Fig. 1: Steve Tomasula
© Catherine Gass1
2Steve Tomasula is an experimental author and academic from Chicago. As a Professor of literature and creative writing at the University of Notre Dame, he founded the &Now Festival, which is devoted to innovative writing. Tomasula is the author of five novels as well as short fictions which were partially collected in Once Human: Stories (2014). His work as a critic and author has focused on experimental writing and innovative fiction in a posthuman and digital context. His writing reflects an interest in new materialism, an aspect of his work that his novels embody as they are always conceived as book objects co-constructed with designers and illustrators such as Stephen Farrell, Mervi Pakaste, Daniel Warner, Robert Sedlack, or Maria Tomasula.
3In this interview, conducted at his Chicago home in early November 2024, we discussed the implications of his research on materiality and posthumanism for his work, and eventually broached the political question of what novels can do. The interview took place just a week after Donald Trump’s reelection, and the stakes of writing the contemporary emerged. Despite the burning political context during which we had our conversation, Steve Tomasula’s answers attest to his retrospective gaze as an author who has had a lifelong engagement with the world he writes in and about.
Hanna Hadjadj: You taught in the creative writing program at the University of Notre Dame. How did you define “experimental” or “innovative” in the classes that you taught? Is it a definition that you have in mind when writing?
Steve Tomasula: The analogy I’d make would be to conceptual visual art where the form or concepts driving the work are foregrounded. But basically, I think of experimental or innovative writing as writing that is trying to find a form that expresses its time, or an idea, or mood in ways other than following the reigning conventions. In this sense, Shakespeare was an experimental writer, inventing the soliloquy as a way to express an individual consciousness in Renaissance England. Faulker was an experimental writer, eschewing punctuation as a way to express a stream of consciousness. The history of writing—or really all the arts—is full of experimentation or innovation. In fact, it’s the reason art has a history at all.
In my own case, writing VAS, for example, I wasn’t trying to write an “innovative” novel per se. It is true that a lot of younger authors approached literature the way I imagine rock bands approached music, or avant-garde poets approached poetry: e.g., a saying that resonated at the time was: ‘If Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was a poet, I don’t want to be a poet; If Robert Lowell is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet; If Alan Ginsberg is a poet, I’ll give it a shot.’ But really, just as form is part of the poem, so it is in the novel, at least for a number of the authors I was associated with, and I was just writing in a form that helped express the narrative. Its collage, hybrid nature also seemed to reflect the world more than a linear plot of cause-and-effect. So in that sense, VAS was realism. It was after it was published that people began pointing out that “this book doesn’t look like anybody else’s.” And as naïve as this sounds, I remember being kind of surprised when critics started calling it experimental. Though I did realize that the book had to be read differently. And that it asks a lot of readers. That is, I wanted the reader to be a kind of co-author or at least be aware of their role in interpreting it—as with any text. So I tried to bring this to their attention by foregrounding its form, instead of using normalized margins, and layout, which are usually invisible to readers because they are so used to them. For example, VAS is told through what I think of as 3 different voices, and music or opera is a motif, or organizing principle, that runs throughout the book. So many of the pages have a musical scale on them but it runs vertically down the page as a kind of score for the 3 voices: the text of the main narrator is anchored to the center line of the scale (what would be Note Ti in music); Voice 2 is anchored to either of the lines adjacent to the center line (Notes So or Fa); while Voice 3 is tied to the outermost lines (Mi or La). Depending on the order that the reader chooses to read these 3 voices, a kind of harmony (agreement or emphasis) or ‘discord’ (contrast or ironic contradiction) emerges. Different fonts encourage certain reading orders, but you can read all of one voice and then all of the second voice and then all of the third voice. Or you can alternate voices in the order they appear on the page, or read across the page horizontally. But in any case, slightly different narratives can come out of the same text—which is what I was really going after.
Fig. 2: VAS pp. 300-301, musical scale on the page.
I came of age as a writer during postmodernism which took as a given that novels or history were constructs. The more skillful I became at creating traditional, realistic scenes, the more they seemed like tricks, or feats of trompe l’oeil: like a literary version of a magician pulling a coin out of thin air. It’s very entertaining, but it also felt increasingly like a lie, an illusion. Your question also reminds me of Ronald Sukenick who said that he greatly admired Victorian novels with their rounded characters and teleological lives but that they had nothing to do with the world as he experienced it.
