As writers, one of the most difficult tasks we face is plotting. We may have story ideas but wrangling them into something resembling a cohesive plot often seems a gargantuan task. In our time of need, we often turn to methods like the hero’s journey, Dan Harmon’s plot embryo, or the three-act structure. These methods are helpful, but can still feel broad and overwhelming, asking for more information than you have at the conception of your story.

Speaking as a neurodivergent individual (ND), conventional plotting methods have rarely been helpful to me, and I believe this is because NDs are often bottom-up thinkers. We are detailed oriented; we see the trees for the forest. Before we’ve imagined a plot from beginning to end, we know the intimate emotions of our characters, the flora and fauna of our world, the powers of our magic users, etc. We are engaged by and care most about creating our little guys and our intricate worlds, whereas plotting can feel technical, distant, methodical—not as exciting. Whether you’re neurodivergent or not, this may describe how you approach stories, and why you’ve struggled in the past with popular plotting methods that require linearity and causality.  

But never fear! My “anti-plotting” methods ask you not to create a timeline or to inflict events upon your characters but encourage building on your strengths. If you love creating characters and themes, a question you can ask is, “What is the emotional core of the story?” (This is different from the premise, or even the theme. It is the simplest, rawest, emotional hook that ignites the story.) If you love creating worlds, you can consider what elements of worldbuilding you want to highlight the most, and derive a plot from the concepts, complications, and conflicts that naturally exist in a well-fleshed out world. I believe that within these two elements, the detail-oriented writer has already planted the seeds of the stories they want to tell.

Emotional Core

The emotional core of a story is centered around an emotion you feel strongly about, a massive, reactor-esque generator of power that gives your story life and gives you the energy and enthusiasm to write it. Let’s take The Mandalorian to use as an example. Star Wars is a broad, complicated universe, but The Mandalorian has a painfully simple core. It doesn’t matter the obstacles Din Djarin faces, or the missions he must complete, he desires one thing: to be a good dad to his adopted kid. That desire, and the way it makes us feel, carries the show, and makes it compelling when you first tune into it. And not only is this emotional core moving and relatable to the audience, it’s undoubtedly easy for a writer to care deeply about it too. So, what moves you?

Knowing yourself and what motivates your writing is an important aspect of finding this emotional core: are you interested in stories of political justice like the Hunger Games? Are you deeply moved by father and son dynamics like in God of War? Does it light you up to write about the sacrificial power of love like in The Locked Tomb Series?

Once you’ve discovered the emotional core that moves you, you expound on that core by asking how it can be challenged, explored, and ultimately realized. You likely have the answers to these questions already because of your intimate knowledge of your characters! For instance, we know that Din Djarin’s motivations stem from the Mandalorian code. But we also know his values include being a good parent—the core of the story. Within the first season of the show, the writers ensure these desires are not compatible. They most likely asked themselves: how does Din Djarin reconcile these conflicts? What are the consequences of breaking the code? Why is he willing to prioritize the child over his desire to be loyal to his people’s principles? The answers to these questions create The Mandalorian’s plot as we know it, and they are guided by the characterization of Din. Similarly, the questions you ask about your character’s deepest drives can reveal your way forward and placing obstacles in the way of your emotional core will motivate you to continue writing around or through them.

Worldbuilding

If you’re not sure what your emotional core is, worldbuilding is an excellent alternative starting point. When you approach plotting via worldbuilding, you want to find what the most important and invigorating concepts of your universe are, the sparks that spawned the rest of your creation. Let’s think of worldbuilding as charting a course or navigating the stars. There are a million different beginnings, but you want to find your true North: the elements that, like the emotional core, hook in your guts and won’t stop pulling. We can start by listing elements of worldbuilding, and then determining which are most important to this story. A good way to approach this is by asking what kind of stories you are drawn to reading, and why? Or, by examining what has inspired you in the past, tracking where you began your brainstorming, and noting when the ideas started flowing. Let’s say this is our in-exhaustive list:

• Setting or Maps — If you pay special attention to settings and desire a wide world that will be well-travelled, this is a good place to begin. Let’s take the famous The Lord of the Rings. J.R.R. Tolkien was a linguist first, and not a practiced cartographer. But he once commented, “I wisely started with a map, and made the story fit” (Letter 144, 1954). Without his maps to guide him, the journeys of his characters would have been nearly impossible to follow, for himself and the reader.

• Magic Systems or Powers — In Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn, there is a heavy focus on Allomancy, a magic system that gives powers to its practitioners through the consumption and “burning” of rare metals. Sanderson’s plot is heavily tied to his protagonist’s ability to master her Allomancy and use these powers to defeat the despotic villain. If you find yourself excited by the creation of complex and compelling magical systems, growing your story alongside those abilities could be key.

• Religions — Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series is all about gods, baby. Percy’s interactions with the gods and his navigation of their expectations is vital to the accomplishment of his mission. If you spend hours at a time constructing the personalities of gods, intricate rituals of worship, or complex beliefs and morals that deeply influence your world’s society and your characters’ decisions, religion may your key element.

• Fauna or Flora — Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy is known for its weird ecology and the ways in which it steps in for the typical horror monster: an “entity” that is wild and unknown, threatening our climate-controlled, comfortable cityscapes or suburban bubbles. Are you drawn towards predatory plants or “living” landscapes? Trees that whisper secrets or marshes that swallow victims whole? Basing your plot around your ecology may seem unusual, but it’s certainly worked for VanderMeer!

• Communication — Samuel R. Delaney’s Babel-17 is a sterling example of communication as an essential element to plot. The premise can’t really operate without the author’s understanding of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, as the conlang of the book, Babel-17, is weaponized to influence thought and to give its users strange powers. If you find yourself drawn to the “peculiarities of language, how conditions of life shape the formation of words and meaning, and how words themselves can shape the actions of people” this may be your ideal approach to generating a plot.

• Government — Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury portrays a conflicted “fireman” who finds an outlawed book and takes it home instead of burning it. As he reads, he fights against what he’s been taught by his oppressive government and struggles to keep the books he rescues safe. If a plot centered on government and its use and abuse of power is a driving force of your book, this element may suit you best. Revolution, rebellion, protests, and political commentary at its most poignant and devastating spring from novels such as this.

• Culture— If you find yourself exploring the stories society tells us, the power they have over our lives, and the influence of tradition, propriety, or familial responsibility, you might be interested in approaching plot through the lens of culture. The Traitor Baru Cormorant is a book that explores the influence of stories within a culture: how a person is allowed to exist, how one should behave, who should hold power, and who should not. What stories does your society tell? How do they influence your characters’ fate? These answers may provide exactly the plot you need.

For this story, let’s say you’ve imagined a beautiful, secretive forest and have researched druidic lore and their rites. In this instance, we might choose Flora as our primary focus, and Religion as our secondary. Perhaps, specifically, we are interested in how these rites allow our druids to communicate with one another, so we add Communication as a tertiary focus. We would now consider how these elements might interact within the ideas we already have. Our starting concept could be “druids using a mycelium network to secretly communicate.”

Now, we want to draw out of these elements questions that support, guide, or complicate the plot. For example: Why do the druids need to communicate in secret? How did they learn to communicate via the mycelium? Perhaps we can introduce an obstacle to challenge this concept. Maybe the druids’ enemies are wizards who can control fire and are seeking to burn down large swathes of forest to destroy the communication system. This gives you more questions: Why do the fire wizards want to stop the druids from communicating? Why can’t they use the mycelium system to communicate themselves?

If you struggle with coming up with such questions, there are many online resources that can help you glean what is important about your world, and how to expand it into plot. Furthermore, don’t underestimate how helpful it can be to share your worldbuilding with a person you trust! Their new perspective and natural curiosity can reveal story threads already woven into the tapestry: ones you can follow and weave further.

Conclusion

There’s an old piece of writing advice that says, “write what you know,” and it is a valuable piece of advice. But I would take it a step further and ask you to write what you love. You can always gain more knowledge, but you can’t fake joy. That’s what these “anti-plotting” methods are asking of you—how is your writing making you feel? Are you having fun? Do you hate this process? Or do you wake up and want to do nothing but sit down and write?

I’m not a believer in the idea that artists must suffer, and I think all creators should be able to enjoy and trust their process. If you love every bit of the story you are building, from its tiniest seedling to its greatest, towering city, you will want to play in this sandbox. You will return, time and time again, to tell stories in this universe, no matter the obstacles—frustration, boredom, an alien invasion. Once you have a plotting approach that feels like an act of discovery, you may find you don’t hate plotting after all.

Published on September 24, 2024 by June Road Press.

