Having Trouble Writing? Rumaan Alam Suggests Putting Pen to Paper During Reruns
“A coincidence,” Rumaan Alam writes, “even about coincidence itself, is interesting only to the person implicated, as dreams are of interest only to dreamer.” In “Have One On Me,” his new story published exclusively at Esquire, Alam interrogates the role of coincidence in our lives—how sly and strange such resonances are, but also how very ordinary. Alam’s story locates an itinerant critic in middle age, who reflects on love and loss while sliding anonymously through airports, hotels, and restaurants. Languid and lonely, “Have One On Me” starts small, but unspools and accumulates to a bittersweet crescendo.
This year, Alam was a National Book Award finalist for Leave the World Behind, one of Esquire’s Best Books of 2020, which will become a Netflix adaptation starring Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington. Alam is also the author of the novels That Kind of Mother and Rich and Pretty. On the day after Election Day, with the fate of the nation still hanging in the balance, Alam spoke with Esquire about tricking himself into writing, teaching undergraduates, and demystifying the creative process.
Esquire: I’m told that this story came about through an unusual writing exercise. Can you tell me more about that, and how this story arose through it?
Rumaan Alam: This is something I’ve done historically. I don't have an MFA, so when I finished college and moved to New York, I was working in magazine publishing. Often I felt like, when I had time in the evenings or on the weekends, the last thing I wanted to do was sit down and write more. I had a sense that what the MFA program might have provided me was structure and discipline, so I found ways of imposing that structure and discipline on myself. For example, I assigned myself reading. I was reading short stories—what I really wanted to be writing. I read a book by Alice Adams, then a book by Anne Beattie, then a book by Raymond Carver. I proceeded through the alphabet that way, as a means of providing structure in my reading.
One of the things I came up with for myself was to write a story either using the title of a song or a phrase from a song. I've done this for a long time. It’s not about finding meaning in someone else's words, and it's not about dramatizing whatever the original text of the song is about. It's just about taking that snatch of language and forcing myself to make something out of it. The way that, in a sewing class, you might be forced to make something out of the rag bag. It's simply an act of reinventing someone else's language.
Often what happens over the course of revision is that the story might move further and further away from that original idea. I’ve succeeded in fooling myself, into making something and telling myself that I'm not making something up, because I'm working with this starting point. I find that a very useful exercise. I think it's a lot about fooling yourself into thinking that you can manage the unwieldy task of writing a story by giving yourself this. It’s not exactly a prompt, but it’s a starting point.
ESQ: That's fascinating. It makes me think of blackout poetry, where you create something new through subtraction.
RA: It’s not unlike that. In 2005, I wrote a story through this exercise; the source material was a Kate Bush song called, “Tons of Love.” There’s a line in the song: "Take your shoes off and throw them in the lake.” In the finished story, a character throws her shoes into a swimming pool. It’s not material to the experience of reading a story, to know this relationship between the way that I've used that image and the way Kate Bush uses that piece of language. It's just a device to get me to write.
“Have One on Me” is the name of a song and an album that I love. It's a text I know really well. In this particular story, the gambit is a bit different, because I do use a phrase from the song in the story. The phrase is, "Lighten up your pockets," but the story has no relationship to the song, except for what I'm saying to you.
ESQ: Hearing about the structures you've imposed on yourself leads me to wonder: how have the events of this year affected your ability to be creative? Have you found yourself leaning on these exercises more?
RA: I think these exercises are very useful. It’s been a uniquely stressful year, but life is always busy and stressful, and you don't always have the time or the bandwidth to sit down at your desk for three hours. I rely on exercises a lot when I teach. Giving yourself that thing you have to accomplish transforms a very big and nebulous idea, which is the creative act, into something that feels achievable.
Often when I do exercises, they have to do with numbers. Which is funny, because I hate numbers. But I’ll say, "You have to write 333 words exactly. No more, no less." I published a story a couple of years ago that grew from an assignment to write a story where every paragraph was its own sentence. I wrote it by hand to curtail the possible length. I suppose I could have spent weeks on it, but I did it in a burst. It's five paragraphs, and each one is one sentence long. Another exercise I often teach is to write for the length of an episode of sitcom television.
I think a lot of people have this idea that you can only write if you have hours at a desk, if the conditions are right, if you have the right pencil and the right notebook. That describes an ideal that’s really far from most working writers’ lives. You may not always make time to get to your desk, but I think it's very common to make time, especially when you're tired, to watch TV. Think about turning that into productive work. Turn on the TV, leave it on mute, let Friends run for 23 minutes, and write, the entire time. When it's over, put your notebook away, fold your laundry, pay the bills, play with the kids—do whatever the demands on your time are. I've seen people who love to mythologize their writing and their creativity. I don't have a lot of patience for that kind of thing. The truth is, many extraordinary artists wrote under less than ideal circumstances. If you reduce the task to something more like a task and less like a calling, it becomes easier to face.
