The Seagulls

TRIGORIN: We write as we must, as best we can.
- The Seagull ¹

(I’m just past the halfway point in my VCCA residency and only just found a surprisingly decent barista in town. I’m very excited about my progress here, having newly discovered the joys of research. Of my first three books, only Memento Park required a small amount of research. This one is different, and I’ve spent the whole first week reading, annotating, cross-referencing, digging. I’ve had that wonderful moment wherein a stray sentence in one book or article sends me down an exciting new path.

My fellow fellows are lovely people, and we are well taken care of. It’s such a gift to have all meals handled, it allows for a kind of immersion that leads to these wonderfully altered states of imagination. I hope to leave next week with a solid opening for the new novel, and so far, I am on pace although the late-night drinking and socializing does wear me out just a bit. 

Anyway, the upshot is I have been reading more than writing, but I find myself wanting to talk about seagulls. And abandoning novels-in-progress. My subconscious seems to insist these are related, though I’m still not convinced, yet I’ve felt the itch to set this all down. Let’s find out. Spoiler alert: it’s much longer than I envisioned.)

1.

Before we moved to Pacific Grove in December 2020, Jennifer and I made regular visits from L.A., often treating them as writing retreats. We’d hole up at our favorite inn, take our pages to the indie bookstore/coffee shop on the corner, and walk along the bay in the evening. It’s always been an inspiring and productive place – I wrote the first forty pages of Memento Park in that café.

As visitors, we were entranced by the deer who roamed freely and by the song of the seagulls. When we decided to try moving up here, our list of “must-haves” included being somewhere where we’d regularly hear the birds. 

On those first visits, I began spinning a yarn about George the Seagull to amuse Jennifer. At some point during each trip over the years, I’d confidently point out a seagull, identify him as George (pronounced with an affectedly long “or” sound, as in gorge). I’d riff on his stints in rehab, his unsuccessful romantic life, his general cranky disdain for humans and other gulls.

I did this for some time, George’s history becoming quite involved, until, after about two years of living here, I became bored, as is my way, and announced that George was missing, presumed dead, but possibly in a witness relocation situation in Florida.

2.

I recently put a novel-in-progress in the drawer, a polite way of saying I’ve abandoned it, probably for good. I’d invested some real time in it, about eight months and close to a hundred pages. And I realized that I’ve now abandoned as many books as I’ve published, and that decision felt worth addressing, an interesting piece of my development as a writer.

I know I’ve had a shockingly easy run of it, in some way. My first two novels were, well, my first two novels; and I was fortunate that they were picked up quickly. (I did have two false starts before Harry, Revised; but these were never consciously abandoned. They just sort of petered out, the usual amateurish first stabs, a sign that I wasn’t yet ready or committed.) @UGMAN, though, was a different story. A long time to find a home, with two abandoned books ahead of it.

The first time I stuck in a manuscript in the drawer was in 2019. I’d finished my MFA at Bennington, where I had been writing a surveillance state novel. It’s something that I’ve always been interested in, I did as much research as one can about a black box and decided I was more interested in writing about the Watchers than the Watched. So I got to it, knocked out about 150 pages of Collect It All (the unofficial motto of the NSA). I bounced around a lot, third person to first back to third. The writing was good enough, my advisor seemed to like it, and I got my degree.

But after graduating, I sat with it for a bit and came to the conclusion that I didn’t believe a word of it. This was, I think, partly due to the lack of available sources on the day to day existence of an NSA analyst; and partly because I was relying too heavily on that vast storehouse of spy movies that we all have. My advisor wisely tried to turn this into an advantage – since no one really knows, you can make it anything you like. But it felt derivative and familiar. Competent but not true. I was too undone by the gap between the book I imagined in my mind’s eye and the book I was actually able to write.

So, for the first time in my writing life, I said fuck it, I’m stepping back. I remember feeling a bit dizzy, my chest tight. But there it was, first book in the drawer. But, as it happened, we were moving into the lockdown and I had a new idea.