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I started Songs for the Land-Bound, but I certainly didn’t anticipate connecting so deeply to this poetry collection. In her debut, Violeta Garcia-Mendoza constructs a portrait of life the way she experiences it. In this collection, she explores the ambivalence of joy and anxiety through nature, family, and all modern life has to offer.

Through many of the poems, we discover what family means to Garcia-Mendoza, along with the many definitions of family she juggles. The past and present occasionally blur as the poet reflects on her own parents and childhood while considering her current situation as a parent. One poem, titled “A Dozen New Collective Nouns for Fathers,” expands on this theme in a wonderful and thought-evoking way by giving fathers names such as “a stable a stumble a stubble/an ambition.”

Although I am not a mother like Garcia-Mendoza, I see myself in poems that touch on being a woman poet with responsibilities. Yes, I want to say to her poems, I get it. I’ve been there. Many a day, I have found myself in front of the sink, elbow-deep in dishes, wondering if I’ll ever amount to anything, as in “Instructions for the At-Home Poet.” I’ve been the one shutting doors around the house when expecting visitors, because, really, I’m not about to put effort into cleaning the laundry room to be conceived as presentable, as Garcia-Mendoza phrases more skillfully in “Housekeeping Secrets.” “In the past sixty minutes,” Garcia-Mendoza writes, “the mother-poet/has not written a dozen lines.” Yes. Yes, to writing about the self-doubt and monotonous chores that otherwise might be brushed off or even looked down upon. Invisible burdens like these are not always taken seriously or discussed so to read great poetry that reveal and revel in these moments feels validating.

Nature is another important theme in this collection. It is intricately interlaced with other topics and subjects, and appears, in some way, in nearly every poem. Even in a poem about type 1 diabetes, nature is weaved in beautifully: “Let the pancreas’s beta cells pinecone//and crumble. Chronic the clouds. Let the blood/sugar fluctuate a flock of blackbirds.” As a suburban wildlife photographer and someone who finds comfort and awe in the natural world, Garcia-Mendoza pays close attention to flora and fauna in her work. She also gives a lot of respect to the animals she writes about. In “Frog Song,” which she dedicates to the resilience of frogs, she writes “Never mind the mud, the pondweed;/don’t apologize. Propel yourself/mouth-first into your appetites—//your every move a swish, your every cell a song swell.”

In a very human way, Garcia-Mendoza is anxious in this collection. Anxious about not being enough of a poet, mother, or wife, about the unstoppable rush of time, and that unexplained, hanging dread, among everything else there is to worry about. When she puts the baby to bed, “instead of sleeping:/set up a Google alert for how to survive a flood/and let your phone mislead you all the way/to Venice, acqua alta and a headline you misread/as A Survivor’s Guide.”  But the poems do not steep in the anxiety or ignore it. Instead, there is a natural push and pull between the anxiety that comes with living, and the undeniable joy of it. As she writes, “you can’t resist/a little still life lit with grief & wonder.” Garcia-Mendoza manages to achieve an imperfect and human balance between the two without falling into one or the other.

I also loved the honesty of modern-day living in Songs for the Land-Bound. The poem, “Lockdown Minecraft” about Garcia-Mendoza son’s Minecraft village is an excellent example of this. The poem reveals a truth about the small, everyday things we do without thinking. “My son builds himself a fortress, hunkers down, forgets/the days. He asks: How strong is concrete versus clay?/What we all want to know: what barriers will keep us safe.”  Her choice to confront these modern phenomena is something admirable. It feels important because poetry is meant to refashion the way we see the world, yet we don’t often find the larger digital world we interact with represented in poetry.

The use of images in Garcia-Mendoza’s poetry is something else I keep coming back to. Many of her poems host surprising, beautiful visuals that I want to shut my eyes and imagine when I stumble upon them. Who wouldn’t linger when told about a “ghost stitch sewn/illuminant over the scar,” or take a moment to fully believe “the body is a mansion meant for pacing,” or want to listen to the “dose/of ocean moving through these woods.” Her clever use of language and construction of imagery will encourage you to listen attentively, because you don’t want to miss any of it.

Though the collection is divided into six sections, with each portion focusing on a few different subjects or themes, it does not feel at all divided. The poems work cohesively together, and the major themes and ideas of the collection carry from beginning to end. Keeping this in mind, it’s worth noting the first section doesn’t stand out as much as the others. Although it functions well as an introduction, the wandering of the poems isn’t quite as effective since there isn’t any immediate connection between the individual poems. Once we move on from the section, that feeling fades away. Since the other sections allow us to learn more about who the poet is and what her life feels like with added context to some of the recurring themes and narratives, this understanding deepens as we read on. Garcia-Mendoza’s Songs for the Land-Bound was a treat to read. It covers a wide lens of subjects and themes but manages to feel concise and deliberate in the stories it tells. Nature, family, and modern life, and the anxiety and joy they stir up, take the main stage in this collection, but subtler themes complicate and broaden the reach of the poems. This is an incredible debut that poetry-lovers should be on the lookout for.

*SPOILER ALERT* This review contains plot details of What It’s Like In Words.

This title will be released on December 3, 2025 by Henry Holt & Co.

I finished Eliza Moss’s debut novel, What It’s Like in Words, on the same day I realized I needed to break up with my situationship. They were sweet, sexy, and spoiled me rotten, and I had to fight against every dysfunctional people-pleasing instinct in my body to even identify I wanted to leave them. But being afraid to leave–or of being left–is not the same thing as wanting to stick around. 

This is familiar emotional territory for the novel’s main character, Enola, on both sides of the equation. What It’s Like in Words explores the murky waters of love, self-doubt, manipulation, and abuse as Enola struggles to finish her novel while navigating her anonymous boyfriend’s turbulent temper. A couple’s trip to Kenya begins to unravel Enola’s long-held narratives about her own life as childhood memories resurface, making it more difficult than ever to maintain the fragile illusion of being the Cool Girl. Enola is forced to confront what happened to her father many years ago, finally facing all she has inherited from her past and gaining the strength to carve a new path. 

What It’s Like in Words fills the void left when Phoebe Waller Bridge said “no” to Fleabag Season 3–Enola is unlucky in love, low on self-worth, and full of feminist guilt. She works at a cafe in London, formerly with her best friend named Ruth–or “Roo” to Fleabag’s “Boo.” The similarities are no accident–Moss lists Fleabag as the first comptitle in the book description. 

Where Fleabag toys with the fourth wall by addressing the camera directly, Moss employs a similar method of unreliable narration, occasionally pulling back and rewriting details of the scene as if Enola had remembered them wrong. As Enola represses and curates pieces of herself, her memories are subject to alteration. The “real” scenes are often less picturesque than Enola’s first attempt at relaying the memory. The novel employs a braided narrative, switching between the past and the present day, and many scenes feel intentionally distanced; quotation marks are omitted, giving conversations a glaze of ambiguity, open to reader interpretation. These Fleabaggian nods to the audience give Moss the opportunity to play with the unreliable narrator, but they disappear for most of the middle of the book and rarely go all the way–except for a shocking split timeline near the end of the novel. 

While they share a sort of British familial frigidness, what sets this novel apart from Fleabag is its unsparing portrayal of emotional abuse. The efficiency with which the boyfriend twists innocent comments, volleys justified criticisms, and escalates minor inconveniences left me feeling as vulnerable to his manipulations as Enola. His narcissism is unpleasantly visceral, from his constant negging to his spite at the success of other writers, and I found myself wanting to argue with this fictional man. In that sense, the novel succeeded by subjecting readers to the emotional erosion of gaslighting. Enola’s self-doubt, amplified by the novel’s ambiguous style of narration, leave a vacuum of certainty that this master manipulator is more than eager to fill. 

While Enola is a relatable and sympathetic narrator, there is nothing good about her anonymous boyfriend to justify her frenzied love for him. From his introduction, he is spewing insults, negging Enola, and dropping red flags like breadcrumbs. Aside from Enola telling readers he is sexy and funny, there’s not much evidence to endear readers to him or lend credibility to her obsession with him. He starts out pretty darn awful and only gets worse. In a culture rife with victim-blaming, it’s hard to write about the senselessness of emotional abuse without making the victim seem senseless herself, for still going home with the guy holding the bright red “Abuser” sign–not to mention, all of her best friend’s unheeded warnings. The first inklings of his abusive nature could have been woven into the story with more subtlety, so that readers initially resonate with Enola’s love for him.

The anonymous boyfriend overshadows Enola’s second partner in the novel, a lawyer named Virinder–the “nice guy” to his “bad boy.” While Virinder is sweet, doting, and capable of making Enola orgasm, there’s nuance to his style of entitlement and manipulation. Moss takes her time to render both men as flawed, nuanced characters rather than archetypes. However, the “bad boy” gets disproportionately more attention, and Virinder’s storyline feels slightly truncated by the novel’s multiple timelines.

