People often ask me how I come up with characters, which is almost the same question as how do I come up with stories, since I write character-driven literary fiction. Do I draw from my own life? Sometimes, in some ways, though maybe not the way you’re thinking. I draw deeply from my creative wellspring, and by that I mean my reserves of grievances and the spiteful acts I wish I could perform but am too self-conscious and too ethical (I hope) to actually act out.

I was one of those many children who got picked on during my years in school and could never come up with a comeback on the spot. Cue the tiniest violin, preferably played by a baby glowworm. I spent subsequent days, months, or even years after an act of bullying perfecting what I wished I had said in a conversation. At age 42, I now have the best comebacks for things that happened in third and fourth grade, though I’m still brainstorming ways to address incidents that occurred last month. But before you think I’m telling you to unleash years of bitterness into the world, like many a tech bro with a hot wife, I’m promoting another idea entirely: Live vicariously through your characters by letting them do the dirty work for you.

And by that I don’t mean simply allowing your inner almond mom with a vengeance against carbs to eat a donut, though that could be fun, too, I guess. I mean fully unleashing your inner Petty Labelle, your equivalent of Billie Eilish’s “Bad Guy,” your Real Housewife of Wherever You Live, your shadow self. One way to do this is to, as I wrote in my previous post, create characters who resist epiphany, who have a nearly or fully realized recognition of the socially acceptable thing to do, then pivot at the last second, choosing a darker behavior instead.

Another way to approach writing from spite is to play the “what if” game. My debut novel (shameless plug: The Four Wives and Five Deaths of Richard Milford, out October 13, 2026) is the result of my indulgence of this game. My mom told me about my great-grandfather, who had 40 children, three wives, and beat them all with a horse whip. And I was like: “JERK.” Then, I was like, “NOVEL!” It turns out that he was not concurrently married to all three women, but my mind had already run with a bunch of shadow-self questions: What if the wives and possibly children of this polygamist could get revenge on him? How would they do it? What if they all killed him at the same time, or what if, as occurs in the book, they kill him by passing the baton, each contributing her own her own method? What if this man, unlike my real grandfather, were the most hated person in a small town and everyone became a suspect? What if he were a cowboy and a moonshiner? What if each chapter detailed one of his five deaths? Thusly, the book.

I think it goes without saying that I would never beat or murder someone, or at least, I hope it goes without saying. But my research took some dark turns, and for that reason, I thank those aforementioned tech bros for private browsing and clean caches. I purchased a leather riding crop to feel the weight and whoosh of it through the air. I made a vengeance playlist (more on that another time). I watched cowboy films and documentaries about 1920s Black life in Oklahoma. I went deeply into all kinds of archives and came out all the more knowledgeable about a niche setting and time period.

But most importantly, my ability to get into the minds of these women, their particular grievances and pains, became foundational to my drafting and revision process as I developed and redeveloped each character. And in particular, my personal understanding of the desire for revenge, my ability to go into the darker places of my own psyche—but not linger there for too long—made it possible for me to imagine these characters’ motivations more effectively.

Prompt: What if?

Recommended Reading: Afternoon Hours of a Hermit, by Patrick Cottrell

Preorder Link for The Four Wives and Five Deaths of Richard Milford

When it comes writing better endings, we can all learn a thing from Charles Baxter’s essay, “Against Epiphanies,” which, as its title suggests, discourages tidy endings with moral musings. But we can also learn a lot from one of my favorite subjects: Canadian teen TV. Quick sidebar: Have I mentioned that I wrote my PhD dissertation on Canadian youth television’s influence on US youth television, including an essay called “Degrassi’s Always Greener on the Other Side,” about the heavy American editing of the series? No? Eh, well, get thee to a JSTOR.

Two of my favorite Canadian television series, Ready or Not, which first aired in the early ‘90s in the US on Showtime and later (edited) on the Disney Channel; and Degrassi: The Next Generation, which I began watching during its 2001 US premiere on Noggin (later The N), employ a use of en medias res (Latin for “in the middle of things”) that I believe can serve any writer struggling with how to end things. Both series’ signature endings leave their teen characters in the middle of decision-making, creating a, for the time, groundbreaking approach to representing young people. And I promise I’m going somewhere with this.

In Ready or Not, a series about best friends Amanda and Busy, every episode ends with the girls still in the middle of their actions, often talking, as the credits roll over them. It’s not that there’s no formal resolution, but that the structure suggests that what we’ve seen in an episode only captures a small portion of their lives on a single day. Busy and Amanda will go on to make bigger and possibly better decisions on their own that we will not see, but as with Mr. Rogers, when we return to them, there’ll be things they want to talk about that we will see on screen. The episodes are not without some sort of resolution, but the dénouement never provides the final word.

