In my second year of graduate school, I attended a reading by Charles Baxter, who was at that time a visiting professor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. This was in the spring of 2013, two years before the publication of his story collection There’s Something I Want You to Do, but the ten stories that would make up that collection were at the forefront of Baxter’s mind, and he read to us that night from “Loyalty,” which later appeared in Harper’s. In that story, the narrator—a middle-aged man with a teenage son, Jeremy, and a second wife, Astrid—must reckon with the reappearance of his first wife, Corinne, who has become, in his words, “a bag lady.” What struck me most about the story at the time was Jeremy’s reaction to his mother’s visit. He retreats to his room, refuses to have dinner with her, and then later, after telling his friends at school about this, admits to his father, “I have to hate her for a few more days.” He knows she’s crazy and gets that she’s his biological mother, but, for his own sake, he needs to allow himself this hatred, this time of bitterness over being abandoned. And then he has to let it go.
At the time of Baxter’s reading, I was twenty-two years old. From the outside, it appeared I was doing well. At such a young age, I had already begun publishing in highly regarded literary magazines. I had an agent. In the spring, I would be graduating with an MFA. But also: I’d fallen in love with the wrong woman, the novel I was working on at the time was a complete mess, and I had yet to give a name to the crippling, sweat-inducing vice of anxiety that often gripped me at parties and sent me speed-walking home so I could curl up into a big shamefaced ball (only later would I learn that these were panic attacks and heed the warning that they were trying to tell me: something is wrong; something is wrong). Though I had the emotional wherewithal to know that this situation was toxic and that I needed to focus on self-care, I did not actually have the mental strength or fortitude to say of my love for this woman, “This is just temporary. I have to love her for a few more days, then I have to let it go.” It felt, in that moment, all-encompassing. Essential. A part of myself that could not be excised. In some ways, I was defined by my inability to let go. Unlike Jeremy, I did not have a loving middle-class father to support me emotionally. There was no comfortable safety net to catch me if that novel failed—which it did. I was young, alone, and only just beginning to realize that I might be depressed.
This went on for another year and a half.
In that time, I thought often about Baxter’s collection. At his reading, he talked about the central conceit of the book: how each story was built around a request—that titular “thing I want you to do”—which is to say that they hinge, at least partially, on a specific set of actions: the ask and the answer (where the answer could be “no, I won’t do that thing for you”). It occurred to me even then that much of my life hinged on not asking: not applying for that thing I want, not going to parties or readings, not working up the courage to ask that cute girl to dance. Up until then, I’d lived a life of both furious literary ambition and complete interpersonal inaction. I do not dance. I rarely networked, even at Iowa, and the thought of requesting something from someone made me spin out into a web of possibilities, each one worse than the last. What if they refused? And what if they found the request so ludicrous that they laughed and badmouthed me to their friends? This social anxiety resulted in a kind of paralysis wherein someone would say something more or less innocuous and I would freeze, my mind branching into the hundreds of possible actions and their resultant outcomes, the idea of which would take so long to unfold that the moment to act would pass and I would return to the present having done nothing and spoken to no one.
Knowing this, the question became not “How do I cope with this anxiety so it doesn’t get in the way of what I want?” but “How do I make this absence of action interesting in a story?” In “Dysfunctional Narratives, or: ‘Mistakes Were Made,’” the first essay in Charles Baxter’s highly regarded craft book Burning Down the House (1997), Baxter writes about getting your characters into “interesting trouble” and putting them in the position to “make interesting mistakes that they may take responsibility for.” This is part of a larger argument against passivity, more specifically the passive voice as seen in our culture of deniability, which Baxter links back to Nixon’s phrase “mistakes were made”—made by whom? When characters take responsibility for their mistakes, Baxter argues, they define themselves. “They are that person who did that thing,” Baxter writes. Not everyone is comfortable owning up to their actions, however. Baxter distinguishes between what he calls “Me” protagonists and “I” protagonists. “Me” protagonists are passive, acted upon, objects in their own stories. “I” protagonists take action, make mistakes, then take responsibility for said mistakes. But my situation led me to believe there might be a third option or a hybrid of the two: a protagonist whose very passivity is a mistake—one for which they will sooner or later have to take responsibility. So the question then became: how do I propel the plot forward when the main character is defined by inaction?
Then it hit me: consequences.
As a result of my passivity and inability to let go, I had: stayed in Iowa a third year, spent countless hours contemplating my inadequacies while burning through my savings, written fewer pages every month, and done next to nothing to ensure I was employable after grad school. So by the end of that third year I had to make some decisions, regardless of whether or not I was ready. And this was the position I wanted to put my characters in: this turning point where, as a result of their inaction and their failure to make good choices, their lives change and they have to consider the consequences of their behavior. I call this The “What Are You Doing?” Moment. When I ask this question of my characters, I think of myself as that close but judgmental friend who holds up a mirror and tells you to look at yourself. I also ask, “Why does this matter to you? Why are you even here? What is the point of all this?” And I get the answers, one way or the other. Several of the stories in my collection Night Beast follow this same format: inaction, consequence, inaction, consequence, and so on. In the title story, the protagonist attends her big brother’s wedding even though she’s having an affair with his fiancé; she wants the fiancé to leave him but cannot bring herself to ask. In “The Twilight Hotel,” a lesbian couple visits a futuristic hotel in the wake of a miscarriage, and the protagonist (who knows better than to ask her wife to try again) marvels in the setting as a way of avoiding the inevitable, or what comes next. For me, what came next was leaving Iowa, moving to Seattle, and building a life for myself. I still ask myself, “What are you doing?” pretty regularly, but the answer is much easier now. Sometimes, it’s simply, “I’m going to work.”