over the walls. For an awful, glorious moment, she thought she saw movement—there, by the shipwrecked washing machine—just from the corner of her eye. Adam, facedown in his gray jacket, hands floating limp in the foul water.
The flashlight dimmed suddenly, and when she shook it back to brightness, he was gone. She went back upstairs, remembering a day on the football field.
Alone under the bleachers, she’d plotted the meticulous lines of curves and vectors. He came across the field, unaccompanied. They had never spoken to one another.
Adam glanced over his shoulder, then swung his fist, hard, against the aluminum bleachers. The sound reverberated wildly, and Cora resisted the urge to cover her ears.
When his gaze shifted and he saw her there, he did not smile, but the shape of his mouth was tender, as though they shared a secret. He shook his head in response to a question she had not asked. “You don’t want to know.” His hand was bleeding in a thin smear.
Behind him, the sky was a hard, indifferent gray. Two and a half months later he lay in the weeds at her feet, all answers gone.
• • •
Again, Cora woke in the dark to find the numbers on her digital clock fixed mysteriously at 2:18. In the bathroom across the hall, the faucet was running. She counted, first to sixty and then further, to eighty. A hundred. A hundred and twelve. The numbers glowed unchanging in the black clockface.
She considered Adam’s declaration, his assurance that she did not want to know. It wasn’t true.
She wanted his life. Not to live it, but simply to examine the hidden facets, his embarrassments and his sorrows. Had he been lonely? Had he fought with his parents, smoked clandestine cigarettes out his bedroom window? She wanted all the small, private moments that were so integral to a person. She wanted the hundred tiny miseries that drove him to the creek at night, the moment when consciousness faded and darkness swept in.
Across the hall, the water only ran, splashing into the basin, gurgling down the drain. Then it stopped.
She closed her eyes, imagining the current, how it would feel to breathe water instead of air. How vivid and real the world must seem in that moment. How inescapably true.
When she opened her eyes again, her room seemed small and strange. The clock said 2:19. She got out of bed.
In the basement, the smell was oppressive, cold as autumn. She flipped the switch and the bulb came on, illuminating the scummy waves as they lapped against the steps.
“I want to know,” she said, cupping her elbows.
There was no answer, only the water. It ran down the walls, dripped from the exposed beams.
There in the shadows, she saw him again, but now he lay faceup, his mouth blue with cold and drowning.
She stepped down into the water. Her pajamas felt heavy, and the fabric clung to her knees. It was deeper now. It had been rising. She waded out to him, kneeling so the water washed over her thighs. His eyes were open, cloudy in the dim light.
“I want to know.”
The hand came up then, catching her by the back of the neck. His grip was chilly and inexorable, pulling her down. His mouth on hers was cold, and she closed her eyes and let him do it.
He knew the dancing, gibbering secret of the world—what it was to die.
She pressed her lips to his dripping mouth and waited for him to share it.
V. WATERLOGGED
That story? Is one of the most unpleasant stories I’ve ever written.
And that’s saying something.
Even now, I tend to think the best thing about it is that it’s short. I think I must have wanted it to be a horror story. Or, at least, I wrote it because
I think drowning is horrific, and also, there’s a certain clinical comfort to sitting down and stating basic facts.
The problem is right there in the first line:
There was a foot of standing water in the basement.
This is the essence of backing away.
I ignored everything about character or emotional stakes and dove straight for the simplest component. The part that scared me.
As I wrote, I cut out a lot of pieces that were important and left ones that were mundane, or just so obvious I didn’t really have to think about them. I did this because some of the pieces felt too complicated, and some felt too scary, or like they were pointing to something else, something bigger or more honest.
There was the ghost of another story underneath, but it was one that demanded so much more, and I didn’t know what to DO with it, so I just gave up. I threw those parts away, rather than taking the time to figure out what they were good for.
Sometimes picking the wrong direction is part of the process, even though it looks for all the world like just wasting time.
There are two things I wish someone would have told me when I was first learning to write, and they are these:
1) People have all kinds of weird, highly personal methods for how to get things done.
2) Most people’s methods are still not as weird as mine.
2.b) And that’s okay.
The way I write is kind of strange. It’s unusual. It’s more than unusual.
This will involve visual aids.
I do not think in that neat, linear way that makes someone an ideal candidate for bullet points or notecards or corkboards covered in webs of string like they have in a TV show about the FBI. I will never be the proud possessor of beautiful color-coded charts or dry-erase markers or sticky notes. And this is disappointing, because secretly, I really want my office to look like a TV show about the FBI.
The problem (problem?) is that everything has a sound in my head—a rhythm that determines the words I use and the choices I make. This includes big rhythms, like scenes or chapters or the whole entire story arc, and little rhythms, like paragraphs or sentences or the individual letters inside one specific word.
I feel my way through a story, finding bits and pieces. When I reach a word or a syllable and don’t know what goes there, I leave a little trail of commas like tiny typographical bread crumbs—like so: [,,,,,,,,]. I do that in all the places where the parts are still missing, and then I move on.
Seriously, you should have seen this page while I was writing it—just [,,,,,,] and blank spaces as far as the eye could see.
For a long time I was very self-conscious about this and tried hard to change the way I did things. I wanted to be putting words on paper, in order, the same way other people did.
“If you keep writing everything in this disjointed way, you’re just going to confuse yourself, and you’re never going to finish anything,” said one of my teachers. And I thought, Oh, no! If I keep writing everything in this disjointed way, I’m just going to confuse myself, and I’m never going to finish anything! Which was a huge and ridiculous fallacy, because I’m confused most of the time, even without worrying about all these blank spots and commas, and I still never once failed to finish an assignment. But for a while (too long), I believed it, because the teacher knew so much about writing, and I didn’t, and I wanted to.