ESQ: Something I love about this story is how much of it exists in in-between places, like cabs, hotels, and airplanes. What do you find creatively fruitful about those “interstitial spaces,” as you call them in the story?
RA: When you’re walking in an airport, you’re like a ghost. You're not really a person; you’re divorced from your life. You can go shopping, or you can wait. That’s all you can do. I love that about airports, and I love hotels, which I write about often. I love that they're like sitting in your loft for domesticity, but not really. It's just a bed, four walls, and a bathtub, but you don't have your things with you. I really love that space, which seems to suit this particular story. It’s so hard to understand why you're making choices as you're making them. I don't know if there was an agenda, or if it's just how the story shaped up.
ESQ: Reading all of those wonderful scenes set in cars, it took me back to my own creative writing education, where professors told me not to set scenes in cars, because it would be too static. It got me wondering: what are the creative writing rules that you love to break, or that you find the most useless?
RA: Undergraduates spend thousands and thousands of dollars for the benefit of an education that really is more of an apprenticeship. I think the pressure on those teachers is to provide something that feels like an education, or like a science, so they construct these rules. Almost every one that I hear, there are a million exceptions. "Don't set a story in a car” feels crazy to me. I think a lot of these rules are very silly. I heard it said of a very well-known professor of creative writing that they do not like writing about smell. They push back on their students whenever they write about smell. That’s just a personal bugaboo, and it's not a real rule. I just don't think you can make rules. There are things I like, and there are things I don’t like, but they’re not rules for how to tell a story.
ESQ: The writer in this story talks about the importance of pattern, “which we call coincidence, because we don't know what else to call it.” What’s the importance of pattern for you, in writing?
RA: I suppose pattern exists more for me as the reader than as the writer. If you're trained academically, in any fashion, what you're doing as you read is looking for that pattern. You're looking for where the meaning resides. You’re so trained to engage with fiction that you do things as you just did in your previous question, which is point out that the story is situated in airports and taxis and hotel rooms. That’s where you find the meaning. It’s just an irresistible tic, as a reader. The story calls attention to it, to be sure.
ESQ: That exchange of dialogue gets me thinking about the ending of the story, and the role coincidence plays in what unfolds there. "Coincidence," you write, "is interesting only to the person implicated." Yet, thinking about the role of coincidence in this story, I return to that idea of rules. We often dislike coincidence in fiction. We think it's too tidy, or too writerly. What was your interest in exploring that idea of coincidence, especially when it can be polarizing on the page?
RA: The particular coincidence of this story is that, one moment in time, this singular psyche encounters this person. Then, many years later, he encounters her again. But the first time he encounters her, he doesn't actually see her. The way in which he knows her is never really revealed, so it’s really only of interest to him. In a different version of this story, he might have run into this woman at this museum in Minneapolis, rather than learning after the fact that she had a show there. He might have actually seen her. Then many years later, he’s seen her again, at a different museum in a different city.
I think would be a harder coincidence to pull off. But what I'm describing is barely a coincidence—it’s just a resonance. It’s meaningful to him, but it's not really meaningful. It's hard to say what it means, or what you're supposed to make of it as a reader, but it feels to me like it could happen. We’ve all had experiences of coincidence that have happened, that feel so tidy and strange, that you couldn't put in fiction because they would defy belief.
ESQ: It strikes me that the narrator's career bears some similarity to your own work as a critic. How does your experience of interviewing writers and writing literary criticism factor into your work?
RA: I suppose it does, in ways that I can't quite understand. If I'm surrounded by this professionally, both as a writer of fiction and as a critic, it stands to reason that it would have something to do with the work I produce as a writer of fiction. But I can't see it, because I'm inside of it. But yes, the relationship between what's being described in the story and my own life is much tighter than normal.
ESQ: I suppose the best material often arises from the things we live inside of—the things that occlude our vision.
RA: I think so. You don't know what your own predilections or tendencies are. That said, the things you think you're really prone to may be invisible to the reader. I usually write with some kind of line in the sand between me and the work, but in this particular story, I thought, "I don't care about that right now. I'm going to make it different and confusing."
ESQ: Sometimes the best things happen in that place of blindness to our own predilections. I love it when someone says, "I love how you evoked this theme," and then I'm looking at my own work with surprise, reading it as if for the first time.
RA: That’s absolutely right. I don't think that's the responsibility of the writer. I really think that's something revealed by the reader. The work doesn't really live until someone reads it and tells you what it is you've done.