In Degrassi: TNG (DTNG), an ensemble series about middle school through college, every episode ends with a freeze frame on the A-plot character still in the middle of making a decision. The original Degrassi series was created by educators Linda Schuyler and Kit Hood, beginning in 1979, who insisted that while the show should be educational, it should eschew overt didacticisms, like forced moral or ethical lessons. Once again, the end of an episode never signifies the “real” end. We’re left, literally, in the middle of things.

Ashley’s friend and stepbrother comfort her after she takes ecstasy and alienates almost everyone at a sleepover gone wrong.

Emma and Toby grieve a character killed in a school tragedy.

Combined and taken individually, I’d argue that these series’ approaches to endings creates a decidedly Canadian aesthetic for dealing with subject matter which in adjacent US television would result in a Very Special Episode, complete with a coda address to camera with the cast recommending phone numbers to call if you are dealing with similar situations. The Canadian series, conversely, teach one to feel more comfortable with the uncertainty, ambiguity, and open endedness of life. To be clear, these endings are not cliffhangers, which leave characters in peril or suspense. Instead, these endings find ways to create a sense of falling action, even as they sidestep epiphanies or avoid tying everything up in a tidy bow.

Here’s where our own writing comes in. Some of my favorite plot lines to write involve characters who resist epiphany, who, after recognizing two or more options, choose the worst one, or simply refuse to make a choice at all. In my story “The Subject of Consumption,” for example, Lisbeth, in a desperate act, continues to dance like Little Edie for the reality TV cameramen well past the climax, sort of like the credits rolling over Amanda and Busy while they’re still talking.

In “Not Today, Marjorie,” Marjorie, after struggling all day with her mental health and a DMV visit that might push her over the edge, realizes that she has made a mistake, and then she chooses to do the wrong thing anyway, recognizing the epiphany in front of her and plowing right over it. The story’s freeze frame cuts away from her in the middle of her highest point of tension (not necessarily the story’s highest point of tension), creating a second kind of climax. Both stories, as in the series I’ve mentioned above, end by ultimately evading endings.

The end.

No, seriously, that’s pretty much the end. We’ve all probably learned the usefulness of beginning a story in the middle of the action, but if we strove to create more questions than we answer by also opening up our conclusions en medias res?

Prompt: How do you play with en medias res in your own work? What are some of your favorite endings? And would an entire letter on different approaches to endings be useful to you?

Recommended Reading: “Against Epiphanies” by Charles Baxter

I’m one of those (beloved) extroverted introverts who presents as shy in small groups but can light up on a stage or a during a one-on-one conversation. I was a conscientious student, ever afraid of getting into trouble at the small, predominantly White Christian school I attended for most of my school years. But the second the teacher stepped out of the room, call me Chatty Cathy, because I was bound to hold a long, animated conversation with anyone who might listen. Find me at any writing residency trying to get everyone to stay up all night with me, a lifelong insomniac, talking. Catch me outside—how ‘bout that—during regular business hours, and I will distract you from your task at hand, asking to brainstorm ideas about current and future writing projects.

This is to say, I’ve come to accept, at long last, that I’m a social writer even if some social situations elicit in me great anxiety. Not only do I love putting my work into conversation with other art through literary allusions or ekphrasis, but I also love real-life conversations about art with other artists, all kinds of artists—and non-artists, too, who often offer so much when it comes to thinking realistically about life. I use words with friends in multiple ways.

The first manifests through one of my favorite games (ironically not Words with Friends), called “What Would You Do?” and named after a childhood series I loved on Nickelodeon, in which I call up random people in my life and ask them a series of “highly hypothetical” questions that I very much intend to use in my writing. (I tell them this so it feels ethical). What would you do if you found out that your house was infested with listening devices, planted by your partner? What would you do if you found out your best friend was being paid to interact with you? “What would you do/ if your son was at home/ crying all alone/ on the bedroom floor/ ‘cause he’s hungry?” (Forgive me, but since the earworm just wouldn’t leave me be, now you get to hear it, too).

Sometimes the answers I receive are as bonkers as the questions, but more often than not, they produce interesting plot points that I can shape into an arc. The more specific the question, the better. My dad is especially good at providing useful answers because he understands generic conventions so well and dabbles in writing himself—he even won a Readers’ Digest short-story competition and placed in a Quill competition when I was a kid—co-writing The Heath Middle Level Literature series for Houghton-Mifflin, and co-writing one academic book with my mom, who is also a writer. My aunt has become another excellent brainstorming partner, providing launchpads into premises with which I’ve already come up.

