The Writer
The story on Alice’s computer screen had been finding its way into words for more than five years, or maybe forever. Over that time, it had grown, changed, creaked, flown, gone silent, and then gained its voice again, its plot taking unexpected paths, its characters turning into people she hadn’t thought they would be, just as she had. This glowing screen, the one constant. This story, in all its iterations. Now awaiting the last step. Someone to say yes.
She was young for a writer, barely twenty-five, but in some ways Alice had always been old. Always been watching, learning, searching for the things that people were not saying. Truth lies below the table; she knew this even as a child. If given the choice, she would have taken her dinner plate down into the cool, dark space beneath the tablecloth, where she could watch her mother’s fingers tighten along with the conversation. Watch her older brother’s shoes point toward the exit even as their father interrogated him about his latest swim meet. Medals he did or didn’t get, effort he did or didn’t expend.
Children, of course, did not eat under the table, so for Alice, a tendency toward napkin-dropping had to suffice.
Why can’t she keep that thing on her lap? her father would say to her mother.
* * *
But you could learn so much more, keeping your gaze down. Just as well for Alice, who had never liked meeting people’s eyes. It always felt like looking into a jam-packed closet—or opening the door to your own.
In any case, her father preferred children who were respectful.
When Alice had learned how to read, she’d discovered her own world, far from their house and their eastern Oregon town. Her brother called it hiding, but as he’d read the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy three times by that point, he was hardly one to talk. After Alice brought her choices home from the library, she’d open their covers, smelling other children’s meals and lives in the pages, and she would put her face in and blow, like a human smudging to make the stories hers.
Her brother caught her at it one day. Peter was eight years older than Alice, and ever so much taller. He was like a great and gentle horse in her life. When she confessed what she was doing, he just smiled.
“Ah, Alice,” he said, switching into his Bilbo voice. “Just a plain hobbit you look. But there’s more about you than appears on the surface.”
* * *
The year Alice turned nine, an author came to visit her school. It was on that day Alice understood for the first time—in a way that was both slightly depressing and terribly exciting—that books were written by people. Real people, with mascara that flecked down onto the soft pale curves of skin under the eyes, and a sweater that was a bit too long in the sleeves. This woman at the front of the class, this not-quite-finished-looking woman, had written the book she was holding in her hand. Before this point, Alice had never met an actual author, and so it had been possible to pretend that they were no more real, and thus as magical, as the characters inside. But here was this woman, telling the class that she wrote every day, during these hours, using this ordinary pen. That the characters were her friends.
“I live in their world when I am writing,” the author said to the class.
Yes, Alice thought, the breath catching in her throat. And in that moment, she changed her allegiance from magic to magician.
* * *
“I’m going to make my own worlds,” Alice told her brother.
Peter was getting his things together for a swim meet. He was always swimming—or running or lifting weights in preparation, his weekends spent traveling to swim meets with their father. Their father said children needed to have goals, by which he meant, win. By which he meant, Peter. Alice wondered what their father would say about her new goal, but it was not something she would tell him. She had learned that being a girl was a little like going under the table, out of the line of sight. And that could be beneficial.
Peter was the one she told things to. He would make a secret picnic—peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, with double jelly the way she liked, and potato chips he’d bought on the sly from the corner grocery store—and they would sit in the leafy refuge of the tree house he’d made in the woods, and he would listen to whatever she wanted to say.
Now, in his bedroom, he glanced over at her and smiled, just a bit, and she looked for a moment into his eyes.
Too much in there, Alice thought.
“Peter,” their father yelled from downstairs, and Peter startled.
He looked at Alice and shook his head. “You get the world they give you, Alice,” he said, reaching for his backpack. “I’m sorry.”
But he was wrong, Alice told herself. He had to be. Books, by their very existence, proved that.
* * *
The year Alice turned ten, Peter went to college on a swimming scholarship, leaving her alone. It had been clear for a while that Alice was not a social creature, never inclined toward sleepovers or witty notes passed in class, caring little for Girl Scouts or clubs. She’d always been that kid—you know the one—reading by herself during lunch or on the bus. A small animal, not weak enough to attract attention, just alone.
It was perhaps not surprising then, that while she was disappointingly average when it came to math and geography, she was always at the top of her English classes.
“She could be a teacher someday,” her teachers said, year after year.
Why don’t they ever say writer? she wrote to Peter.
Because you’re the one with the imagination, he said. That’s your door out, Allie girl. Use it.
* * *
So Alice decided to train herself. If writers were magicians, she figured, then there were tricks you could learn. She was old enough by that point to know that magic in the real world was just a series of illusions, carefully crafted to distract you from what was really going on. A wall of medals. A fresh pie every Sunday. A father home for dinner every night. Look there, not here.
People didn’t see reality because they didn’t want to, not because it wasn’t there. It stood to reason that writing was no different. Look carefully and all the tricks would become clear.
* * *
After that, while some girls spent their allowances on clothes or lip gloss, Alice bought books.
What’s wrong with the library? her father demanded. But Alice needed the books to be hers, so she could write in them. Notes in the margins. Arrows drawn from one page to the next. Marking the clues that tipped you off to what was coming, the one detail that told you all you needed to know about a character.
