A Guy Walks into a Fiction Folder
A few days ago, I opened the folder called Fiction on my laptop, looking for a piece of work I intend to revisit, a horror story I literally abandoned at the altar five years ago.
My folder Fiction is packed. It contains everything I have written since I first acquired a Mac in 2001, and I write every day for at least two hours and always have. Scanning the files, searching for the one I’d jilted, I noticed a document called Nobody Pays For It.
The title perplexed me. I couldn’t remember anything about the story. I couldn’t remember writing it, or what had happened to it. For a second, I thought it might be a student’s piece that had somehow ended up in the wrong folder, or it might be notes for something I either never completed or even attempted.
It was, though, a story written by me. I just couldn’t remember writing it. Usually, I have strong recall of the motivation and process of how I wrote a story, and can summon a vivid picture of where I was when I wrote it, in what room in what flat, in what season, what mood, in what state of self-delusion or agitation.
The address where I wrote it is typed on the manuscript. I remember the desk, the window, glittery sunshine in the early mornings and the foxcubs that played in the alley, but not the story. Nobody Pays For It moves me like a corpse moves when you prod it with a stick.
How We Know Each Other
Even when I read the story, nothing comes back to life. Ashley Stokes Reanimator I am not. Nobody Pays For It is 1000 words long. This possibly means I wrote it in one sitting. It was a fling then, not an affair. I was still drinking when I lived in that flat and maybe the details are hazy, the how-did-we-end-up here unclear, out of character or something me and it agreed never happened, seeing as we can hardly remember how we even know each other. Stephen King was so deep into coke and booze that he doesn’t remember writing Cujo. Is Nothing Pays for It my Cujo? Is that what it is?
Write Sober, Edit Sober
I’d hasten to add here that although I would love to find a Cujo-style manuscript in my Fiction folder, some mental, scurrilous rubbish I wrote on a lost weekend or massive bender, I never had a problem like Stephen King’s. I mean, I never wrote and drank at the same time. The quote often attributed to Hemingway says you should write drunk and edit sober. This is bollocks, obviously, or is not to be taken literally, it just means you should write and edit in different states of mind, maybe uncritically and critically, Apollo and Dionyssus, right brain, left brain. Hemingway never even said this, nor did he write drunk. F Scott Fitzgerald, Patricia Highsmith and John Cheever did all write drunk, but they were all chronic and morbid alcoholics. No doubt they edited drunk as well. They did everything drunk. They were drunk all the time. I always wrote sober even when I was drinking. I just drank too much socially out of social anxiety and a desire to get away from myself, not be that person. Close to four years ago I dealt with this problem by stopping drinking, stopping socialising and agreeing to be limited by myself, maybe trying to like myself more. I also had to admit I don’t actually like drinking or being drunk and hate its attendant phantoms of guilt, regret and incomprehension.
The Last Work of a Prodigious Writer
I have read the story three times now. It’s not a story about drinking, though spectres of drinkers hang in its backrooms. The story goes: an unnamed woman, a successful recruitment consultant receives a manuscript called J, the last work of a prodigious writer called James Jay. James Jay has committed suicide. It was believed until now that he had taken his last manuscript into the sea with him. The woman had known Jay when they were teenagers. They had met once as adults. There was something between them, but they failed to either connect or admit their feelings for one another out of reserve, fear, imposter syndrome or being English. There is an allusion to this situation in J, the moment of a lifetime missed. This leaves the woman with a sense of an oncoming emotional storm, of trouble ahead.
Incarnations of Burned Writers
I have a weird emotional tic that I feel that only the last two things I’ve written have any merit to them at all, everything else being the poo of failure rubbed in my face. At this moment, my inner catastrophist tells me only My Cujo and a story called Cloaker I wrote last week do me any credit. As I have had fiction published on a regular basis since my late twenties, this can’t be true. I can’t have conned that many editors, I can’t have bought that many rounds.
The non-junk quality of my earlier stories is often proved to me when I do happen to read something older of mine. I often like it. Initially I don’t dislike Nobody Pays for It. The ending is elegiac. The prose is confident, fluent, has authority. I don’t like it much either. I feel embarrassed by it. In fact, I like it less the more I brood on it.
