The very first short story I finished after leaving my job to “become a writer” was about a young father whose daughter becomes obsessed with a present he’s gotten her, a virtual reality best friend. The dad becomes obsessed with the knowledge the virtual friend is learning and logging from his daughter and her environment.
Despite what I felt was an interesting premise, the story failed to come together in any way that satisfied me. I’d set out to write about the ways that technology is diving generations — wondering, what kinds of things will our future kids play with that we won’t understand?, landing on VR, which is something that had already made me feel old and alienated, when it became the cool thing to work on among my friends and colleagues while completely failing to interest me. I ended up writing about this dad’s lack of compassion and his pathetic confusion about technology. Because I have never been friends with or even I think known a young divorced dad (to up the stakes and eliminate the number of characters I had to deal with, I made him divorced), I guessed that he would be feeling mean-spirited towards his ex-wife and jealous of her new boyfriend. Because I haven’t spent much time around children, the daughter was always either saying something cute or throwing a tantrum. I had no idea how to describe her interactions with the virtual friend — the very generational gap that I was trying to write about — because virtual reality interested me so little that I didn’t even have the willpower to research how this might work.
Finishing the story felt like finishing a sports game that you know you are going to lose. I pushed the dad towards some kind of epiphany…he cuddled his daughter and removed the virtual reality glasses from her room. “Main character is not likable,” I wrote in my notes. “Look into how VR actually works.” It took me a few more months, a few more failed story attempts, to realize that I’d rigged the game against myself from the start.
Next, I wrote a story about another put-upon man, a software engineer whose team is responsible for a bug that caused a fatal self-driving vehicle crash. This idea was taken from the headlines. I’d come up with a great title: “Post-mortem,” the name of the document we had to write whenever something went terribly wrong on a product at work, only in my story, it obviously also referred to the real death that had happened. The death — that was the problem. I thought I needed to write about something dramatic and important, to discuss tech companies’ great power and responsibility, but I had no idea how to actually deal with the death in a way that felt realistic. My main character’s tears felt insincere; his manager’s whip-cracking did, too.
I tried to picture my former tech leads in the main character’s situation, struggling to find and fix the bug. But I could only recall the ways they acted around me in (less) stressful situations — what happened between them and their monitors had been, mostly, a mystery. And so it remained in my story. My character banged his head on the keys and the code went blurry in front of his eyes, and so on. As the story meandered, sometimes into truthful situations full of details I remembered from office life, I finally had a mysterious stranger come and fix the bug for everyone, and my main character took a new job. I could feel it; another defeat.
I talked about my dissatisfaction with my life coach, who was helping me achieve the life goal I murkily and emotionally announced during our initial conversation: “to create something I was proud of.” She encouraged me to celebrate finishing stories, to show my writing to others, and above all to call myself a writer, something she dubbed “acting as if.” But I wasn’t a writer. Not yet. Would someone call themselves a painter, if they set out to paint a scene realistically, and then the trees came out blobby and the perspective was all wrong? “How will you know when you’re ready?” she asked me; or, of the work, “How will you know when it’s ready?” I was frustrated with the implication that I was being difficult to please, that if I couldn’t be satisfied with my progress so far, I might never be satisfied. I knew that if I wrote a good enough story, I would recognize it, the same way that as a beginning baker, I still recognized a decent loaf of bread from a flat and dense mess that had to be thrown away. “I’ll know when I know,” I said. “I’ll know when I feel like it’s right.”
I was journaling the whole time, getting to know the small voice inside my head, the voice of a young woman. A few of the books I was reading had encouraged me to write about memories, and though I was convinced I’d had a very uninteresting life, I found myself crying as I wrote about walking down to the beach with my family, or my grandmother hanging a fresh-flower lei around my neck at her house in Hawaii. Then, I wrote a speech for my grandfather’s memorial service in April — my first real writing assignment. Just talk about some memories, my mom said, and though at first I worried I wouldn’t have enough, as I sat down and focused, memories of him came flooding back, and of how I had felt as a girl.