Retrospectively, I see that my own writing was agreeing with him: I wanted to continually knock readers out of the “dream of a novel.” I wanted to prevent readers from being immersed in the text and instead foreground that they’re holding a book, a fiction that somebody made-up as a way to comment on the world we live in now. I wanted readers to realize how much of our politics and assumptions about the world are baked into the very language we use, the way we keep saying that the sun rises, when we know fully well that it’s the earth that turns. Or the way we refer to God as ‘He.’ There’s a politics or power dynamic in all of this, of course, as when someone who grows up in a segregated city might absorb the idea that segregation is natural, or homeland is destiny or any of thousands of other “truths” we grow up assuming are as natural as saying the sun rises. This is why fascists like Trump are very afraid of the fluidity of language and want to control it through censorship or policing or funding—at the core of his Make America Great Again movement is an effort to return to ways of speaking that are embedded within white supremacy, class hierarchies, patriarchy, and many other assumptions that came to earlier generations as received truths.
In teaching, I think of literature as having two traditions, both equally old. In the novel, for example, there is the kind of writing that we think of as traditional realism, then there are novels such as Tristram Shandy, which incorporates visuals, and is also a kind of a parody of novels. More recently we put a postmodern or avant-garde label on work like that, but in every age there has been a kind of “alternative writing.” This is much more apparent in visual art, where you’ve got this tradition of representational art which, like realism in fiction, is kind of a seamless magic act, an illusion that makes the viewer think they are looking at a bowl of fruit, or seems to have the depth of distance, when really it’s all a flat, painted surface.
- 1 See Conceptualisms: The Anthology of Prose, Poetry, Visual, Found, E- & Hybrid Writing as Contempor (...)
But then there’s the other tradition in art that underscores that you’re looking at art. It’s more conceptual in that it foregrounds the concepts motivating the work. In teaching and writing, that’s the tradition I am more interested in, and the myriad forms this can take.1
H.H.: You’ve just mentioned realism: I’ve read an interview where you said you thought of your work as “posthuman realism” (Pactor)...
S.T.: Yeah, the critic Mary Holland first wrote that, and then others picked it up. But I think it’s a good way to characterize my novels. I mean, think how humanism is based on a conception of the human as a unique individual, an exceptional individual, essentially independent of society, and with an expectation of privacy, and how the humanist novel arose out of these assumptions. See how many modernist authors tried to model inner consciousness, for example. Now consider art that models experience from a position where the individual is neither the Kantian center of creation nor unique and exceptional; where the narrative engine is more likely to be a concept of emergence rather than cause-and-effect; and whose characters embody a posthuman ontology of permeable borders, distributed cognition, and non-human agency in place of the unique, individual singularity, and exceptionalism of humans in the humanist novel. Here I’d like to distinguish posthuman ontology from transhumanism which it’s often confused with. That is, I’m not using the term posthuman to signify an extension of human powers, i.e., the cyborgs of science-fiction that often reify the most traditional humanist values. Rather, consider how in the arts and in all mediums there are works that depart from the humanist and Enlightenment traditions that have dominated over the last 500 years.
H.H.: How did you adapt your writing to that idea of the posthuman? And is the posthuman a representation that requires innovative forms? What qualifies as an innovative form or a form innovative enough to respond to the posthuman condition?
S.T.: A posthuman aesthetic is easier to see in the visual arts, so maybe can serve as an illustration: here I’m thinking of works like Eduardo Kac’s “plantimal,” that is a flower that carries the genes of a human and was created as a work of art—which is really different from, for example, a traditional painting of a flower, or a traditional self-portrait. Or Heather Dewey-Hagborg’s “Stranger Visions,” which look like a series of traditional portrait busts, except she makes them by picking up bits of hair, chewing gum and other trash on the subway. She extracts the DNA left on these things, then uses it to generate the 3D portraits of the people that the garbage she found came from. Obviously, these aren’t just traditional representations of people in line with Stendhal’s metaphor of the novel as a mirror on the road of life. In literature there are also narratives that are at home with a larger-than-human scale and the agency of nonhuman actors. One that not only does not mourn the loss of the first-person narrative, but privileges the virtual over being present, or big-data patterns over individual detail; that incorporates randomness or chaos as parts of life, and privileges probability over mechanistic cause-and-effect; that takes as a given the fact that the body, the last firewall to the individual, is in the end as permeable as all barriers between the “I”, culture, and society. At least that’s what I’m trying to do in some of my novels, The Book of Portraiture, VAS, or Ascension, for example, which looks at the metamorphosis of “Nature” to “Environment” to the “Anthropocene.”
