Hello there, readers! Today I’m excited to announce my very first guest columnist, the inimitable Jessica Gross, whose second novel, Open Wide, is so wonderfully weird and smart about intimacy, sex, and mothers. I was lucky enough to do the NYC launch of Open Wide with Jess back in August:
You can see I am listening very hard! That is because her writing is so good.
Jess is not only a brilliant writer, but also brilliant about how to write. In this column, she tells us what her toddler taught her about writing prose.
Little frustrates my toddler more than me or my husband failing to read her mind. No, “frustrates” is too mild here: when we try and fail to meet her request, she seems to feel something more like panic-fueled rage. The wrong parent might fetch the right object, or the right object might be placed in the wrong spot, or maybe, despite our best effort, everything about the attempt will have been wrong, wrong, wrong. The result is apoplexy.
I empathize with my toddler’s distress. To have another person fail to read your mind and “get it right” — to have your speech misunderstood — is to confront the fact that your mind is only your own, that it is separate from everyone else’s, including your mother’s, which means that you are utterly alone in the vast black universe.
In fact, having to explain yourself is one of the earliest concrete confirmations of the fact that you are alone. It’s not the absolute earliest — that would be when separation anxiety begins, before babies are a year old — but it comes quite early. Language skills begin to develop, only to be followed by the tragic recognition of their limits.
This limited tool, language, is still the best bridge we have between one mind and another. But to apply language to the purpose of conveying one’s desires or thoughts with the precision necessary for the recipient to understand them truly is a difficult task. It is of course difficult for a toddler; but it’s difficult for an adult, too. And somehow, the act of trying to commit one’s thoughts to the page makes accuracy more difficult for many.
At least, this was my conclusion once I began to read the writing of college students. During the years I adjuncted at The New School and Texas Tech University, teaching nonfiction and fiction writing, the hardest and most common thing I endeavored to teach was how to accurately commit the full range of a thought to the page. Often, students would jump from A to D and assume readers could fill in B and C; I tried to explain, in so many ways, why readers needed A, B, C, and D to all be written out, in as precise language as they could muster.
One could say that my students’ difficulty was the result of laziness, but I believe that “laziness” always covers up something else, something more complicated and interesting. There’s the fact that to express accurately one’s mind, one needs to know one’s own mind, which is as hard an ask as accepting that there is a solitary mind to know. And this acceptance is so hard. Perhaps my college students’ resistance to explaining themselves on the page was an extension or reprisal of the toddler’s distress. Perhaps they were, on the page, tantruming against the fact that the reader wasn’t inside their mind — that no one was, not even their friend, partner, or parent.
The writer places herself in the position of forcibly overcoming this hurdle with every sentence, facing the fact of her separateness head-on. With the page divorcing writer from reader, there is an even more concrete barrier between people than there is when we speak to each other in person, which may be why expressing oneself in writing presents even more difficulty than in speech for many. Yet the person who commits herself to the alienating endeavor of writing is, I believe, trying to own that separateness, to defeat it. You, reader, will come live inside my mind after all. Is the page one of the hardest places to bridge the gap between minds, but also, if handled well, potentially the most fruitful? Yes: I think it is space where the dogged and diligent writer can attempt to master, or unravel, separateness.
So how, on a craft level, to achieve the precision necessary to reach what Stephen King calls, in On Writing, “a meeting of the minds” between writer and reader, or “telepathy”? In my college classes, I often started the semester reading an excerpt from King’s book and followed it up with an exercise inspired by a challenge I’d done as a middle school Mathlete. I would give each student three blank index card and instruct them to draw something abstract on one of the cards. When they were finished, I’d ask them to take out the second card and write instructions for how to replicate the drawing. After, they were to stand up and deposit the card three seats to the right of their own chair; when they returned to their seats, they’d have to follow the instructions on the card left there in order to draw, on the final card, the abstract image the instructions were trying to conjure. I’d have students compare the original drawing with the replication, holding both up for the class to see; the results were often hilariously disparate, but once in a while, the two images actually resembled each other. The point: describing something in precise enough language that the reader can fully understand it is really, really hard.
With fiction, I believe there are two craft buckets in this domain to master. The first concerns stage directions: conveying the image that the writer wants the reader to conjure. So much more detail is necessary here than I realized when I began trying to write fiction. This task is more in line with the exercise I described above: describing a setting, or a character’s movements, or the positioning of characters in relationship to each other or to a room, in step-by-step detail.
The other bucket concerns getting the character’s thoughts on the page in sequence without missing a step. This is necessary in nonfiction, too, but in fiction there is the added challenge of having the thoughts accrue in a way that justifies the action the character is about to undertake, which of course is an action that you, the writer, have made up.