When she had to go out in the real world, she watched for what people didn’t know they were telling you. She noted a hand playing with a necklace. An eyebrow, as an interrogative or a dismissal. The way little kids’ shoulders would turtle up near their ears when a bully was near. She listened, as well. To the pauses. The falters. The emotional floods of surprise or warmth or anger. She collected the stories she witnessed and wrote them in notebooks that she kept under her mattress. Once in a while, she would send one to Peter.
Maybe you can make worlds after all, he wrote back.
* * *
Alice was fourteen when Peter quit college, four months before his graduation, taking off for parts unknown.
You see? their father said to their mother, this is what happens when you insist upon naming your child after a boy who wouldn’t grow up.
For a few years, he sent her postcards. A rocky coastline in Maine. A market in Egypt. Mono Lake, its limestone formations rising out of the blue water like castles. Allie girl, you would love this. Alice would hold the postcard close to her face, inhaling to see if she could smell her brother on the paper. Sometimes she thought she could. But as time went on, the cards became fewer, the words on them more and more vague until they seemed to disappear even as she read them.
And then there was nothing at all.
* * *
Alice’s father said he had wasted enough money educating his children, but the eloquence of Alice’s application essay helped get her a scholarship at a small, tree-lined college in Maine, a whole continent away from their eastern Oregon town. That first semester, Alice signed up for two classes in science and one in economics. The last item on her schedule was a creative writing course—small and innocuous as a white rabbit, a minor prop on a well-appointed stage.
Core requirement, she said to her parents, when they asked.
Now things will start to happen, she thought.
* * *
Alice took a seat in the third row, on the right side near the door. Closer to the front than she would usually choose, but she was excited. The creative writing professor was already there, standing behind the podium, making conversation with a few students. An older man, tall, but with a kindliness that surprised her. She’d been expecting something more along the lines of Jack Kerouac or James Joyce, all tortured soul and swagger. But Dr. Roberts was neither of these things—although he did seem absent-minded, one side of his button-down shirt collar still stuck underneath the neck of his sweater. Alice wondered how long it would be before he noticed.
“I know,” he said, as he started up the class, “you’re all dying to be published. But it can take a long time, and sometimes it doesn’t happen at all. That’s not the point, though. The point is what you’ll learn on the way.”
Alice could almost hear her father: That’s what people who failed say.
“Let’s start with the basics,” Professor Roberts said. “If you think about it, every story—even the most fantastical—is grounded in things we already know, and every book is about questions that have already been asked.”
Alice leaned forward, waiting for more explanation. She’d waited years to be here, with someone who could open the doors she needed opened.
“Bilbo may be a hobbit,” the professor continued, “but we were all small at some point. And if you want to be a writer, chances are you’ve also experienced what it’s like to be an underdog.”
“What about serial killers?” interjected a young man in the second row. Alice looked over, observing the sprawl of his body in the chair. No underdog there, she thought. She could already see his future. Fifty books with his name emblazoned across the front in sans serif type. Probably in red.
“Well,” Professor Roberts said, “of course serial killers do exist, although in far fewer numbers than your average airport bookstore might have you believe. But more relevant to this discussion”—and here, for a moment, Alice thought that Professor Roberts might be more formidable than his appearance suggested—“the serial killer genre asks one of the most common questions of all: What are we humans willing to do to each other? Or for each other? It’s actually the same question you’ll find in The Iliad or Pride and Prejudice. Or, perhaps, any night around a family dinner table.”
Alice looked up.
“The trick for a writer,” the professor continued, “is to take those eternal questions, those known bits and pieces, and put them together in a way that helps us see our world in a different light. That’s where you come in.”
He looked out at the class and smiled. “Easy, right?” he said. “So, let’s start at the beginning. Write me a story.”
Alice had been waiting her whole life for someone to say that.
Back in her dorm room, she took out a pen and a pad of paper, and let the words race out of her. She worked all weekend, ignoring economics, science. The night before the story was due, she stayed at her desk until dawn, typing up the handwritten pages and checking for misspellings, grammar mistakes. She wanted it perfect. She turned it in with a feeling of complete and utter satisfaction and waited to see the response.
* * *
It was a simple one, written across the top of her first page: Let’s talk. My office hours are Tuesdays, 12–2.
* * *
Professor Roberts’s office was just as it should be, bookshelves from floor to ceiling, a desk of dark wood, covered with neat stacks of papers. He motioned to the chair across from him.
She put down her backpack, and sat looking at him, expectant.
“Alice,” he said, “you’ve got incredible talent. I’ve never had a student with such a command of details.”
This is where it happens, Alice thought. This is where it starts.
“Thank you,” she said. Then she saw it, the way his fingertips reached for his pen, brought it closer. “But?” she said.
He smiled. “You see? Details. That’s what makes you good.”
She waited. It’s going to be okay. Whatever it is, you can learn it.
“Alice,” he said, “the world you’ve created on these pages is extraordinary—but reading this feels like watching a beautiful movie from the back row. I suspect that’s because you’re doing that, too.” He paused, then continued, “If you’re going to write the book you’re meant to write, you’ll have to let it in. You’ll have to let us in.”
“I don’t know…” she said, but inside her, the sentence was shorter, instinctive. No.
“I understand,” he said, nodding. “And I’ll teach you everything else I can, but that one’s on you.”
Copyright © 2023 by Erica Bauermeister
