As a part of the Zell Visiting Writer Series, the University of Michigan was lucky enough to welcome bestselling author Rebecca Makkai to campus on Nov. 3 to discuss one of the most frustrating aspects of writing: coming to a crossroads of impossibility within the piece you’re working on.
Makkai has received immense acclaim for her novel “The Great Believers,” a bestseller that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and won the ALA Carnegie Medal, Stonewall Book Award and the LA Times Book Prize. Makkai released her mystery thriller novel, “I Have Some Questions For You,” earlier this year, which has been met with many equally favorable reviews. Makkai is an author who not only writes powerfully riveting stories, but precisely complicated ones — balancing on the edge of impossibility while still staying true to the reality she’s composed. Going into her talk, I knew I would be coming out with a new outlook on writing.
Makkai’s talk was to go over the paradoxes and “cosmic impossibilities” that are essential to push through in any worthwhile artistic endeavor. Makkai immediately captured everyone’s attention with her openly warm demeanor and charismatic energy; this was not going to be a lecture but a discussion with us all. At the beginning of her talk, Makkai let her intentions for the next hour stand clear: She was not going to lead a craft discussion on the technicalities of writing but more so about the big picture. This big-picture discussion, she promised, was flexible enough to withstand most genres of writing, from fiction to poetry to creative nonfiction.
Makkai wasted no time immediately illustrating what she meant by “cosmic impossibilities.” Through examples of her own as well as problems she’s seen with students and colleagues, Makkai explained the variety of ways in which someone could come to a dead stop in their work: How can you write from a villain’s perspective without making the audience and yourself overly relate to and sympathize with them? How can you write to an audience holding an outside perspective without pandering to them, and how might you properly write family stories you weren’t actually there for?
In her past novel, “The Great Believers,” Makkai explained that her crossroads of impossibility was that no matter what story she told or what plot she chose, she felt as if she was making a statement — that she was playing God. In a book largely about the AIDs epidemic in 1980s Chicago, she knew that how she framed how people acquire HIV was impactful and that making these powerful decisions in her fiction might constrict the narratives she was representing by falsely displaying a clear cause and effect to the transmission of HIV.
While hitting a wall in your writing is overwhelming and exhausting, Makkai explained that this is how you know you’re in a perfect position to make your writing meaningful, saying that “the thing that is stopping you is the subject.”
Makkai titled her discussion “Can’t Go Over It, Can’t Go Under It: Writing the Impossible Story,” cleverly employing a well-known children’s chant, “Going on a Bear Hunt,” to explain her solution to writing the impossible story. She explains that when you get to these “cosmic impossibilities,” you can’t ignore the problem and you can’t necessarily solve it. Instead, you have to go through it.
Going “through it” can mean many different things. With “The Great Believers,” Makkai acknowledged the pressure she felt as an author and vocalized it through one of her characters, highlighting the real-world struggle that she was coming across in her writing. Going through an impossibility can also be letting your novel contradict itself, switching up the narrative mode to give a range of perspectives and even going meta. However, a caveat that Makkai highlighted is being cliche when going meta and writing about writing: “I would just say, it’s been done so you better do it well.”
As the hour came to a close, Makkai opened up the room to dialogue, creating a space to ask questions about personal impossibilities writers have come across in their work as well as general questions about writing. While there is no perfect answer to getting through the impossibilities many might face in writing, the author’s advice stands clear after her discussion: “It’s not worth writing the easy story,” Makkai warned future writers. “What makes the project worth it in the long run are the hard parts.”
Daily Arts Writer Logan Brown can be reached at loganvb@umich.edu.