Often, for me, a lot of linguistic precision in both categories — but especially the latter — comes together in revision. When I’m writing something new, the unease of uncertainty makes me rush. I want to know what’s going to happen, or that something is going to happen, and can’t bear to be painstaking in my descriptions while I figure it out.
But once I have, I get to revise, and revision is glorious. This, for me, is the fun part: getting to fill in the gaps in description or thought with details, beautiful language, unusual adjectives, surprising analogies. Sometimes, the push for more precision comes from an editor, who points out that a character has jumped into an action without the requisite internal buildup. This will require me to psychoanalyze the character — why did she want to undertake this particular action at this particular time? — and then translate my conclusions into an inner monologue that will make sense to the reader’s entirely separate and foreign mind. Sometimes it takes many tries to get this right.
In my most recent novel, Open Wide, a pivotal scene required a tremendous amount of effort and attention to both categories of precision. This was the scene in which the narrator of the book, Olive, who is obsessed with her boyfriend Theo, decides to unzip his torso via his teeth and climb inside of his body.
Building up to this supernatural and extraordinarily bizarre turn of events took many scenes and chapters — the entire first half of the novel, in fact — but came to a head in the pages and paragraphs right beforehand. As usual for me, these coalesced largely in revision and in response to feedback from close friends who read early drafts, my agent, and my editors. Guided by their questions and critiques, I kept fleshing out (pun intended) the narrator’s conflicts and desires, from her relationship with her mother to her inner monologue as she tried and failed to stop herself from enacting her astonishing invasion, until her action felt reasonably justified by her psyche.
Then there was the stage-direction bucket — the matter of describing this surreal event in as much detail as I could so that readers could picture it without imaginative hitches. I researched bodily anatomy and interviewed doctors so that I could explain with some accuracy what Olive was seeing inside Theo’s body and then descending into. As for this descent, I wrote out in painstaking detail Olive’s movements:
I balanced on one knee, hand pressed against the wall, and lifted the other foot up and over Theo’s body as though climbing into an inflatable pool. For a few moments I hovered my foot above the pulsing puddle of his organs, then quickly, before I could lose my nerve, dipped my toe into his intestine. It was tender and warm. With little effort I pushed my foot in up to the ankle. It squelched loudly.
(The accompanying sounds also felt crucial to submerging the reader in the scene.)
Despite the work I felt I’d done, I still missed essential components: on one read my agent inquired how, exactly, Olive could fit her whole body inside her boyfriend’s torso. Did she shrink? I said I’d hoped to elide that detail and leave it up to the reader’s imagination — a cop-out — but my agent pressed me to commit to a vision. After some tantrumy consternation (did I really have to write out everything?), I wrote some lines that I am now extremely fond of and that definitely made this a better book:
In the pool of his torso, my feet looked smaller than normal, as though they’d contracted to fit the space available, though this apparent shrinking didn’t register as any kind of tension or crunching or pain. It was feelingless, in fact — natural, biological; the only sensation was that of his organs against my skin. I sank my entire body inside him — each part seemed to grow smaller as it made contact with his insides — and lay on my side, fitting myself between what I thought were his stomach and his liver. One of his lungs, or maybe it was his diaphragm, pressed down on my head, his ribcage a crown. The opening was now above me, and I zipped him back up until the darkness was complete.
Writing at the level of detail required to communicate a vision takes tremendous attention and effort and, often, overcoming a feeling of resistance. This resistance — which is my gut response any time I’m pressed to dig deeper, to be more precise, before it resolves into excitement to return to the page — reminds me not only of my students’ challenges, but also, of course, of my daughter’s.
And, to add another wrinkle: not only do I see this difficulty in my daughter’s efforts to communicate with me; I feel it too in my own efforts to communicate with her. New as she is to language, she needs even more precision than an adult in order for a sentence or set of instructions to be comprehensible. Every action that is second-nature for an adult — brushing one’s teeth, using a fork, putting on a shoe — needs to be broken down into its component parts in order for a toddler to assimilate it.
Which means that parenting a toddler requires not only witnessing the development of but also practicing, and hopefully honing, one of the primary skills of writing. My hope is to emerge from this phase of parenting with a greater capacity to be diligent and painstaking in my literary communications than I had before, and greater patience for the endeavor.
Jessica Gross is the author of Hysteria (2020), which Publishers Weekly declared “every bit a page-turner as it is a descent into sexual madness.” Hysteria has been optioned for TV development, and Open Wide for film development. Gross’s nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Lilith, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. She has taught writing at The New School and Texas Tech University and currently lives in West Texas.
Thank you for reading! I’m hoping to post here more regularly, especially as I get ready for the release of my new novel, Immersions, out May 5th from Tin House. After you buy Open Wide, you should definitely pre-order Immersions! :)