3.

KONSTANTIN: I sank low enough today to kill this seagull. I lay it at your feet.
NINA: What has got into you?

We recently went through gull season, and the town was awash in gray, dazed fledglings. Earthbound, they toddled around the neighborhood, oblivious to cars. Cute little bastards but perhaps not the brightest.

Every evening, my kiddo and I stroll from our house through town and back again – the main drag, Lighthouse Avenue, is less than a half-mile long. The kid is prone to agitation, and our sunset walks would help calm them, giving them a chance to talk comics with me and to visit with the town dogs and cats. The kid loves animals of every stripe, and has lately been on a bird kick.

We began to see this one fledgling pretty often, around the same spot in front of the town movie theatre. We were both a bit worried as it bopped around the middle of the road in weekend tourist traffic. The first night, we gently guided it back to the sidewalk. The second evening, some other locals were directing it to safety. I worried that Darwin would soon do his work.

The following morning, I was walking up to the local café and I saw the flattened pile of feathers in the road, right in front of the theatre. Of course, I understood there were many such babies around, that this was not necessarily our bird. And yet, I knew it was. 

Heartsick, I walked back home to get a garbage bag; I couldn’t let the kid see this on our nightly walk, they’d be heartbroken. I scooped up the broken body, still warm through the bag, and deposited it in the trash. I walked home furious; initially, I had blamed the dumb young fledging but really the fault was ours, roads, cars, speed. People and our so-called progress.

4.

The second novel I set aside was a comic novel. My first book had been a dark comedy, and since then I’d avoided writing for laughs. But we were all so miserable, so frightened, perhaps a tiny bit hopeless; and so I told my agent I wanted to return to form and write another comic novel. But one that was big-hearted, warm and generous. Richard Russo’s Straight Man was the model I had in mind. He loved the idea, said “I’d buy that book in a heartbeat,” and so I set to work.

I tried to structure my early Covid mornings. I’d come downstairs, have some coffee and hit the dining room table in my Santa Monica apartment by about 8:30 or so. I’d try to stay put for at least two hours first thing. I’d take a mid-morning break and come back in the afternoon hours for another go. Because, really, what else was there to do?

I’d been carrying about this idea for a while, a redemption arc that I’m still a bit cagey about discussing for reasons that will come later. I was excited to be working on something new, you know that liberating feeling when it’s so early that anything goes. And I got to it. I wrote.

And I wrote.

And I wrote.

But it wasn’t funny. How could it be? I’d lie awake at night, heart racing, terrified of illness, terrified of dying, looking at the Dashboards of Death, watching Trump stumble his way through an apocalypse. And then came the election, the daily unending stress. I was a jittery mess, depressed and short-fused. The thing I’d be reaching for – hope, generosity, spirited joy – was being blocked by this black cloud of rage.

So I put eighty-five pages of the comic novel into the drawer. And I put my rage into @UGMAN, which I wrote in record time, started under Trump and finished under Biden. And published under Trump.

5.

SHAMRAEV: Here’s the thing I was telling you about … (He takes the stuffed seagull out of the cupboard.) Just as you ordered.
TRIGORIN: No memory of it. Not the faintest.

This section is about seagulls, yes, but it also happens to be a scene taken from the book I just abandoned. I share this excerpt here, which describes the moment more or less as it happened. The “he” referenced here is the father of a troubled child.

**

He comes out one Saturday morning to the sound of the dog barking. The dog has many registers, most of which he regards with affection and indulgence. But this one always unnerves him with its wild pitch, completely out of control; a frenzy of throaty barks, whining yelps, alternating with a low steady growl. His eyes follow the dog’s snout, pointed rigidly up at the glass ceiling of the sunroom. A seagull is lying there on the edge. Not perched, but sprawled, as if the last bit of its energy was exhausted in the flight to this spot. He immediately understands it is dying, and his attention on the bird, confirming the dog’s instincts, makes him bark even more orchestrally.

