‘A/S/L’: How I wrote it

Jeanne Thornton’s latest novel A/S/L is about video games, three queer friends and the code(s) they learn to survive. It’s not officially published until next week, but we have a few special early signed copies – order yours now! In this blog post, Thornton tells us how she wrote the book, discussing the multiple perspective narrative, the problems of conveying in writing the intensity of playing video games, and some of the influences that have shaped her work – from Final Fantasy VI to Georg Lukács.

My last book, Summer Fun, was an epistolary novel about a musician as filtered through the perspective of a superfan’s intensely parasocial letters. It was a hermetic book to write; by its end, I was struggling to find ways to throw the narrator and her overwhelming voice into relief, to find something outside her all-consuming self. I swore that in the next project, I’d find more ways to create more exterior, more oxygen. The new novel, A/S/L, is an attempt to give myself this nice gift, somehow through writing a story in which one of the characters spends most of the book living underground alone. 

A/S/L is about three friends, more or less – Abraxa, Sash, Lilith – and the story of their teenage vow to create the greatest video game in the world using a crude text-based program they’ve found for free on the Internet of 1998. In telling the story of their messy friendship and what becomes of it, I wanted to avoid privileging any one character’s perspective as canonical, to let the reader, who has access to all three’s interiority, assemble their own sense of complex truth. The immediate model for this was Hironobu Sakaguchi et al’s Final Fantasy VI, an ensemble Japanese RPG released for Super Famicom in 1994 where exactly who ‘the player’ is remains fluid: any character might be the main one, any desire line central. (Of course, the multi plot narrative has earlier antecedents – of course! – but these are not the ones I understood the world through, for better or worse, at eleven years old.)

One principle of writing I try to teach my students: if you want your fiction to feel real and rich, you must develop capacity to imagine the story as filtered through the perspective of any character, major or minor. (Taken more broadly, there are no minor characters; that’s no one’s experience of herself.) There’s a parallel with visual art: optical perspective works because it compensates for your eye’s distorting effect, your solitariness – in other words: that part of the beauty of a painting is the loneliness of a painting; that you-the-viewer can only observe it from one angle; that there are parts of the story you will never know. 

I tried many methods to achieve (or anyway approach) this optical trick in A/S/L, where any story could be the real one. Early on this looked like keeping intensely lengthy character notes, working mostly on looseleaf paper that I could rearrange as I liked in a massive pink three-ring binder labeled with the name of the fictional game company in the book. It looked, I imagined, like the notes its characters might themselves have kept as opulently self-involved teens. The binder contained facts – often contradictory, variable as a quantum cat until the moment I delivered the book to my editor – about characters’ preferred foods, living situations, attitudes toward others. Each character had a section of the binder: any time one section seemed shorter than the others, I worked to build it up, to try to find the things about the characters I didn’t yet know, the work of years. The writing I like sometimes resembles this kind of spelunking.

It was important to me, having been around 2016 when I was striking ground on the book very under the influence of Lukács’s essays on literary realism, to write trans women who came from different economic worlds. This element was more pronounced in earlier drafts – in the final novel, Sash is an online financial dominatrix; in earlier drafts, she’s an academic, contrasted to Lilith’s white-collar labour and Abraxa’s itinerant queer life, dependent on relationships and striving not to be. But what presence it has in the text I owe to Lukács, I guess. I think Lukács is a cool cat whom more people should read.

On each revision pass, I’d assume that a different character was at the story’s core, and I’d work to revise each of the three plotlines in service to that. The process was similar to changing a hubcap: tighten one bolt, move to tighten another. (Or when you can’t tighten, loosen, rethink, permit space.) Characters began to grow in response to other characters; each of the three core characters began to spawn a supporting cast, each with their own binder sections, motivations, partially glimpsed inner lives.

Slowly I got better at finding each character’s voice and motifs. Lilith’s third person is forever looking back on a past slightly more shameful than her present, forever optimizing, filtering her understanding of the world through other, often cisgender eyes. Abraxa’s third person, by contrast, is sealed off from other perceptions, a perpetual unfolding of present experience without a sense of history – her simultaneous confidence in the spell she is casting and her terror that she is doing harm. Sash was the hardest voice: I wanted her to be in the second person, but a different second person than Summer Fun’s invasive yet warm you. The key came through remembering how much I loved the quality of sprawling old FAQ (Frequently Asked Question) files, a kind of many-thousand-word recipe – often written and posted online by fans at great expense of labour and zero compensation, often illuminated in arabesques of fixed-width text – for completing a rambling fifty-hour Japanese RPG about a Grand Tour of an imaginary world to slay a wicked jester. That relaxed second-person imperative – something like a tour guide to a major city – is one I thought paired well with this compulsive woman living under the shadow of a brutal inner critic. (Sash’s voice is also by far the one we most encounter mediated through other forms of text – emails, IRC chats – forms that obscure the punishing inner monologue beneath a still exterior poise, ocean life leaving no trace on the surface.)

One challenge of the book was trying to give a sense of what it’s like to play – much less make! – a video game. The genre the characters are trying to work in, through whose narratives they understand their world – through whose narratives I as a kid, and tragically still often today, understood the world – is the 1990s-era jRPG, is Final Fantasy, a very specific-feeling game about intense midnight conversations, careful weapon and magic budgeting, and watching your powers scale from frailty to deification. Honestly this is the same thing I came to classic novels for – less the deification, more their techniques for showing life changing under the influence of time. But in RPGs, this is present in felt ways: you feel time transforming your character, and you, in a way that feels and works differently. The life in a novel, the sins of its characters, are trapped behind magic lantern glass, objects of contemplation; in a game, you must commit them. Does it increase or decrease your understanding of sin if you’re holding the controller? And how can I impress that on a reader who’s never felt it, the intensity of pausing your own body and constructing another body, a player-body with a stack of ninety-nine healing potions traversing a smoldering volcano at 2 a.m., just you and this false-light world? To what extent is a video game a trance, a vision? I don’t even know how I found ways to write about this, if I even did that. For something that has so little to do with the body, it felt like writing about dancing, albeit dancing with an invented body. Sometimes this is what transness feels like too.

In the end, I wanted it to be a book about online and creative friendships in all their dimensions – rich and lived in, comfortable and infuriating. I wanted it to be specifically about friendships and love among trans women – we women whose native soil is often enough the video game, the place where you’re allowed to think about emotions and relationships because there is also violence and goal-oriented killing; the place where you get to play as a girl and no one can judge you for it. And I wanted it also to be about the things being trans in the world can sometimes do to your friendships, or your soul. I was in therapy for lots of the process of writing this; many parts of it dig deeply into an ore-vein of shame that often feels embarrassingly dark and juvenile now. That is part of what it feels like to be a trans woman, too. But I tried to bring out the joy of that being: because it is a dance, which is always directed outward from the self, a movement given to others to contemplate. And a dance, being motion, takes you somewhere. I believe there is a way out of the false-light places, toward seeing, connecting, being with other people like you, toward being able to offer kindness and grace, toward navigating this human game where you have the capacity to hurt or be good to people, and that’s also not a game.