I probably shouldn’t admit this, but writing for me sometimes begins in a spirit of revenge. I looked it up recently: the word revenge comes from the Anglo-French revengier, sharing lineage with vengeance, which originates from the Latin vindicāre, meaning “to assert a claim, claim as one’s own.”

I write to lay claim. To claim the world as my own.

When I was a young writer, my revenge was on history’s deceptions. As a mixed-race Black girl constantly perceived by strangers to be white, I felt myself to be an “other” among others. My identity lived so far outside the mainstream, it might as well have not existed. The mulatto in that era was as imaginary as Snuffleupagus—the creature everyone assumed was made-up, no matter how much Big Bird insisted he was real. When the mulatto did appear, we were figments of the white imagination, broken tragedies to prove that interracial mixing led to bad, sad things.

This article appears in Issue 28 of Alta Journal.
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The mulatto was an inconvenient smudge, both on white America’s idea of itself as pure and superior and, for me growing up in the 1970s, on the Black Power movement’s ideal of a unified, uncontaminated Black front.

I began writing to lay claim to an America that was more complex, more muddy, more intersectional. I suppose I’m still trying to write my world into existence with each new book.

Sometimes the spirit of revenge comes from a more personal, petty place. I want to tell how someone wronged me. But what I love about fiction is that nothing ends where it begins. In the writing, I am forced to identify with the person who wronged me and to look critically on the protagonist who was wronged. Through endless drafts, I’ve drifted so far away from the original story—so far from the spirit of revenge—that I find myself in a more tangled and interesting new place. So the real act of revenge is that I was able to make art out of the ashes of real pain.

I’ve never been convinced that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. But if you know how to make fiction out of lived experience—how to turn the “me” into a “she,” how to find the story that didn’t happen within the one that did—you don’t walk away from the calamity empty-handed. In a spin on the old Zen saying, the obstacle is not just the path but the muse itself. Or, in Nora Ephron’s words, “everything is copy.”

To be a fiction writer is not so much to lessen the pain of real life as it is to make it useful. It’s like being an expert recycler. You don’t let anything go to waste.

There’s a prompt I sometimes use in the classroom. I ask students to describe the protagonist of the story they want to write. This should be a sympathetic character they want to protect. They must write out the character’s likes and dislikes, habits and fears, strengths and weaknesses. Next, I ask them to write about the story’s antagonist.

Only when they are finished do I tell them it’s all the same character. They must write a single character who possesses all these traits. The character needs to be protected, sure, but from their own worst instincts.

This is the space where revenge ends and real writing begins. My novel Colored Television revolves around a female writer who gets exploited by a Hollywood producer. In the first draft, only the producer was dishonest. By the last, the writer was as well. It turns out she had some of the bad producer in her, and he had some of her verve and humanity. Only when I blurred these lines did the book become interesting.

For me, the best fiction resists binaries. Comedy and horror exist in one story. The main character is monster and hero, liar and truth teller.

I start with revenge but aspire toward something murkier, where the joke is not on the other but on myself—and on the reader, too.

On the best writing days, all of us are complicit in the problem, together.•