He regards the poor bird at something of a loss. Living creatures in pain have always confused him, sometimes repelled him slightly. Pity discomfits him. Years earlier, he helped a group of volunteers haul up a wounded seal up from the beach into a waiting truck for medical care. He was a passerby roped into assisting, it was virtuous and right to help, he knew. He felt sadness for the wounded creature, and he wanted it to be over quickly, repelled as he was by the animal’s rough coat, infected smell, and bloody abrasions. He understands now that there’s no one else here to help, the responsibility is his.

He takes the dog by the collar and pulls him into the bedroom, where he continues to bark and claw at the closed door. The ruckus brings his partner in from her gardening. He points at the bird, and she covers her mouth in sorrow. Somewhere between corralling the dog and her arrival, the bird has died. He feels terrible, wondering if he was present for the extinguishing of its light; or if he missed it wrangling the dog, the poor creature slipping into darkness alone, unattended. The thought is a bit more than he can bear, and he begins to cry in his partner’s arms. Not for long, a short, intense volley of sobs. Then he finds some rubber gloves and a heavy green trash bag, pulls out the ladder and climbs up to the roof.

The bird is heavy, uncooperative. He finally understands the phrase dead weight. He manages to slide it into the bag, registers the shimmering iridescence of the slope of its wing as he ties the bag closed. They place it in front of the house, under the stoop, where the dog won’t find it, while they try to figure out what to do with it. A helpful representative on the animal control hotline explains that they do not pick up bird corpses, they should just place it in their trash can. He throws the lid open, furious. Catches himself, lowers the bird in gently, with a whispered I’m sorry. Inconsolable, he opens a bottle of Woodford Reserve, relieved the kid is with their mother this weekend. The bird deserved better than this. They all do.

**

(Strange footnote is that this episode was originally slated for inclusion in the comic novel. I have it right here, in my notes. Which should explain why I put that one into the drawer … my comic judgment was not firing on all cylinders. But the moment has never left me.)

6.

The third and most recent novel I set aside was my stab at autofiction. (By the time I get around to any fashionable literary trend, you can assume it’s pretty well dead.) But I was inspired by Sigrid Nunez’s recent loose trilogy (The Friend, What Are You Going Through, The Vulnerables) to try to write about the worst year of my life, raising a suicidal kid on the spectrum. It was a year of emergency rooms and inpatient visits, a pretty hopeless time until, as seems to happen in movies-of-the-week, the therapist who changed everything finally came along.

I struggled mightily with this one, learning the hard way that there’s more to autofiction than appears at first look. I tried three different approaches to the material, never fully settling into any one idea, although the last version did produce about a hundred pages. My earlier residencies this year all focused on grappling with this material. 

When I returned from my spring residency at Studio Faire, I had about eighty reasonably polished pages, which I sent to my agent for a look-see. I don’t usually do this, I tend to wait until I have a whole book before I send it along. But I think on some level, I knew I hadn’t really licked it. And to his eternal credit, Simon told me my instinct was correct. He thought the writing itself was excellent; but he didn’t yet see the novel’s shape.

There were three things that undermined my faith in the novel. The first was what Simon diagnosed; I could never figure out a narrative shape, something to make it more than just a year of miserable shit happening to me and my kid. There was something a bit unrelenting about it.

The second was simply that I was having no fun. At all. Writing, for me, has to be fun, even when you’re struggling with a thorny problem. But here, I’d been reliving that horrible year, re-reading doctor’s reports, having to immerse myself in the shittiest time of my life. And when I was done, I felt none of the “I enjoy having written” vibe. I just felt lousy, spent, hopeless all the time.