Secondly, I write online with friends through writing dates, structured as several 45-50-minute sessions, with plenty of time for the Talking Tina in me to engage in socializing—or plotting mischief—during breaks. I have done this with many a friend, including the independent scholar Diana Bellonby, whose forthcoming edited book—Victorian Gaslighting: Genealogy of an Injustice—I cannot wait to read. It keeps us accountable and excited to sit down to write.

Speaking of accountability, the third way I have engaged in social writing is through check-ins, an idea R.O. Kwon—whose praises I seem to sing in every letter so far—suggested. These brief email exchanges have simply outlined what we worked on during a given week. Or with Regina Bradley, I have exchanged actual pages, neither of us reading them, just using them as proof of what we accomplished. The only pressure in these situations comes from within, to remain accountable to a caring friend.

And finally, there’s the traditional writing partner or group, often involving the exchange of work or simply peer-to peer or mentor-to-mentee advice. I’m joining a new one soon, and I can’t wait to see what I learn and how it motivates me.

Prompt: How do you best engage in writing, socially or in silo? How might you play your own versions of “What Would You Do?” or Words with Friends, broadly defined?

Recommended Reading: The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan and “A Sort of Preface” by Toni Cade Bambara in Gorilla My Love, both versions of words with friends at some level.

By fourth grade, when I first encountered Judy Blume’s work, I became so immersed in my Fudge books—beginning with Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing—that I brought them to school to perform long passages during recess. (So obsessed was I with Beverly Clearly and Judy Blume that as an adult I, in fact, named one of my cats Ramona Quimby Beatrice Arthur Spires and the other Farley Drexel “Fudge” Thompson—pictured below). By middle school, I briefly thought it bright to exchange books with a friend and hold a small-scale—and I mean small—would-be book club about our selections.

I formalized my love of reading and talking about literature into academic passion projects, majoring in English during undergrad, heading directly into an English Literature PhD program after, and a few years later earning an MFA in Creative Writing. In each of these programs, there would, I told myself, be time enough at last to read and write as much as I wanted. I kept an extensive collection of detailed annotations on my computer, akin to 3x5 notecards, with synopses of the books I read and quotes I pulled and cited from them. Nothing captured one of my top irrational fears more than the episode of The Twilight Zone, “Time Enough at Last,” in which Burgess Meredith’s character finds himself alone with a lifetime supply of books to read after an explosion and then steps on his glasses, stuck forever in library purgatory, unable to read anything at all.

But since the pandemic, I have struggled to maintain the attention span required for reading much of anything. And even audiobooks, which certainly count as reading, have not been able to bridge the gap in returning to my former passion. This is why I’m going to try psyching my mind much the way I had to in order to finish my doctoral dissertation, when I read a book called Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day, by Joan Bolker. The main premise of the book is that daily low-stakes writing combats the fear of the blank page. Telling ourselves that we’re only going to write for a mere fifteen minutes often allows us to find time in our day that formerly seemed unavailable and to write for much longer periods of time than we intend. As with freewriting, the practice creates a flow state. I have recommended this book to countless people since I read it circa 2007.

And now I’m recommending a modified version to myself as it relates to reading. I’m planning to tell myself that if I read for just fifteen minutes a day, which I can find if instead of calling everyone I know to chat about writing—see my previous letter, “Words with Friends (and Dads)”—I actually set aside a regular quarter of an hour to read. My hope is that, as it did with writing, this 15-minute investment will produce longer, sustained stretches and help me find my way back to one of my first loves.

And blessedly, I am nearsighted, so I don’t even have to worry about breaking my glasses, yet.

Prompt: How do you maintain a reading practice? What strategies have helped you?

Recommended Reading: Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day, by Joan Bolker

I’m no stranger to spicy Bravo reality shows. I have regularly watched many a Real Housewives of season, some ad nauseum. My favorite franchise is Beverly Hills, though my cat Fudge prefers the Black ones, Atlanta and Potomac. She may look like an off-brand Russian Blue, but Fudge is a Black cat, and she knows from whence her catnip comes.

The summer and fall of 2024, after I underwent my fourth endo surgery, the summer I entered what they call “surgical menopause”—which is just regular menopause—at age forty-one, I needed a big pick-me-up, and the opioids I was prescribed simply weren’t enough. Stretched out on the couch, listless and in excruciating, back-hunching pain between doses, I did not have the attention span for films, nor did I especially feel like laughing and injuring my fragile body with my go-to, comedy. The dilaudid and oxycontin did not, thank God, become a problem for me—though I can easily see how they would for susceptible brain chemistry. I became hooked, instead, on The Real Housewives of Atlanta, because, to quote Sheree Whitfield, “Who [was] gonna check me, boo?” Sidebar: I really could have used some comfy She by Sheree loungewear during this time, but that, too, is perhaps an issue for another day.

