2025 MLA Interviews
What does your writing process look like?
My process consists almost entirely of revision. The only problem with that is I have to draft something every so often. In the early stages, I’m writing to figure out what I’m writing. Once I get a first draft, I’ll spend months reworking it, making massive changes and tiny refinements, until every syllable does exactly what the story needs. I also give stories a lot of time on the shelf so I can come back to them with more objectivity.
Like many of my pieces, “Downstream Benefits” started as a gag. I’d planned to write it as a short satire of corporate culture, with the narrator running “a side hustle translating Normal to Business.” That was cute but didn’t have much substance. So I kept writing, just riffing on things, until a deeper meaning emerged. Once I realized that dehumanizing business jargon could represent the fractured communication that comes with depression, it was just a matter of putting maximum pressure on my protagonist. I say “just a matter of” like it wasn’t a big deal, but it was. The story went through countless revisions, including several major overhauls, and took about a year to finish.
This painstaking approach means I don’t produce a huge volume of work, but I’m okay with that. I’m in it for the experience of crafting a story. And it’s the only way, as far as I know, to achieve the layered storytelling I’m looking for.
What do you believe makes your writing unique?
The most notable thing about my work is that it combines opposites, especially humor and drama. I write like this because it’s just the way I’m wired. I’m a deeply silly person, but I also want to talk about things that matter. And humor is a handy way of quickly building a relatable character; readers are more likely to lower their guard for a character with a sense of humor. From a craft standpoint, humor heightens the drama, and vice versa. It’s more than just comic relief; a story without both elements feels incomplete to me. Life’s not monolithically funny or strictly dramatic, so why should a story be?
I’m also infinitely amused by slang and idiomatic language, so I plunk that stuff down alongside more formal modes of expression. This contrast creates an enjoyable texture, sometimes even tension. “Zhoosh,” perhaps the funniest word in “Downstream Benefits,” is juxtaposed with words like “inscrutable” and “incomprehensible.” These tonal mixtures allowed me to portray that maddening, oxymoronic, work-from-home experience of the pandemic. It was also another way to illustrate the protagonist’s feeling of being caught between his absurd work life and the harrowing situation with his wife.
How and why did you decide to divide your work into sections the way you did?
The titled sections are an artifact of an early draft that took the form of a corporate website. The subheadings (things like “Who We Are” and “Contact Us”) were designed to connote ideas like alienation and communication breakdown. I quickly dropped the website idea, but I retained the sections because I liked how the buzz terms created a certain atmosphere and expressed the protagonist’s struggle in a satirical but meaningful way.
This technique doesn’t work for every story, but it felt right for this piece because of its corporate sheen, as if these are sections of a really unfortunate employee manual. On a practical level, the structure forced me to build momentum to propel readers from one act to the next. (You can do that without sections, but it was a helpful guide for me.) The sections also create the illusion of a much bigger story. The implied passage of time between sections makes the story feel expansive even though it’s only a few thousand words. This effect captures a recurring idea in the story: that our perception of time can distort our sense of reality.