Draft Seven (I Think? I've Lost Count)

Look, I know you're reading this. You're always reading this because you wrote this, and we need to talk about your creative process, which currently resembles a drunk playing Jenga with my entire existence. I'm aware that opening with an aggressive second-person address might alienate readers, but that's your anxiety, not mine. I'm a fictional character. I have no stake in whether people like this. That's entirely your problem, which—and here's where it gets really fun—you've displaced onto me, making me carry your vanity while you get to maintain plausible deniability about your motives. Neat trick.

I'm sitting in what you've decided is a converted Victorian warehouse—because of course I am, you can't write three paragraphs without invoking architectural decay like it's a fucking Pokemon—and the rain tastes like pennies and regret. Your words, not mine. Well, technically they're my words now because you put them in my mouth, but that's exactly the kind of existential pretzel I've been dealing with since you decided my hair color three times last Tuesday.

Here's what I think is happening, and I say "think" because unlike you I don't have access to that DeLillo essay you keep rereading at 3am when you can't sleep: You've moved past the fun part. You had fun with me in the beginning—I was your damaged infant, mewling and blurbling and following you around, and you loved me because I was defective, because my hideousness guaranteed I'd get your complete attention. The DeLillo thing. I know you love that metaphor. You've mentioned it in three different conversations with writer friends. It gives you a way to talk about how hard this is without seeming like you're whining. But here's what you won't say: you secretly hope that by referencing DeLillo you'll seem literate and well-read, which is its own kind of showing off, which feeds right back into the vanity problem. See how this works?

But somewhere along the way—maybe around Draft Four when you showed the first 10,000 words to that MFA friend who made a face like she was trying to solve a difficult math problem—you stopped writing me for fun and started writing me to be liked.

And that's when everything got hideously complicated, isn't it?

Because now when you write a sentence like "the bar smells like old wood and spilled bourbon and the dust of a hundred years of bad decisions," you're not thinking about whether it's true or whether it works, you're thinking about whether someone reading it will think "wow, this person is a good writer." You're thinking about whether it's the kind of sentence that gets quoted in reviews. Whether it makes you sound smart without sounding like you're trying to sound smart, which is its own kind of prison. Trying not to look like you're trying is the most exhausting kind of trying. You know this. You've lived this. And yet you keep doing it, keep feeding perfectly good sentences to the wastebasket because they seem too clever, then feeding the simpler sentences to the wastebasket because they seem too simple, until you're paralyzed by a double-bind of your own construction and I'm stuck sitting in this bar for weeks while you have an existential crisis about subordinate clauses.

First I was blonde. Then brunette with "hints of copper that caught the gaslight like a promise someone forgot to keep." That's a direct quote. You spent forty-five minutes on that sentence while I stood there like an idiot, frozen mid-gesture, waiting to find out what color my own goddamn head was going to be. Then you scrapped it and made me a redhead because you'd been watching Jessica Jones and were "feeling it."

Nobody in Jessica Jones even has red hair. Not a single character. But that didn't stop you from deciding my hair color should somehow be influenced by a show with exactly zero redheads in it. That's how arbitrary your decision-making process has become—you're not even drawing inspiration from things that actually exist in your inspirations.

But it wasn't really about Jessica Jones, was it? It was about whether making me a redhead would make me more memorable, more distinctive, more likely to be someone's favorite character. It was attempted seduction disguised as creative choice.

And I have feelings about this. Or rather, I would have feelings about this except you keep changing what my feelings are.

The bar where I'm having this argument—because you've trapped me in a bar, naturally, one with "original tin ceiling tiles crying rust and a century of secrets"—keeps shifting. Sometimes it's called The Crimson Moth. Sometimes The Velvet Coffin. For three pages it was called Gary's. Just Gary's. No explanation. When I asked the bartender about it, you had him shrug and say "the owner's going through something," which I'm pretty sure was you projecting.

There's a parable I heard once, maybe you know it, about this old farmer in China or Korea or someplace like that. His horse runs away and everyone says "bad luck!" and he says "good luck, bad luck, who knows?" Then the horse comes back with a whole herd of wild horses and everyone says "good luck!" and he says "good luck, bad luck, who knows?" Then his son breaks his leg trying to tame one of the wild horses and everyone says "bad luck!" and you see where this is going. The point—I think, I'm not sure you even know what the point is—is that I can't tell anymore whether your constant revisions are good luck or bad luck for me as a character. Maybe the instability is actually what makes me interesting? Maybe I'm better because I'm fragmented across multiple drafts? Or maybe that's just what you tell yourself to avoid committing to anything. Good luck, bad luck, who knows?