The next time I sat down to write a story, I wrote about a young woman, sitting for a tech interview — and quickly her interior thoughts went from skin problems to getting sucked into Wikipedia browsing to riding the bus to outdoor education camp in sixth grade. There was so much emotion as she thought about that time — the excitement of being away from home amid the smell of the pines, how sad she’d been that it didn’t snow, the odd girl she’d been trying to distance herself from that year, but who ended up sharing a cabin with her anyway. What happened between them? I wasn’t sure, but I felt it was something uncomfortable, embarrassing, and confusing. Because of course something like this had happened to me. We were far from the interview now. I was writing a new story, my first true story.
In this story about camp, all the details were deeply felt, and I raced towards the ending with a sense that the truth could win. When I finished, I wasn’t sure if I had a victory or not; I thought some of the character’s choices weren’t fully explained, as if in reaching so far back, I had dropped a few essential pieces and needed to go looking for them again. The story simultaneously contained too many true things and not enough, ending up a kind of muddled reflection in which one could barely see the outline of the plot and the meaning. But for the first time, I made it to the finish line with an exhausted feeling of pride. Looking back, my speech for my grandfather was the first thing I was proud of — the real completion of my goal. But this was the first piece of fiction I was proud of, which had been my real goal.
Or was it fiction? I was afraid, as I wrote, that I was cheating by using so many things that weren’t made up. But this was also exciting, as if I was doing something illegal, seeing what I could get away with. I started another story, pulled directly from my recollection of being almost kidnapped while on a work trip in Shanghai, which I’d written in my journal months back in lieu of posting a #MeToo publicly. My last story had been based on memories of being 12; in this story, I was remembering being 22. It was much easier to remember how I’d felt and acted, but the emotions were duller, perhaps the result of too much drinking or my immature capacity for empathy. I was also creating characters from fragments of former coworkers, some of whom, unlike my elementary school classmates, I still occasionally saw and talked to. My first draft was too realistic, just because that was the only way I knew how to get it down — then I took out the details that didn’t serve the story, and merged and distorted the characters until they became new people, unattached to the real world.
This story, after several drafts, finally felt right to me — it was accurately saying something I wanted to say, something I cared about. I hadn’t known what I wanted to say when I set out to write the story — unlike in my first attempts — only that there were some emotions back in Shanghai, some unfinished business like in my story about camp, that asked me to dig deeper. And in the end the truth seemed to emerge out of getting those details and those feelings as right as I could make them. I was happy and invigorated, but confused. Sure, I had made up some things; if you figured that all memories and perspectives are “made up,” I had made up everything. But this didn’t feel like fiction to me — the way I had written stories in college from the point of view of a poor woman in Costa Rica or an artist’s muse, neither of whom I knew anything about, neither of whom I could even picture in my mind’s eye.
When I learn a new way of doing things, my first feeling is always skepticism. There’s always something foolish and ridiculous about myself, trying something so out of character. There’s often something just too obvious about this new way. In this case, I was learning to “write what you know,” which meant exactly that, and which must be the oldest piece of writing advice. I’d been resisting it for so long, justified by the fact that so many books or interviews had told me it was wrong and limiting — everyone is allowed to write about anything, and this rule can be followed too strictly, used as a way to play it safe.
But for me, writing what I knew was my artistic risk. For one thing, it involved getting a close look at myself, which I hadn’t done perhaps ever. For another, I was sure that what I’d written would reflect badly on me, and possibly hurt other people — as I started writing blog posts that were sort of about my parents, or as I handed my fiancé, my first reader, that Shanghai story, in which the main character dances dirty in a club and has a crush on an obnoxious guy.
“Just please don’t think that it’s about me,” I told him, unable to be in the same room as he read, and unable to sit still, either, scribbling in my journal. When he came over, he reassured me that was easy to think of the protagonist as someone else. Affection in his eyes told me that this pretends mattered much more to me than it mattered to him. He wasn’t mad. He liked the story.
I submitted this story to a few writing contests. As I wrote more and more truthfully, with that same fear I continue to force myself to reframe as a thrill, I gushed to my coach about my epiphany. “Acting as if,” had, in fact, been a necessary step — I had to just type every day, I had to finish a few bad stories, to figure out how to do things better. But acting as if, I was excited to report, was really no substitute for being.