Its influences start to clamour and hum. I can feel my vampiric touch drawing from the sort of mood found in some Richard Yates novels and stories. I was reading a lot of Yates around this time. Blake Bailey’s biography of Yates, A Tragic Honesty had affected me profoundly. In 2010, when I wrote Nobody Pays for It, I was forty years old and assumed I was going to end up like Yates: destitute, obscure, alone. Smoking and drinking would eventually kill me like they had most of my heroes. The other story that haunts Nobody Pays (and many of Yates’, too) is The Lost Decade by F. Scott Fitzgerald, another sad tale of a scant few pages but weighty with regret, melancholy and a devastating final paragraph.
James Jay in Nobody Pays is not a Richard Yates-type of self-destructive misery merchant but instead a David Foster Wallace figure: the feted and fated, celebrated but emotionally tormented writer and artist. Both Wallace and Jay are multitalented, wealthy and successful, but it doesn’t save them.
I was never a massive fan of Wallace, though I do love two of his short stories, Incarnations of Burned Children and The Depressed Person, the former being only two pages long and the latter displaying a heavy reliance on footnotes (the Depressed Person’s whining and self-obsession breaks the page and sprawls into footnote after footnote, it’s hilarious, it’s terrifying).
Wallace’s suicide in 2008 had shocked me. How we get there when we are in Wallace’s position may have bothered me in some way. I mean, writing was giving back to him in a way it hadn’t to, say, Yates, or me.
This is not a simple trade, though. This is not how depression works on someone. Depression was Wallace’s problem, not his writing, or its reception. Depression wasn’t Yates’ problem. Drinking was, and how drinking drove him mad enough to end up in several psych wards to sober up. The hospital bills only made his financial problems worse. Yates drank because Fitzgerald drank. Yates thought becoming an alcoholic was a ritual. If you become an alcoholic, you would be accepted into an elite order of writers, some hallowed circle of romantic dreamers, tellers of sad truths whose talents were as natural as the pattern of dust on a butterfly’s wings and whose best pages of good prose were invincible. Fitzgerald was dead at 44, alcoholism literally breaking his heart. Yates died at 66, years of a hundred a day turning his lungs to cobwebs, and at the end having little to his name beyond two cans of Heineken and some Hemingway collections.
In Nobody Pays for It, I didn’t explain what was wrong with James Jay, why living had become his problem. The problem is his mystery. It should be mysterious. I use Mystery here in its deepest, quasi-religious sense, that of something about ourselves we will never know, and maybe shouldn’t.
Thinking about it like this makes the title make sense. Someone does pay for it. The Recruitment Consultant will be ruined because of James Jay’s actions. This is what we are left. It is this that I give you.
Standing for Something
I still don’t remember writing the story, though. I had assumed I had by then read DT Max’s biography of Wallace, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, hence the details I leant to James Jay. I have read Max’s book, but it didn’t come out until 2012 and, according to my old website, Nobody Pays for It was published in 2010. I assume it was written that year, too. A story can take years to find a home and sometimes years to appear. I am pretty sure that if Nobody Pays had suffered multiple submissions and rejections, I would have remembered it more.
My old website also informs me that the story was published by Ink Sweat and Tears, the online prose and poetry magazine that is still commendably doing its thing even now (longevity is everything in literary adventures; you either want to be in the first issue or in something that has been going twenty years). IST’s current archive only goes back to 2020 so you can’t read Nobody Pays for It there. Maybe they secretly hate it, too. I now remember that I wrote Nobody Pays for It because Helen Ivory at Ink Sweat and Tears asked me for a story.
Now I feel like a failure all the time and still do now sitting here writing this and I probably always will whatever the future holds, whatever the sword I one day pull from the stone. A feeling of failure drips off me like beer-sweat and malarial fever. I have to fight it off. I have check myself, ask myself what failure is, whether failure is relative, contingent and personal, or whether success resides on some balcony above me, an exclusive area where masked judges and actuaries give me the thumbs up or the thumbs down. And if I climb to that balcony, they will be gone and I will look up at another balcony, other shadows, and so on and so on.
I mean: I was asked to write a story, and it was published.
In all my years of teaching, workshopping and at sometimes editing, both writing a publishable story and being asked for a story, this occurrence would for so many people be some bucket-list, tape-snapping-at-the-finish-line moment. You could rest easy afterwards. You have the proof, the trophy. You did it. You are a published writer after all. I mean, David Foster Wallace wrote Infinite Jest, Richard Yates wrote Revolutionary Road, I wrote Nobody Pays for It. It has to stand for something.