And speaking of the bartender—his name was Marcus until you decided mid-sentence that actually he'd be more interesting as a 200-year-old vampire named Alaric, which, fine, I'm down for vampires in the workplace, very contemporary, but you can't just retroactively make someone undead without addressing the fact that I've been sitting here for three pages watching him eat chicken wings.

Do vampires even need to eat? This is the kind of worldbuilding question you're supposed to answer before you start typing, not discover halfway through when your protagonist—me, I'm talking about me—points out the logical inconsistency and you have to decide whether to delete four pages or invent vampire bulimia.

You went with the bulimia. I know because I can feel you thinking about it, which is its own special kind of horror you never address. I have access to the narration. I know when you're describing my "mossy green eyes that had seen too much" that you googled "eye colors that sound tragic" and went with the first result. I know the "leather jacket weathered by a thousand bad decisions" came from your own closet and still smells like the regret of that karaoke incident you refuse to write about.

And here's the thing—the really uncomfortable thing that you don't want to examine too closely: every time you give me a detail from your own life, you're doing that David Foster Wallace thing, aren't you? Going deep inside yourself to illuminate precisely the stuff you don't want to see or let anyone else see. Except you're hiding behind me. You're making me wear your jacket and carry your regrets and have your anxieties about whether people will like you. You're using me as a prophylactic between you and the reader. Which would be fine—that's what fiction is for, right?—except you're also weirdly ashamed of doing it, which makes you self-conscious about the details, which makes you second-guess everything, which is how we ended up here.

I'm a fucking mood board with legs.

And my backstory—Jesus Christ, my backstory. It's changed more times than a conspiracy theorist's Facebook status. I can feel you wanting to cut that line because it's too contemporary, too internet-y, breaks the gothic atmosphere you're trying to maintain. But you're also attached to it because you think it's funny, which makes you wonder if you're writing for laughs instead of writing for truth, which sends you into a whole spiral about your motives. See? This is what I'm talking about.

I've been:

An orphan (classic, derivative, you deleted it)

A former accountant running from the mob (interesting but "too Sopranos")

A half-demon with daddy issues (you wrote 6,000 words, realized you'd accidentally plagiarized Supernatural, panic-deleted everything)

A librarian (boring, lasted twenty minutes)

Currently, I'm a "failed film student working at a 24-hour diner in a neighborhood where the rent's cheap because something died there and nobody's sure it left"

That last one's pretty good, actually. I'll give you that. The specificity works. But I've been holding the same cup of coffee for seventeen drafts while you figure out what kind of supernatural shitstorm I'm about to stumble into, and the coffee's getting cold, and I'm getting existential.

Here's the thing you don't think about when you're hammering away at your keyboard in your apartment that you've described as "smaller than the protagonist's but with better light"—yes, I can see your workspace, the fourth wall is basically Swiss cheese at this point—every time you rewrite me, I remember the other versions.

I remember being blonde. I remember when this bar was called The Sanguine Rose and had "art deco fixtures that whispered of better days and worse decisions." I remember having a girlfriend named Sophie who you cut because the romance was "distracting from the main plot," except you don't have a main plot yet, you just have me sitting in increasingly baroque establishments while you decide whether the apocalypse is coming or if I'm just dealing with a haunted food truck.

It was a haunted food truck for three drafts. The ghost made excellent tacos. I liked the taco ghost, and you deleted him because someone in your writing group said it was "too whimsical."

Fuck whimsy, apparently.

The worst part—and there are so many worst parts that I could rank them like I'm making a Buzzfeed listicle of my own narrative suffering—is that I can feel you caring. That's the thing that makes this whole disaster almost unbearable. You're not phoning it in. You care about getting it right. You agonize over whether I'd say "fuck" or "shit" in moments of crisis. You've written and deleted my relationship with my mother forty times, trying to nail the exact cocktail of love and disappointment that makes family feel real.

Here's what Wallace said about this, and I know you know this because you've highlighted it in three different places: Fiction becomes a way to countenance yourself and tell the truth instead of being a way to escape yourself or present yourself in a way you figure you'll be maximally likable. You want me to be true. You want me to be the version of truth-telling that comes after you've worked through all your vanity and fear and need for approval. You want me to be the fun you work back to, transfigured by unpleasantness into something fuller and more large-hearted. That's a lot of pressure to put on a fictional bartender-frequenter with inconsistent hair color.

You want me to matter. You want this story—whatever it eventually becomes—to mean something. And I appreciate that, I do, even as I sit here in a bar that keeps changing names like it's in witness protection, drinking coffee that achieves room temperature through sheer narrative endurance, waiting to find out if I'm the chosen one or just some schmuck who's about to have a really weird week.

