Rebuilding the Room

A brief word on the will

A few months ago, in preparation for a workshop,

Emma Copley Eisenberg

asked me for a voice memo describing how I “stayed in the room” to write The Future Was Color — particularly when writing fiction can feel uncomfortable and unproductive. It came at a good time for me, I think, as I’d been struggling (and still am) with how to keep going on my current novel, which I pick up and peck at now and then like a sinewy drunken aristocrat promising to finish his memoirs. I’ve included the voice memo here as a sort of accidental craft talk (and proof of gay voice, I guess), but I want to expand on it.

A novelist without a novel is superfluous. This seems to me the best explanation behind the mysterious depression that so frequently settles in once the work is done. For months or years at a time, a novel is where a novelist shows up for work. Then, one day, there’s nowhere to go. This points to the novel, or really the work or act of the novel, as a place — as the room Eisenberg asked me about.

In my twenties, a blog post of mine about using a typewriter went viral. I’d said something about shutting the door to write, but that the internet was still a portal to the world outside the room. Obviously, a typewriter has only one function, and if you’re not writing on it you’re probably trying to fix it. The New York Review of Books retweeted me, and I’d never felt more famous. But while the typewriter served a crude sort of purpose, it was far more helpful to build a different kind of room. I began to set an alarm for five o’clock in the morning, and wrote for about an hour and a half before I left for work.¹ This ensured that, by the time I arrived at work, the day’s real work was already done. It helped me finish and revise the book I eventually sold to Graywolf.

The Future Was Color was written in a very different room. My second book, Image Control, was careening toward publication, which gave me a deadline and a distraction. The pandemic was still legally enforced, which provided a modicum of financial stability (unemployment, food stamps, stimulus, healthcare). It also removed a lot of choice in how to spend one’s time, as well as prohibited contact with other people (and other pleasures) from one’s life. I didn’t realize it, but in choosing to write this novel when I did I’d created a rich, sensuous place to spend my time, and went there gratefully. The project of the novel gave me a place not only to hide, but to stretch out, to revel. It was also a return to fiction after the strange experience of writing a book about fascism and social media. I noticed then an important difference: that fiction makes me feel as though I’m adding something to the world, and nonfiction makes me feel like I’m describing the world I already live in — and not in the most reverent terms. This isn’t everyone’s experience but it is mine. Image Control left me depleted, depressed, angry, and alone. The Future Was Color gave me a place to regain myself. “He thought he felt his will returning,” as Joy Williams puts it in The Changeling.

My experience is and remains obviously that of a writer — the novelist in search of a novel — and a “room” can mean anything since it’s only a state of mind. But what interests me about this metaphor is that it seems to invert the Sartrean formula: there is something in us or about us that’s essential, and we create the conditions for its existence. Yet it also obeys it: what could be more of a choice, more of an act, than creating such a place? When I said I wanted to expand on the memo I sent to Eisenberg, I think what I meant is that I want to commit to it — which is what anyone does when they build a room: we commit to our capacity to live bigger, be freer, and to practice agency. This is, I think, what a lot of writers are getting at when they complain about the internet, about social media, about television, about family, and of course about money. Each is a kind of trespass against privacy or sovereignty; each redirects our agency toward something we didn’t necessarily ask to deal with, at least not right now. To create an inner space for oneself, a kind of sanctuary or asylum, is to place yourself, even if only in spirit, beyond the world’s reach. The rooms we build for ourselves are where we cultivate the will.

I’m grateful that Eisenberg’s question helped remind me why I show up for work — and that maybe I should bother to do it more often. Hopefully it can help you too.

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Speaking of The Future Was Color,

Garth Greenwell

just posted an absolutely incredible essay about a single sentence in my novel — my “Ithaca sentence,” as I call it. There’s also a brief conversation between the two of us that follows. It’s a paid feature but I promise you Greenwell’s Substack is very, very much worth the subscription.

Thanks for reading Entertainment, Weakly. I have a lot of new work on the way, including essays about celebrity fever in the Democratic Party, the potential of UX design to be an antifascist endeavor, and the imaginative geometry in the work of Sophie Calle. As ever, anything you can do to help support me in my writing is greatly appreciated. <3

1. I once heard Marlon James describe this way of working as “having a secret.”