Random Underlinings
I still don’t like Nobody Pays for It much, even though I now remember why I wrote it, how it was probably written quickly when there was an opportunity and someone had been kind enough to think of me. I also remember that the title came from randomly underlining phrases in Emergency Kit: Poems for Strange Times edited by Jo Shapcott and Matthew Sweeney, part of my gathering process that around this time had given me the title of another very glum and realist short story, All Else is Photographs, which appeared on Wufniks, a website now sadly passed. This reminds me that the creative process of using random stimuli to enliven a story at the planning stage that I recently described and codified in The Eyelash Tarot Experiment has earlier origins. I was playing like this in some ways almost a decade before I’d assumed.
Bleeding Out
In The Eyelash Tarot Experiment, I also bleated about not being able to write very short stories, that flash fiction – stories up to 1000 words long – is a form that does not allow me to explore the things I like to explore when I write fiction, association, vibration, lushness, lore, a sense of the immediate, of living in and through the moment of the story, psychological depth, the depth of obsessions. The pace of my fiction tends to more, not less (and, lest we forget, Commissar Minimalism makes everyone sound the same and thus like generative AI). To be fair to Nobody Pays for It, Helen probably asked me for a 1000-word story because that’s what IST publish, the poem-like slice-of-life. I wrote to the brief like a pro. If I’d handed in my recent story, We’re Not Friends, a 14,000 word mini-movie about an investigation into a cult that worship the iguanas in Ballard’s The Drowned World who are hiding out in a flooded south London mall, Helen might have turned the story down.
By 2010, I had found myself writing a lot of short fiction simply because I couldn’t settle into the groove of a new novel (most of my novels have started out as short stories that metamorphized from moth to mammoth against my explicit instructions). Beforehand, I had seen writing short stories as postcards, calling cards, business cards, short-stay projects I completed between novel drafts or sometimes because I was asked for one. I had just written the sequence that would become The Syllabus of Errors. Some of these stories were quite substantial, more like mini-novels, or ‘book movies’ as I like to think of them (‘Book movie is the movie in words’, Jack Kerouac’s Belief and Technique for Modern Prose). Coming out of this, and realising that the market, especially the non-genre and online market for short fiction was wordcount restrictive, 3000 words being seen as literally Homeric or Proustian, I was experimenting, minimalizing, trying new things, new subjects, too, maybe. The characters in Nobody Pays for It are not like the sort of people I usually write about. They are both, in their own ways, successful.
I tell myself now that I am terrible at writing short-short fiction. Yet here I am in 2010 writing (albeit forgettable) 1000 words stories. I wrote others, too, that appeared elsewhere, Iguanodon, The Insurrections, Zone Ends.
I am lying to myself.
I can do it if they make me.
No one made me.
I can do it if I want to.
I still don’t like the story.
I don’t like it because it tries too hard to fit in.
That’s what I feel: it’s desperate for approval, it’s respectable, it begs for acceptance, it’s needy for validation, it’s safe and it’s sane, it rattles no cage, it is transfixed by shape not scope. Anyone could have written it.
See: I am being quite hard on it.
I am being quite hard on myself.
It’s a transitionary piece, the story.
That’s all.
I was trying things out.
Big projects were behind me.
Big projects were ahead.
I write because I can’t help it.
I don’t have any other explanation for it.
Whatever validation comes, however vast the void, I’ll not be able to stop doing it.
Be quiet. Stop bleeding. You’ll ruin the carpet, Ashley.
The Last Lost Decade
The question I suspect is haunting no one’s lips by now is what was I doing in my Fiction folder in the first place, what was I looking for on that rummage that led to my fateful encounter with a sixteen-year-old unremarkable, unloved story that no one remembers, not even its author?
While I was not looking for my not-so-great lost short story, I was looking for my not-so-great lost weird horror novel, The Queen of Sleep.
This I wrote in 2016 and 2017. It marks the beginning of something, and something I can sense that has its origins in what I detect as needy or derivative vibrations in Nobody Pays for It (I am now beginning to feel sorry for Nobody Pays for It; I mean, why should I apologise for it? Mike Gayle never apologises for writing that scene in Turning Thirty where some cunts come round to watch ER?).