H.H.: All your work involves book design: you’ve made a conscious effort to always work with designers and illustrators, and at no point is the form of the book something that is taken for granted, made invisible or simply forgotten about. Your books have been described as “formally innovative” (Chevaillier), and have sparked the question of “how to do things with books” (Tissut). How was creating book objects different from writing straightforward texts? At what stage does the materiality appear?
S.T.: I keep telling myself I must be nuts because other writers just write the text, then let the publisher worry about making the book. But I think inherent in the material nature of the world that my novels are about is that the materials of the book itself are part of the story. VAS, for example, is very much about how genetics has allowed us in both a literal and metaphoric way to think of the body as a text: we edit the generic letters like text, and copy, paste, patent or copyright strings of letters. And the vocabulary of the book itself is loaded with the language of the body: body text, or the spine of the book, for example. An original meaning of plagiarism was the kidnapping of a child. The novel leans into the body as a metaphor for the book, and to call attention to this, I wanted the book to be a metaphor for the body—and this conception carries down into the writing of the narrative itself. For example, in one passage I include a diagram from a medical handbook that describes how to measure the volume of a skull as a way to measure intelligence.
Fig. 3: VAS pp.36-37, diagram of a skull and scan sheet juxtaposed
This seems laughable to us because we have enough historical distance to see the folly of its error. But I wanted to point out that this was cutting-edge science at the time, not the work of quacks or frauds. So I juxtaposed it with a computer scan sheet of the kind people of my generation were asked to fill out when having their I.Q. measured, again another idea—that a person’s intelligence can be represented by a single number—that’s becoming laughable. But partly because it’s done with a computer, at the beginning of the computer age, the measurement seemed so objectively true. The point is less to call out that scientific ideas change or are often based on erroneous assumptions, than that for those time periods, the results were “true” in that they were cognate with the contemporary conceptions of “intelligence” or the “human,” and accepted by the majority. If you have a racist society, you’ll have racist science. And the same is true today—as our conception of the human comes out of a mix of materials, tools, economics, politics, historical events and consequences, and the accompanying narratives that emerge. Look no further than global warming, or health care in America, where we often get the science corporations pay for, or the reality that conspiracy theorists are now setting policy and establishing the “facts.”
H.H.: How is “new materialism novel”(Tomasula, 2023) or experimental fiction a way to position yourself in the political discussion, if at all? You seem to be saying that there is a commentary when you juxtapose such images.
S.T.: Yes, I think these works are inherently political, though not in the sense of political parties. A lot of my thinking on this comes from Foucault and his attention to the narratives told by the materials of a time. I’m thinking here of his Discipline and Punish in which he juxtaposes the daily schedules of prisoners as a way to talk about what society thought rehabilitation should be, and how this changed from spiritual rehabilitation to job training, and how these attitudes were incarnate in the regimes prisoners were required to follow—and in fact helped lead to prison reform.
In my own case, for example, I wanted to write a story that wasn’t told through characters or dialog, or the conventional tropes of a story, but to instead put the emphasis on the story told by materials, or rather the traces that a person leaves behind. If a person has a large footprint, say someone like Napoleon, there are lots of materials to tell his or her story through. But what about someone who treads the earth much more lightly? So the character in my story never really appears, but it’s this girl that has died, and the traces she leaves behind are things like the origami cranes that she made—things like that. I tried to use all of those sorts of material things as a way to tell the story of an ordinary person, someone like most of us. Again, it’s one of these stories that puts a lot on the reader because there’s no real action in the story, no real conflict. If you pick up any handbook (cookbooks, I call them) on how to write fiction the first thing they tell you is you need conflict in your story; you need some kind of plot to drive the thing. I’ve never done that myself. I’ve always been more interested in novels that move, but that move in ways other than action.
