MattCarney::FictionWriter

Among the recent set of sto­ries I sent out to mag­a­zines was one called “Sin­gu­lar­ity,” a reac­tion to my time liv­ing abroad in India. It’s about one Colin Rezo, a pow­er­ful oil exec who is taken hostage by his foul imag­i­na­tion on his trip back from Chen­nai, Tamil Nadu, and launched into a spec­tral tail spin. Then other stuff happens.

So, this is what I was think­ing. I’ve at least con­vinced myself  that I’ve read far too many tales about tryst­ing through for­eign lands and com­mit­ting clumsy faux pas over and over, about being another West­ern tight-ass finally learn­ing to adapt to loose­ness in the third world. Or what­ever that story was about.

I real­ized I had a strong urge to write about my time in India out­side of jour­nal­ism. But I didn’t want to make fic­tion by sim­ply rehash­ing sev­eral of my real life expe­ri­ences abroad, naked save for a very sheer veil, fin­ish my drink and call it a day. I wanted to push myself and attempt not to ‘write what I knew,’ but write what didn’t have a fuck­ing clue about.

So, the first thing I did after hav­ing this rev­e­la­tion in terms of direc­tion was to utterly defy it and ‘write what I knew’ com­pletely ver­ba­tim. And that story became “A Dead Sober Story,” which was a thinly veiled tale about the time I killed an aban­doned new­born birdie in Thai­land via inescapable bad luck and deter­mined idiocy.

After, I set about work­ing out how to write what I had no fuck­ing clue about. Seven drafts later, that story became “Sin­gu­lar­ity,” and it was some­how tied to my time liv­ing in India, though I am nowhere to be found.

Maybe if I bribe and swin­dle enough peo­ple, you will one day read these sto­ries in print. One day.