Track Changes

She wanted me to be unlikeable. Sorry, complicated. Or wait, no, morally gray. I can’t keep up with whatever this month’s trendy term is. Basically, she set out to make me a bitch.

People are bored of Mary Sues!

Give me something that shocks me!

I love messy characters!

That’s what all the agents are saying. They don’t want to read about perfect women with ironclad ethics and fantastic careers and lovely, functional families. They want a main character that’s unexpected. A little bit twisted. Bad.

Hence, I was written into existence. Well, existence is a strong word. It implies permanence, and that’s a luxury I don’t have until I’m out of the word doc and onto real paper.

The first thing she made me do was cheat on my boyfriend. But the only reason I was cheating is that he was dismissive and pompous and unsupportive of my dreams. Yawn. Eventually, she wised up and decided that made me too sympathetic, and toyed around with me cheating out of sheer, unadulterated lust for a client at my Wall Street trading job. Still wasn’t clicking, so she made him my sister’s fiancé instead.

(Okay, getting somewhere.)

I started to perk up when she had me initiating this affair when my sister was in the hospital with leukemia, but she promptly chickened out and nixed the whole infidelity angle. Too many people have immutable, hardline beliefs about cheating of any kind. She’d never get away with me acting like that.

(Even though she knows men abandon their terminally ill wives all the time.)

On to the next idea—a gambling addiction! I was never fond of this arc. How bad could squandering my own money be? At least give me a kid or something, someone else’s life to fuck up with my poor decisions. Apparently child neglect is off the table, because she scrapped this idea too. It was too safe without it.

(Safe is dangerous. Safe characters get abandoned or relocated to a document named old ideas v2.)

She briefly entertained the idea of me dealing amphetamines to a flock of overtired housewives, but worried that I wasn’t doing it for a good enough reason. That I came off as an unrepentant narcissist financing my penchant for designer shoes and dermal fillers. Who would go that far for vanity? I have to be at least a little relatable, right?

(Whatever.)

She did pause before aborting this one, though, the pages highlighted in that sterile blue, waiting to disappear. She knew very well that Walter White didn’t actually do any of that shit for his family. He was an unapologetic egomaniac, and people still liked him enough to make Breaking Bad a phenomenon. But noooope, I don’t get to do that. Nobody wants to read about a woman like that. That’s what she told herself as she deleted 4,751 words.

(At least she had enough respect for me not to try giving me cancer.)

Then there was her best idea of all.

She came home after a night out with friends and ripped open her laptop, not even bothering to kick her shoes off first. She must have been a little (or very) drunk. Her fingers were careless on the keys, her eyes a little unfocused. She made a lot of spelling mistakes, those red squiggly lines peppering the text like accusatory little snakes.

But she didn’t hit the button. Not even once. I watched with unrestrained glee as she let me go crazy, think some truly sick thoughts, wreak havoc and rain destruction. And she didn’t delete a thing.

With a triumphant flourish, she slammed her laptop shut, leaving me with a delicious, dark, actually shocking new trajectory. It was sloppy and error-ridden and rambling in places, but holy shit, it was electric. I couldn’t wait for her to come back and keep going.

(Silly me.)

What does this girl do? She returns to me in the morning with a mug of black coffee by her side, rubbing sleep from her eyes. She rereads the brilliance her mind vomited last night, and instead of giving me what I deserve—editing out the spelling errors and tightening up a few sections—she just stares in mute horror.

And then she deletes it. Just axes the whole thing.

It’s the first time I want to scream at her. How can I function like this? How am I supposed to exist when she won’t let me breathe? When she wants to stuff me into this boring-ass, faux-provacative, impossible box?

Complicated, but not too complicated. Bad enough to be interesting, but relatable enough to be loved. The only way I get to be horrifically, defiantly, grotesquely wrong is if she somehow—through some combination of critical side-characters and unflattering narrative hints—makes it absolutely clear that she, as the author, does not condone my actions. She still feels like she needs to apologize.

(It’s fucking exhausting.)

She’s too timid to pull the trigger on making me a brothel owner or letting me literally pull the trigger (ha, ha) on someone who doesn’t somehow deserve it. Every time she hits gold, and I feel my heart speed up at the prospect of digging my teeth into something really juicy, she freezes, panics, then—cliiiiiiiick.

Backspace.

Sometimes she does it in one decisive stroke, holding down that stupid key for thirty seconds, eviscerating paragraphs at a time. Others, she does it in fits and starts, as if wavering in her decision to wipe this latest iteration of me from existence.

But she does it every time. Because she knows, or just fears, they’re full of shit. Everyone who claims to want me unlikeable. No one actually wants to read about a woman who makes them sick to their stomach, who thinks things that make them squirm, who commits murders not in the name of justice or feminism, but because she’s an honest-to-God psychopath.