Though of course, often the two intersect, as in my latest novel, Ascension, which imagines a future where the materials of one age are very much present in the next, e.g., sea level rise creating refugees, including from affluent areas in the U.S. The climate change protesters of this time are pretty much helpless by this point, so they take out their revenge on the materials of the past, doing things like digging up Trump’s grave to put him on trial for killing the earth with his war on science. They want to hang his corpse as punishment, but the crowd gets out of hand and kicks the corpse apart till there’s nothing left to hang, the way a mob kicked Mussolini apart in Italy.
H.H.: Do you see a relationship between race and innovative writing? How do you position yourself in the conversation in fiction about race? Is there a specific materiality to that cultural appreciation? I was thinking in particular of stories like “The Color of Flesh,” in which the character of Yumi deplores that neither band-aid nor prosthetic leg are available in her skin tone, or “The Risk Taking Gene as Expressed by Some Asian Subjects” which raises the question of the representation of a minority by the medical community, but also some of the conversations about eugenics or phrenology that you develop in VAS.
S.T.: Percival Everett is an author that comes to mind for me in questions like this. The U.S. State Department had a program that brought in scholars from different countries for a cultural tour of the U.S. Part of their tour included a week with three American authors. The year I was one of these authors, Percival Everett and Gerald Vizenor (an Anishinaabe author) were the others. At the time Percival told me about a Euripides play he rewrote, but his agent asked, “What does this have to do with Black people?” He was pretty insulted, of course, by the idea that because he’s Black he could only write about Black people. So I guess if I’m understanding your question right, I’d say that the relation between race and innovative writing is the same as it is in innovative music, or visual art, or any medium: people are trying to express something and that takes a lot of different forms, one of which can be called innovative writing. Sometimes they write in traditional forms, sometimes in forms that are innovative, sometimes the innovation becomes more mainstream and so isn’t recognized as such, or accepted as just another genre, like jazz, or metamodernism. When a book like that becomes a best-seller, it’s not considered “innovative” or “experimental” anymore, I guess, because people just get used to its otherness.
H.H.: So, in a provoking way, one could rephrase this as the idea that authors seem to have been boxed in: white authors can write about white people and that’s it. There’s no new cultural appreciation possible…
S.T.: I hope I’m not saying that. Nor applying that logic to females or any demographic slice. Maybe audiences and the publishing industry exert pressure for this kind of pigeonholing, but isn’t it more nuanced than this? All you have to do is look at literature to see what an extreme position your statement presents, and how enacting it would ban works like The Merchant of Venice and Frankenstein. At the root of your statement is an assumption that all novels are essentially autobiographical or memoiristic. Even so, it’s important to recognize that different ethnic groups, especially minorities, have a history of being misrepresented. Minstrel shows being an obvious example. The way Muslims, Latinos, or immigrants are portrayed by right-wing media in the U.S. being another. And even extraterrestrial aliens can be portrayed in a racist way. A character as minor as a doorman holding open a door introduces issues of representation. So I understand the roots of that position.
The seed for “The Color of Flesh” was the fact that the Crayola crayon company, at the time, had only one crayon called “flesh” and it was sort of a Caucasiany pink or salmon-colored. The story is about how our words acquire their significance through use, through family resemblances, context or equivalencies, and how these meanings work their way back into the world outside the book and have real-world consequences… Allowing kids to grow up in a world where only one shade of pink crayon or one color of Band-Aid is thought of as the color of “flesh” is not a neutral act. Especially if you multiply these simple, everyday examples millions of times and are encountered across a lifetime. Nor would I pretend that “The Risk-Taking Gene as Expressed by Some Asian Subjects” is trying to pass as a story about an “Asian” experience. The Chinese narrator is very aware of Chinese stereotypes in Hong Kong action movies, and plays with them to his advantage, but the scientist in the story is more oblivious to how stereotypes can also be expressed through scientifically gathered data. The title is a quote of an actual genetic study, and the story is a critique of how knowledge is created, and the role of language in the creation of “facts,” sort of the way the seventeenth-century painter Diego Velazquez is a narrator in my novel The Book of Portraiture. The novel is about how all portraits, be they rendered in paint, photography, or databases, contain acts of self-portraiture—not that it’s trying to speak for the Spanish, or seventeenth-century people, or the Jews who were expelled from Spain, the Catholics who held the Inquisition or any of the other demographics who also appear in that chapter. So I think the short answer to your question would have more to do with stereotypes or how the representation is done, and the effects it creates rather than making any kind of generalized, blanket prohibition on what an author or any artist can or can’t write, or paint, or make films about.
