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November 5
I'm not much of a storyteller. Or at least I've built stories up into too terrifying a concept for me to deal with directly. I imagine there’s all sorts of rituals involved. You have to establish characters, create conflict, generate intrigue, delay climaxes, and so on. I have no idea how to do any of these. All I know how to do is write sentences that begin with the word “I.”
It was strange yesterday, when for a few moments I actually was telling a story — one that only lasted for a paragraph. One event followed another. Sentence by sentence information was revealed. I forgot that was a thing I could do.
Usually when I sit down to “write a story,” I get lost in conceits. If I’m telling the tale of a man who’s found himself trapped in the apartment of a 富二代 student at an Ivy League university at the beginning of the 2020 pandemic, lost in her narration as she talks about her friends all dispersed across the great centers of world culture and commerce, inevitably I start writing paragraph after paragraph of this man’s opinions about music or Greek historiography, and have no idea what to say about any of the events that led this to this apartment or the dialogue within. When I feel nervous enough about nothing having happened yet, I send him into the bathroom and have him describe the pajamas this 富二代 has forced him to wear (leftovers from her days collecting men’s clothing) that reveal a hint of his feeble chest hair in the mirror. Or I describe the shag carpet beneath his feet, the dried soap scum on the shower curtain, or all the banana-scented bath products imported from Japan that line the bathtub.
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