By 2016, I had a great hankering to do something different with storytelling. As I say above, Nobody Pays was also an attempt to break out of an old holding pattern, or, I had mined several subjects that I had now exhausted. I had exhausted myself, I had exhausted my reacquaintance with modern history (my degree subject) and the idea that fascism was both coming back and quite possible in suburban England (an unfashionable idea in 2012 when The Syllabus came out; ‘Short Stories warn of Threats to Democracy’ said the page-long review in the Eastern Daily Press – no one heeded the threats, or bought the collection). My reading and watching habits had changed. Editing Unthology had brought me into contact with a lively weird fiction scene that had some overlap with my own (which might not be apparent if Nobody Pays was my sole achievement, my signature story, or your only experience of reading me, but a lot of my stories were dark anyway and only needed a push to become full-blown horror stories). I desperately wanted to do something else. I desperately wanted to unlearn something I couldn’t quite identify, burn off a shadow hanging over my stories, insult some code of laws lain down by someone demanding I impress them in a certain way, some perceived commissar or professor, some old bad-faith companion, an unfaithful lover even. And the world was increasingly becoming weird and out of joint. It very much seemed to me that realist and mainstream literary fiction was not up to the task of responding to this, or, less sweepingly, my realist mainstream literary fiction was not up to this task.
Moreover, after a few years of experimenting with very short and shortish fiction, a time when my output was quite slow because I was co-running a press and a journal, I did manage to write the novel that would become Gigantic. In that novel, I rediscovered something of the love of SF I’d had as a kid even as I was sending it up. I felt come back an enthusiasm for wild ideas and sheer mystery, some primal, playful throb that I had somehow lost in high-mindedness and trying to be something I am not to impress people I don’t much like. I had often thought about writing horror. The writer and editor Dan Coxon, who I had met through editing the Unthology journal had jumped ship to horror and was encouraging other writers to have a go.
So I had a go.
Having a go changed everything.
Once I was gone, I was gone.
Gone solid gone.
So, I wrote a horror novel, The Queen of Sleep, supposedly the first in a trilogy.
Cut a long story about a short novel short, the consensus from people who have read The Queen of Sleep is the second half is strong, among the best fiction I have written, in the same room at least as Cloaker and My Cujo. The first half, though, is both weak and not in line with the quality of the horror fiction I have written since.
I suspect this is because of trying to set up a trilogy (overreach), tonal hesitancy, and being written too close to Gigantic when I’d not yet found my horror feet. Although horror people liked Gigantic, it’s more a comedy than a horror novel. Early on The Queen can’t make up its mind whether it’s a comedy or not.
My agent had made some observations and suggestions, and I promised to rewrite the novel. I was keen to do this. The second half of the novel is proper horror, freakily fucked up and scary. I just need to streamline, economise, sanitise, cut a few Gordians.
However, I kept getting distracted by other ideas and calls for submission. Not just once or twice. I mean, for five years. Rather than attempt the simple task of revisioning something I have already drafted, I wrote two novels, one short novel, three collections and sundry other pieces of fiction, life writing and collaborations (close to half a million words and I am excluding the books I ghosted during this period). Earlier this year, I drew up a new plan and made development notes for Queen 2, and still managed to write three more short stories than I’d intended. And while I was looking for the master document, finally about to drag the fiend from its coffin, I find Nobody Pays for It, and stop to write this here instead of starting to rewrite The Queen of Sleep.
I went looking for something and found something else.
A story I don’t even remember writing.
My Cujo.
If I put my weird SF writer’s head back on, I could think of writing a story so obscure it writes you.
Thinking about Nobody Pays for It, what I love about writing SF and not lit fic is that I know what I need to do.
I need to write something that unsettles you.
That’s the only genre rule (or the only one I pay attention to).
That’s the aim, and to have an aim is excellent.
Alternatively, Nobody Pays for It could just be a neat four-word summary of my so-far twenty-eight-year career as a full-time writer. Ouch.
Anyway, I have included Nobody Pays for It here as it’s no longer available through Ink Sweat and Tears. I’d be interested to know what people think. Am I being too harsh on myself or it? How does it read to you? Was I correct to stop writing fiction like this? One of the aims I set for myself is that you should write stories that no one else could write. I am pretty confident no one else but me could write Gigantic. I suspect a monkey, a marmoset or any of the marsupials could have written Nobody Pays for It.
