.png)
I turned up to my writing workshop a bit nervous.
It was my day, and my classmates withdrew copies of my short story from their bags. By sophomore year, I’d beat myself out of the expectation that my classmates or professor would label the draft brilliant.
I was nervous on this day because I took a risk.
I’d written with abandon. The story, “I Watched the Truck Go By,” opened with long, meandering sentences with lyrical rambles that recall the rural Kentucky back roads where the story was set. The story was about a writer—a war correspondent who landed on assignment covering a fracking operation in Kentucky. While he's there, he meets a sad man who invites him into his home. The reporter ends up stealing the poor guy's wife.
A real melodrama.
When the discussion started, I delighted in the level of polarization my story provoked. Some enjoyed my winding sentences, others were baffled. They kept saying something like, “I don't get why the edits are there.”
Someone would retort: “They’re a meta commentary. The writer is changing the story as we're reading it.”
I had no idea what they were talking about, but as the writer whose work was up for discussion, I was sworn to silence until the end of class.
The critique went on, and to my surprise, my professor expressed her profuse love for what I had done. I'd taken bold chances, she told the class, and everyone should consider doing the same.
“You don't have to go out and write like Eli,” she said. “But I want you to take risks.” She also appreciated what I was doing with “the edits.”
Finally, I spoke up. “What edits are y'all talking about?”
A classmate slid her copy over to me. I remember nodding slowly, as I considered how to address the red boxes staring at me on the page. I’d sent the story to my brother for an edit before I turned it in. He’d made suggested changes, which get tracked in red bubbles in the margins (“track changes” for my word processors out there).
My class wasn’t seeing ingenious—or senseless—meta commentary. They were looking at edits I thought I’d completed, and hidden, days ago.
I laughed and fessed up. I told them I just couldn't figure out Microsoft Word.
Looking back, I should have gone with it. The meta commentary was a cool idea. And the conclusions people drew from it showed a level of depth in my writing that even I didn’t appreciate.
This is not an unusual feeling for writers. There’s even a name for it: the Dead Author Theory, coined by French philosopher Roland Barthes. It goes like this: A writer loses control of the meaning of their writing as soon as it hits the reader's eyes.
At least, that's my interpretation of it.
The first time I can remember this happening was in my senior year of high school. My playwriting class gathered at the end of the semester for a salon reading where we performed each other’s work from excerpts in our scripts. Mine was selected from the group to be produced on stage, so I went last.
My play was a real bloodbath. A 1930s tale of despair and hope and death. I read a particularly sappy passage where the central character unloads a moment of vulnerability to the man who secretly plots his family’s demise.
After the reading, an English teacher found me and started to tell me how the tension I’d captured recalled some other great work that he’d read. I told him I was sorry — I had never heard of the book, or even the writer, he was talking about.
“Next time,” he laughed, “you should just nod your head and say, ‘ah, yes. Very smart of you to notice.’”
I thought that was a cynical comment at the time. It felt dishonest to take credit for an allusion to a work I didn't know. But as soon as my classmates recited those lines of dialogue, I ceased to own them. I remember sitting there, watching a room of people receive my work, as I read the stage directions.
It took me a long time to heed my teacher’s advice.
Three years ago, I wrote a new short story and shot it over to my brother to get his opinion (by this point, I’d learned how to disappear track changes).
“The best part,” he told me, “is how the boy she's remembering from college becomes the husband she resents.”
I sat and nodded. He didn't know what I set out to write. A glimpse of a woman lying in bed debating with herself whether to awaken her husband, who writhes under the spell of a nightmare. In the story, she thinks back to a guy she knew in college. I thought she might be recalling someone she loved and lost. He saw two sides of the same guy: One alive and engaging, one cowering in his sleep.
His version was better, I thought. So I didn't change a thing.
Here’s my short story “Night Tremors” from 2023. Give it a read, if you like, and see what it means to you. No matter your opinion, you’re probably right.
He came to bed late again tonight. For hours, the living room TV thundered with echoes of bomb blasts and gunfire until the sound faded. Every exhale carries a breath of bourbon across the pillow.
Bourbon smells sweeter; Scotch is distinct, earthy, but I don’t mind it. Vodka is bug spray: thick July air somewhere west of Baton Rouge and the sun fading through trees. A college bonfire there in a clearing of pines, where the boy I knew was a little drunk and loping in circles around the flames with three of his friends, shirts open with their pastel colors flapping. I waved him over, and we shared a blanket for the first time.
A warm heel jerks into my shin. “Ouch,” I whisper, though I know he can’t hear me. “Kick me again and see.”
A tremor rattles through him. Something seeks him out in his sleep. Maybe it’s a monster, or his older brother. The urgency in his movements suggests panic. He scrambles to escape. His fear puffs from his body in audible whimpers. Does part of him know I lie here, doing nothing?
Thinking. About the boy from the fire: I found him the other night, his face aglow in orange as if lit by flames, in a place we’d never been, laughing with people that I didn’t recognize over a table of chicken wings plastered with extra sauce, and his watery eyes darted from his conversation to meet mine. My stomach jumped.
And I awoke with fingers prodding into the skin above my breast. “You were having a nightmare,” he said, and crumpled back to his side. The jolt in my stomach melted away, and I lay missing the sleeping fantasy of this guy, this sweet but handsy guy who bought me vodka drinks that I’d swap out for cider at the bar.
His shoulders writhe in a stunted backstroke. He’s cowering before the monster. The huffy whimpers dampen to quivering groans. A kick in his shin would be mercy. He’d wake and I’d tell him it was alright.
I think, maybe, that it’s real. Not that he isn’t sleeping, but that he’s imagining a world that could exist: some blown-out country house in a WWII movie where he’s huddled with his comrades. When I wake him he’ll fall still, covered in the sweat from his nightmare. And minutes later, that entire world will smooth between the sheets of his brain. The adrenaline will melt away.
Would he miss it?
Would he wake stunned, resentful to find himself wrapped in the safety of the dark?
He woke me. The prod in his fingers squelched the tumbling feeling that coursed through my stomach. And every night since, I search for those orangey eyes that glow like the flames of that college bonfire. And I wonder what I would see if I hadn’t awoken.