Writing Toward Personal Fantasy

No, not dragons; grief holes; the return to MAC Lipglass

Hello beautiful creatives,

Thank you for being here. I have heard from some of you who tried the guided visualization in my last post and it sounds like it’s been useful! I am so glad, and I hope you find ways to keep using it. I want to just remind everyone I will be teaching for Tin House this summer online, so if you are looking for a lil summer inspo, come join me. And also, Goodreads has a MADWOMAN giveaway if you want to enter to win a free book! There is a tiny bit of time left, and while you’re at it, please add it to your “want to read” list.

Today our post is going to be a process one, and I will sprinkle in a little tidbit about where I am in my grief journey and also my return to an old favorite in an attempt to self soothe.

Let’s start with process, shall we?

I have wanted to write about the way I think about fantasy as a driver in my work for some time. The word fantasy for our purposes today does not refer to the genre of magic and adventure—instead, I’m referring to what I think of as personal fantasy. I’ll try to define what I mean by this a little before we dive in and explore how this idea might be useful to consider for you.

I think that for most of us, we have a supply of what I’ll call “our shit” that we write about. Motherhood + motherloss, effects of generational violence, dark humor, secrets, wellness, poverty and class, complicated emotional terrain, and unexpected redemption—ding, ding, that’s my shit! That’s the stuff I circle again and again from different angles and may well do this forever in different forms. I can always add to my pile of…okay let’s drop shit for now—I can always add to my stuff at any time, and these things will likely shift and expand as I age along my own journey as a woman in this world—but I highly doubt that out of nowhere I will get a bolt of inspiration to write a historical novel about say, the life of…I don’t know, some historical person. I mean never say never, but that’s just not my shit. That’s not what I read, and that’s not what I crave, and that’s not, as far as I can see, what I can uniquely offer the world. I’m more concerned with women’s voices telling urgent stories about survival, now. And within my treasure box of stuff, there is an element I want to unpack today, because I think in some ways it’s at the heart of my practice, and guides the work more than the rest. This I call Personal Fantasy.

Here’s one of mine: The girl I once was, alone on the eve of losing my mother. Nine years old and still under the impression she was coming back for me someday soon. The fantasy anchored then: my mother having repaired herself, screeching up the street and into my grandparent’s driveway, window down, her tan arm beckoning me, and like in a movie she’d say something like, “hey, kid, what, you thought I wasn’t coming back? Of course I’m here, get in!” and I’d jump in the car, leaving behind all my stuff—who needs it—and we’d drive off into the life we were always meant to live. I could SEE her coming up that driveway. I could HEAR the car.

For the next many years of my childhood I sat out on the hot concrete with the anxious sensation that I was waiting for something, the something being my mother’s return.

This rather palpable and stirring feeling has informed a lot of my work. If you haven’t read my work I’ll do my best to condense what I mean—in almost all of my stories and novels, there is a moment where unexpected redemption occurs. This is my version of magic, and I write toward it because, well, I CAN. On the page, I can do whatever I want, and what I want to do is offer my characters that moment, where no, it’s not a mirage, it’s a real car screaming up that driveway just for them.

I talked about this in the last class Kim and I taught, but it reminds me of my professor in grad school explaining that once he wrote a story where all he really knew about it was that by the end, the father would tell the son he loved him, and it would be an earned, beautiful moment. He didn’t know how he would get there, wasn’t sure what that story was about exactly, just knew that’s where it had to land. I’ll go out on a limb and guess the inclination to write toward that moment of “I love you” was in some way based in that writer’s personal fantasy.

Let’s pause, in case about now you are thinking, well Chelsea, aren’t we just talking about a happy ending? You can’t possibly just be saying that you believe in happy endings??

Reader, I am not. But I am usually aiming for an ending that goes a beat beyond what reality might generally offer and into the land of some element of unlikely redemption, because redemption is the keystone of my personal fantasy. Why? Well, because frankly, redemption is not what I actually experienced in real life with my mother. That car never came back up the driveway for me. She never got sober or found stability. In fact, the whole fucking thing just got worse and worse, and then she died. I lived my life without her and she without me. It’s unspeakable, the pain I feel over it, and will always feel over it. I’m thankful every day I’m a writer.

