A.E. Osworth Had Planned to Write a Romp

But then 2020 happened

Hi Friends,

It’s been a strangely sunny January for Vancouver, and I’ve had a lingering cough. But as of yesterday, the sun sets after 5 pm here. That’s something. Coming into the new year, I had a clear sense that I wanted to do more writing by hand, and I have been! It feels good. I’m also working through revisions on the collaborative pedagogy book, waking up a dormant sourdough starter, and eating plum jam my sister gave me for Christmas. Oh! And I bought a yellow octopus at Ikea that matches my office chair.

The dumpling steamer has cardamom apricot shortbread in it.

Writing = Making and Solving Problems

Over time, I’ve come to realize that problems aren’t an impediment to writing. Problems are the substance of writing: we set problems for ourselves and we work them out. In this feature, I ask writers to dig into a specific writing problem and how they resolved it.

I’m so pleased to share today’s conversation with my friend and colleague A.E. Osworth (you may recognize them as my Avoidance Club buddy) about their new novel Awakened (available April 29th from Grand Central Publishing). I got to read this book in draft form and sit next to (and at times below—read on for details) A.E. while they revised this book, and I’m so excited for this book to be in the world! If you pre-order, you will give your future self a nice surprise at the end of April. For now, I hope you find something useful for your own creative work in our conversation about trying to make joyful work in disastrous times, which is, alas, evergreen.

What are three key things to know about this book?

1. I wrote Awakened explicitly against JK Rowling and Harry Potter. See, I grew up with Harry Potter and I'm a trans person. When I say I grew up with Harry Potter, I mean I was eleven when I read the book where he was eleven, and so on. Looking back, there are things in the text I find problematic, but at the time, these books felt powerful and were among the many, many books that taught me a love of reading. So it's upsetting to know that that author is against me specifically. And it's even worse to know that she is a policy driver in this world. So where Harry Potter is a school story, this story takes place mostly in New York City. Where Harry Potter centers on children, Awakened is very much about adults. And whereas, apparently all of the witches in JK Rowling's world are cis, all of the main characters in this book are trans.

2. Second, I used tarot cards to help me generate the characters and some of their personality traits. Later, whenever I was ready to start a new chapter, I would pull a card to write from. I don’t write linearly, so then I had the job of arranging the pieces into an order that made sense. But the whole project was very tarot-driven.

3. The last key thing to know is that these trans witches fight artificial intelligence with magic. I needed the AI to sound more like AI than I was capable of writing, so I made an autocomplete keyboard using a janky AI called Botnik Voicebox. Slick pre-trained transformers like Chat GPT or Claude draw on a corpus of billions of words, but I trained this keyboard on a corpus of just Machiavelli, Arthurian legend, a database of spam text messages, and The Dungeons and Dragons Player's Handbook. So the villain in the book is made of those things.

What’s a problem—small or large—that you encountered while making this book?

I started the book essentially on January 1st, 2020. I thought 2020 was going to be my fucking year! I was all set to sit down and write this book in a calm state of creative flow. Shortly later, I was at a residency at the Banff Centre, and I went from making art in this beautiful place to trying to figure out how to race across the border to the US before it closed, as Covid raged through the world.

I was supposed to be writing a romp. See, my first book We Are Watching Eliza Bright was about Gamergate, and I decided to narrate it from the point of view of the worst actors in Gamergate, an incel, men's rights activist, manosphere collective that detests the protagonists. It was a pretty heinous point of view to occupy. I stand by every choice in that book. And I didn't wanna do it again.

This book was supposed to be fun (and don’t worry, I think it turned out fun in the end). But I was inputting a huge amount of pandemic news every day. And we were all isolated and anxious and scared for our lives. It was just a dark fucking time. But the book was under contract, so all I could do was grit my teeth and write anyway. I remember the first round of edits that I got, the big feedback was “Is this supposed to be fun?” And I went, oh fuck. Because the environment I'd been writing in had really gotten in there.

What did you do? How did you move forward?

The main way that I fixed that problem was by iterating—multiple drafts, multiple passes. I’m someone who drafts a lot and throws a lot out, and I’m used to that. Having this kind of practice, I was able to make big substantive changes throughout my drafting process for Awakened.

In terms of reconnecting with pleasure and being able to bring fun and play into the book, here are a few things that helped:

• The tarot cards and the AI. They introduced randomness to the work. It’s impossible not to have some kind of unexpected response when something surprises you, and these were constantly surprising me.

• Eventually, getting out of the house to write. I remember going to write at Seventh Son Brewery in Columbus, Ohio. What would have been a normal thing before lockdown felt so heightened and fun. I drew on that energy.

• Writing with you! Not doing it alone. In fact, I remember being in that queen bunk bed above you in that shipping container when I tackled a really hard scene. It's a scene where a white trans woman and a black trans woman have a reckoning about their different experiences, despite both being trans. I am neither a white trans woman nor a black trans woman. I’m non-binary. So that was a hard scene to write. I was relying on research and my community and throwing my voice really, really far. And being in a beautiful place with a supportive person helped so much.

• Finding the formal pleasures of the project. Like, my narrator is super fun. And part of the fun of this book for readers is figuring out who the narrator is. So I got to have fun in my voice, at the sentence level and with my word choices.

Awakened is a balanced book at this point. There are elements of it that are super fun. There's a gay bar where people are wearing masks and thinking about the spread of germs and having a great fucking time. Other parts are really sad or really complicated. It wound up being a more balanced book than it would have been, had I not had the year we all had. I mean, I think I would have found my balance another way, but still, everything counts. Nothing is wasted.

Photo by A.J. Lowik

A.E. Osworth is a transgender novelist. Their debut, WE ARE WATCHING ELIZA BRIGHT, was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award and was long-listed for The Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, the Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize, and The Tournament of Books. Their next book, AWAKENED, is forthcoming from Grand Central Publishing in April 2025. They are a lecturer at the University of British Columbia’s School of Creative Writing where they teach fiction, interactive fiction, and new media.

Try This at Home

• Use tarot cards to introduce some chance (and useful friction) to your writing. By drawing a tarot card at the start of a chapter, A.E. gave themself a problem to solve. What associations does the card bring up? How do these associations connect with what has already happened? With these particular characters? With what I maybe already know about the book or the world but haven’t fully articulated yet, even to myself? Our brains love solving puzzles and making connections. It’s almost impossible to draw a card and not leap to an interpretation. Where you land can be both surprising and deeply personal.

• A.E. describes Awakened as written “explicitly against JK Rowling and Harry Potter." Let frustration, disappointment, and anger fuel your writing. I have an assignment (developed in conversation with my painter friend Amy!) that asks students to reflect on sources of inspiration and influence along several parameters, including “something you encountered before the age of twelve” and “something you have conflicted or antagonistic feelings towards.” I ask students to do this because we are all shaped by things we don’t choose and by things we might feel nostalgic affection for even as we critique them. Rich, true, nuanced art-making can come out of this space of complicated attachment when we’re willing to sit with our ambivalence.

• Try a mini writing retreat (alone or with a friend). Writing residencies like Banff are lovely, but they can be competitive and can take time, money (or income loss), and schedule stability that we don’t always have. But, as I’ve written about before, you can get a surprising amount done over a long weekend at a place like Postcard Cabins where A.E. wrote the tough scene, or even at a friend’s apartment while they’re out of town.

Some shipping container bunk bed writing retreat adventures.

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Warm best,

Bronwen

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