Sad Boy Writes A Novel

In which I head to a writer's conference for a novel revision fellowship...

Hi, Y’all! Glad You’re Here—

Tomorrow, I head up to Southampton for a writer’s conference. A few months ago, I was accepted into the Book Ends Novel Revision Fellowship; I’d submitted the manuscript for my latest project, a novel titled 34% Of This Story Is A Lie, a book about a boy who lies about going to Heaven in a dream.. This is the second novel I’ve worked on over this last three years—the last novel was a book about gay marriage and gay divorce (a story that eventually mirrored my own reality). I’d queried that novel for almost a year, with many agents saying that they enjoyed the book, just not enough to represent me. Then, I queried a proposal for an essay collection, titled Sad Boy Attends Book Events, inspired by several of the Sad Boy essays I wrote last year, during one of the most difficult periods in my life—many agents said they enjoyed my voice, but weren’t sure how to market it. But because I never give up, I’ve started again. This novel is based on a short story I wrote almost a decade ago, based on my life…because, what have I written that wasn’t based on my life?

I shared that story in this newsletter before, but I thought it might be fun to share a little more about the process of working on this story over the last decade or so.

I tried writing my first novel when I was nine, a Danielle Steel knock-off, about a woman who ends up with many abusive husbands who she has to run away from—loosely inspired by my Granny’s life. Then, throughout high school, I tried writing books about serial killers and books about fallen angels, a book about rich people who lived up north. I did everything I could to avoid writing about my own lived reality. I had no interest in writing about poor people in the south. I was living it, and I wrote in order to escape.

When I started community college in my hometown, the lit professor offered to read some of my work. He liked hearing stories of my upbringing, found me fascinating, and hoped that my work would reflect this. But it didn’t. I hid my voice, my life, my perspective, behind a mask I’d sculpted based on what I thought good writing was supposed to be. He lent me essay collections and memoirs and novels that he hoped would show me that I could be good, even if I embraced writing about something closer to me. Eventually, he convinced me to write something closer to home.

I wrote about a funny suicide attempt I had at sixteen, I wrote about helping my Momma steal from the gas station, about driving her to the methadone clinic and helping her buy pills from her dealer, a man named Buck. I wrote about being raised as a girl for a year when I was twelve. I wrote about the crush I had on my stepbrother, stories he’d never get to read, since he died before they were finished. Eventually, I decide to write stories that I saw as love letters to my Granny, to show her how grateful I was for the life that she had given me. Which is when I decided to write about going to Heaven in a dream.

The novel as a whole is about my family’s penchant for lying, about how this lie I told spun out of control, about how all the lies we told changed our lives irrevocably. But before it was the novel, back when I was twenty-one and trying to find a voice that was authentic and close to my own, I wrote a draft that started like this:

This isn’t a story about how I went to Heaven, but it started off that way. I’d woken up to a woman on the television interviewing people about the one-year anniversary of 9/11 and how it affected our country. A fireman, snatching the microphone, claimed that 9/11 had been a baptism; he said we’d been washed in the fear of terrorism, and that things would forever be looked at as a before and after. I knew our country had overdosed on fear in the year since the World Trade Center tumbled to the ground, but at nine years old, the gravity of such things hadn’t weighed on me. I was lying in a comfortable bed, covered, like a wound, in white linen sheets, and surrounded by white walls and broken yellow sunlight. I had no idea what before and after looked like.

When that didn’t feel right, I tried this:

It was a new millennium. Jesus had not yet risen and no one was missing due to the rapture, but Granny swore the end times were near. That’s why, when I had a dream about going to Heaven, she took it as a sign from God that she was now the caretaker of a new messiah. We went from house to house, spreading the tale of my dream, expounding on certain events that were a little foggy and probably made up a few weeks after the dream occurred. But none of that mattered as long as Granny had a purpose.

It’s true that 9/11 played a role in when I lied about Heaven, that the lie felt like a dividing mark, a before and after, in the same way 9/11 felt—it was around this time that I first read The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, and if you ever read the entirety of this draft, the influence would be unmistakable. But this wasn’t my voice, wasn’t entirely true. And even though most of this story is about lying, I knew that the lies had to be solely saved for the characters, and that I wasn’t comfortable lying as the narrator.

The next version felt unfair to my Granny. It didn’t capture the nuance of the situation. It was also a fake voice, something that wasn’t quite right.

Eventually, I wrote a new draft, which was the first time I discovered my voice as a writer:

I’ll say I went to Heaven on the one-year anniversary of 9/11 but it was probably another day in September. I know it was close because Granny had this framed drawing of Jesus in the debris of the Twin Towers—a gift one of her clients printed off-line the month before, hanging in the hallway between the house and the beauty shop. Jesus’ graphite, blurry eyes stared at me as lies rippled the lake of truth in my head. Yes, I’m a liar, but most of what I’ll recount to you is true, and I’ll try to catch myself in any lies that slip. I’ll also admit I didn’t really go to Heaven, but the explanation will have to come later. For now, I’ll just tell you the truths I can recall.