I’d watched RHOA before, during its early days back in 2008, before Kim Zolciak’s daughter and Kandi Burruss’s daughter appeared in a next-generation reality series of their own. But I hadn’t kept up with RHOA because I moved on. When I checked the Peacock App to find that the show had also moved on, without me, (at the time on season 14), I shifted my swollen body two inches on the couch and said, “Bet.”

I began bingewatching, starting from season three, filling my days and Fudge’s waking hours with the sounds of Bravo, yelling, screaming, fighting, playing the dozens. I’d love to say that thus began a healing journey with which I’m now finished. But endometriosis, especially recurrent endometriosis, is about as kind as Nene Leakes is to white refrigerators. (I said what I said).

What began instead during my RHOA deep dive was a feeling of parasocial solidarity I had yet to experience. With the Real Housewives of Atlanta, I found a televisual affinity group that looked like me—minus the contouring, though if I knew how to chisel my cheeks and bake my concealer, I might try it. Porsha Williams, Shereé Whitfield, Kandi Burruss, Kenya Moore, and Cynthia Bailey—and I may be missing someone—all struggle with fibroids and/or fertility issues during the run of the series. Not to get all academic on a smut stack, but according to research, 80-90% of Black women and 70% of White women deal with fibroids by age 50. Let’s sit with this for a moment: 80-90% of Black women, as in ten percent away from 100. I can say without hyperbole, that’s like, almost everyone. And while Black women experience endometriosis at rates similar to White women, we face much more significant barriers to diagnosis and healing. See, for instance, Jodie Katon et al.

My own mother and cousin and grandma suffered through fibroids and hysterectomies, and one aunt dealt with endometriosis, that I know of. I’m sure similar stories of many of my foremothers, undiagnosed but suffering, are buried along with them, the network of our wombs, or missing wombs, tangled together and held taut by adhesions. The physical pathology—the epigenetic load—that I thought was part of my ancestral inheritance affects so many more people than I ever could have imagined, and witnessing the stories of the many women of RHOA made me feel like Matilda, a little less alone.

I’d like to imagine myself twirling as I write this, free as any woman wearing flowy pastels in a tampon commercial, gone-with-the-ovaries fabulous.

But I grieve as I write this, hoping for a better healthcare system, medical equality instead of medical apartheid, whole women with healed parts, beauty instead of ashes. And six surgeries into this journey (four for endo, two for secondary but related issues), I still live with daily moderate to severe pain.

Later this week, I’ll catch up on either Real Housewives of Beverly Hills or Real Housewives of Potomac. Fudge and I will report back with anything else we learn.

Prompt: To what, smutty or otherswise, do you turn when you need respite from the demands of the body/ mind?

Recommended Reading: Rudine Sims Bishop’s “Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors”

I’m guessing many to most of us have read Anne Lamott’s “Shitty First Drafts” from her acclaimed book Bird by Bird. And if thou hasn’t, get thee to today’s recommended reading, below. In the essay, Lamott says, “Very few writers really know what they are doing until they’ve done it. Nor do they go about their business feeling dewy and thrilled” (94). It takes most of us many tepid to possibly terrible first attempts to “get there,” if getting there is defined as creating something that feels “ready.”

Forgive me, a childless woman, for the imagery, but my first book popped out of me un-breached, head first like I was 10cm dilated. Perhaps because I wasn’t supposed to be writing it. I meant to work on a revise-and-resubmit for another book, a young-adult novel, out on submission to more agents than I can count (well over 75, possibly 100). While I don’t recommend querying in such a belabored (see what I did there) way, I was new to the publishing game and did not know what I was doing. Several agents said they liked that novel, but either didn’t know how to sell it or thought it needed revisions, some of them in different directions.

Irritated and easily distracted, undiagnosed with possible ADHD (have I spoken about the powers of a Vyvanse prescription?), I got to work on an altogether different book, what became my first published one, Heads of the Colored People, which—and I’m not bragging—landed me an agent, sold very quickly at auction, and went on to win numerous awards. Can I get a Hallelujah? But as I’m getting at, Heads of the Colored People was the first book I wrote that sold, not the first I attempted or even the first I sent out to agents. My path to publication involved many scatological first drafts, and second ones and third ones, and so on.

