How the beloved memory of dead pets can guide the writing process ‹ Literary Hub

The last time it happened, I was driving home from my mother-in-law’s house with the family and saw a large animal with its legs up on the side of the road. Something about the corpse, frozen in the form of a final act like the statue of a Greek myth, triggered a deep feeling of sadness at all the pain that exists around us every moment, the kind of suffering that most of us struggle against are powerless. I once read that for the purest definition of compassion you have to imagine a parent with no arms or legs whose child is drowning.

I didn’t tell my wife or daughter about the dead deer. I just kept driving. Then, as it often does, my head began to buzz and I was flooded with the story’s most vivid details: characters, setting, and even a final scene to think back on. Not everything, but enough to get started. For me, this is how every book and every story begins. There used to be a boy sitting outside a casino in Las Vegas wearing only one sock; a visually impaired woman in a department store on Long Island Feeling the items on the shelf.

I don’t choose what I write; I am chosen. And writing is not something I particularly want to do or am particularly excited about. It’s not a hobby, but a coping mechanism for the emotional chaos of our world that I find difficult to reconcile without telling stories.

As language began to become a means to an end rather than an end in itself, a feeling of decline took hold.

I knew from experience that I would have about five days to sit down at the typewriter and turn the little flame of the dead deer into the fire of my next story. That is, if I didn’t want the story to choose anyone else.

Back in late 2021 when I started what would become the book Sipsworth(my tenth work of fiction), I wanted to try something different, to break away from my usual process and take control of the narrative instead of being guided by something external, like the dead deer or the boy with a sock.

Nabokov railed against a comment by EM Forster that characters would take over the writing of a novel, referring to his characters as “galley slaves.” It’s a disturbing image, of course, and I should have stayed away from it, but the core idea of controlling each fictional character from start to finish was enticing. Imagine not having the fear to force yourself to write even though you only have a vague idea of what will happen. I could save myself the sweat of dozens of pages being thrown away because they end up slowing the pace and not serving the plot.

I could sit with Earl Gray at Le Crocodile, a hotel cafe near my apartment, and plan the entire book, chapter by chapter, scene by scene. Nothing would be left to chance. How could there be flaws in a carefully planned story arc?

My GodI imagine, This could be a bestseller! If the entire story were planned in advance, why not introduce trending themes, elements that ensure the success of commercial novels? If I pushed through all the resistance and just wrote the thing, I could cry later and watch my friends and family shoot into the pool at our new cottage in the Hamptons.

Of course, as you may already know, I thought I was at the gates of heaven, but in fact I was on my way there.

Pretty soon into my “new process,” I realized that I wasn’t so much writing as I was impersonating a writer named Simon Van Booy.

What I wrote didn’t become my next novel; Instead, it was the worst writing of my career.

If you have enough experience as a writer, this type of writing that I tried is possible. But sitting down to work is a terrible experience day after day. Like trying to make the most delicious meal when you’re not hungry. As language began to become a means to an end rather than an end in itself, a feeling of doom took hold – everything I typed brought my project closer and closer to the iceberg.

When you tell the right story, there is a kind of excitement, a strong sense of agency and obsession.

Enter Sipsworth, my pet mouse. Or rather, leave Sipsworth.

The poor guy who sometimes fell asleep on my desk while I worked had been sick and suffering for months, so I took a few days off from “writing” to consult with the vet and look through the many mouse books I had had. have accumulated. In the end, I know what I had to do, which didn’t make acceptance any easier. We made a final appointment at the vet, where Sipsworth and I had one last play session, one last peanut, one last cuddle in a treatment room with Ikea chairs and the faint smell of bleach.

In the moments before his death, Sipsworth lay curled up in my hand. I think he was grateful to be freed from the pain of his tumor because he ground his teeth in a way he had done as a young mouse when he felt like it.

The vet placed Sipsworth’s body in a small box with some tiny flowers. He looked like he was resting. We closed the box for the first and last time and then drove back to our apartment to dismantle Sipsworth’s house and put away his toys forever.

A few days later I was back at my desk impersonating myself when Sipsworth showed up. I couldn’t believe it, but there it was at the end of a paragraph where the main character (according to my plot outline) was supposed to fall down a flight of stairs, but had stopped at the moment before tripping because she was lying under a box on the other On the side of Rue Lepic, someone very small was staring at her intently.

There was no mistake. The soft gray body. Pink paws. Mona Lisa smiles. It was Sipsworth. And just like that, I returned to my usual writing process—as if I were catching a wave that had suddenly appeared, big enough to ride whatever this new book would become.

A few weeks later, the old plot outline was completely unnecessary. I think the only thing I kept was someone shouting out a window in chapter three. I wasn’t upset because when you tell the right story there’s a kind of excitement, a strong sense of agency and obsession and a fierce determination to finish the story before you let the editor version of yourself take over the role of the artist takes over. even too early.

The confidence of allowing my beloved dead mouse to take over the novel that now bears his name is one of the reasons I like to call myself writerand not just someone who writes.

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