In Godshot, Lacey May gets what some relieved readers considered a “happy ending” which has always been a little funny to me in some ways, because like, ummmmm she has SO much therapy in front of her, that poor sweetie—but also, yeah, there is some redemption. All is not lost for her. She’s been to hell and back and lives to tell the tale. Her story ends with a door opening rather than a door closing. And in this we find a sense of hope. She has a moment where her mother attempts to protect her, and while there is no mother coming back up the driveway, she finds her way. With that book, I wanted to write a little more into the reality of motherloss but still offer the reader the sense of redemption I so desired. In Madwoman, when you read it, you will see this occur again in a different way.

I don’t think it was until I started writing my current project that that specific image of the girl waiting on the driveway came back to me and I suddenly possessed a deeper awareness that this writing toward fantasy thing is what I do. And it’s a happy discovery because now I can be intentional about playing with it. This book is me pushing my personal fantasy to an extreme, and it’s been a very deep and enjoyable experience so far.

But back to you: Your personal fantasy can be about anything. Take a second and consider, what is yours? What’s that deepest longing within you? What’s your biggest pain point? What do you wish happened instead of what did? Maybe it has something to do with heartbreak being solved, someone finally understanding you, connecting with that person at last, having a career you might have had but went another direction, a longing for intimate friendship, a longing for anything? When you close your eyes, what do you want the most? Remove logic from this equation, and lead with feeling. Logic really has no place here as far as I’m concerned. I can still access the feeling of sitting on that hot concrete in Fresno, willing my mom’s car to emerge as if from a mirage. I can access that any moment. I think that version of me comes into the room as I write. I know she does.

And she helps me. She is a guiding light. She focuses things, and she opens up possibility. And then I also get to explore, well what happens if she got what she wanted? All the additional complications the fulfillment of fantasy can bring. Like, had she returned like that…it might have been destructive and terrible. Or, with fiction, a great and calamitous adventure might ensue. And then the writing can explore all of that because my fantasy opened the door.

This idea of Personal Fantasy is certainly at the heart of our projects. The class I’m teaching in June is all about finding the heart of your novel and this is one component with how to do that. This all also reminds me this great talk on ‘desired scenes’ with Celine Sciamma that the great Claudia Dey turned me on to which is all about defining what you really want out of your art and not compromising for anything that doesn’t fit that. It’s really gorgeous and I highly recommend giving it a listen.

Alright, so what is your “stuff” and what is your personal fantasy all about? I think beyond what we do on a craft level, if we consider writing a spiritual act, then there is something healing about allowing this fantasy to play out on the page for our characters. Or at least, I have found it to have elements of healing.

Happy writing!

Okay, in other news I am just emerging from a very intense time that I can only describe as a ‘grief hole.’ I won’t go into too much detail but I was so subsumed by sadness, and I really was so weepy for days. I worried it was never going to end. But then I heard someone say that grief doesn’t require time, it requires space. This resonated with me so much, because the idea that ‘time heals all wounds’ is not true for me, but what does feel true healing requires the space to feel the loss and this space is sacred and needed. I realized I haven’t been offering myself much space to feel the hugeness of losing both parents in the last three years, and my body finally was like, goddamnit, you will cry. Alright fine. I also recently started Bowenwork, and I do think that has stirred some things up that have needed to be released.

In the grief hole, I found myself in a suburban strip mall with my children just to shake things up. We decided to see a movie and walk around, and we happened upon the MAC store. Not Apple. You know which one. The home of my old favorite, the lipglass. I remember in high school all the girls had the color Oh Baby (glittery brown) but that color looked like crap on me. Nymphette emerged as my true favorite, a shimmery golden pink. The whole store was 25 percent off and I felt wild with desire suddenly to revisit the old sticky lipglosses of yore, which I always loved the smell and shine of. I gave them up long ago in search of “clean” beauty but in my reckless state I thought what the hell. My daughter and I each got one joyfully and you know what, they are still good. I don’t know what’s in them and right now I don’t care. They are shiny AF. I needed a little shine.

Tell me, were you too once a teenager in the early aughts sharing lipglasses with three other girls like me?

Tell me about you—what’s your comfort product? What helps you in the grief holes? And if you consider Personal Fantasy in your writing, as ever, let me know :)

In gratitude,

C