-my friend Toni, being right as usual
There’s a trap that you can fall into as a writer where you can become good enough at writing that you don’t notice that you’re actually a bad writer.
I write fiction primarily. Sometimes prose, sometimes scripts, but usually fiction. (This newsletter is becoming my first real outlet for nonfiction writing in a long time and it still started with a short story.) I think I have a pretty good head for story, both in my work and when I’m workshopping other people’s work, which is a thing that I do a lot. I think that I’m really quite good at making other people’s stories better and pretty good at telling my own stories.
But I’m terrible at plot.
I’m in awe of a lot of my writer friends. They can just come up with plot.
Let’s take a moment to define our terms. What is plot? And how is it different from story?
The plot of a narrative is the concrete events that happen in said narrative. For example, in the first act of Star Wars, Luke Skywalker’s parents get killed by storm troopers and then he leaves his home with Old Ben. These are plot points. They are physical things that happen in the narrative. You can see them with your eyes when you watch the movie. They are concrete.
The story is the underlying theoretical structure that explains why those events happen, how they’re connected, and what we’re meant to take away from them. In the case of Star Wars, Luke’s parents get killed because the empire is looking for the droids and so he leaves because they have been killed and he needs to keep the droids safe.
On another level, he leaves because this is the first step of his character arc, which requires him to grow up and become something bigger than himself, and because this is a standard beat in the first act of “the hero’s journey” (which is itself a metastory about stories). Indeed, the phrase “first act” is a story term. The important thing is that story is theoretical. You can’t see it in the movie. It emerges from the juxtaposition of plot points. It is abstract.
When I, personally, start writing something, I always start from story. I know the thing I want to write about. Maybe it’s a theme. Maybe it’s a character arc. But I begin with formulating a theory about what the narrative is supposed to be. Then I try to come up with some things that could happen that would best fit the story beats that I need to have happen in order to tell the story that I’ve decided to tell.
I’m so bad at that second part of it.
A lot of my friends aren’t, though. They just decide that this thing should happen and wouldn’t it be neat if that thing happened next and oh, you gotta have this other thing happen later because that’s just fun.
The funny thing is, some of them are really bad at the first part, the part where you decide what the story is going to be about. Some of them don’t even start with that part. They just make up some plot just for plot’s sake and then later figure out what it all actually means. Sometimes they need me to tell them what it means.
Because I have a theory brain.
It always used to bug me when people held up emotions as the thing that makes humans human. Emotions are a huge part of the human experience, I would usually grant. But emotions aren’t human-specific.
The thing that makes humans human, I’d always argue, was that they told stories. This is, of course, a very self-serving thing for a writer to think. But let’s humor the old me for a second, because I don’t think she was totally wrong or anything.
Human beings theorize. They hunt for patterns and then build theories out of those patterns and use those theories to make predictions about the future. We observe events happening in the world, and then we tell stories about them. It’s not just that the clouds get dark and then it rains. It rains because the clouds get dark. And the clouds get dark because the gods are mad.
Or because water vapor in the air condenses at certain temperatures and altitudes or whatever. Different stories about the same thing, but they’re all just stories. Theoretical frameworks that we use to understand natural phenomena.
It’s the instinct to make meaning. To find patterns and recognize structures. To tell stories. To see shapes in the stars. Whatever you want to call it, it’s the same thing. It's the human instinct to stare at the chaos of the universe and try to find an order in it.
We are so good at this—and so driven to do it—that it causes us to write fiction. Fiction is just the theory instinct acting in reverse. Normally, the universe offers us some chaos and then we find meaning in it. But we create fiction, we do the opposite. We start with some meaning or theory and then create some chaos of our own that elucidates that meaning. The meaning is story, and the chaos, of course, is plot.
Anyway, this storytelling instinct was the thing that I’d always argue was unique to humans. Not emotions. Lots of animals have emotions. “I’ve been around dogs for years” I would say, “and I can tell you that dogs are great at having emotions!
I was not great at having emotions.
Being trans means having a lot of anniversaries. You have the anniversary of when you started HRT. The anniversary of when you came out, or when you went full time, etc.
One anniversary that trans people often talk about is the anniversary of self-acceptance: the moment that you realized and accepted that you were trans. I place that date for me on May 29th, 2019. This is mostly for convenience’s sake, as my HRT anniversary date is also the 29th. (And, of course, this newsletter goes out on the 29th.) My basis for placing self-acceptance at that date is a couple of blog posts that I wrote around that time in which I declaratively state that I am trans.
The truth of it is much more muddy. I waffled a lot in the months between when I supposedly self-accepted and when I eventually began taking hormones and started coming out to people. During that time, I poured over my past, looking for evidence that I was trans. There was plenty of evidence. but I could find alternate explanations for all of it. And I never knew if it was enough. I felt that there needed to be a threshold of evidence that, once crossed, would prove that I was trans. Because I needed proof. I couldn’t enact a change in my life this huge without proof.
My problem, I thought, was that I didn’t have a theory of gender. And, as someone with a theory brain, I desperately needed a theory of gender. I needed to be able to tell a story about me being trans. I needed to be able to say I was trans because of something. All of the moments in my life wherein I daydreamed about being a woman or felt discomfort with masculinity or stared at myself in the mirror/in pictures and felt a sense of profound confusion and disconnect, they weren’t just a series of unconnected events. They were evidence. I was trans because of those moments. That was the story.
But I could never decide if they passed the threshold. I couldn’t tell if I had a good enough story that it meant that I was a trans woman.
