DESTINY AS FANTASY

The Rumpus published DESTINY AS FANTASY: TALKING WITH BETH MORGAN. and I poached these selections as part of my ongoing argument that one needs to write the story before worrying aaobut genre.

The Rumpus: Let me start by saying that I was totally unprepared for how A Touch of Jen ended. The novel begins as psychological realist fiction, continues in that vein for a long time, then evolves into something that operates on a completely different plane of reality. How did you come up with the ending? Is there a specific way that the reader is supposed to understand it?

Beth Morgan: I always try to write something that will allow the reader to have as much space as possible for their own emotional response. My early readers had very different reactions to the ending and different interpretations of it, and that was great. I wouldn’t say that there’s a prescribed way to experience it. I was just really excited by the idea of starting the book in everyday reality and taking it into this realm of fantasy, because books and movies that I really like take risks and go somewhere you’re really not expecting them to go. Towards the end of the book, one of the characters becomes fixated on what they see as their destiny, and it didn’t feel right to keep that in this reality.

The idea of destiny or even of a personal journey is itself a fantasy, a self-serving story about our individual desires, and you can’t trust a story like that because it shapes our perception of reality. I think it might have been my desire to portray the absurdity and self-absorption of the personal journey or the hero’s journey that made me decide that the ending should take place in this absurd, fantastical register. The ending actually went through a pretty major revision after the first draft. All the fantastical elements were in place, but I had to revise the entire last fourth of the book to make the cosmology cohere—logistically and emotionally.

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Rumpus: I’ve read a couple of your short stories, and I suppose that everything you write could be called speculative fiction. Do you have any idea why you’re drawn to that genre?\

Morgan: What will happen is that often I’ll start writing something that feels realistic and discover that the options that are available to me within this plane of reality are kind of boring and are not going to challenge the characters enough. Also, it probably has to do with my love of science fiction and horror movies. When I combine realistic elements with speculative aspects, it creates a more accessible sense of instability, and I’m drawn to that because my experience of reality does feel very unstable. I don’t feel that I can trust my own sense of reality, and when I try to get at this feeling, that’s inevitably where I go.

I know only what I read in this full interview but the woman strikes me as very thoughtful about writing, so give the rest of it a look.