ESQ: So much of this story involves fraught interactions with strangers. You write, "No one gets at people as they really are," but do strangers have a unique ability to get at us?
RA: The performance of the self is less conscious with people you don't think are watching. In this conversation with this writer, she was performing as herself, but only because he's there to listen to her. This is something I'm very interested in. Who knows you? Is it the people you spend your life with, in a romantic or familial relationship? Or is it the people you randomly brush across, for just a few minutes? It’s a mystery.
ESQ: One of my very favorite things about your work is what a keen and detailed observer you are of domestic life. The details about the life our narrator shares with Phillip are so beautifully felt. Details like, “paying a lot of money to have bookshelves built in, and file your books together,” or, “making the same spaghetti sauce you always make.” Yet there are writers who avoid domestic life, because they say it’s uninteresting on the page. What’s so resonant for you about this dimension of life?
RA: I've heard this expressed before. Domestic life is the emotional point of access for a reader, I think. For a person reading any text, their point of entry is the ways in which it feels familiar. If you're talking about the same spaghetti sauce you always make, that means something to the reader. It means something personal to the reader, and I think they're seduced into the story by that. I'm interested in these kinds of trivialities—or what other people might consider trivialities, because I don't think they’re small. I think it's a weird misunderstanding of how life works. I know that argument, and I reject it altogether.
ESQ: So much of this story is transacted in these little trivialities. I'm thinking of the Asprey lighter, or the bookshelves in the apartment, or the Balthus painting. As you shape a story, how do those symbols appear to you, and how do they accrue meaning as you go through multiple drafts?
RA: I definitely just stuff I'm interested in as a human being. These totems may not have any meaning for the reader, but it's important for me to use them, because they mean something to me. Whatever they mean to me can remain inscrutable to the reader, because it's beside the point. But when they think about a painter I love, or a piece of music I love, I use that stuff in my work all the time, actually. Quite often.
These devices to which I have a relationship establish something between me and the story. If you ask why these items, in particular... I don't know why that I think that's a nice choice, but it feels like the right choice. I felt I could see it, and I felt I could feel it, and I felt I could understand how these people felt about that object. It doesn’t really matter if other people care about those choices, or if they don't know who J.M.W. Turner is. It doesn't matter, because it mattered to me when I was writing it.
ESQ: How does being a teacher of writing affect your own writing process?
RA: I think it's very enriching, because I have such smart students. It’s interesting to hear their arguments about the work that they like, and what they're responding to in those works. The particular power I possess as a teacher is to assign stuff that I care about rereading. I'm teaching a class on the short story to contemporary undergraduates who are all between ages of 19 and 22. I thought "Okay, I'll teach only living writers, and I’ll choose writers who vary widely, in terms of their approach, but who all feel very important, and worth thinking about, and reckoning with."
I'm teaching Lydia Davis, but also teaching Bryan Washington, because they're very different writers. I’m teaching Lorrie Moore, but I'm also teaching Carmen Maria Machado. I’m teaching Curtis Sittenfeld and, I'm actually teaching Adrian Tomine's book, Killing and Dying, which is a collection of graphic work. Teaching is extra fun right now, when I have a book out and I'm feeling in a place of active writing. It’s a terrible time in the country and in the culture, and none of us are focused. I think it enriches my practice, to spend this time talking with these smart people.
ESQ: I'm curious what it's like to be a student studying creative writing in 2020. What impressions are you gathering about what's on their minds, or what kind of stories they're writing?
RA: This is going to just make me sound like such an old man, but I'm really struck by the difference in their context of reading and my own. They live in a very different world than the one that I live in. For example, when I was an undergraduate, Lorrie Moore was our god. I was at Oberlin between 1995 and 1999—before she published Birds of America, actually, but everyone I studied with knew those stories from Self-Help. The state of our ambitions as writers was to write like that.
What’s different about working with these young people is that I can't identify what that text is, or what that ambition is. Even a few years ago, I would have said it was George Saunders, for young readers. But I don't think it is anymore. I'm not sure if that particular ideal of the American writer of fiction exists for these young people.
ESQ I find that to be an encouraging development, myself. That it’s not all students aspiring to one prescribed career or one prescribed voice—that it can be more freeform.
RA: I think so. I think it's such a difficult time to be a young person right now. Especially one who is teenage, getting a really expensive education, being on the precipice of entering a broken economy. I think that's a really fraught place. Today I ended class early, and as I was getting off the Zoom call, I said, "I don't even know what we're doing here. I don't know how morally defensible it is, what we're all engaged in. I don't know what to tell you, but I've just given you this assignment, and now you have to go do it, because your grade depends on it. Now I've given you this gift of something you have to do.”
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