A friend of mine who is much smarter than me says that this is the wrong way to think about this. You shouldn’t ask yourself, “Am I trans?” This question is ultimately an abstract philosophical conundrum that cannot have a real answer. The question you should ask yourself, she says, is “Do I want to take steps to medically transition?” (This is also the message of “The Null Hypothe(cis)”.)
She’s right, of course. The only way you can deal with this is to reframe it from a question of being to a question of wanting and doing.
You know, provided you have the ability to want and do things.
I have a bad habit of writing passive protagonists. In my defense, it’s because I spent most of my life being a passive protagonist.
I never knew how to just do things. I didn’t know how other people just did things. But they did them. All the time. They wanted to do something and they’d just do it. This seemed like magic to me. They didn’t even need a reason beyond wanting to.
Wanting was also magic to me. I rarely wanted to do anything, other than look at my phone or a TV or anything that would give me enough stimulation in order to passively exist during my waking hours. And it’s wrong to say that I wanted to do that. It’s better to say that I needed to do that, in the same way that I needed to eat and sleep.
Need was something I understood. Eating and sleeping weren’t really things I wanted to do. They were just biological obligations. And the best way to make me do something was to make it an obligation. It was so much easier for me to do things at work, because I needed to do them, or else I wouldn’t get paid or I’d let everyone down or things just wouldn’t get done. Even artistic projects were much easier to create if they were an obligation. Most of the art that I’ve created in my life was done for other people, whether it was for friends or for school. I greatly enjoyed making it all and put a lot of myself into all of it. But I wouldn’t have made any of it if it weren’t for outside obligations. Even this newsletter is an obligation, of sorts. I could not live my life without obligations. They were obligatory.
This same thing was behind the need to find proof of my transness. If I was trans, then transitioning was an obligation and thus I had to do it.
But, no matter how I tried, there was no way to make it an obligation outside of just wanting it.
Wanting is magic. Literally.
In 1909, Aleister Crowley published The Book of the Law, which laid out the basis for the occult tradition that he had developed called Thelema. The word “thelema” is an ancient Greek word that comes from the verb thélō, which means "to will, wish, want or purpose". The central tenet of Thelema is that “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” And magick, as Crowley defined it, is "the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will." Crowley’s work is the basis of most 20th century western occultism.
In England in the 70s, a particular strain of magic developed that was interested in stripping away the more ritualistic aspects of magic and focusing on getting results. Growing concurrently with postmodernism, this strain of occultism didn’t believe in any sort of gods or absolute truth or objective reality, but instead saw magic as primarily a tool for getting what you want. In a sense, they were dispensing with as much of the theory of magic as possible, and focusing squarely on the practice.
(The practice itself varies wildly from practitioner to practitioner, though usually involves creating sigils, symbolic representations of intention and then “charging” them while in an altered state of consciousness. Scottish comic book writer and magician Grant Morrison has expanded on this idea, creating longform pieces of art with magical purpose that he calls hypersigils. Honestly, it’s all a little bit The Secret, but don’t tell them that.)
This strain of magic is called chaos magic.
Occultist Peter J. Carroll said that chaos was "the 'thing' responsible for the origin and continued action of events." Carroll isn’t wrong, but he doesn’t quite take the idea to its logical conclusion. Chaos isn’t responsible for events. Chaos just is events. It’s action. It’s desire.
It’s plot.
The popular image of chaos is that it’s an abstract force, nonlinear and unknowable, the inhuman churn of the galaxy that we attempt to pilot ourselves through like white water rapids of spacetime. But that’s all backwards.
Chaos isn’t abstract, but is instead resolutely concrete. Indeed, it can never be abstract because it is the thing that abstraction is attempting to move beyond. Chaos can never be the map; it must always be the territory. Which means it also can’t be nonlinear. At least, not in a linear universe. To abstract something is to try and take it outside of time. To reduce everything that something does into a theory about what it is. But chaos never is. It only does. And doing is always linear. You want to do the thing. You do the thing. And then something happens, regardless of whether or not you can predict what.
But just because it isn’t predictable doesn’t mean it’s unknowable. Chaos isn’t understood. It’s experienced. You know your desires, your emotions and even your actions primarily through experience. And so chaos cannot be inhuman, either, because to feel and to do is the most human. Chaos emerges from our actions just as much as from the universe. Chaos is agency. And agency, it turns out, is the thing that makes us human.
I’m sick of my theory brain. I want a chaos brain.
A common saying among trans women is “If you want to be a girl, you can be a girl.”
When I was desperate for a theory of gender, this turned my brain sideways. Because I was unconsciously operating under the inverse assumption: “if I am a girl, then I can want to be one”. Wanting, I thought, could only arise from being.
But ultimately, what am I apart from my actions and desires? Apart from my experiences and emotions?
Before I began transitioning, I was so out of touch with my emotions that I could barely feel them. I thought that I was a robot, maybe, incapable of love. But now, I can feel fully and exquisitely. And I’m hungry for experiences. To be honest, one of the great tragedies of transitioning during COVID is that I’m forced to stay home in this moment where, for the first time, I want to go out and see the world. At this moment, I feel like I’m standing on the precipice of the next phase of my life. I’m just waiting to for the moment when I’m allowed to jump.
In the meantime, I’m doing my best to write more, and to write better. To create better plots, both for my characters and myself. Find new experiences. Sow some chaos.
Because the woman that I am emerges from the things that I do, finding ultimate expression in the act of transition itself. My existence isn’t a state. It’s an action. Which is why I’ve stopped talking about my transition like it’s something that’s already happened. Because it’s still happening. It’s never going to stop.
I’m permanently transitioning. It’s called “being alive”.
And it’s magic.