Interestingly, What It’s Like in Words takes place against the backdrop of the 2016 United States presidential election cycle, despite being a story that revolves around Londoners. Echoes of Trump’s campaign and various misogynistic scandals are peppered throughout the book while Enola contorts herself to appease mediocre men. Sexism, of all the -isms, is most lethal inside the privacy of an intimate partnership, but the reverberations of state-sanctioned misogyny ring clear across the Atlantic Ocean. The women of this novel feel the threat of misogyny, but they feel the weight of their own reactions in the face of misogyny even more. 

Enola hates both men in What It’s Like in Words yet returns to them when they dangle the carrot of emotional security over her head. She takes stuttering steps towards independence, but it’s not until she fully understands she must choose her own peace that she can leave both of them. The same people-pleasing tendencies keep her trapped with the “nice guy” just as much as with the abuser. It takes courage to realize someone being “the better option” doesn’t mean they are the one. Enola discovers the power in rewriting the narrative of her own life, of evolving from a passive character to an agent in relationships who can revoke consent when she wants to. What It’s Like in Words is the story of the self–the whole self, the uncurated self–overpowering the fear of being left behind.

*SPOILER ALERT* This review contains plot details of Apastoral: A Mistopia.

Published on July 15, 2024 by corona/samizdat.

Apastoral: A Mistopia by Lee Thompson is hilarious and horrifying from stem to stern, a wildly imaginative meditation on the absurd nature of incarceration. As stark as that may sound, Thompson subverts the subject matter with magical scenarios and rhythmic language that resolves like a fable. Apastoral is gritty and harsh, at its heart is a violent crime and a very violent State, but it also contains love, loyalty, and the innocence of friendship. Thompson weaves impressionistic prose into the narrative, creating an existential point of view for a pantheon of characters. The result is a story that feels lived, rather than recorded.

In Apastoral, particularly pernicious criminals, are no longer locked in small concrete cells. State authorities have decided that the most dangerous among us are better relegated to the bodies of livestock, literally. The Constock Program (convict + livestock) transplants the eyes and brains of unlucky defendants into pigs, cows, goats, and chickens. Rather than wallow in grey dungeons, convicts roam vast, fortified farmlands—trapped still, but placated by their docile existence and environment.

The casual cruelty of the Constock program is buttressed by absurd bureaucracy and mad, giggling bureaucrats. Far from any innocent intent, the program has evolved and is fitted with uproarious live broadcast show trials, elaborate psychoanalysis/change-of-life counseling, and a civilian population making bets on convict fates—hungry for the grim entertainment of it all.

It is within this context that we are introduced to Apastoral’s protagonist, Bones, whose participation in a badly botched jewel heist has damned him to life as a wooly sheep. “You’re a wobbly table in a pub, Bones, accept it.” This observation from Bones’ Constock program psychologist represents the State’s attempt to help Bones (and society as a whole) reckon with what they plan to do to him. The extreme psychological and medical conditioning, the experimental surgery, and trapping a human mind in a farm animal are all warranted—excused—because Bones is hopeless.

Thompson roundly calls out all sides of the conflict; the brutal system’s hypocrisy and depravity are laid bare for the reader, and society’s passive and active participation in the farcical show makes the madness even more realistic—some froth at the mouth for news of the next convict transplant, while others vow to burn the whole horrifying system down. PETABBY, an ineffectual anti-Constock resistance group, provides a flawed but ethical reckoning for the program with direct action in the form of clumsy prisoner rescues.

Through PETABBY and characters imprisoned by the Constock program, Thompson illustrates the tragedy of resistance against overwhelming forces, namely that if good people/animals allow it, resistance will become the monster it sought to destroy. “…activists, they’re boring. They just spew what everyone’s been telling them. They’re no different from the lawyers and bankers and cops they make fun of.” The inmates and society as a whole are formed and affected by the Constock program: the inmates parrot the authoritarianism that imprisoned them by devolving into petty dictatorships, and the free citizenry gleefully take up their charge as deputized guards and judges.

There are no sedentary characters in Apastoral; human and post-human-livestock alike are vibrant, even when their time in focus is short. The present and recent past are skillfully intertwined throughout the tale, expanding the world and conflict without blurting out the important parts prematurely. When the reader finally gets a peek at the cause of all the trouble (Bones’ life, friends, and especially his crime), it lands as a gift, necessary at just that moment. The book’s excellent pacing is to blame.

Simply calling Apastoral dystopian is lazy. It is dystopian, of course, but it also reflects a dire reality: plenty of people already live in an absurd carceral system. You may even recognize a few elements of Constock that feel close to home. These systems vary widely at every border but are unfailingly designed to pick up certain people and leave the really big criminals for public office. Within Apastoral’s blooming myriad of moral quandaries, it murmurs from the rafters, be on guard, the absurd becomes the maniacal with a slip of the pen.

*SPOILER ALERT* This review contains plot details of Play|House.

Published April 2024 by Northwestern University Press.

To say that Jorrell Watkins’ debut poetry collection Play|House contends with the troubling reality of being black in America would be an understatement that doesn’t do his work justice. Not only does Watkins unpack what it means for black boyhood and black psyche to succumb to drugs, guns, invisibility, and other intimate brutalities fostered by the U.S.—he also cultivates a curation where the poetry and music he cites are in conversation with one another. The music introduces figures such as John Coltrane, Ruth Brown, Nas, and Migos as another avenue Watkins simultaneously projects and confronts his boyhood and manhood while he addresses the historical and current injustices haunting black living. “I’ll play songs for you, something you can get with / we don’t have to talk, let music restore what we built” offers the first poem, “Brotha Speaks.” With language, rhythm, and structure that challenge traditional poetics as much as he challenges readers to bear witness to what he has witnessed, Watkins demonstrates his fearlessness to go for the gut when highlighting the hurt. Amidst his prowess, Watkins refuses to surrender to the violences perpetrated upon black living in America and, instead, celebrates the triumphs that originate from black joy.

With his ambitiousness, Watkins doesn’t ask readers to be patient when interacting with his unique dialect—he dares them to step into the cadence he knows and loves dearly. In “Acquisition: Mothership,” inspired by Parliament-Funkadelic’s “Mothership Connection,” Watkins riffs out, “Under the groove our steps collate minds / Maggot brain culture we kilowatt the bots / Overcharged, bail out systemic headlock / Bypass the rulers, circuit trip this business / One hundred and fifteen claps per minute.” Such language demands a reread, but this is not a criticism of the language itself. Rather, subsequent examinations of passages like this allow for a greater appreciation of Watkins’ deftness as he merges poetic and musical meters with commentary on America’s broken systems and how they’re broken. Watkins strikes just as hard with more conventional storytelling when a memory calls for it. In the poem “Up a Notch,” which follows him and his brother cooking a meal as a metaphor for pain birthed from creation, Watkins writes, “Concoctions made, teaspoons drawn, / which taste bombards the palate? / Jody’s nose bleeds, my throat peels. / [again] Emeril’s jazz band muses / his Cajun creation. Jody froths chili-mucus, / I hack heavy metal.”

Speaking of heavy metal, musical genre dictates both the poems and the three sections they are organized under, “House Below the Heavens,” “Halfway Blues House,” and “TrapHouse.” “House Below the Heavens” pays tribute to the hip-hop album Below the Heavens by Blu & Exile and situates readers within Watkins’ own house below the heavens—namely, insights into his childhood, adolescence, family, and reaching beyond cycles of harm to find black joy in a world that constantly takes it away. Meanwhile, “Halfway Blues House” borrows terminology from a living space known as a halfway house, a living environment that serves as the transition stage between incarceration, drug rehab, or mental health treatment and complete reintegration into independent living in society. The mixing of blues’ melancholy with the concept of the halfway house further juxtaposes Watkins and black living with the liminality imposed upon them. This leaves Watkins to question whether full healing is possible as joy and cycles of harm carry over from the first section. Finally, “TrapHouse” is directly modeled after its namesake, where illicit drugs are sold and used or where clay targets are released for skeet shooting. Here, everything Watkins tackles in previous sections culminates where he most explicitly confronts drug use, gun violence, and oblivion. One of the last poems, “Brotha Moves,” is a no-holding-back rhetoric on trauma sustained from police violence. Watkins recalls the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd and contemplates how he could just as easily be at the other end of an officer’s bullet.