The third thing, perhaps the most important one, was that it was becoming clear that I’d not really reckoned fully with the question of the kid’s privacy. I’ve always been a bit “write now and worry later” and the ruthless part of me felt, hey, this was my life, my experience, and I get to tell it my way. But that didn’t really hold up, and I began to think more fully about how the kid would feel to find this story in such detail out in the world. I could do it, but I could not justify doing it. (Writers can be an amoral bunch.)

Simon’s analysis gave me the cover to set it aside; but it was the strong combination of the second and third reason that allowed me to abandon the project. This just happened last month and it was the hardest one to let go of.

7. 

TRIGORIN: Idea for story – young girl, like you, brought up on the shores of a lake. She loves the lake like a seagull and is happy and free just like a seagull. Then a man happens to come along, he sees her, and, having nothing much to do, destroys her, like this seagull. 

A few weeks ago, after I’d removed the seagull corpse from the street, the kid and I were on one of our evening walks. The days have been longer and we usually work in a stop at the new ice cream joint that opened this summer – the kind of thing that makes headlines in our town.

We were coming down the street along the side of the theatre that connects to the main drag and encountered this little drama unfolding in the theatre parking lot: a full-blown seagull altercation was taking place. Specifically, three adult seagulls were attacking one of the gray fledglings. A lot of squawking, threatening flapping, biting and entanglement. 

We were both quite upset and I ran into the fray, shouting at the adult birds, and as they backed off, the kid ushered the little one away from the melee. The adults finally flew off in one direction, and the fledging flew low across the main street, presumably to fight (or fall) another day.

I turned to the kid and said, “Those guys are mutherfuckers.” The kid, inured to my salty turns of phrase, nodded in sympathetic agreement and we continued on for ice cream.

When I got home, I did a bit of googling and learned that seagulls are generally unpleasant creatures. Violent, conniving, thieving. Quick to turn on their own. They kind of suck. Sometimes, I walk into town and a dozen of them are shouting at each other across rooftops, like some seagull House of Commons. Sometimes I think of George, and I find I don’t hear them quite the same way I used to.

8.

NINA: What I’ve realized, Kostya, is that, with us, whether we’re writers or actors, what really counts is not dreaming about fame and glory … but stamina: knowing how to keep going despite everything, and having faith in yourself.

I’ve got three days left to my residency. I took longer to write this than I’d expected, fiddling with it between bits of research and writing, but that’s ok. It’s also longer than the new pages I’ve actually written for novel four, but that’s ok as well. I always keep expectations light when I start something new. Too much pressure can squeeze out the life. The momentum will come, sooner or later. 

I remember when my second novel came out, how happy I was to see the “Also by” flyleaf. It gave me some validation, that my first book wasn’t a fluke. It was a moment where I felt like the “real deal.”

I’ve had a few of those “real deal” moments throughout my writing career, and I suspect now they never quite go away, imposter syndrome and all that. But lately I’ve felt that being able to set aside a novel that isn’t working is also a “real deal” kind of baller move. It takes a clear eye, cool appraisal, and a strong enough heart to let something go.

When I talked to Simon about my dilemma, told him I was thinking about abandoning the autofiction, and I pitched him the novel I am writing now, what he said surprised me a little. Usually, I have a good sense of what he will advise, the benefit of a long relationship, but he said something so unexpectedly helpful that I must share it here. He said that the only way to know if a book is really ready to be abandoned is to start something else. And see if the abandoned book still exerts any pull, still calls you back. Then you’ll know.

I suspect I will return one day to the NSA and comic novels (hence my earlier caginess); there’s enough spark in both that I do periodically start mulling over how to revive them. The tug is still there. But I’m pretty sure the autofiction will not return; the decision to stop work yielded only immense relief, a thorn finally pulled out. I have not looked back once. I feel no sense of failure. I learned a great deal from each of these efforts.

Fortunately, there is always another book to write. I used to worry this wasn’t so, that I’d run out, yet here I am in rural Virginia, starting down the road once more. I’ve loved every minute. See you all again in a few …

1  All excerpts from The Seagull are translated by Tom Stoppard.