Heads came together so quickly and so easily, I believe, in part, because the stakes for it felt so much lower. I’d won a contest for the titular story and built a little confidence that I might be able to organize a book around it. But I also had that young-adult project cooking on the backburner. I worried far less about Heads’s eventual publication, just by virtue of thinking of it as a side project, and finished the collection (about three stories of which I’d already written and published) in just a few months, whereas I worked on that other novel, the one I was supposed to be revising, for years. I wrote Heads for myself, with a strong sense of playfulness, and thought of additional readers as great but not fully necessary to my fulfillment. In an adjacent way, my friend R.O. Kwon has talked about telling herself no one will ever read what she is writing in order to keep her anxiety at bay. By thinking writing-first versus reader-first, I kind of psyched my mind.

Every book, however, like every child, is different, and the birth of Heads (I’m gonna stop with the labor and delivery analogy now) was nothing like the process for my next two forthcoming books, which took many rough—and I mean rough—drafts, putrid drafts. With my adult novel debut, The Four Wives and Five Deaths of Richard Milford, which is forthcoming October of 2026, I struggled tremendously with revision. Another post on that subject coming eventually. With my editors’ guidance, I reworked everything, from character depth to story arc. It was actually R.O. Kwon, if I may sing her praises again for a moment, who helped me figure out a structure with which I am ultimately happy, but no spoilers about that here.

That other novel, the young-adult one, I was supposed to revise, BTW, sold ten years after my first query letter for it. And even after receiving my editor’s notes, I decided it to rewrite the book from scratch. After shelving it for so long, I see it differently all these years later. Those early drafts still did not work for me. I ended up scrapping 50,000-ish words and two points of view. Whether this paid off for other people is yet to be determined, but it taught me that I could do something I deeply feared (real, time-tested radical revision), and this applies both to my personal and writing life: You can start over and come out with something potentially better. And periods of rough writing (I’m tempted to evoke DMX here), the periods through which you just have to stop, drop, and then reopen your writing shop, teach so much more about the process than the easy times. Kind of like life, occasionally.

To quote Lamott:

Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something—anything—down on paper. A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft—you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft—you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it’s loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy (96).

My most recent two books have required more of these dental drafts, this rough writing, than I ever expected, but I’m (slightly) less afraid of the work now.

Recommended Reading: Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

Writing Prompt: What might you need to excise from your current manuscript? Where can you return to a sense of play to guide your revision?

Works Cited

Lamott, Anne. “Shitty First Drafts.” Language Awareness: Readings for College Writers. Ed. by Paul Eschholz, Alfred Rosa, and Virginia Clark. 9th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005: 93-96.

Dancing with Myself

Hello, friends, old and new!

For fans of R. O. Kwon, Lindy West, Samantha Irby, Suleika Jaouad, and so many more, I write to introduce you to my new Substack, Chronic (long, insufferable, unsuitable subtitle: Letters at the Intersections of the Body, Pop Cultural Trash and Treasures, and a Fulfilling Writing Life). Told you it was insufferable.

Yesterday, I admitted to my therapist that when I dance at home, I have to turn off all the lights and make sure the blinds are closed, so self-conscious am I about “being perceived.” My therapist asked me to interrogate why I, like a potential subject in a Bruce Springsteen song, only feel comfortable dancing in the dark. Does it have to do with my religious fundamentalist upbringing in a cult-adjacent setting? Perhaps. Is it a body-image issue? Perhaps. My ballet training? Perhaps. And I asked myself later, after we discussed how guarded I am in the carriage of my body (interesting since I frequently deal with spasticity yet am medically hypermobile), whether it relates to my more general guardedness. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

Perhaps this all seems unrelated to the pretentious subtitle I’ve decided not to use here. But it strikes me that writing often works best when we consider it a dance, a repeated negotiation between ourselves and potentially a partner or group. When I dance with others in mind, just as when I write with others in mind, I often feel stifled, clinically stiff, whereas when I dance with and by myself in the dark, feeling my way through with an ethos of curiosity, the writing often comes out stronger, braver, yet more playful.

I would argue that repeatedly returning to this ethos of curiosity, this unbridled sense of play, is foundational to improving and revising stifled writing. And like a dance, it may look slightly different each time we return to it.

In Chronic, I explore, biweekly, how to create and maintain a productive writing life from every angle, often lacing advice with pop culture and lessons from a chronically ill chronic reviser who once lived on so much Chronic that—well, that’s a story for another day. I invite you to show up with your concerns about the publishing industry and despair about revision (all of which we’ll discuss) with an ethos of curiosity. And I hope you will leave with a laugh and a fresh look at your work—and perhaps the broader world.

Join me biweekly on Wednesdays for Chronic!

Warmly,

Nafissa Thompson-Spires

Recommended Reading: Alice Walker’s “Beauty: When the Other Dancer Is the Self”