In case you missed it, one of my stories (“We Are Endless”) got adapted to a podcast this week, and you can listen to it now. You’ll have to subscribe to the Sleepless Universe to get access to the subscriber version of the show, but it’s a great podcast worth supporting. Please consider supporting these talented artists who provide a fantastic platform for fiction writers.
There’s a lot that’s strange about being a writer. One of the oddities is that publishing works v e r y s l o w l y. Whenever I get something published, it’s usually been a long time since I’ve even thought about it, much less worked on it. Some of the fun of publishing comes from being able to revisit or even rediscover a story and see it with the benefit of distance and perspective. So, I thought I’d take a few moments this week and think out loud, as it were, about “We Are Endless,” what I put into it, what my intentions for it were, and anything else that slips out of my brain as I look back on it now in audio form.
First, if you haven’t listened to it, do that, but here’s a spoiler-free synopsis: A man who’s been undead and imprisoned in his own body a long time finds himself revisiting important places from his life, which causes him to reminisce about how he came to lose everything and everyone, including a young child he’d assumed guardianship over.
Got that? Good.
“We Are Endless” was the first story I wrote after finishing my MFA program. I had worked very hard, maybe harder than I’ve ever worked in my life, for three years, and part of the difficulty was self-imposed: as a writer, I wanted to take the opportunity to challenge myself and experiment. I’m so incredibly fortunate I landed in a program (George Mason University) that gave me the space and freedom to do that. Much love to my friends and family there.
When I finished that challenging program, I wanted to write something more straightforward, so of course I ended up experimenting with structure and tense.
Narratively, “We Are Endless” isn’t exactly groundbreaking. There aren’t many surprises, the plot is somewhat conventional for zombie and apocalypse stories, and I maybe turned some wrenches a bit too tightly for the sake of expediency, since the challenge of short story writing is balancing conflict, stakes, and resolution in the confines of a tight word limit that seems to be getting tighter year after year. [Insert old-man rant about fleeting attention spans here.]
But that was what I wanted: a straightforward story. I think, instinctively, I knew the story needed something more to make it interesting, and while I do think the engine of the story is its narrative that I feel has a lot of heart, the structure and tense flips is a highlight for me in terms of why this story stands out.
In recent years, the last decade or so, I’ve been fascinated by the idea that time is a volume, not a continuum. We just perceive it that way. However, we have the ability to navigate the past in our memories.
I also had intended to write a story about a zombie who is very much still the person he was inside but who is unable to stop himself from committing absolute horrors, and in thinking about that story for a long time, I realized the story wasn’t what the zombie did but what the man trapped inside experienced and how he might exert some kind of agency over his fate.
It seems every writer recommends Stephen King’s On Writing to other writers, even if neither party likes Stephen King’s work. I recall a passage in that book about where stories come from. Here:
“There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas come quite literally out of nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun.”
Side note: I was asked to read something at my undergrad English department graduation ceremony, and this was my first choice. The good people in the department didn’t like that, so they had me read something by Raymond Carver that I’ve long forgotten. That was 20 years ago, and I’m honestly still a little bummed about it.
Anyway, that’s how “We Are Endless” happened. The story is about navigating time and memory when that’s literally all you have, and it’s about finding your agency in the past so you can take control of your future. It’s about guardianship, but more than that, it’s about choosing to be someone’s guardian. It’s about giving the next generation a future even when the present is dire. It’s about love. A friend once told me all of my stories are love stories, and I feel like I keep proving them correct. And it’s about the heartbreak of letting go of the past and choosing to move on.
As a writer looking back on a story that I intended to be simple, it strikes me that I genuinely feel it’s beautifully complex in ways that matter to me. I’m proud of it even though I understand it might be a big ol’ shoulder shrug to some people. I didn’t write it for them. I wrote it for you, the person who’s so charitable with their interest, energy, time, attention, and support that you’ve made it here because something about what I’ve done or am doing is intriguing. I love that because it’s intriguing to me, too. Otherwise, I wouldn’t do it, and the fact that you’re still reading means we’ve shared something wonderful in a way that only human beings can.
So thanks for that.
I’ve made it weird. I do that. But I don’t know how to end this one now, so here are some disorganized, rapid-fire thoughts about “We Are Endless”:
- I struggled for a long time to gracefully and artfully get into the story so that you’d have this experience of, “Oh shit, this guy’s a zombie,” but I ended up just ripping that off like a band-aid, and I think that was the right call. Sometimes, just giving the reader the information they need, even if it ain’t pretty, is the way to go.
- I wanted the prose to be descriptive but also natural, since it’s from the narrator’s point of view. I think I did okay with that, and I think Dan Zappulla’s narration for the podcast shines in making the writing sound as natural as it does, but if you detect any oddness, that’s why. It’s my fault.
- George Saunders taught me at some point (via an article or video interview or something; I don’t know him personally) that it’s imperative to determine which character owns the story, and to do that, we have to figure out whose life is most affected by the events and decisions in that story. When I wrote “I should tell you about the Kid. This is all about her,” that’s the narrator, but it’s also me, leaning into your ear. “We Are Endless” is not the narrator’s story. It’s the Kid’s story, even if she’s absent from much of its telling. The narrator is merely the perspective we have to the Kid’s story, and I hope that, by the end, that becomes clear. I hope that, as you listen to this story, you experience that shift in understanding whose story this is. And then I hope your mind fills in the voids in the storytelling because the narrator can’t know what’s in those places.
Okay, that’s enough prattling. If you came here with questions, I’m sorry if I didn’t answer them, but I thank you for reading (and listening) nonetheless.
Please support the NoSleep Podcast, and please listen to the latest episode, Season 25, Episode 11, which contains my story, “We Are Endless.” I’m proud of my writing in that one, and I’m very happy with what the podcast team turned the text into.
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