The Question

Jane finished reading and looked up at me expectantly. I did my best to appear thoughtful, as if her story had given me something to contemplate. There wasn’t much to contemplate. She had submitted three different stories over the eight weeks of our workshop, and every one of them centered on an extra-marital affair. She rubbed the ring on her left hand as she awaited feedback.

“Thank you, Jane,” I said. “Thoughts?”

Shawna spoke first. Of the five people in the group, she was the best writer. Privately, I worried that her writing might actually suffer as a result of the advice she received from this group, but she seemed to know how to politely ignore the wrong suggestions.

“I just want to say, this was so much cleaner than your first draft. Don’t get me wrong, there were some nice passages and the intrigue was there, but it was like sifting through the pieces of a puzzle you’ve just dumped out of a box. You knew there was something there, but it wasn’t clear what it was. This version was like seeing the completed puzzle.”

Jane smiled, thanking Shawna for the compliment.

“I couldn’t have said it better myself,” I agreed. “You’ve come a long way these past eight weeks, Jane.”

“I felt bad for the husband,” said Harold. “He seemed like a good guy, just a little oblivious.”

“I didn’t,” said Dwayne. “Dude clearly doesn’t know how to treat a woman. You gotta tend to that flower, son. All he did was drink milk and watch sitcoms. He deserved to be cheated on.”

John said nothing. He was rolling a quarter between his fingers, ready for someone to ask him the gender of his narrator. He’d been asked about it at every workshop. His response, always the same: “Flip a coin. Get it?”

“John, what did you think?”

His eyes were fixed on the ground, staring hard enough to burn a hole in the carpet. “It was good. I just don’t see how it was any different than her first two stories.”

Jane bristled slightly at the mixed review. Shawna gave him a cold look.

“Some people say that we all have one story in us. No matter how many books we write, we’re really just finding new ways to tell that story.” Of course, I actually agreed with John, but when you’re the instructor, people look to you to be a source of encouragement. “Would you like to go next, John?”

John read his story about the end of the world, told from the perspective of the only person who hadn’t “mysteriously disappeared.” He sat back after reading, coin clutched in a sweaty fist, waiting for someone to ask him about the narrator’s gender. No one did.

Dwayne read Spent, a story about a tiny shop that literally bought souls. For a tidy sum, you could sell that ethereal quality of yourself for which we have no suitable definition. Jane commented that Dwayne’s story gave her the shivers. Dwayne beamed.

Harold’s story was as forgettable as Harold himself. I won’t bother describing him because the thought of doing so makes my eyes droop, but if you ever saw him, you wouldn’t need an introduction to know he was a Harold.

The title of Shawna’s story was If I Could Talk, I’d Sing of Your Sins, about a girl born with a monster in her throat. If she tries to speak, the monster will get out, so she keeps her mouth shut, even as she grows up hearing and witnessing her parents’ abusive relationship. Every time her dad hits her mom, the monster grows a little bigger. Every time her dad comes home with breath smelling like wet rust, the monster grows a little bigger. It grows bigger and bigger until she can’t keep it back anymore. She opens her mouth and lets it out. Free from its prison, the monster devours her father in one gulp. It retreats to a cave in the mountains where it spends seven years digesting the father, while the girl and her mother start a new life together in a distant town where nobody knows their names. Without the monster in her throat, the girl can talk, and her voice is music.

I thanked Shawna for her story as she and the others passed forward what they’d written. I would email them my final thoughts, but I found it easier to engage with physical pages. I started to go into my spiel how far they’d all come in the last eight weeks, encouraging them to keep in touch with each other, writing and critiquing, when Shawna interrupted.

“What about you?” she said.

“Hmm? What about me?”

“We’ve been sharing our work with you for the past two months, but we haven’t seen anything of yours.”

Heat flooded my cheeks. I hoped they didn’t look too red.

“Well, I have a couple of books out...”

“I’ve read those. I mean, what are you working on now? It’s been ages since your last book. Surely, there must be something you’re in the midst of?”

“Oh well, I don’t...”

“Right, how does your shit look before it’s been all polished and manhandled by your bigwig editors?” Dwayne challenged.

“Not really worth reading at this point...”

“Oh come on,” said Jane. “Just a peek.”

“We’d all love a preview,” Harold chimed in.

John stared.

“As much as I appreciate the enthusiasm, the truth is...”

The truth is I hadn’t written anything in five years. How could I tell them that? How could I admit that I’d lost the center of who I was?

I trailed off. The length of my silence didn’t hit me until I noticed the eyes of my students around the circle. It was as if they had flipped over a garden rock for the first time, had seen the creatures writhing in the dirt caked onto the underside, and now would never again look at the rock the same way.

“The truth is, I haven’t been able to finish anything since my wife left me. I judge the work of others, give pointers for making it better, but I can’t even string together my own stories from beginning to end. I start meandering in the middle to avoid falling into the same traps I’ve written myself into a hundred times over, never drawing to a fitting conclusion.”

“Sounds like you could use some help,” Shawna said.

I tried to smile. It hurt, like always.

“I don’t even have anything to show for myself. Every time I look at one of my half-finished stories, I just get depressed and shut my laptop for three weeks.”

“All the more reason to let us help,” said Jane. “You just need to get through it, no matter how ugly. Clean the gunk out of your system.”

“She’s right,” said Dwayne. “You gotta get yourself motivated. Right now, you sound like a quitter.”

“Let’s all meet back here this time next week,” said Harold. “Every one of us. And when you walk through that door, you’ll have a completed first draft. Doesn’t matter how many words, just as long as it’s a complete story with a beginning, middle, and end.”

“One week, huh? I could try, but I don’t want to waste everyone’s time. I’m sure I’ll start strong only to go cold halfway through like I always do.”

“Just get through it,” Dwayne said. “Doesn’t have to be good. A shitty first draft is all were asking.”

A shitty first draft. When you put it like that, it didn’t sound so bad. After all, it was no more than I’d asked of them in the past two months. Quite a bit less, in fact. It almost sounded achievable.

“I’d like to,” I said. “I really would. I just don’t know if I can.”

“Commit to it,” said Shawna. “If you commit to it here and now, you’ll hold yourself to it when you’re at home this week. You’ll find a way through.”

“I wish it were that easy. I need more than dedication. I need a muse, a spark of inspiration, some sort of a cosmic sign.”

“What if you had one?”

We all jumped a little at the sound of John’s voice. It was the first he’d spoken since reading his story. It came out low and strained, a cold intensity in it that shivered my blood whenever he spoke.

“Well, then I guess I’d go home and write something.”

“In that case, it all boils down to one question.” He raised his first, and, with the deliberation of a mob boss opening a suitcase full of fifties, unraveled his fingers to reveal the sweaty quarter in the middle. “Heads or tails?”