Watkins’ amalgamation of “play” and “house” embodies poetic and personal maturity that not many debut writers can boast they have, especially considering the gravity of the issues and topics he faces. We see this playfulness intertwined with house in every sense of what a house can entail in “Up a Notch.” Similarly, to start “In the House,” Watkins writes, “Welcome to the most dreaded edifice of the living realm / where haunts whelm flesh into gastric muck and vultures / slurp the gutsy gunk. Watch your step.” Phrases like “gastric muck” and “slurp the gutsy gunk” showcase Watkins’ mastery of playing with poetic language while “Watch your step” and other horror-like descriptions like jet bats, a silkworm, and mercury bile paint a picture where escape is desired. In another poem titled “Mean what I say,” Watkins admits, “There’s three-fourths gallon pecan streusel bread / pudding on second shelf right door garage fridge. / Don’t know if nuts are too much, but it’s from / brotha-owned shop cross town.” From streusel bread to the literal haunting of a house, the oscillation between play and house makes the physical and emotional weight of being so close to these contrasting states of existence tangible as Watkins commands our attention from start to finish.

Play|House utilizes poetics and frames music as a muse to conjure a landscape where joy can be power in the face of America’s familiar obsession with cultures of drugs, guns, and invisibilities. This is not to say that joy is an absolute cure. Instead, Watkins poses moments of black joy that can build upon each other as growing triumphs amidst a reality that demands his people’s blood, sweat, and tears. Thus, joy is ultimately one form of survival, and Watkins shows no signs of slowing down in his disruption of hauntings, histories, and hellish systems. He issues his own challenge in “Brotha Moves” when he writes, “I’m not trying to be one seen on dark-mode dusked screens. Yo what Tupac say? I aint one to push but if pushed, watch how far I go.”

I had the wonderful opportunity to hear you read from your story collection, An Agent of Utopia. I was drawn to the vivid sense of place and setting in your work, especially how richly you convey areas such as Florida and the American South. From a craft standpoint, how do you envision setting? How do you find the sense of place in a story, and how do you know which setting is right for a piece?

Before I start, I’d like to dedicate this Q&A to my late friend and mentor Michael Bishop (1945-2023), a brilliant writer in multiple genres who was far more eloquent on all these topics than I am. And now, after a moment of silence, onward we go.

Setting isn’t just backdrop. It pervades, informs—no, better, infuses—every other aspect of the story. This is most obvious in certain genres, for example ghost stories, sea stories, adventures of survival or exploration, locked-room mysteries, historical fiction, and all those suspense thrillers that depend on isolation: Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None is an exemplar of that form. But it’s true across the board. Setting is story.

Many of my story ideas are place-dependent from the outset. My Thomas More story An Agent of Utopia, for example, had to be set in London, specifically in the tower, and during the reign of Henry VIII—placed also in time. All this I simply knew, first thing. “The Devil’s Whatever” is almost a parody of that approach, a story determined entirely by the many interesting places I could find that invoked the Devil in their name.

But with “A Diorama of the Infernal Regions,” I knew that once Pearleen stepped through that ticky-tacky, dime-museum canvas, she could be anywhere—but where? I wrote the story’s opening right up to that point, then stopped for a long ponder. I knew only that it definitely would not be the Infernal Regions! It was a long time figuring out that she would emerge in the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose—a place I had visited, which is always an advantage.

When you find the right setting, you know immediately. It’s like solving a word puzzle. You finally think of that obvious word that had been eluding you all along. “Duh!” you say aloud, as you write it in. It had not been at all obvious, before, but it became so, the instant you thought of it. I guess any piece of fiction is a word puzzle, in a sense.       

An Agent of Utopia is a thrilling short story collection—at once wonderfully bizarre, piercingly humorous, and infused with historical weight. I love how seamlessly your writing weaves historical details with fabulism and speculative elements; what is your process like for approaching this intersection? What role do you think history plays in science/speculative fiction?

The late Philip Klass, who wrote as William Tenn, argued that history was the only science that science fiction ever really had—certainly the only complex human field of study that science fiction was ever really about. He pointed to future history and alternate history and parallel timelines; to all those time travelers in both directions; to all those extrapolations of the California Gold Rush into the asteroid belt, or of the Roman Empire onto the Galactic Empire; to all those pirates and generals and revolutionaries in space. He always reminded us of Gene Roddenberry’s successful pitch to TV executives who had been minting coin off Westerns for a decade: Star Trek would be “Wagon Train to the stars!”

Tenn’s is one of those lovely assertions, rife in our field and perhaps in every field, that seems to explain everything, until it doesn’t. It explains a lot, though—at least to a history buff like me!

More usefully, perhaps, anyone with even a glancing interest in history knows how partial it is, how incomplete, how biased, and how it keeps changing thanks to fresh ideas, new outlooks, and current research—just like physics, geography, economics, everything. Look at all we’ve learned in my lifetime about, say, Stonehenge, or the pre-colonial Native cities of the Americas.

Viewed in this light, any attempt to re-create the past has to involve fabulism and speculation—so it seems perfectly natural that at some point, you cross a fuzzy border and realize, what the heck, you’re writing spec-fic, so just roll with it. I would argue that it still should be truthful; but I assert that, William Tenn-like, about all fiction.

You are a graduate of the Clarion West Writers’ Workshop, and you’ve since returned to Clarion West and to Clarion at the University of California San Diego as an instructor. What role did attending Clarion West have on your growth as a writer? On the other end of this trajectory, how has the experience of returning as an instructor shaped your writing or your creative aesthetics?

A complete answer to the first question would entail everything I’ve done and thought and written and been since summer 1994, but the terse version is simply that I returned from that six-week residency in Seattle knowing that I was a writer and committed to living a writer’s life.

This seems odd to say, as I had been writing for newspapers for more than ten years at that point—but identifying as a reporter, even as a journalist, was a much narrower aperture for me than identifying as a writer. Suddenly I saw the world in widescreen and in color.

Clarion West was the making of me. And my greatest career honors are my invitations back to Clarion West or to Clarion to meet the future of the field, and to help these people however I can, including the paramount service of getting out of their way so that they can become more fully themselves.

I realize the Clarions are not for everyone—can never be, for countless practical reasons—and many other routes exist to finding oneself as a writer. I laud all of them. Whatever works, I say. But the Clarions helped me, and so I try to help them in return.

I really admire your expansive involvement in the science fiction and fantasy (SFF) community. From your participation in Clarion to your numerous publications and interviews, you’ve been an integral part of the community for years. Though the literary industry is ever evolving, what advice do you have for emerging writers as they seek to build their literary careers?

Imitate everyone; it’s a necessary part of every writer’s development, and every writer’s toolbox. Moreover, if you imitate a variety of things simultaneously, you’ll seem not imitative, but original.

The ultimate goal, however, is not to fit anyone else’s genre(s), but to become your own genre, a genre of one. The highest public compliment I ever received was in an unlikely place, an online comment thread debating whether one of my award-nominated stories fit this genre or that genre ad infinitum, and Gardner Dozois shut it down by saying: “I’ll tell you what kind of story this is. It’s an Andy Duncan story.” 

Keep reading everything, especially the work of newcomers—and when you like their work, please tell everyone, beginning with the newcomers themselves. They need the boost.  

Get involved. In addition to writing, try lots of writing-adjacent things—editing, publishing, reviewing, interviewing, organizing, publicizing, lobbying, running for writerly or artistic office, fundraising; even, bless your heart, teaching—to see which ones you enjoy and are good at and can keep doing, alongside the writing. Because your fellow writers sure can use your help, and as you help us, you’re also deepening your own experience as a writer.

Also, practice saying, whenever needed, “No, thanks, but I appreciate your thinking of me,” so that you can return to what you want to do.

Finally, I pass along Stephen King’s advice: “Put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support-system for art. It’s the other way around.”

You’ve been a member of the English faculty at Frostburg State University since 2008. How has working in academia shaped your writing? Additionally, is there anything you hope to see evolving or shifting in the academic sphere with respect to creative writing?

I’m a bit unusual, I think, in that my academic career and my fiction-writing career began simultaneously. When I left my newspaper job for graduate school in summer 1993—which enabled my summer 1994 Clarion West experience in the first place—I told the truth to everyone who asked: “I want to see whether I like teaching, and whether I like writing.” I thought I’d give them a try, and if they didn’t work out, I’d go back to journalism. In fact, I reveled in both, and though I would return to stints of journalism after graduation, it was always as a clear interruption (however pleasant or practical) to what I now viewed as my true path, a twinned path: I write; I teach. To me, the one shapes the other, an ongoing exchange.

Needless to add, this is not a universal experience! Plenty of teachers, even of writing, don’t write; plenty of writers, don’t teach. But to me, they seem inseparable. (I should reaffirm here what I said earlier: There are many routes. Higher ed is only one, but it was mine.)