Nobody Pays for It
Two days after his car was found burnt-out near a cliff’s edge her PA handed her a padded envelope. She recognized the handwriting, its unruly loops and truncated stems. There were meetings scheduled that day. Her clients had travelled distances, one from as far as Cologne. She cancelled them all and left Populus, the recruitment consultancy she’d built from a desk in a spare room to a suite of offices on London Wall. She drifted around the City, not looking up or down until she found the restaurant. She insisted on a table not facing the street. At first it seemed he’d sent her nothing personal, no letter or explanation, only J, a manuscript an inch thick. His agent’s statement had said that James Jay’s last masterpiece was either ashes or he’d taken it to the sea.
She had known James Jay for over thirty years, though since they were teenagers she’d met him only once, in Bennetts three summers ago. The first she remembered of him was out in the park where they all used to play, the timid, scrutinizing boy who involved himself only if someone wandered offside or overstepped the crease. It was known that every night no one in his house ate dinner unless a previously agreed-upon dead language was spoken throughout. It was said that from an early age his parents had gifted him the role of little Solomon in their frequent and vicious disputes. Nothing was so complicated that an eight-year old couldn’t adjudicate. He grew tall and athletic, but stooped and leant away when you talked up to him. He jumped a year at school, took exams early and additional subjects for fun: Philosophy, Ancient Greek, Further and Furthest Maths. He was the first-choice captain of the school water polo team but never found a way of leading the others. Eventually they handed the role to someone who could.
When she was sixteen she used to watch him play. When she watched him she knew. Her mother said – and said it more than once so must have been cool about it – that hopefully something of his brains and prospects might rub off on her.
After the game where he scored five second-half goals in front of the England selector, she counted all the Alistairs and Tobys out of the changing rooms. She’d dressed less tomboyishly than usual. He was sat on a bench, still wet, still dripping. A vein stood out on his bicep. It was awkward afterwards. She promised herself that she would never expose herself like that again. It would not be the first time that she made this promise. It would be written out in journals and diaries and confessed to expert strangers in book-lined rooms, after work, after the end, for £125 an hour.
The first page of J was dense. She’d had trouble reading his work before. The Thresher, his only novel, had stumped her. His other books, all non-fiction, were called Reason’s Inward Pulse, Doctor Neuroscience Takes a Train and The Splendour of Fear. The only thing she had liked was Fin, a memoir about swimming. In fact, it was Fin that alerted her to him again. When she’d read an interview, accompanied by a moody photo (he was an interviewer’s nightmare: evasive, ogreish, bored), the wires connected. She’d written to him via his publisher, old-style.
In Bennetts he didn’t take his beanie hat off and clearly hadn’t shaved for some weeks. He ordered the same meal as she did, and the same wine, but touched neither. It took her a while but she was a people person, talked for a living, made others feel at ease. He was interested in the rise of Populus. He wasn’t married to woman called Katinka, as one post on a web forum had stated. He listened when she explained that she was seeing a man called Bart from Seattle who seemed to be bringing to the forefront of her thoughts some old, sapping confusion. It was better talking to James. He told her what to do. He said he made sense out of senselessness. His new book was called J. She asked him about his favourite TV programme, a parting-shot question she used in interviews if she’d made up her mind. He told her that when he was a child he used to creep downstairs and turn on the TV to relish the shrill pitch at closedown. Then he said, ‘that or the space programme.’
In the street she had tugged his sleeve and asked him to come back to her flat. There was a terrace, river views and champagne in the fridge. He looked scared, like there was something desperate, life-or-death to do instead. He said he’d call, invite her to visit him. He lived on the coast, up there. He never phoned.
J was disorganised. She found herself skimming notes for a biography of a sixteenth-century astronomer called Jirkwald, a made-up man, she suspected. After about ninety pages the writing began to settle, compose itself. He came down from the skies. An account of a water polo game, five goals in the second half and a conversation with the selector and: the girl slinks into the changing room after the others leave and the girl is beauty, the fork in the lightning, and in her eyes you see something in you that you don’t believe, and even then you know how these things end, what they get like. And you make a mistake, fail to give yourself. You end up here, the air, and end. Maybe?
She made a call and tersely dumped Arturo Quick, a trader she’d been sleeping with for five months.
No body was found. Meanwhile she would find herself opening and closing the book at this point, over and over with each new hope and their parting. Here, yes, here, she would later explain, it was here that the trouble between them really began.
