Shedding Skin

What you're afraid to write today may not seem so scary tomorrow.

This is your reminder that my debut novel, VICTIM, is available for pre-order. VICTIM is a satire about a hustler from the Bronx who sees through the veneer of diversity initiatives and decides to cash in on the odd currency of identity.

---

I recently read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by David Eggers for the first time and loved it. In addition to the intricacies of Eggers’ unique voice and narrative style, there is a passage in the book I’ve been dwelling on ever since I put it down. 

It comes about mid-way into the book, during a moment in which Eggers is essentially interviewing himself, and probing why he feels so confident sharing “embarrassing or private things” with such exquisite detail. 

Most people, he writes, tend to believe that sharing “our secrets, our pasts and their blotches” will expose them in ways that might lessen who they are and what they stand for in the eyes of others. 

But Eggers doesn’t seem to have this fear and presses for “more bleeding, more giving.” 

What stuck out most to me is this wonderful metaphor he spins to explain why he isn’t afraid of excavating his soul and his deepest, darkest, embarrassing thoughts and feelings in the way that he so compellingly does in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. 

“These things, details, stories, whatever, are like the skin shed by snakes, who leave theirs for anyone to see. What does he care where it is, who sees it, this snake, and his skin? He leaves it where he molts. Hours, days or months later, we come across a snake’s long-shed skin and we know something of the snake, we know that it’s of this approximate girth and that approximate length, but we know very little else. Do we know where the snake is now? What the snake is thinking now? No. By now the snake could be wearing fur; the snake could be selling pencils in Hanoi. The skin is no longer his, he wore it because it grew from him, but then it dried and slipped off and he and everyone could look at it.” 

I’ve been thinking about this passage a lot as I’m tinkering and frequently dreaming about this new novel I’m working on. 

I’m in this wonderful ingestion period where I feel like everything I take in as I move through the world right now—little snippets of conversation in the street, song lyrics, developments in my personal life, or even the quirks of characters on reality television shows—is being filtered through my mind and interrogated with questions: Can I use this for my new novel? How? 

I’m constantly jotting down notes. I’m constantly trying to refine my vision, and I’m watching that refinement happen in real time. I’m watching myself drill down closer and closer to what it is I’m really trying to say. 

There is still much to discover about the project. But, in a lot of ways, I realize, what I’m trying to do is bottle up a moment in time. 

I’m trying to hone in on the transition period from being a man in a long-term relationship, to being a married man, to being a father of a young child—a transition, which happened for me, as is the case with many people these days, in the space of just a few years. 

In that timespan, my perspective on myself, and on life, and on the world and its future prospects, fundamentally shifted. 

There were things about myself, my past, and my family history that I was forced to reckon with in a short amount of time. There were new skills I had to learn, seemingly on the fly, and while a small, defenseless person’s life hung in the balance. There were things I had to give up, and new responsibilities I had to take on. There was a lot of joy, a lot of confusion, and a lot of growing pains. 

It was, in short, a moment of great change for me, as it is for all parents in this stage, this crossing over from pre-parent you, to parent-you. A lot is lost, and a lot is gained, and I’m very interested in crafting a story around that little slice of time. 

And yet, that is easier said than done—especially in the earliest iterations of this book, which are going to end up being more personal and closer to life than whatever final form the novel takes. 

That is just how my writing process goes, I’ve learned. 

I tend to start a book wanting to pull off some big, elaborate plot that has nothing to do with my personal life. But, pretty quickly, I lose steam and end up reverting back to the center, back to what I’m actually living through or have just recently lived through. 

I end up writing something that feels too close to home, and then, over the course of multiple reads and revisions, discover little threads to pull at and twist and turn and refine and take to their extremes in order to come out on the other side with something that has elements of real-life people or events but that is fundamentally different and distinct. 

Though I sort of know this about myself, having just experienced this process while writing VICTIM, it doesn’t necessarily make it any easier to get those initial things down on the page. 

At the end of the day, it is hard to write as vulnerably as Eggers describes. It is hard to bleed on the page. There is a lot of fear involved in the process, a lot of concern as to how others might interpret it, and what they might think of you after they read it. 

I guess that is why I resonated so deeply with Eggers’ passage. It gives me a lot of inspiration and confidence. It sort of frees me up, and lights a fire under my feet.

Because he’s absolutely right.

We are like snakes, constantly shedding different versions of ourselves as we age and move through different stages of life. Our perspectives on things constantly shift with distance, which is why, I think, it is important to get things down as honestly as we can. 

In my case, I can already feel the immediacy of this transitional period I’m writing about slipping away. I’ve been a dad for three years now, married for almost six. I obviously don’t have it all figured out, and don’t think anyone really does. But I’m certainly not the same guy I was three years ago. I don’t have the same worries or thoughts even. There are new ones now. 

As a result, I’m trying to get down as much as I can about that previous, new dad period—things I know won’t feel as fresh to me in a year or so, but that still feel scary to write today. 

That is the rub. To do this right, you have to convince yourself that what feels scary today, won’t feel scary tomorrow. In fact, what feels scary today, will be what informs the best writing you’re capable of tomorrow. 

“The skin is no longer his, he wore it because it grew from him, but then it dried and slipped off and he and everyone could look at it.”  

Shed the skin. Shed it as truthfully as possible. 

I learned a lot about this process because of how my first novel came to be. Even though I say it took 10 years, the truth is that in that span, about three or four versions of the book were actually written. Three or four versions that were more focused and influenced on whatever I happened to be going through or experiencing at the time. 

In reality, I just happened to find a way to end the latest version, to get it right enough that I was able to walk away from it. I’m keeping that in my mind as I work on this new thing. 

I’m trying to get the best version down, the rawest version down, that I can, and reminding myself that no matter how vulnerable or scary that might feel in the moment, there will be a time pretty soon where looking at the skin I shed from a distance won’t feel the same as it feels drafting this new thing—or how it felt drafting what would eventually become my first novel. 

Those vulnerable or scary things won’t really pertain to my life as much as they once did. They’ll be tied to a previous version of me, a previous iteration. A previous layer of skin that wouldn’t fit me even if I tried to slip it back on. 

Peace, 

Andrew 

Recommendations: 

• This essay by Shannon Sanders about balancing parenthood and being a writer, from a moms perspective, was great and honest. 

• I loved this opinion piece by Meher Ahmad in response to the Hasan Minhaj debacle that interrogates her own willingness at times to tell tragic stories knowing they’ll find “an eager audience.” 

• Daniel Oppenheimer
  wrote an excellent analysis of what The New Yorker style of writing means to our society and culture today, and how it has evolved over many years to get here. 

• Junot Díaz
  wrote an illuminating post on the importance of keeping your audience in mind while drafting a novel. It is filled with tons of helpful advice for those in the early stages of a novel project. As a side note: All of Junot’s craft posts and insights have been outstanding and I’m so, so happy he’s on Substack. 

• Aside from writer interviews, one of my favorite things to listen to is interviews of old-school hip-hop legends on the Drink Champs podcast. They recently had Big Daddy Kane on and he did not disappoint.