H.H.: From what I understand, “novel” was only added on the cover of VAS later. You initially didn’t want the word “novel” to appear. Why step away from this form? Why was there this discussion around the word “novel”?
S.T.: Yes, it’s true. The publisher was the one who insisted on adding the subtitle. The same with “TOC: A New-Media Novel,” which was published by a different publisher. It’s true that I have issues with terms like “novel” or “story,” which imply the traditional conventions of “stories,” such as the arc of rising action/climax/denouement. But literary categories always seem to be more about how to sell a book, or which shelf to put it on in a bookstore. I didn’t want any of my books to be categorized in that narrow sense. Adding the subtitle “novel” to TOC probably made sense, as part of its narration is made up of animations, and music and other things that can’t be done in a paper novel, and it was originally published as a DVD, then as an iPad app, with a 3rd edition coming out on the web, none of which brings to mind a “novel.” But really, adding the subtitle “Novel” to VAS just seemed redundant. Just because it asks readers to think of the novel in more expansive ways doesn’t mean that it’s not a novel. But my editor at the University of Chicago Press thought “nobody will know what this is,” and in fact that’s what some of the reviewers said too so I guess she was right.
H.H.: Thinking about narratives and the way you categorize or not categorize them: two chapters that appear in The Book of Portraiture also appear as standalone stories in Once Human: “C-U See-Me” and “Self Portrait(s).” How did that writing evolve from chapter to short story?
S.T.: It’s the other way around, actually. Short story to chapter. They might not have been published in that order, but I often write short fictions as a way to try out an idea, or to see if an idea is rich enough to spend five years or more with, which is about how long it takes me to write a novel. Like this new-materialist story that I was telling you about earlier: it’s called “A Puddle, a Field, a Rock, a Mound of Dirt.” I wanted to write a novel through the lens of new-materialist thought, so I thought I’d try that idea out in something short. The same thing was true with a number of the stories that ended up in Once Human. I was trying out an idea to see if it could work on a bigger canvas. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t or I learn something else in the process that gets carried forward or not, but sometimes the “experiments” end up as short stories.
H.H.: Did you rethink the design? Is that something that you were able to play with?
S.T.: In The Book of Portraiture, there is a cohesiveness throughout the book so we had to redo the design of the chapter that appears as a short story in Once Human. Each of my books is its own project. For example, I wanted the first chapter of The Book of Portraiture to be printed on paper that could be seen through so it would appear as a palimpsest to readers. The lines on each side of a page would be misaligned (and those on the reverse side would appear backwards) so a reader would still be able to easily read each page, but the idea of the novel as a palimpsest would be incarnate in the materials of the first chapter: the whole story is to me a kind of palimpsest with each age writing on top of those that came before it. But translucent paper was another thing that got axed by a publishing budget.
H.H.: The idea of layers appears very clearly in the form of the book. The edge stacks differently colored papers, so that it does look like different layers of paper.
S.T.: I’m glad you noticed. That was one of the things I really wanted Robert [Sedlack], the designer I worked with on this one to do. I wanted him to use different shades of beige so that the first chapter evokes sand, and then the last chapter evokes skin, with those in between standing in for parchment, then old typewriter paper. I’m using the color of the paper to help tell the story. The color of the paper is trying to evoke a history of writing surfaces with sand being the first and skin the last. As you mention, when you look at the edge of the book, the different colors look like strata in an archaeological dig.
H.H.: I have another question about narratives and the way you build your books. Thinking of posthumanism and materiality, I’m wondering whether your construction of characters has evolved with those ideas or as a result of working on the design of the book, particularly for example, in VAS has the body of the book informed the evolution of Square as a character?
