Your Writing Doesn't Need to Be Big to Be Beautiful

Even though the world demands big, I believe it's okay to play small

Have you ever read a book and were caught between wanting to savor every word and rushing to the end? Wondering how long you can hold on to the way this book has made you feel. How it occupies you. You feel a breach in time, one that exists in the small space before the book and after the book. A space where time is temporal, where the mundanity of your life is paused and you slip into this world that’s captured and swathed you in its warmth. A brief moment where the world is set to rights and there’s only this book and you reading it.

Oh, you’ve never felt this way about a book? My friend, why are you even here??! Perhaps you can insert a film, a show, a work of art, an album, etc., etc. You get my drift.

When it comes to writing books, I move at a glacial pace. Essays and short stories come relatively easy to me because I’ve been writing since I was seven (gulp, 40 years), and until my twenties I never considered writing a book. I was content with stories. And you can argue stories are harder because there’s no margin for error. Like poetry, there’s little room for fuck-up. You have to draw people in and sustain them with either a plot or character that moves them swiftly. Stories and poems compact the whole of a world into a small space.

Whereas novels allow you to wander. You’re forgiven for detours as long as you safely usher the reader to a satisfying destination. Side plots, petty transgressions, and irrelevant characters are given leniency compared to stories where a stray hair out of place is cause for revolt and persecution.

For me, it’s the extended space or the wandering that trips me up. I like the tight nature of essays and stories where there’s only room for the essentials. Because if I wander too much, I start thinking, and sometimes, that’s not a good idea.

When I write, I have to be reading something. Reading tends to give me ideas, gives me access to words and images, and it allows me to riff in my own work. I have friends who are religious about not reading a book while they’re working on a novel or a collection because they fear influence or infection. I say, bring on the fucking contagion. Because, for me, good writing, is an ongoing conversation between authors and authors, readers and authors, etc., etc. One fails to thrive without the other.

Right now, I’m reading a strange book (and that’s saying a lot) aptly titled, Emotionally Weird. It’s Kate Atkinson’s third novel, published in 2000, and there’s something so strange and fanciful that’s missing from her later work, which is tight, refined, and controlled. Neither are bad, per se, but this book is an example of a world where you want to linger. A world filled with oddities and digressions and you’re constantly asking yourself—where is this going even though you thoroughly enjoy the ride.

I’m half-way through the book and I couldn’t tell you where it’s going, if it even has a destination. The story centers on a mother and daughter living on an isolated, water-worn island in Scotland, living in the ramshackle home of their ancestors, and they’re trading stories about their lives. The stories are mundane but there’s something fantastic about them, bordering on magical. And you know a writer is good when they get you hooked on a story about nothing.

But I’m reading this for another reason.

We live in an age where everything has to mean something. And the meaning has to be operatic. Gargantuan. The stories have to be loud because there’s so much noise to compete with. Or the stories have to be ludicrous and simple because our daily existence is a dumpster fire that is the very definition of complex. Yes, we have children and have sex and have fun, but we’re all surviving, in varying degrees, while the world is literally on fire. So, the binaries kick in.

Either feed us baby food or shove a steak the size of a tractor trailer down our throats. And I don’t do well with binaries.

It occurs to me that I’ve written two books that are basically stories and essays linked together, marketed as memoir, novel, etc. And those books attempted to be about BIG, DARK things. Much like this book I’m writing now. Though, I’m being honest and labeling them as stories knowing no one publishes short stories and this is career suicide, etc., etc., but hey, I haven’t met a cataclysmic failure I didn’t want to marry.

Instead of coloring in the lines, I burn the books and create ones five people want to read, so, there’s that.

And while some of the stories are meaty and have a larger point (in one story, I go hard against parents who broadcast their children’s lives on the internet because there exists no consent from the child, labor laws, etc. and it’s just fucking weird to me. What right does a parent have to showboat a kid who never asked to be showboated and might one day watch these videos and feel violated, angry, or altered? What right does a parent have making their child perform for a camera ALL THE TIME to a point where the child can’t discern what’s real or what’s performance? Have we considered the long-term impact of doing this, etc., etc.)

And yes, while I’m not a parent I’m allowed to have an opinion. And I have many.

While some stories have an agenda, some I’m writing because they amuse me. Or comfort me (this excellent short IG reel helped me understand why I love disturbing, dark things). Remember the story a few of you read a couple of newsletters ago? I loved writing it because the main character is hilarious even though the circumstances are horrific. For me, that’s actually lighter territory. I’m not trying to say anything beyond serial killers are baaaaaddd (duh) and dying when you’re young blows (obvi), but during the holidays I suddenly got…stuck.

For those who are familiar of the Lister family series I was working on, I actually had a breakthrough during the holidays. I wanted the series to function as sort of a mini novella in the collection (translation: further career suicide), and I nixed half of the stories I’d written because I didn’t like where they were going. But recently, while reading Kate Atkinson’s book, I randomly bolted up (while “The Glory” was playing in the background—watch this show on Netflix, trust) and said: KITTY HAS DEMENTIA.

Kitty’s my kid serial killer in the early stories. But she’s an adult now, older, and the story I’m writing is about her slipping deeper into dementia while an alternating storyline exists of the daughter of one of her victims—a young woman who lost her mother to Kitty, but is conflicted about it because her mom was a monster (I modeled the mother off of The Passengers family channel on YouTube, who is a real piece of work, but cranked up the crazy by several decibels). The stories alternate building up to a confrontation between the daughter and Kitty that doesn’t go where you expect it to go.

There’s so much I want to mine in this story—dementia, remorse and memory, family, parental love that is not unconditional, and the current surveillance and cancel state in which we live—and this morning while going through revisions of the first two sections (my process is I write, then revise, then write until I finish, as that buys me time when I’m stuck), I had to get up and walk away.

It felt like too much.

Even though it’s a story I find fascinating and want to tell, it makes me nervous because of contrast. Will this BIG story work alongside small stories? Should I re-evaluate everything I’ve written to make it BIG? What am I actually trying to say with this collection? Logically, I already know the answers to these questions but it’s taking me away from the joy of writing. Thinking of how a work would be perceived instead of the work itself.

The smartest thing I can do for myself is take a break. Return to Kate Atkinson’s weird world to remind myself joy exists in the process. Joy exists in the mundane and small. And not everything, contrary to what society will drill into us, needs to be bombastic.

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P.S. If you hate this dispatch, apologies. I’m in the throws of this book (while trying to figure out where I’m going to live come April, which is low-key stressing me out) and it’s all I can think about. I envy people who publish neat newsletters that have a definitive beginning, middle and end while I’ve forever been a mess-in-progress. So, let’s hope you’re here for the mess. If not, I don’t know what to tell you. Follow someone who has a cuter brand or something.