How to Make a John Wiswell

Greetings, citizens of Substack! Welcome to Take This and Live. Here you’ll get news about everything I publish, including my debut novel SOMEONE YOU CAN BUILD A NEST IN (DAW Books, 2024). You’ll get profound insights, and you’ll get jokes. And TODAY ONLY you’ll get the dizzying satisfaction of being in on the ground floor. This is the first newsletter I’ve ever written. We’re living out a new creation myth.

So let’s set our expectations way too high… and then jump into it.

Origin stories are a funny thing. Often you don’t know you’re living an origin story until it’s too late and you’ve become yourself. No protagonist survives a Coming Of Age novel without being drenched in origin. Every villain who gains enough popularity will get an origin bolted on, if they didn’t have one to start. For superheroes the origin story is often their one true story, and if we’re unlucky that origin story will be retold until we’re sick of seeing them get their costume.

But our characters aren’t the only ones with origin stories.

We authors have them. We came from somewhere, too.

I wasn’t imaginatively designed. A middle class kid with more energy and excitement than whit or diligence. I never met a notebook that I didn’t want to write three pages of an epic in and then abandon. But my parents were clever, and read to me at bedtime, and often when they drove they’d get an audiobook from the library and play it over the speakers. Even when I wasn’t creating stories myself, I loved to be surrounded by them.

After my little brother was born, my mother had a difficult time of getting me to stop pestering her for attention. I was a two-year old who wanted his mom to know the complicayed lives of my toys, urgently. It was typical first-child stuff. At one point she was tired and she ordered me to the play room, to do anything, but I had to stay there for ten minutes.

More than ten minutes later, she came looking for me. According to her I had found out how to turn the TV on, and the Hulk cartoon was on. I was transfixed by the giant green rage monster.

In her words, “And you never came back.”

Much to my dismay, I did not grow up to be a giant green rage monster.

In fact, I came close to not growing up at all. I fell profoundly ill around ages eleven and twelve, and the doctors we could find were worse than helpless. Their treatments worsened my conditions until I couldn’t get out of bed alone. My previous bottomless well of energy was gone, replaced by a bottomless well of pain we couldn’t medicate or explain. On so many nights I laid awake, thrashing, wheezing for breath, the pain keeping me from being able to sleep.

The hero of this story is stories. Because what got me through so many of those sleepless nights was what my mother got out from the local library. A steady diet of page turners: Michael Crichton, Mark Twain, John Grisham, Stephen King, Ernest Hemingway, and whatever else my mother could find on the shelves. I became fascinated by the similarities in story structure between Homer’s Iliad and Jim Starlin’s Infinity Gauntlet (truly both are massive crossover action epics). I actually read the novelizations of Star Wars before ever seeing the movies. I could not listen to Tolkien’s The Hobbit enough (which I liked much more than Lord of the Rings, but LOTR did have cool wraiths, and that was something).

Literature has so many gifts to give us. It can broaden our empathy. It can help us understand what it is to be someone else, or make us accept and care for others despite us not being capable of crossing the gulf of our differences. It can grant insight, and it can make us recognize insights we did not know we already had. It can make us appreciate the rain drops and sunbeams that have sowed all our days but gone uncounted.

Among its gifts is escapism. It is the most often maligned gift of literature. Yet allow me to tell you that, as the survivor of a childhood that nearly killed me, that on so many nights left me with no reason to live other than to see what happened on the next page of a scary story, that escapism is inspiration. All those stories were the fountain of my persistence.

I climbed out of that hole, and I read the whole time. As I taught myself to walk again. When I returned to school. When I switched my medications (over and over and over). I had the great privilege of discovering so many new authors (John Steinbeck, Akira Toriyama, Rumiko Takahashi, among others) who granted me new thoughts and new reasons to make it to tomorrow.

But now I needed to make stories, too. I vividly recall wanting to write a novel and mail J.R.R. Tolkien a copy as thanks, no matter what the status of his mortality was. Not only were storytelling tropes becoming my favorite language of expression, but there was a debt. Stories had delivered me. On some irrational level I wanted to do that kind of work; to make stories that helped guide others through their worst nights and to better dawns. To encourage people to survive, if only to see the sweet third act.

And I wanted to thank storytelling itself. It had given, and it deserved some of itself back. In that way, storytelling is a fine deity.

Ever since I’ve wanted write. If you follow me on Twitter, you know I’ve never stopped consuming works. I don’t see how you can participate in the current conversations that happen between genres and sub-genres if you don’t read widely. And every time I read a great story, I’m grateful. Somebody out there put the time and the effort and ingenuity into this simple act of generosity.

Reader, I want to be generous in kind.

So today I write to you as a Nebula-winner, a Locus-winner, published in nine languages, having published over a hundred times, with my first novel roughly eighteen months away. This stuff is both my ceaseless passion, and it’s my crumpled up dollar bill in the collection plate.

This career is my thanks to you.

Thank you for writing so I can read.

Thank you for reading so I can write.

It’s a beautiful cycle we’ve got going here. Let’s keep it going, yeah?

Take this and live.

SO ARE THERE GOING TO BE JOKES OR WHAT

Firstly, I ended that section with the title of the blog. That was at least joke-adjacent, wasn’t it?

Fine! Let’s get funnier.

If you know who originally posted that cat picture, please drop a link in the comments. I’d really like to credit the original person. Creators of elite cat content deserve praise, and you know their cats won’t give it to them.

The next time I update you, I expect to have some good news to share. And who doesn’t like good news?

Be good to yourselves, and to each other.