S.T.: I took Square from Edwin Abbott’s 1884 book about geometry, Flatland. There’s a line in Abbott’s Flatland that I use in mine also, because I thought it perfectly captured the idea of the posthuman. In Abbott’s Flatland, Square struggles with the meaning of the phrase “Upward but not northward.” Remember he’s a two-dimensional figure—a geometric line drawing—living in a two-dimensional world, the flatland of a sheet of paper. So he’s having a really hard time imagining how a third dimension might work. I thought that was a perfect way to describe what we’re going through at the dawn of posthumanism and trying to imagine this other dimension of interchangeable body parts and genetic engineering, and all the other changes that are shifting our understanding of what it means to be human… And the same can be said for the dawn of the AI revolution we’ve just entered. It’s like another dimension to us. Posthumanism is just beyond the horizon for us. We can’t quite grasp it, we’re not able to step back far enough to have this bird’s eye or historical view that you really do need to see a culture, and the humans who live within it, as a product of that change. That was the genesis of the character, really. And trying to imagine what a character like that would be like. A character that’s not going to have well-rounded descriptions and psychological depth. Everything is very flat in that novel. I was trying to write a different kind of character for that story, and so yes, that involved thinking through the story both formally and materially.
H.H.: Yet you speak of bodies: characters do have bodies and you articulate that question a lot with the design of the books. VAS is perhaps the most obvious example, with the cover resembling human skin striated with blue veins, that you peel back to reveal blood-colored endpapers. Your fiction is full of the bodies of characters.
S.T.: That’s a good observation. Even the square in Abbott’s Flatland has a body. He’s a square, drawn on a page. I guess that’s my point: bodies can be different things. “Body” is a word. A social construction even if it has a material basis. We use this imperfect vehicle called language to describe bodies, and right away we think of flesh and blood bodies, but the closer you look at it, the more apparent it becomes that it’s a sloppy approximation. In “The Color of Flesh,” Yumi, who is a pretty conventional character, has an artificial limb, which in the story is a self-referential body, sort of the way the subject of René Magritte’s “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” both is and isn’t a pipe.
H.H.: Is there relay or prosthetic function for the design of the book? Using the design of the book as a prosthetic for the character, for example. Is there back and forth between design and bodies?
S.T.: No, probably not. Maybe a reader such as yourself could see one, but I guess that wasn’t in my thoughts as I was writing that story. It almost always comes down to language and/or representation. Like in that passage at the end of “The Color of Flesh” where the characters have the court judgement put up on their wall: Her leg is an artificial leg, the judge concludes, but rules that it can’t be confiscated as a weapon because she used it in ways that were wholly consistent with kicking (like a flesh-and-blood leg). Maybe that idea comes closer to what you’re referring to? A leg as a cultural thing, not just a flesh and blood thing, but they’re both bodies, you know. Writing about the hole in the ozone layer, Bruno Latour once observed that its reality was a hybrid of being simultaneously physical, narrated, and collective. And that’s true of Yumi’s leg.
H.H.: What about temporality? Would you say that working with the design of the book has had an influence on the pace of writing?
S.T.: Somebody else who writes about my stuff was just asking about narrative time. And yeah, I feel like, I’m always kind of scripting the text. TOC is most related to your question, as the novel is about time, and I tried to incorporate the clock of the computer as part of the narrative: that is, I tried to incorporate the clock that regulates how the cycles of software playback animations, music and other elements as part of the experience a reader would have while progressing through the novel. The novel opens with an astrolabe that’s rotating like the hands of a clock, and I wanted it to rotate smoothly, and slowly, as a way to pace the opening to the story. So I worked with Chris Jara, the programmer who was doing the coding to get it to move that way, which wasn’t easy but seemed aesthetically important as that would influence how the reader entered the mood of what I hoped was a meditative story. That kind of design writing runs through most of my novels.
The editors of a critical anthology about consciousness and literature asked me to contribute an essay, but I asked if I could express my thoughts through a story instead. So I wrote “Clay,” which starts with a conventional character who’s dying and the page layout is also conventional. But as he does start to die, I scripted the text to have his thoughts more random and irregular on the page which invites a slower pace. At the point at which he dies, the page goes blank. After a blank page the story continues; a few pages later it does this again. And I hope the design of the story helps make the idea of “consciousness”—including the consciousness of the reader—and “endings” more ambiguous, and does it in a way that is formal as well as intellectual. So yes, thinking of narrative both in textual and material ways certainly slows down the writing itself—if the two modes were teased out separately, it would be like writing the book twice. I’d never call myself a poet as I have too much respect for poets, but in this regard, it is poet’s work in terms of using the white space of the page as well as the black text. I’m a really slow writer—maybe because it’s a way of thinking through a novel in multiple modes? Maybe this is why I’ve always worked on multiple books at the same time?