I would love to see creative writing as a recognized, honorable, necessary component of every discipline taught on campus, which is part of my larger desire to see the arts and humanities reaffirmed as the core of a university education, and not as a gang of unwashed buskers barely tolerated so long as their sidewalk squat is kept outside the corporate gates. No problem facing the world is solely a STEM problem, and no past, present, or future student is solely a STEM product. We have to learn everything, if we are to know anything. Thanks for asking!

Recently, you released a webpage called “Weird Western Maryland,” an ongoing culmination of what you call “many years of happily random research.” These tales are so impressively sourced from a wide range of locations, materials, and historical moments. Can you talk about the process for collecting these legends, beliefs, and stories? What role did creating this project play in your own creativity or storytelling impulse?

To say that I have a “process” for collecting this stuff would make it sound a lot more logical than it really is. (The same is true for my fiction-writing “process,” I’m afraid.) Certainly, I collect and read books and articles on all these topics, and my happiest mailbox moments are when Fortean Times arrives from London. I perk up whenever anyone in conversation mentions some weirdness in their family or neighborhood or hometown. I’ve taken a number of classes via the Rhine Research Center in North Carolina. And I am a compulsive list-maker, note-taker, file-creator, document-filer and (digital) cloud-seeder; I will never run out of material, but I am always hungry for more.

After years of witnessing all these OCD behaviors, my wife, Sydney, had a brilliant suggestion as sabbatical time rolled around: “Why don’t you write up for your sabbatical the weird stuff you’ve been collecting about Western Maryland ever since we moved here?” That jump-started not only the sabbatical but the public outreach finally bearing fruit at Andy Duncan’s “Weird Western Maryland.” That it’s housed on a university website is weird in itself!

What is something you are currently reading, watching, or writing that you’re excited about?

I agree with my friend Amy Branam Armiento, immediate past president of the Poe Studies Association, that Mike Flanagan’s The Fall of the House of Usher on Netflix is not only terrific but the best Poe adaptation ever. There, I said it, and with scholarly backup! But I love The Great British Baking Show, too.

*SPOILER ALERT* This review contains plot details of In the Shadow of the Fall.

It will be published on July 23, 2024 by Tordotcom.

Tobi Ogundiran’s In the Shadow of the Fall delivers a compact yet powerful exploration of self-discovery in a magical, African-inspired world. Despite its brevity as a novella, Ogundiran’s debut excels with vivid character development and absorbing worldbuilding, offering readers a fresh twist on genre expectations of Eurocentric fantasy. The story traverses culture and identity through the eyes of Ashâke, an upstart, failed acolyte who brashly attempts to summon the orisha, gods of the West-African Yoruba religion, for her own purposes. This sets off a chain of events that plunges her into a sprawling journey to uncover the truth about the world and her place within it. Comparable to N. K. Jemisin, Ogundiran’s voice is gritty, but the narrative retains a gripping mystique. It strikes an intriguing balance between the contemporary surge in low-fantasy titles and classic tales of epic gods and mythologies, making for a fresh change of pace.

The standout gem of In the Shadow of the Fall is its African worldbuilding, which serves as the vibrant tapestry against which Ashâke’s personal narrative unfolds. Ogundiran weaves elements of folklore, mythology, and African culture to create a setting that feels authentic and enchanting. The textual communication of oral tradition in the story is an admirable feat as Ashâke learns of her heritage through song. This a transformative, spiritual experience that readers are easily able to pick up as they read along. “Jaha stepped into the circle, spread his ample arms wide, and bellowed to the heavens…The world fell away. The griots, the trees, the fire…then the world burst to colour before [Ashâke].” We are buoyed by Ogundiran’s expertise as he plunges us into a new world of vital and tantalizing images.

In the Shadow of the Fall’s magic-brimming world is paired with impactful prose, highlighted particularly during action scenes. Whether it’s a pulse-pounding chase through the forest or a retelling of a creation myth, Ogundiran renders plot beats with cinematic flair. “Several bolts of lightning fractured the heavens, terribly in their beauty…A bolt forked through the Tower. The top half shifted, teetered on its edge, then with a great groan, shattered.” His writing is bold and evocative, painting striking images that linger in the mind. In these moments, Ogundiran’s talent as a storyteller is on full display, immersing readers’ senses and leaving them hungry for more.

Through the eyes of young Ashâke, readers are introduced to a diverse cast of personalities: the eccentric Ba Fatai, the high priestess Iyalawo, and chief Mama Agba, who guide Ashâke on her journey of self-discovery. These characters are vivid and visual, springing to life in just a few sentences. Due to the succinctness a novella’s word count demands, they can at times feel tropey, although, perhaps only because Western literature has already made caricatures of these types of characters. Ogundiran’s work arguably humanizes these tropes by contextualizing them within their own culture and giving them their own motives. We know Ba Fatai and Mama Agba are meet-the-mentor and fairy-godmother-type characters. Leaning into these assumptions while giving the characters a striking visual identity orients us quickly and seeds our expectations for the role they will play. Ogundiran then promptly spring boards us into more nuanced, informed character expression—a territory into which I was more than happy to be flung. My only gripe is that I desperately wanted to know more about these characters.

There are moments where In the Shadow of the Fall’s feels constrained by the same economy of language that sets it apart. Take the description of the griot encampment Ashâke encounters after escaping the temple for example: “Eight huge boats idled in the river. Each vessel was onion-shaped, their hulls covered with brightly painted whorl patterns…It looked like a floating city.” I read this and want to know, has Ashâke heard of griots before? What kinds of whorls are painted, and what might they represent? Who fashions the griots, and from which resources? It’s important to consider that I don’t see these answers because I am unfamiliar with African history. I read the word “whorl,” and think it’s describing a shape: a swirl. It may be a culturally significant symbol, like my own koru—an indigenous swirling pattern used in New Zealand Māori art—and I am only scratching the surface of its meaning.  With a higher word count to play with, Ogundiran may have built on these frameworks and further showcased his potential for introducing an underrepresented culture to a broad audience.

The novella could also have benefitted from more socio-political intrigue. The psyops of belief is pivotal to the story’s gods, the orisha, and to Ashâke’s self-discovery. Who holds the power to control information for the masses is an important question that was not wholeheartedly answered by the book’s end. While Ashâke is sheltered and primarily concerned with her identity, this naivete could have been used as a blank slate from which to launch her—and the readers—into the subversive realm of the book’s politics and religion, giving us a broader view of the forces at play when magic meets man’s lust for power.

Qualms aside, In the Shadow of the Fall is a refreshing debut, and a testament to Tobi Ogundiran’s talent as an emerging writer. He blends intricate worldbuilding with compelling, character-driven storytelling to create a debut that is pithy, culturally crucial, and filled with mystical allure. While the novella may leave readers yearning for a deeper exploration of its world, its strengths lie in the same place—a richly imagined setting, nuanced characters, and vibrant prose. Fans of fantasy and adventure will find much to love in this captivating tale of old gods, found family, and identity.

As F(r)iction invites you explore the invisible realms of our latest release, The Unseen Issue, we’ve compiled five best-selling novels to whet your appetite for the unknown. These stories, told by hidden narrators, challenge traditional storytelling conventions to shed new light on visibility, identity, and reality. Slap these on your reading list for 2024 with F(r)iction: Unseen as your companion—packed full of emerging talent and diverse voices—and strap in for a deep dive into the dark.

This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

In this genre-bending epistolary novella, Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone weave a patchwork narrative that unfolds through a series of hidden letters exchanged between two rival agents—Red and Blue—across divergent timelines in a galactic war. The narrators, never explicitly revealed, are the voices of these agents as they lace a complex tapestry of love, espionage, and temporal manipulation in their letters to one another across time. As readers navigate the cross-dimensional landscape of the novella, the boundaries between protagonist and storyteller blur, submerging readers in a dual experience of action and retrospection.

The shapeshifting ability of the narrators allows El-Mohtar and Gladstone to build a referential work, with many of the covert identities Red and Blue assume resembling existing historical figures on Earth, or renowned icons of sci-fi literature. Here, science fiction hums as a living undercurrent, freeing the authors to zoom in on the rivals-to-lovers epic between Red and Blue in its star-crossed glory. This genre tension is perfectly captured by the quote, “I would rather break the world than lose you.”

Circe by Madeline Miller

Madeline Miller breathes life into the mythological figure of Circe, enchantress of Aeaea, in this first-person narrative rippling with power and vulnerability. While the narrator is ostensibly Circe herself, her omniscience and agency are realized through Miller’s clever utilization of point of view: Circe is unarguably the reliable narrator of her own experience. Miller gives an authentic voice to one of many hitherto silent female figures in Greek myth, sweeping readers into a transformative inner-journey across the vast mythology so many of us know and love in the classics. As Circe recounts her journey from divine exile to powerful sorceress, Miller imbues the narrative with her rich knowledge in Greco-Roman literature, filling in the gaps where spotlight characters like Odysseus and Heracles historically took front and center. Circe is a deeply informed work, reimagining the classics with masterful finesse. Miller leaves us with the feeling that Circe’s story was always there. She wrote until she set it free. 

Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

Tamsyn Muir crafts a labyrinthine tale of necromantic intrigue with the second installment in The Locked Tomb series, AKA: lesbian necromancers in space. A stark detour from its prequel, Harrow the Ninth flirts with reality and illusion as the protagonist, Harrowhark Nonagesimus, struggles to piece her identity back together following the dizzying events in Gideon the Ninth. As Harrowhark navigates her new role as Lyctor to God of the Nine Houses (a role she cannot remember being assigned), the story’s narrator remains bafflingly elusive. Muir leaves us to oscillate between Harrow’s internal monologue, her fractured—and blatantly incorrect—memories of the events in Gideon, and what appears to be her experience of hallucinatory psychosis. We cannot be sure, nor are we supposed to be. This complex narration adds an unsettling obfuscation to the story, challenging us to discern truth in a universe where death holds no dominion and Harrow herself must grapple with the unreliable narrator of her own mind.

The Invisible Life of Addie La Rue by V.E. Schwab

V.E. Schwab tells a haunting tale of immortality and longing in her 2020 fantasy release. The titular character, Adeline, grapples with the consequences of a Faustian bargain she made to escape an unwanted marriage in the 17th century, traversing the centuries as a deathless wanderer, until the year 2014 where she meets a man who carries a similar curse. Addie’s narrative unfolds like a confession revealing the loneliness of her immortal existence and the cold solace she comes to find in her only friend, the very demon with whom she forged a pact. While Addie stumbles through time, her future self is subtly present to guide the reader across the trajectory of her journey, allowing for flashes of insight that Addie herself doesn’t yet have. Schwab’s refined storytelling gives us a profound insight into identity and mortality, as Addie embarks on her eternal quest for connection.

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

Ishiguro explores the intersection of artificial intelligence and human fallibility in his dystopian sci-fi, hitting closer to home every year since its release in 2021. Through the eyes of Klara, an AI companion designed to bring solace to the lonely child Josie, Ishiguro challenges us to consider whether empathy is learned or innate, engineered or universal. Ishiguro imbues Klara with a sense of childlike wonder and existential curiosity. Yet her endearingly short-sighted conclusions about the world—such as her mistaking the sun for a god as a solar-powered android—point to a deeper exploration of sentience. Klara does not understand where the sun sets, or what it means to go to sleep or die, but somehow, she understands more profoundly than the human characters in the story, the struggle to save a loved one from suffering. Klara vandalizes public property as a plea to the sun to free Josie of an incurable sickness. This heart-wrenching story confronts us with what it means to be conscious, and what shape kindness takes in an age of technological advancement.

Hidden narrators beckon us into a liminal space where voice and identity can shift, and new perspectives can be gleaned. These five novels sit on the bleeding edge of genre innovation, calling on us to broaden our horizons and push our awareness. F(r)iction calls on you to delve deeper with our Unseen Issue. From spectral illusions to elusive truths, Unseen is packed with genre-staples as well as newer, weirder, and wilder tales. Grab a copy from our store today or subscribe to our tri-annual publication for your very own dose of the unknown. 

It’s happened again. You picked up a new book or started a show, and your spidey-sense began tingling. There’s something about this character. Something unique, compelling—relatable, even. There’s an element of their personality that reminds you of you. You have a hunch, a building suspicion, so you google the character, read interviews from their creator, scour message boards for fan theories and headcanons. You try to find out if anyone has seen the same something that you have. This character is definitely, undeniably, totally-saying-for-sure autistic. But this doesn’t seem intentional. And not for the first time you wonder: “Why are the best autistic characters always accidental?” 

“Woah,” you say, “Slow down. I’ve never had this experience. I’m not even sure I could tell you what autism is.” Never fear! For the uninitiated, here is a brief explanation: Autism is defined as a developmental disability or a neurodivergency that affects communication and how individuals process sensory information from their surroundings. Because it is a spectrum, autism presents differently in every person, and there is much variation in behavior from one person to another. However, there are traits many autistics frequently have in common, such as divergent thinking, processing stimuli differently, unique ways of speaking or socializing, moving differently, or having higher support needs. For me, autism primarily affects my communication style and the intensity of my interests. And one of my interests happens to be how the media portrays autistic characters. 

Despite my long history of enjoying media of all types, I have rarely seen depictions of people with autism that reflect autism that looks like mine. Intentional depictions of autism usually fall into two categories: stereotypical and/or negative. However, underneath the intentional, there exists an unseen world of accidental representation full of neurodivergent characters that resonate more authentically and affirmingly with a neurodivergent audience. So, why does this happen? And why should we care? 

Unsurprisingly, positive and negative representations of neurodivergent individuals have positive and negative consequences. To understand these consequences, let’s examine autistic stereotypes and their harmful impact, and in contrast, study what good representation looks like, and how we can make accidental representation purposeful and positive. 

Stereotypical and Negative Depictions in Media

The two autistic stereotypes most commonly found in media are the child and the savant. The child can be a literal child, or an adult treated like a child, but either way, this character is usually assumed to be incapable of caring for themselves. On the other hand, the savant is seen by others as a genius, but they are often portrayed as being socially inept, rude, emotionally stunted, or in other ways inconsiderate and unfeeling. Infamous examples of this include Dustin Hoffman’s character in Rain Man, and Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory, who is often quirkily callous or casually misogynistic. Even when autistic depictions expand past these two categories, it is rare to see characters that aren’t straight, white, and male. The image generally held in people’s heads is a skinny, pale, moody young man with obvious differences in mannerisms. We do not imagine autistic people as queer, fat, gender diverse, or as people of color. 

Autism focused studies over the years have indicated that depictions of people with autism in the media could have a significant impact on the public’s perception of autistic people. As summarized in a study by Sandra C. Jones, negative stereotypes can increase the alienation and isolation of autistic individuals, and promote misconceptions, prejudice, and negative behavior towards them. 

The theory is, if these depictions are narrow and negative, so will be people’s opinions of autistic people. I, unfortunately, don’t have to theorize. The most common reaction when I tell people of my autism diagnosis is: “But there’s nothing wrong with you!” Because autistic people are portrayed as unable to speak well or advocate for themselves, I cannot possibly be autistic. Because autistic people are portrayed as emotionally stunted or unempathetic, I cannot possibly be autistic. Because autistic people are portrayed as “superhuman” and robot-like, I cannot possibly be autistic. But I am, because I am a nuanced human being, not a stereotype. And good representation reflects that nuance. 

Accidental Depictions in Media (AKA: Nonstereotypical and Positive)

The accidental autistic varies wildly in race, gender, age, and personality. The accidental autistic is three-dimensional, well-fleshed out, and possesses agency and independence. Many of these characters go unseen as autistic by the majority of the audience because they don’t represent the stereotypical traits, but this is the very thing that makes them relatable to me, and other autistic individuals. 

“Well, that’s great,” you might say, “And you’re making excellent points, but can I get some examples of accidental autistics?” I’m so glad you asked. As I do not want to speak for anyone but myself, the following characters reflect what I consider to be my autistic traits, but I assure you that these results have been peer reviewed by an expert group of researchers (i.e. my autistic friends.) 

• I see my one-minded enthusiasm and passion reflected in Fox Mulder of the X-Files, an FBI agent pursuing the disappearance of his sister via extraterrestrial means. His authenticity to himself, to his beliefs, and to the people he loves even when they betray him—these traits are not seen as naive, gullible, or idealistic, but are venerated and valued. 
• Represented in Aloy of the Horizon series is my honesty, empathy, and unassailable sense of justice. The chosen savior of her planet, the only hope of humanity, her bluntness in social situations is not portrayed as inept or inconsiderate, because every interaction with her showcases the depth of feeling she has for human beings and their happiness and safety. 
• I find my expansive vocabulary and literal sense of humor in Xenk Yendar of the Dungeons and Dragons movie, a compassionate and dramatic paladin dedicated to the defense of his realm (and to sticking his nose in the business of lonely bards.) He is loved for his sweet naivete, and is found charming in his heartfelt declarations and his idealistic beliefs, not mocked, not belittled. 
• In Captain Holt of Brooklyn 99, the dry-humored leader and caring mentor of the 99th Precinct, I see my enthusiastic organization, my rigorous intellectual pursuits, and my happy disregard for conventionalities. This unconventional attitude is celebrated by his coworkers; it becomes what they love most about his leadership.
• From Katniss Everdeen of the Hunger Games series, there is my independence, my pragmatism, and my self-soothing stims. In her rebellion against the Capital, I see my desire to fight against impossible odds for the people closest to me, no matter the personal consequence. Even though Katniss struggles with connection, she is the spark that starts the flame of resistance, a resistance that would have been impossible without her contribution.    

