Why We Write Fiction?
Barefoot Women
I’ve only met Vicky in person once. She was short, carried two cups of coffee to me, and said hi, immediately explaining that this wasn’t her usual behavior: meeting a classmate offline. I’d only known her for a month in our Louise Erdrich reading class. On screen, she was usually in a grey jersey, her background blurred, the light slightly tinted. She always commented with gusto, holding her mic close to her mouth, defending the characters in the stories, insisting on how truly kind they were. She’d lift her glasses to stress a point.
I used to think, Ah, it’s Vicky’s show. She could always spot a literary device on her first read, a stereotype I deepened when I learned she was a full-time English teacher. Then she invited me to a writing workshop, facilitated by four of our classmates, people I barely knew beyond fleeting comments.
It was a two-and-a-half-hour workshop. The four of us, all in the midst of preparing for or attending MFA programs, put on our professional editor hats. We judged pieces with phrases like “characters too flat” and “false emotional leads” or “not enough expositions”. At the end, Vicky’s voice carried a shriveled pain as she shared her truth: “Guys, I wrote this piece in a day. It’s the only time I get to write.”
I learned the other side of Vicky’s life: she’s about to start her own agency, supports a five-year-old, and working on weekends is her norm. She explained how hard it is to switch hats from full-time worker to writer. “I don’t have enough time to inhabit the characters in the story,” she murmured, almost crying. “I just don’t have enough time.”
I remembered that first time we met, at a children’s book fair. I asked why she hadn’t brought her kid. She said she doesn’t multi-task; visiting a friend and bringing her son along are two separate things. She only gives him one-on-one quality time. I thought her boy was lucky to have her as his mom.
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At the Tin House workshop I attended this fall, a writer spoke about how difficult it was to leave her kid to write her book at a retreat. In fact, that was the only time she could focus. She would focus on her work, then return to be the mom her kid needed. Then the program director, A.L. who could always break a silence with a genuine laugh, commented: “That’s good role modeling for your kid, to see Mom doing what she loves.”
Stories about sacrifice poured in. One writer said his wife took over all household duties while he wrote his book and went on tour, and that he’d do the same for her. Another dropped his PhD to write. Another fought with her depression. I’d like to think that in every fully-fledged fictional world, there is always a warrior—the author—who fought all kinds of obstacles to make that world live, to bring it a bit closer to how it first rushed into their mind.
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This is the first year I decided to drop almost every responsibility to write. To read and write, to be more specific, because writers may not learn to write from writing, but from reading. At least, that’s what my literature mentor told me.
As my bank account ticks away, I spent the year first greeting old friends on the dusty shelves: Olive Kitteridge, the retired woman from Maine who liked to throw cold truths at people, and Bob Burgess, also from Maine, known as a sin-eater absorbing others’ sorrows. Both characters came from the universe created by Elizabeth Strout, the Pulitzer winner who spent a lot of time understanding nursing homes and our relationship with aging.
After finishing her books, I did a bit of treasure hunting, tracking down her inspiration, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, which have characters desperate to run away from their small town, only to be eased back by fate. My mind sought comfort, tracking back to a time when I lived in Iowa, sitting with high school friends around a bonfire, telling dark tales of the town. Secrets, they said. They grew up walking barefoot on the grass, drawing obscure graphs with sticks, while coyotes howled nearby. It all felt like it happened in a past life.
I’d like to think the urge to write comes from our relationship with time. Perhaps we suddenly feel the clock ticking down, that we don’t have much time left on this earth, so we scribble as fast as we can to capture the memories important to us, but we do it wearing our characters’ clothes and routines, crying, yelling, and running to absurd places that make perfect sense to us.
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I have a friend who writes to survive. She said she has two personalities, and before she quit her full-time job, she suppressed her “B-side” so much that she had no choice but to let it out. Writing was the only way. At her mid-40s, she packed up, moved out of her city apartment, and went to live with her parents. She did nothing for the first seven months, mostly doom-scrolling and watching tennis matches.
Then she thought she might be ready to write. She wrote long, invasive, curvy letters filled with sentences that only made sense to her, like a person writing her dreams down to enter them again. An access point for her B-side. She wrote from midnight until 4 or 5 a.m., rinse and repeat. She mostly maintains this schedule to this day.
When we walked along the riverside by her home, sitting on the grass to watch the sun fall, I asked her to breathe the moment in. But her mind was elsewhere, consumed by her MFA application deadlines. A few months later, she made it. She flew to London to start her year-long program. She didn’t believe her classmates’ compliments until she wrote a story that made them all feel claustrophobic. Her words shift minds, but she still writes in an explosive style, letting everything settle until midnight and then writing until dawn, much like a tennis player waiting to strike. By the end of the year, she had finished the first two chapters of her novel. She posted on Instagram that it was the hardest thing she had ever done and that she was proud.
In her story, the characters went to the deep end with a therapist, interrogating what was wrong with her and why life was so hard. She attached a theorist’s character assessment questionnaire as part of the chapter. She was writing and rewriting her life.
She has permanent dark circles and throws whatever’s in the fridge into a rice cooker and calls it a meal. Every time she says she’ll be “normal,” she juxtaposes it with another all-nighter of doom-scrolling, unsure if it’s her B-side calling. Her savings are almost gone, but she recently got a bunch of referral money from a gig and said she can “legitimately lay down for a while” without worrying about feeding her expensive poodle, a metaphor for her writing career.
Choosing to be a full-time writer means you have to endure a lot of shit; it can seem indulgent, selfish, prideful, and privileged. But I have a rosy filter toward writers, especially toward my writer friends. I’d like to think I love them as passionately as I love my characters.
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In Vicky’s story, a story we all thought was so sad, a girl employed at her married lover’s cafe, living under his roof, has just had an abortion. Vicky disagreed with our assessment. She argued that the girl’s decision to leave everything behind was a new beginning.
To quote a line from her story: “Sometimes I wonder how far a barefoot woman can go. Where she can go without other people’s shoes.”