Thisbe Wu
I want to write the novel that ties up all the ends that have ever been loose. The story that makes my own trajectory clear, that gives meaning to the years I’ve sat around anxious, lethargic, waiting for answers—that affirms, declares me a human being, materialises the most scattered parts of my idea-centric mind into something you can hold and love and know. But I don’t know what free indirect discourse is, so I’m taking a short story writing class.
Over the course of a semester, the class asks its students to write a single story and revise it twice. It is taught by a Pulitzer-Prize winner who mumbles his guidance. Under ruffling leaves and the heat of the sun, the wind drowns out his words: “There will always be a gap between the greatness we can imagine and the approximation we can write down. This is only the beginning.”
This column is about the process of writing my story: the false starts, the revisions, the manufactured ends.
This essay is about my first draft.
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Randomly assigned to the last workshop group, I had five weeks to write my story. I was excited to get started–to sit down, play with words, and prove to myself that I could make something– but exactly what I was starting, I wasn’t so sure. As much as I try to be concerned with meaning and value, the joy I take from writing largely comes from twisting language and controlling time, from captivating the reader with a single move, from tools like a dash, a long dash — which brings everything to a stop.
I’d been toying with an idea for a story where, on the night before his wedding, a nameless boozed-up middle-aged man stumbles through the streets of Johannesburg and falls asleep outside the home of Nelson Mandela. When he awakens, Mandela is dead and, through a morning special, the national news has turned our protagonist into the face of a decaying South Africa. My inclination to write this was less about exploring themes of projection, national instability, love and dependency, and more about my wanting to write a page long sentence that captured what it was like to trudge through a city your incapacity altered by the footstep; what it was like to be carried by the sounds of the night with nothing but tension in your body and a beer can in your hand; what it would feel like to take that final fall towards greener grass that wasn’t cut for you– before the thud, the thud, the thud and the spill and the aftermath.
I considered writing about an accident lawyer who died while driving under one of his own billboard ads. The story would have followed his wife as she planned the funeral. Again, less about faith, mourning, death and chance, and more about writing a scene in which the late lawyer’s commercial played on TV, a scene that ended: “There was war in Iraq; The Wire was on— it was time to change the channel.”
On the weekend before the Thursday my story was due, I had nothing but considerations. I’d wasted four weeks thinking about writing and very little time actually doing it. Sunday came, and I decided that the only way to get something done was to find a subject close to my heart, drag it to a desk, and throw it onto the page. If I continued to think about possible sentences and exciting rhythms, I’d be paralyzed by possibility, a writer who never wrote. So walking to Book Trader, a local cafe, I decided to resign myself to The Idea and give myself to Chance.
What followed felt like fiction:
Stumbling through the rain on my way to Book Trader, I was stopped by Helen as she rushed from her dorm. Dressed in black (raincoat, jeans, boots— no umbrella), she said that she was going to New York, that she’d accidentally bought an extra ticket, that I was welcome to come, but the uber was leaving now, right now.
On the train to Grand Central, reading Sheila Heti’s Motherhood, I came across the line: “It wasn’t a matter of choosing one life over another, but being sensitive to the life that wants to be lived through you.” In the margins, I noted, “So much fate in my life today. I ought to do something with it.”
At Grand Central we took the L train. Coming out of the Subway, we ran into the rain, Helen with her black hooded jacket, I without anything at all. We came round a corner, and the first person I saw was an old friend I knew for a short time many years ago. He wore silver steampunk sunglasses with neon blue lenses that glistened with raindrops. He was studying in “The City,” now; he’d found himself a home. He was making short films and meeting C-list celebrities. He didn’t know, but in that moment, he reminded me that I had a past, that I was a product of a long line of people who had stood in the rain.
Helen and I spent the rest of the day working in coffee shops and looking for stable Wifi. She went thrifting for a bit. I ate a flaky cinnamon roll, falling deeper into Motherhood. At 6, we got on the Metro North. At 9, we got back to campus. Helen, whom I’ve come to know believes in no god save diligence itself, went to church, the way she always does. I, who’d come to feel that the world was at my fingertips, retired to my room without writing a word.
The structure was there, and that was what mattered; the ideas were inside of me. I went to bed that night with fate on the mind, ready to put it to the page when I must.