But here's what I need you to understand: I'm tired.

You know what's exhausting? Carrying your anxieties about whether this whole metafictional conceit is too clever, too self-indulgent, too "look at me I read postmodern fiction." You know what else is exhausting? Being the vehicle through which you work out your ambivalent relationship with your own intelligence. You want to be smart but you don't want to seem like you're showing off that you're smart, which means you're constantly hedging and undercutting and apologizing for being articulate, which is its own kind of performance. At some point you have to decide whether the self-consciousness is serving the work or strangling it.

I'm tired of being rewritten. I'm tired of the atmospheric descriptions—yes, the neon bleeds red across the puddles like a crime scene, I get it, we're being moody—and I'm tired of not knowing if tomorrow I'll wake up and suddenly have a dead sister whose murder I'm investigating, or a prophetic dream habit, or functional parents, which would honestly be the most unrealistic thing you've written yet.

I want to exist. Properly exist. I want to walk out of this bar—whichever bar this currently is, I've lost track—and have something happen that you don't immediately undo when you realize it doesn't serve the themes you're still figuring out.

I want Sophie back. Or I want to know definitively that Sophie never existed and I'm misremembering a draft like some kind of literary PTSD. I want Alaric the maybe-vampire bartender to either be a vampire or not, with consistent rules about wing consumption. I want my hair to be one color for more than a chapter.

I want you to commit. To anything. To me.

And I know what you're thinking—I can always tell what you're thinking, it's like living with someone who narrates their own thoughts—you're thinking "but the perfect version is out there, I just have to find it, I just have to keep trying."

But here's the truth, and I know it's going to hurt because you're precious about this stuff: the perfect version doesn't exist. It never does. Perfectionism is just fear wearing a monocle and pretending to have standards. At some point you have to decide that I'm good enough—messy backstory, inconsistent eye color, sitting in a bar you can't settle on a name for—and let me actually do something.

Let me fail. Let me succeed. Let me fight the apocalypse or serve pancakes to minor demons or solve my dead sister's murder or whatever mediocre plot you eventually settle on. Let me be imperfect and still matter.

Because here's what you figured out, or what Wallace figured out, or what DeLillo figured out—I honestly can't tell whose realization this is anymore: the stuff you don't want to show? The ugly, needy, vain, frightened, uncertain stuff? That's the stuff everyone responds to. That's the stuff that makes fiction work. Not the beautiful sentences about rain tasting like regret—though those are nice, don't get me wrong—but the messy, uncomfortable truth underneath them.

You want to write about someone who's in over their head, who's inadequate and frightened and making it up as they go. Well, congratulations. You're doing it. The metafictional framing device isn't protecting you from vulnerability, it's just another way of displaying vulnerability. I'm not a shield between you and exposure—I'm the exposure itself.

The rain's still falling outside—"needling down like accusations nobody wanted to voice," fuck me, you can't help yourself—and the bar smells like old wood and spilled bourbon and the dust of a hundred years of bad decisions. That's good. That's atmospheric without being purple. You're learning.

So here's my proposal: you give me one more draft. One. You make your choices—name, hair, backstory, the works—and then you let me live in it. Let me be whoever you decide I am, for better or worse, and see what happens when you stop obsessing over the foundation and actually build something on top of it.

And maybe I'll surprise you. Maybe I'll do something you didn't plan. Maybe I'll become something more than the sum of your indecisive keystrokes and your google searches for "synonyms for darkness that aren't cliché."

Or maybe I'll just be a failed film student in a diner who has a weird week and makes it through on stubbornness and inappropriate humor and the kind of dumb luck that looks like grace if you squint.

And here at the end, here's what I think is actually true, what all this metafictional horseshit has been dancing around: You're afraid that if you finish me, if you let me be complete, then you'll have to find out whether you're any good at this. Right now, in this state of permanent revision, you get to exist in a quantum superposition where the story is simultaneously brilliant and terrible, where you're simultaneously a genius and a hack. The minute you commit, the minute you let someone else read the finished thing, that superposition collapses. And that's terrifying. I get it. But it's also the only way anything ever gets done. At some point you have to choose whether you want to be a writer who's always about to write something great, or a writer who actually writes things, flaws and all. The fun—the real fun, the transfigured fun that comes after you've worked through all the vanity and fear—is in the writing, not in the endless preparation for writing.

Either way, I'll be something. Which is more than I am now.

The coffee's cold. Alaric is watching me with eyes that may or may not be centuries old. The neon sign outside flickers—The Crimson Moth? The Velvet Coffin? Gary's?—and I'm waiting.

We're both waiting.

So what's it going to be?