Two months ago, I almost died a gruesome death.
I was in Austin, Texas with my buddy, Navy Seal Mike, as I call him, since he not only was an ex-seal once upon a time, but because he has that calming, protective presence when he’s with you, as if nothing bad can happen.
It was a peaceful time in my life — I’d begun to settle into my new chapter, personally and professionally, and I’d ducked down to Austin to record an episode of the Tim Ferriss podcast, catch up with Navy Seal Mike, and get my fix of good barbecue and breakfast tacos, both sorely lacking in St. Louis.
The two of us had just finished a long, leisurely meal at Odd Duck and were walking back to our hotel on the outskirts of town. We started crossing a wide-laned mini-highway, deep in conversation about Mike’s new business venture. The light turned green. Austin is notorious for confusing crosswalks and we’d misread this one. The cars launched forward, but they surely spotted us in the middle of the road and were revving towards us out of warning. But one didn’t see us. The guy was in a massive Ford truck, high off the ground, and he was fiddling with his phone. He floored the gas, not looking at the road or the wide-eyed brown boy in his crosshairs. Navy Seal Mike was on my other side, with no time to Navy Seal. The truck throttled at me full speed. It was so fast, so violent, that I had no options. No time to move. Nowhere to go. My legs went to jelly; I almost buckled to the ground, as if my mind and soul had already died before my body could. A protective way of ending my life without too much suffering. I thought of how stupid an ending this was. How Navy Seal Mike would explain this to my partner. How no one would ever get to read my new book. How life shouldn’t be cut short like this, over something as inane as misreading blinking lights.
Then the strangest thing happened — the other cars on the six-lane highway stopped cold, aware of imminent carnage, and the sound of a highway screeching to a halt woke the driver up, just enough that he slammed the brakes full-force, his truck skidding within 2 inches of my face. I saw my reflection in the steel.
Mike dragged me to the curb. My legs were too wobbly to walk. And despite the gratitude that I was still around and the nightmares that haunted me for two weeks after, I came away with something else, more long-lasting — an understanding of how bad things happen in life and how poorly we tend to capture this physical and emotional violence in art.
The feeling returned this weekend, when my partner and I did a 24-hour whirlwind trip to Los Angeles for a wedding (one of the groom’s was Ramon, familiar to SGE readers as one of the original hosts of EverNever TV). With 8 hours before the wedding, we hightailed to Universal Studios Hollywood in the middle of a rainstorm, taking advantage of the light crowds to cruise through 10 rides and roller coasters in less than 3 hours. As we were flung around to the theme of various franchises — Harry Potter, Transformers, Simpsons, Minions, The Mummy, Jurassic Park — I noticed how much the bursts of violence in each ride are telegraphed. How there’s a choreography to the fear, usually precipitated by warning signs and little shocks that build to a grand, death-drop finale. (Even the term “ride” is a baked-in deal that there will be a series of “bad things,” designed to give you the high of danger without the experience of it.)
It’s the same thing in books, of course. The trail of red flags carefully seeded into an architecture of violence. There’s a unity to the chaos: “bad things” will happen to your favorite characters but they will happen artfully by design.
While we were on the ride home from Universal, I checked my phone. A Moscow music hall had been attacked by terrorists — over 100 dead in a matter of minutes. Kate Middleton had announced her bout with cancer. Two very different stories, but to the people living through them, an example of how bad things in real life come with no architecture or warning. One moment, you’re living your life; the next, it’s cut short or upended.
There’s no way to reason out bad things like this or even anticipate them. To soothe ourselves, we might search desperately for breadcrumbs — didn’t US intelligence warn Moscow of an imminent attack? — anything, anything to make sense of the story. But most of the time, there is no sense. Life happens not in a line, but in a series of sudden shocks and quakes, good and bad, with periods of recalibration in between.
How to capture bad things in art, then? To just have violence spray through stories at random, the way it can in life, can feel emotionally sadistic or even nihilistic (i.e. a movie like Funny Games, which I could never bring myself to watch). Instead, as artists we like to play God and use our fiction to explain the bad things: to rationalize them, assign them, control them as if they’re part of some great, big karmic thread running through our sewing machines. But deep down, I think both author and reader know there’s something mechanized and simulated about all this. That this architecting of violence is about as real as a fairy tale.
In my new book, then, I’m trying something different.
Violence is an important part of the story, given the stakes and the world in which it is set. But I want the violence to feel authentic and visceral — where it detonates through life, sudden, sharp, disrupting its rhythms, instead of lurking around like a kid in a mask saying “boo!” whenever we need a new inciting incident.
I’m benefited by the fact the book takes place in first-person. In the world of The School for Good and Evil, the narrator was king. Everything in the lives of Sophie, Agatha, and Tedros seemed controlled and designed by a higher power. In fact, I planned on starting one of the books (I think it was #3) with the following line:
“There comes a time, dear Reader, where you should consider asking the question of who is telling this story and why.”
Toni, my wizard editor at the time, wondered if it would pull the reader too far out of the tale, if was just too meta and philosophical for the rip-roaring trilogy I was trying to drive towards conclusion. She was most certainly right, but readers of SGE would do well to question the Storian’s motivations. The Pen is not replicating life, but rather calibrating the best story to move the world forward. Violence is simply a tool to a larger end. In the Endless Woods, fate and predestination are the highest powers.
That was me… then, as J. Lo might say.
In this new era, I’m more interested in the idea that we don’t have any access to our sense of fortune and that both good and bad things happen in a rhythm completely alien to our mind’s sense of narrative. That the stories we tell ourselves have zero temporal and spatial relationship to the way that life actually unfolds. Yes, this too sounds meta and philosophical – but in practice, it’s about writing from the body instead of the head.
This time around, I’m using a first-person narrator to lead me through the story, without outlines, without planning – a narrator who forces me to be so immersed, so present to the details and feelings and intensity of every moment, that when violence explodes, it does as a surprise to me and a surprise to the audience, born out of the organic fabric of life, rather than a consciously sewn one.
Not that this comes without a price. Something about all this feels very Dark Arts.
Like I’m going looking for the kinds of answers we’re not supposed to find…
Have you ever struggled with how to think about the bad things in your life and art?
Until next week…
As a former Texan, I TOTALLY agree about breakfast tacos and barbecue. Salt & Smoke has the best, and closest to Texas-like, brisket. It's so good!
I have struggled with how to process and feel when bad things happen. My mind and body wants to fix it and my heart (spirit? soul?) wants to marinate in it for awhile. I nearly died 2 years ago and even now I still wonder at all the "what ifs". What if I died? What if I was disabled? What if someone blamed themselves? What if no one was there to...etc.?
The marinating part of it is harder to explain. Yes, I think of all the choices I could have made (and those I didn't) and I consider the ideas and experiences that brought me to where I am now. I hope those have changed me for the better.
I try to be better; do better. But, that experience will always be traumatic for me.