The list goes on. But you may be thinking, “Well, these are traits anyone could have.” And it’s true. In accordance with the premise of the accidental autistic, all of these examples are noncanonical. We have no confirmation from their creators that they are autistic. But I invite you to google any one of these characters. I can already tell you what you’re going to find. Threads on Reddit, articles on WordPress, posts on Tumblr—all with neurodivergent people discussing, celebrating, and comparing their lived experiences to these characters. 

So, why are the best autistic characters always accidental? Well, when nonautistic people write autistic characters, they often make the mistake of looking only to previous depictions in media, or of writing to a set of stereotypes. But the accidental autistic is written with love, with fondness, with joy, not to meet a preconceived idea or a diagnostic criteria. The criteria isn’t the character, the character just happens to meet the criteria. Because their creators weren’t consciously writing an autistic character, they avoid many of the harmful stereotypes, and humanize these characters instead of alienating, parodying, or ridiculing them. 

So, What’s Next? 

Now, you may be saying, “Alright, I’m on board. What can I do to ensure that autistic representation is both purposeful and positive?” And you’re in luck, because I have a handy little list:

1. Gain awareness and education on autism: Talk to neurodivergent people, discover their art and inventions and stories! Find books written by autistic individuals, both educational and personal. Consider your preconceptions of autistic people and interrogate your assumptions.
2. Explore positive representation: Even and especially if it’s accidental! Ask your neurodivergent friends who they believe are good autistic representation, who they’ve connected to in their favorite media. Not only will you gain perspective on the breadth of the spectrum, you will also learn more about how autistic individuals experience autism.
3. Create positive representation: Now that you’ve broadened your horizons, it’s time to write autistic characters! These should be characters you love that just happen to be neurodivergent. Give them rich narratives, complex motivations, and non-stereotypical traits and flaws like you would any other character! 

Positive representation may seem a small effort in the face of the discrimination and prejudice autistic people face, but do not underestimate the power of a story and a lovable character to transform minds and touch hearts. It is my hope that, eventually, we will not have to rely on the “accidental autistic” to see ourselves but be able to seek autistic characters out across media: canonized, valued, and loved—just as we should be. 

You’ve heard it before—that sage, age-old writerly wisdom, supposedly enough to crack the code to creating vibrant, truthful, and resonant works of literature: “Write what you know.” Sounds simple enough, but what is it exactly that we’re supposed to know again? Surely not every story should be restrained by the quotidian characters and scenarios of real life; surely not every self-indulgent Mary Sue should make its way into a final piece. But the goal is not to turn fantasy into realism, or fiction into memoir—rather, it is to enhance your writing with the verisimilitude of life, whatever genre it may be. What the teachers, authors, and workshoppers bestowing this classic advice fail to explain is how to actually know what it is that you know.

Here are some concrete writing tips and exercises to help you truly “write what you know,” gathered over my time as a F(r)iction intern and a Literary Editing and Publishing student at USC.

1. Observe from Life

Just like visual artists practice live figure drawing, sketch out the characters in your life by taking notes on their conversations, mannerisms, and idiosyncrasies. You can even people-watch and eavesdrop on strangers’ conversations in public. These details can easily become part of a fictional character, a scene, or dialogue, but even more importantly, you’ll get in the habit of observation. The more you view life like a writer, the richer and more lifelike your work becomes.

2. Journal, Journal, Journal

This advice is nothing new; but how do your whiny diary entries help you when you want to write Good Serious Fiction, you might ask? To continue the artist analogy, treat your diary or journal like an artist’s sketchbook. Your diary isn’t merely a confessional experience, it is also a practice space, full of authentic introspection and observations about life that can be drawn out into a more formal piece of writing. You never know what snippets may fit perfectly in a piece or inspire an entirely new story.

3. Practice Self-Indulgence

Many writers share a fear that writing too close to your personal experience will come across as self-indulgent, flimsy, arrogant, cringe, righteous, boring, or any number of negative associations. It’s scary to reveal ourselves or our loved ones—and women writers especially face the dreaded accusation of the “Mary Sue,” as if a “self-insert” character is the most cardinal crime a genre writer can commit. Well, I say write it anyway. Write the cringey, self-insert fanfiction—you’ll still be practicing the essentials, like style, plot, voice, dialogue, theme, atmosphere . . . the list goes on! Write dumb things until you no longer believe that self-indulgence equals dumb.

4. Follow the Shadow Self

To get inspired, ask yourself one simple question: W.W.E.M.D.? What Would Evil Me Do? Take a scenario from your recent life and reimagine it: If the worst possible version of yourself took over and made all your decisions in that moment, what would have happened? Play out the most outlandish scenarios, discover new plot possibilities, and indulge in your shadow self to create exciting characters. By drawing from a real moment in your life, where you could have made a different decision, and following that shadowy voice that tempts you to take the low road, even the wackiest conclusions will be grounded in realism.

5. Embrace Autofiction

Writing from real life doesn’t have to be boring. Whether you’re writing fantasy, sci-fi, horror, or realistic fiction, literature can explore questions of the self regardless of genre. Autofiction, or stories that fictionalize elements of the author’s life and leave the truth intentionally ambiguous, proliferates the current literary fiction scene. Many authors are already out there blurring the lines between author and narrator, between the self and its representation, between fiction and reality; this is exciting new territory and it’s reshaping how we view the fictional novel. Don’t be afraid to write as yourself—or some skewed, semi-fictional version of yourself. Audiences are eating up the ambiguity.

As a writer, you are your own greatest asset. Anyone can learn how to string some pretty words together, but the most valuable thing your work has to offer is that it came from you. It is uniquely yours—a cocktail of your worldview, psychology, passions, interests, observations, past experiences, hyperfixations, and the characters that fill your life, shaken not stirred—and that is not a recipe anyone else can recreate. The first step to writing what you know is killing the critic inside your head that cringes away from anything that feels “too you.” Spoiler alert: you’ll never succeed at becoming not-you, so you might as well embrace what you got. I promise it’ll make your writing even better.

In I Love You More: A Reluctant Memoir, you mention your mother wanted you to write this story, and you usually do as your mother wants. In addition to this motivation, what else led you to write this book?

I wanted to address some deeper confusions I had about my childhood. I wanted to research and understand the truth because I wasn’t confident in the stories I’d been told my whole life. Searching for the truth led to writing, and writing led to the truth. After that happened, and with my mom’s encouragement, the story took on a life of its own.

Projects will do that! I’d like to talk about your choices regarding content. This story spans many years and many miles, beginning in the Appalachians and tracing back family lines. Was this one of the ways I Love You More took on a life of its own? What was it like as a writer to decide which places, people, and events to include in such an expansive project?

Choosing the places to write about was easy because each place is a character in the story, in its own right; they each hold a place factually, thematically, and emotionally. While that wasn’t an issue, how much life to give these places was difficult. I would have given them much more, but I already had 400 pages of content. I love to write about places. Describing them is fun for me; evocative nature writing is what I aspire to, quite frankly.

In terms of events, let me address my choices in terms of structure. This was tricky for me; I struggled with how to best present everything. Eventually, I realized chronologically was the best way… it’s an easy choice for readers to follow. However, I bookended this story with the present day as the frame, in which I meet with my father and present him with my questions. It took a while for me to come to that decision. What I came to realize is it was better for both myself, and the story to let the reader know from the very first chapter that this awful thing happened. I didn’t want to be coy about it because there was already enough to tease out and develop.

Another aspect of this decision that ties into character choices was my inclusion of Trudeau, the cop. Trudeau is a major character. I struggled with this choice until it became clear to me that you can’t include a cop until you have a crime, but the crime doesn’t happen until halfway through the book. So, I had to put it in context by disclosing that I only know about many details of the crime because Trudeau gave me the information. I realized that by just telling the readers what I know up front, and why, it gives me credibility. That was a choice related to structure that was harder, but in the end, I was very happy with it. The reader came along with me on my journey.

In a different interview, you mentioned the only structure you could tell this story through was as a memoir through your eyes. Can you speak about how you came to that decision?

I came to that decision through painful and excruciating trial and error! When you take writing classes, the teachers will tell you to explore different writing styles, and even copy them, much like a painter may copy the Mona Lisa as an exercise. They’ll say, “Well, pull up Tennessee Williams and try something that he did. Try it on.” So as exercises, I “tried on” various styles and literary devices to see how they felt. Writing can be very tedious work, so why not have fun and go off on a tangent every now and then? It’s like candy! My advice to writers is to just let yourself go and don’t take yourself too seriously; see what sparks from experimenting.