I’m still proud of this opening, even if I have issues with it as a whole. Once I allowed myself to embrace my true voice, it became so much easier to write. I wasn’t trying to be something I’m not, wasn’t trying to write about things I didn’t understand. Even the stories I wrote that had nothing to do with the life I lived now came easier, because I allowed myself to write about the things I had observed first hand, seen from the people around me. I stopped trying to be Donna Tartt and allowed myself to be influenced by Flannery O’Connor, Harper Lee, and eventually Karen Russell and Jesmyn Ward.

The paragraph above became the opening to the story I eventually submitted to various literary magazines, and it even placed me in Glimmer Train’s Top 25 New Writer’s Award. But because I worried it wasn’t good enough, or felt too juvenile, I wrote this:

Many would later blame my Momma, a gold medalist liar, for the ill-timed fabrications I spouted at nine years old. Despite my not having seen her for months before the trouble began, people thought it was the only logical explanation for why a child steeped in sin would claim he’d been granted early access into Heaven. But I come from a whole family of liars, and having spent most of our lives in South Georgia, the buckle of the Bible belt, we can quote the holy book straight from the womb.

I didn’t hate this version, though I felt like it lacked the musicality of my previous opening. I still found myself a bit trapped in by wanting to be a “good” “adult” writer.

When I took an online writing class with Kate Milliken, author of Kept Animals, she told me she loved my stories, but asked if she could make one suggestion.

“I think your first line is buried in this paragraph. Maybe consider starting with ‘I come from a whole family of liars.’”

I knew she was right, but I had already grown discouraged and worn down from trying to find the right version of this story after so long. I put it away for several years and began focusing on other projects.

I didn’t want to write a book about my childhood. Everyone writes coming of age stories and I felt like mine had nothing new to offer. While being a writer has always been my dream, I often doubt myself and wonder if I have anything to say that could actually add something to the world, that didn’t just take up space. Even the very act of writing this newsletter had become daunting to me over the last year, because I was always worried that whatever I wrote would bore you, the reader. But the other day, I sat reading a book that I didn’t much care for, about things I didn’t really find very interesting, and discovered that over five-thousand people had reviewed it on Goodreads, and that it had a very high overall rating. I thought, well, if this book is beloved by so many, I guess my work can’t be that worthless.

So here I am, sharing what I’ve been working on, which might also explain a little bit of my absence. I’ve spent most of my free time trying to make something that could finally get my foot in the door, get people to consider my work and maybe help me get it out into the world. Even if it doesn’t happen, it’s fine, I still enjoy the process. I just figured that, if nothing else, it might be nice to share all of this with you, the people who listen when it feels like no one else does, who help me think through my thoughts on books and writing and big ideas.

Over the next week, I will be working alongside my other fellows in figuring out how to approach the next drafts of our novels. Who knows what all might change, what might stay the same. But for now, this is where I am.

Now, here is the full opening of my novel-in-progress, the first three pages, which I hope you enjoy. Maybe it’s silly to share this now, a little premature. But I’ve always overshared, so no point in changing now.

I come from a whole family of liars. My Momma was the best, a gold medalist fibster, spinning the most outlandish yarns with such conviction that she could convince anyone of just about anything. She’d once told her landlord that she needed ten-thousand dollars for this shot that would cure a special kind of cancer that only she’d been diagnosed with, and he pulled out his checkbook, begging her to let him know once she was in remission. Another time, she told a bank teller that my Granny had died and that she was sent to close out Granny’s account. The woman simply nodded sympathetically, said she was sorry for Momma’s loss, and plopped several stacks of bills on the counter. I spent my whole childhood in awe of Momma’s talent for fabrication. Whenever I asked her why she lied so much, she always gave a different answer, but the one she offered with the most regularity was that lies were a way to help people in times of need. I guess that’s why, once Momma ran away, once Granny and I lost everything and had to start over, I saw no other option but to take up the family tradition.

I woke one September morning to the mattress shaking, a loud whirring right outside the bedroom door. We’d just moved in, hadn’t even put the bed together, and the mattress lay plopped on the floor like a soggy piece of wonder bread. Mine and Granny’s bedroom was a sad, hospital white, but this late summer morning gave everything a warm, heavenly glow. Dust mites danced in the sunlight cutting through the bent-up blinds, and somewhere inside that swirling haze was everything I knew Granny needed. I ran from the bedroom to the beauty shop, where Granny was rolling a perm, and hollered over the blaring of The Young and The Restless that I’d gone to Heaven in a dream.