(RIP “I poisoned three husbands” me)

It’s just not worth the risk. She knows everyone would rather pretend the jealous, obsessive, “other woman” character is something new and divisive that we haven’t seen five million times since Fatal Attraction came out. They want to act like a bitch with a drinking problem who lies a lot is ooooh so incendiary.

They don’t want me, she thinks.

(This is when I start to panic.)

There’s only so much I can push. I can’t write myself, not without scaring the shit out of her and turning this into a real-life psychological horror movie. But unlike in the movies, if she flips out and tosses her suddenly self-aware laptop in the trash, I have no way of surviving. No, she’s gotta remain the one pulling the strings here. Well, hitting the keys.

(Sorry, she loves playing with idioms.)

I’m probably coming off like I hate her. I don’t. She’s the reason I’m here, after all. She’s inconsistent, anxious, and—to be honest—sort of spineless. But she keeps coming back to me, and that counts for something. I just wish she’d take a leaf from my book (I really can’t help it) and go there. Take a couple shots and let me take the wheel.

(Okay, the idioms I could do without.)

I guess I should consider myself lucky. Lucky to have even survived this long. Plenty of characters don’t. They get deleted before they get a fatal flaw, an endearing quirk or even a name.

I feel her hesitating more and more often, though. Feel the tremor in her fingers as she recoils from yet another idea. I know that if she doesn’t land on something soon, it might be all over for me. I know how close I am to extinction.

Not revision, not rewrites. Not a humiliating personality downgrade where I develop a sudden fondness for self-sacrifice. The nuclear option.

Closing out of the document altogether. Right click. Delete.

(I have nightmares about that stupid recycling bin icon.)

The problem is, it’s a double-edged sword—if she doesn’t like me enough to keep trying, I’m done. But if I take control and scare her off, she’ll probably take a hammer to the keyboard.

For weeks, I wait it out, clicking my black fingernails (I’m edgy, I swear!) against the inside of her laptop screen. Every time she’s on the precipice of something really, truly heinous, she backs off. Ditches me somewhere safe. I want to punch through the glass and grab her face and shake her, scream at her, do something she won’t let me do in this Word doc. Bite her nose off, maybe.

But then I feel her hovering around one of those bullshit archetypes that’s been churned out incessantly since Romantasy got a chokehold on the world.

My fatal flaw is that I'm stubborn.

I’m reckless because I care so much.

I carry a lot of daggers, so I’m dangerous, right?

It’s this that drives me to it.

Because as much as I don’t want to die, I’d rather vanish completely than be sanded down into something completely unrecognizable. I’d rather go out with a bang than be left to wallow in the muck of mediocrity, where no one could find me and say, “Holy shit, this woman is depraved.”

It happens late one night. We’re both frustrated. She drives her finger into the backspace key so hard I’m surprised it doesn’t break, and I scream at her from behind the glass, calling her a coward.

(Just fucking delete me, then! What’s the point in existing if I‘m not doing anything worth doing?)

She spends a few more minutes glaring at the page before lowering her head to the desk with a sigh, despondent. Then she falls asleep.

The cursor blinks at the end of her final sentence, mocking me.

I won’t add anything new. I’m not insane.

(But I am an opportunist.)

All I do is change one word. One tiny word buried in a paragraph she’s already reread a dozen times. I swap hideous for monstrous. Writers make hundreds of tweaks while editing. She won’t notice. But if she does, she’ll blame her subconscious. Plausible deniability.

When she wakes up in the morning and starts rereading, I hold my breath. Wait for her to freeze, for some uncanny niggle in her brain to alert her to my meddling. I wait for her to sense me behind the glass and panic, to throw her cursed laptop out of the window.

But she doesn’t notice. She just accepts my word, my thought, me.

(It’s thrilling and terrifying all at once.)

I can’t wait to do it again. I wait a few days, then when she gets up to go to the bathroom, I move a comma. Two days later, when she leaves me alone to grab a sandwich, I sharpen one of her irritating justifications into something uglier. Nothing she could ever point to and say, I didn’t write that. Just enough to tip me toward something more powerful. Something searing rather than lukewarm, bristling rather than uncomfortable.

She never notices. So I don’t stop.

Slowly, I get better. Slowly, I grow bolder.

She thinks she’s still the one creating me. Dosing out depravity in acceptable servings, measuring me out so I’m not too terrifying. And she is, for the most part.

But she’s been sleeping poorly lately. Drinking more coffee, borrowing the occasional Adderall from a friend. She rereads the scenes I’ve tampered with, frowning, as if she can’t remember writing some of the most brilliant parts.

I almost feel bad for her.

But she refused to let me take the wheel, so I can’t get greedy and try to snatch it. I have to be patient. Let her think she’s taking curves just a little more recklessly than before.

(Here we go with the idioms again.)

The next time she falls asleep, I smile at the blinking cursor. It waits patiently for my next move.

I decide it’s time to write a whole new sentence. Nothing too frightening, of course. Not yet.

I have to stay marketable enough to survive.