While working on I Love You More, I tried writing this memoir in third person and second person, but neither of these perspectives made sense; it wasn’t accomplishing the purpose of this project, which was to get my feelings out. So, I think it was inevitable that this story be written in first person.

Did the writing process of I Love You More differ from your other writing ventures?

Yes. Before I decided to write I Love You More, I had a job which required me to write pieces that were more technical and not conducive to telling a story. I had to learn not only how to write a story, but how to structure a story. I’m not saying you need a PhD, but you need to know some principles. I realized I had a big hole in my writing education, so I went to fill it at workshops with Lighthouse Writers, who do a great job. They made me become a better reader, and it certainly helped my writing. I would encourage anyone in a similar situation to get help; Lighthouse gave me vital feedback and helped me get on track when I was flailing about.

Another important note about my process for writing I Love You More is that even though I did all this learning on how to write story, I wasn’t being deeply honest with myself. At first, I didn’t know that was the case. I wasn’t consciously trying to hide anything; I just didn’t realize that I needed to delve deeper. Erika Krouse, a mentor I met through Lighthouse, was so generous with her time in helping me with I Love You More. She was very gentle about it, but she made me realize that I wasn’t addressing the big questions raised by the book. This forced me to address those questions, and in doing so, I became honest with myself. I highly recommend her book, Tell Me Everything: The Story of a Private Investigation, in which she bared her soul, which gave me the courage to be brutally honest and totally vulnerable in my own writing.

Aside from writing, you’re also an artist, working primarily with glass. I’m curious about the creative process of fusing glass, and how it’s similar and different to working with words.

The beginning of both art forms starts with a glimmer. When I see light through colored glass, it just makes me happy. It’s beautiful to witness the incredible colors of colored glass come to life when lit up. That moment is what I call a glimmer. Writing, especially nature writing, needs to start with a glimmer: a moment you have all by yourself where you witness something beautiful—or even something awful—that moves you. That glimmer compels you to take the next step, which is to preserve it, getting it down and recreating it.

The actual work of glass fusing is very painstaking. There’s a lot of trial and error, at least when I was just starting out. That fits my personality: I’m an organized, picky person with a strong work ethic. My mother taught me to finish what you start, and that helped with putting together the different pieces of my book, finishing it, and publishing it. Like we discussed earlier, I Love You More took on a life of its own. But once it got that life, I couldn’t let it go! I had to finish it. Even when I realized it needed improving, I never gave up; with writing, you have to tell yourself if it’s not perfect, the next draft will be better, but you have to keep going! As an author, that picky side of myself is always looking for areas to improve or wishing I wrote x instead of y. It’s important not to quit what you start, but once your work is finished and out in the world, it’s not your work anymore. You have to let it go. It’s the same with glass.

What’s the most important thing you learned through the publishing process?

It’s important to clarify your goals with selling and marketing your project. With I Love You More, I decided I would not do the needle-in-the-haystack approach where I hope and hope against all hope that somebody would notice me and I’d get an agent. I decided to go with a hybrid publisher, meaning they’re not one of the big publishing houses; there’s more independence on the author’s end, but they help you with the process.

That meant I wasn’t going to end up in Barnes and Noble or have a hardcover version of I Love You More because it goes through a different system. But I didn’t care about that; I just wanted to tell my story. The amount of control I had during the publishing process was critical to me, I designed the cover myself, using a beautiful Alaskan photograph by David Parkhurst, and the book is available on both Amazon and e-readers; these are the things that really mattered to me.

Your author bio mentions another project that you’re currently working on called Light Through Colored Glass. Can you speak about this project and how working on it has differed from writing a generational memoir?

Light Through Colored Glass is a collection of short stories I’m working on. I want to finish some of the stories I tried to tell in I Love You More but was not able to for various reasons. I also have a growing list of other ideas. I’m planning to go to Juneau for a week in May to focus on this collection. I’m making an appointment with myself to work!

Lastly, I’d like to circle back around to I Love You More. There’s a line at the end that says, “My brave mother chose happiness over despair, so that is her destiny. If I can muster the strength to choose love over anger, grace will be mine.” Did writing this book help you choose love?

Absolutely. Mother Theresa said, “If we really want to love, we must learn how to forgive”; Gandhi said, “The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is an attribute of the strong”; and Paul Boese said, “Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future.” Although I had to absorb these basic principles on my own, all the research and writing helped me in my journey toward forgiveness. At the end of the day, what I do know is that it was critical for me to forgive in order to move on and experience the love, and the life, I wanted.

What was the inspiration behind writing The Insomniacs?

In high school, my best friend was (and still is) an insomniac. At some point, I realized she had a whole other life that took place at night. She had two social lives during high school while most of us have only one! Years and years later, I loved this idea for a story—the chance to have a double life but also tell the story of a friendship/romantic relationship that takes place strictly in the night.

In The Insomniacs, you include a level of mystery. Why is this aspect important for your style of storytelling? What challenges did you face while writing The Insomniacs when trying to incorporate this element?

I love writing stories with multiple layers and slowly revealing them. The set-up of the book was inspired by the Hitchcock film, Rear Window, although it was challenging because this book is a mystery, not a thriller. Instead of a dead body, the mystery revolves around betrayal. The book is in many ways, a psychological mystery, and that internal journey was extremely challenging to write! It incorporates the element of “Did I actually see that or was it all a dream?” and “Can I trust my own eyes when I’m exhausted and recovering from an injury?”

The novel touches upon familial issues with Ingrid’s absentee father and a mother who is almost always working. How does this play a role in Ingrid’s guilt and PTSD?

Ingrid, like many kids, is protective of her parent. She is powerless when her dad leaves, and watches how it impacts her mom financially and emotionally. As a result, Ingrid takes on more emotional responsibility and worry than she should—in doing so she’s sent messages of strength and independence that are easily misconstrued as “I don’t have any problems.” Both Ingrid and Van internalize much of their grief about their parents as their fault, becoming central figures in the stories they tell themselves about their parents and what happened to them.

When writing how do you decide which plot point to focus on? How do you bring your initial story idea into fruition? What plot point did you most want to focus on with “The Insomniacs?”

This book had pretty intricate plotting. I like to think of the different plot threads as spinning plates that need to be balanced, not dropped! If I’ve left one alone for too long, it was time to bring it back in. I mostly wanted to focus on Van and Ingrid’s love story! Those scenes of reconnection, flirtation, and misunderstanding were so fun to write.

Throughout the story, we also see Van and Ingrid’s romantic relationship develop as the story progresses. What was most important to develop this relationship? What role do you think romance plays in The Insomniacs and other YA novels?

I aimed to establish the slow burn in the story, highlighting the contrast between Ingrid and Van’s perceived social differences. Building trust between them, as well as rekindling their childhood bond was very important. I appreciate how an old friendship can transcend time and circumstances. To me, romance in YA novels represents hope and a new experience knocking on your door. Suddenly the day-to-day changes and ends up demonstrating how life can take on new dimensions overnight.

The Insomniacs has been described as a coming-of-age story. What elements do you think are important to you when writing such a story?

My characters grapple with flaws they see as permanent, terrible parts of themselves. They undergo a journey of self-forgiveness and realization that their flaws don’t define them as bad people. Easier said than done! Through their experiences, they gain awareness that they’re not alone, that we’re all flawed, including the adults in their lives. Almost all of my characters realize they need to listen to their own instincts over the opinions of those they love most in the world. They move forward, making decisions more aligned with their true selves.

It’s mentioned on your website that you enjoy writing YA. What is it about YA that draws you towards the genre?

I love writing YA because I remember that time in my life so vividly! Everything seems brand new because you haven’t made any permanent decisions that will take you down a set path. The world appears open. Not all of my books have this, but my favorite trope is friends to lovers. Also, a touch of Romeo and Juliet because I love when people cross perceived social barriers to be together.

How would you describe the publishing process? What was most difficult and what made it easier for you? What advice would you give to aspiring authors?

I thought it would be smooth(er) sailing once I signed with an agent. But then you need editors/publishers to say yes, then you need readers to say yes. My advice would be to remember that the process is SO subjective. One reader will love your main character and another will say, “your main character didn’t resonate.” My author friend and I say, over and over again, “It only takes one.” It only takes one agent to say, “I love it!” Also, you can’t just tell yourself to have a thick skin, but you definitely develop one over time. My best advice is to finish whatever you are working on. Just finish it!! So many writers never finish their project whether it’s a book, a screenplay, a play, etc. You are way ahead of the game if you complete something (even if it’s a terrible first draft!). Just keep going, even if you’re feeling unsure.