The shop stank of ammonia and rotten eggs, made all the more nauseating by the orange sherbet walls. There were women under the hood dryers, shampoo-and-sets, flipping through magazines, their crossed legs wagging with impatience. The two stylists who rented booths, Matt and Lisa, were tending to the clients in their chairs. Granny looked up, confused, and muted the TV.

“What’d you say, little baby?” Granny asked.

The lie was peanut butter sticky in my mouth.

“I…I said I went to Heaven,” I swallowed. “I dreamed I went to Heaven.”

Granny dropped the bottle of perm solution in her hand and hurried over to her desk to find a pen and paper. She knelt down beside me, legal pad balanced on her knees, and asked me to describe Heaven in as much detail as possible. Granny, being a woman of God, was always on the lookout for miracles. Her hands shook as she transcribed my fibbery to paper, but her eyes were steady and excited.

The details of my Heaven were stolen from Sunday school lessons and an episode of Unsolved Mysteries, where a man saw the afterlife during a brain aneurysm. The rest I just made up as I went along. Large mansions cast in gold, onyx doorknobs that sparkled in the sunlight. I even said I met Elizabeth Montgomery, and that she’d taught me how to wiggle my nose like she did on Bewitched. When I felt like I’d offered a sufficient amount of details, I wrapped it up by saying that at the end of the dream, I’d been falling, and that when I woke, the bed was shaking, which is the one part I told that wasn’t a lie. When I finished, I looked around and realized everyone at the shop had been listening in.

“Did you see Joyce there?” Granny asked, removing her glasses. Aunt Joyce was her sister. She’d been gone four years (ovarian cancer), but Granny still kept a picture-box full of her memories hidden under the bed. I hadn’t expected Granny to ask about anyone we knew. If I lied, if I was wrong, she’d eventually know. But it seemed cruel to say I hadn’t seen her when Granny seemed so hopeful, so I said yes. I said I’d seen Aunt Joyce singing with the angels, all of her pinky-blonde hair restored, wearing the powder blue dress she’d been laid to rest in. Granny smiled, saying she figured as much, and wiped her tears on her sleeve.

Everyone in the shop looked at me like stupid goats, I suppose in a state of shock. This was before Heaven tourism was a commonly recognized activity among children of holy rollers, and nobody was sure what to think. I’d turned nine earlier that summer, which was young enough for people to assume the only way I’d know these details was through divine revelation, but old enough for people to suspect I might be making the whole thing up. Granny hugged me, always a true believer.

Lisa stepped forward and helped Granny up off the floor.

“Can you finish up Ms. Sandy?” Granny said, pointing to the orange-haired old lady in her chair. “I wanna type this up and make some copies.”

“You can’t be serious,” Lisa said, glancing back at me. “You know he’s just making this up.”

“Hunter don’t do that with me,” Granny said.

Lisa had been at the beauty shop my whole life, was the one who’d fetched my Tarzan book from the oak tree after I threw it too high, the one who taught me how to French braid and played me Shania Twain. She had made enough attempts at parenting me to have witnessed Granny’s wrath. She backed off, told the woman in her chair she’d be back in just a minute. The shampoo-and-sets pulled their hood dryers back down. Ms. Sandy grabbed the remote to turn up the volume on the TV. Matt, oblivious to the tension, took his client to the shampoo bowl to rinse out her color. Granny told me to come on and stormed down the hall to the bedroom.

I followed her down the hallway, passing by a new drawing of Jesus on the way. We had at least a dozen portraits of Jesus hanging around, but this one was the most haunting. It was a pencil sketch of Jesus in the debris of the twin towers, the ghosts of the dead floating alongside him. Granny always told people I drew it, but everyone knew it had been some kid over in Valdosta—they were just too polite to correct her. Jesus’ graphite-blurry eyes followed me down the hall, and I wondered if he knew what I’d just done.

Granny typed out my dream on our beige Packard Bell. I watched from the wicker loveseat as the copies spit out of the printer. The lie had only been meant for her, something to make her feel better since she’d convinced herself we’d somehow gotten on God’s bad side, but she spent the rest of the day handing out these copies to each of her clients. They would laugh at first, not sure if Granny was serious. She had been working on a novel for a few years—a story about a serial rapist who finds God—and at first people thought she was showing them an idea for a new book. Then, as their eyes shifted back and forth, scanning the page, the frown of concentration would soften, and the whites of their eyes went pink and glassy. We lived in the buckle of the Bible Belt, so it wasn’t that surprising when someone believed. After each person finished reading, they looked up, smiling at me, hopeful and expectant. Some dug out pictures from their wallets and purses, asking if I’d seen the person from the photograph when I went to Heaven. It was too late to take it all back, too cruel to say no. If for no other reason than my deeply ingrained southern politeness, I always said yes.

Thanks for reading, for making the time. Hopefully I’ll get back to sharing more writing and bookish thoughts with you soon.

Until next time,

XOXO