The reason it’s important to learn how you write is that there are all kinds of exercises and techniques that are not going to work for you, and as you practice and experiment and try things, you’ll start to know what does work. What will help you get an idea on the page, and what might not help you at all.
It’s still totally reasonable to try everything once, though. Even if you don’t really understand it or it sounds weird or you hate it. Trying things is a really good way to learn how you write. Techniques that don’t feel comfortable or natural can still be good exercises, because even though the easiest way for you to write is sometimes the same as the best way for you to write? Sometimes it isn’t.
When I revise, I comb through concepts and characters and ideas and take them apart like I’m repairing a clock or rebuilding an engine, or else putting a totally different engine in the original car.
When I finally came back to my drowning story, I was determined to find the engine. I wanted to say what I meant, or at least what I felt.
The first thing I did was change the point of view. In the course of trying to write this story, I’ve looked at it through a lot of lenses, shifting gradually from the real-world facts—my aunt’s chilly December-morning discovery—to my own disjointed thoughts on a tragedy that happened near me, to the pretend story of a pretend girl who’s strange and lonely and finds a body.
Again.
As I moved into fiction, the point of view drifted further and further from me. She was named Viola for a while, who then became Cora, who eventually becomes Jane in the next version.
Even at its starkest and most remote, I think this has always been a story about wanting things, wanting to act, wanting to have done the thing that needed doing. The third-person point of view wasn’t working, so what about first? Someone tenacious, someone brave. I went down through the series of events, thinking of ways that every scene could show relationships. Which is kind of the exact opposite of Cora and her lack of human connection and her haunted basement. In fact, one of the main reasons I had such a hard time executing early versions was that I couldn’t figure out how to get a real, actual person in the mix. Change the viewpoint and you change everything else.
(What about the person I wasn’t, but wished I had been? The power of fiction is in its ability to explore the untrue—to consider what might be, what couldn’t be, what needed to be but wasn’t.)
The next thing I had to tackle was the problem of drowning itself. It had been the starting point and also the exact wrong point of entry. Instead of writing about people who wanted things, I kept trying to write about a creek, about a flooded basement. I was depersonalizing everything, alienating myself from my own story.
I’d spent so long collecting water nymphs and river spirits and the ghosts of drowned, weeping maidens. What was the point of all those years studying fairy tales if I didn’t use what I had learned? Which was another way of saying, what if drowning is not a concept—what if it’s a person?
The day I had that tiny, random thought was the day the story started to become more like itself. A tragedy is remote. It’s wordless. You can ask a person questions. They can still be mysterious and strange, they can still be monstrous—mythic—but when you ask, they answer, and when they look you in the face, it is very, very personal.
I went back through all the scraps that I’d cut away, and the closer I looked, the more I started to see something else there, something that might be evidence of a real story.
In “By Drowning,” Adam is practically a stranger—someone the main character knows from school and at the same time doesn’t really know in any meaningful way. I wanted there to be some human aspect to that, but the relationship is just so remote and ugly and completely filled with ambivalence. In the following scrap, you’ve got Viola thinking back on a humiliating interaction that Adam had been witness to, and even though it’s painful to her, she’s still considering kissing him, and it’s all just so impersonal, and so very upsetting.
because remember, before she was Cora, she was Viola
Now she tried to compile a list of shared encounters—anything worth treasuring—but all that came to mind were insults and miseries. Times other rough boys had teased her and Adam had stood by, wordless.
The morning at the bus stop when Billy Creedy, emboldened by Viola’s smallness and her silence, had torn the geography book from her hands and stood on it, his arms wide, mouth gaping. Adam had only smiled grimly, shaking his head. He’d drawn close, as though to whisper or to kiss her. Even now, the memory of his mouth thrilled her in a melancholy way. Then he had turned away.
> This is sort of the worst thing ever, but also, there’s want in there, and bitterness. There’s story.
It turned out there were a lot of snippets like that, that I cut and then looked at later, thinking, “Wait, here’s what I meant to say—if only it weren’t so horrible and ugly.” But the part that struck me more acutely than anything was this:
At 1:45 she’d woken to a stifling heat, and she’d opened her window.
In the field behind her house, their voices had been clear. She’d leaned on the sill, pressing her cheek against the screen. They were laughing, the raucous cries of boys and girls together. They shrieked, then hushed each other, voices spiking with delight.
How she had envied them their blurry freedom. Their carelessness.
In the morning she’d gone down to the stream, and after several minutes of sweeping through the weeds for evidence of their wanderings, she’d found Adam’s body.
and then the part that actually made it in
She wanted his life. Not to live it, but simply to know the hidden facets, to enter them in her notebook, his embarrassments and his sorrows. Had he been lonely? Had he fought with his parents, smoked clandestine cigarettes out his bedroom window? She wanted all the small, private moments that were so integral to a person. She wanted his unadulterated character, the secrets that loomed behind his flatness and his silence. She wanted the hundred tiny miseries that drove him to the creek that night, the moment when consciousness faded and darkness swept in.
If Viola/Cora wants these things, then there’s more than a passing chance that as the writer, maybe I do too. Maybe the reader does. Maybe the point-of-view character wants and then gets these things, or tries and gets rebuffed, or has to be satisfied with a glimpse of them and a promise for the future.
The Anatomy of Curiosity Page 18