Draft Zero
Emily Cementina explores rules of literary engagement, an artistic awakening, and Lena Valencia's MYSTERY LIGHTS.
I. Exposition
When I began taking my relationship to literature more seriously in college, I discovered that I wasn’t very good at embracing convention. After realizing that, as much as I enjoyed math in high school, I didn’t quite like it enough to pursue it as my major, I considered studying English, my other favorite. But when I reviewed the departmental requisites, the idea of slogging through classics like Moby Dick, Pride and Prejudice, and Crime and Punishment put me off. Instead, I opted to major in Dramatic Literature, with a double minor in English and Creative Writing, so I could pick and choose courses that centered texts that were more in-line with my nontraditional tastes—or, what I might more specifically articulate as my interest in authors who put language, sound, or feeling over plot, over even character.
Some highlights from my undergraduate reading syllabi: Ron Padgett’s “Nothing in that Drawer,” a poem in which the line “Nothing in that drawer” is repeated 14 times; Lyn Hejinian’s fragmentary autobiography My Life, composed of forty-five forty-five-sentence-long sections, to represent Hejinian’s age at the time she wrote the book (or, technically, revised it; an earlier edition, which I did not read, was comprised of thirty-seven thirty-seven-sentence-long sections); Samuel Beckett’s one-act play Krapp’s Last Tape, in which an older, banana-obsessed man listens to a recording of his younger self, with whom the current Krapp can hardly relate; Gertrude Stein’s Three Saints in Four Acts, a play that Stein considered a “landscape” (a concept which fascinated me, though, admittedly, I was never sure I grasped it fully); and Robert Smithson’s essay “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic New Jersey,” in which pipes, parking lots, and sand boxes are considered monuments, and every object exists in its own place in time.
These texts felt rebellious, and playful, and, most importantly, they inspired and empowered me. As I encountered more writing that eschewed conventions like narrative arc or character development, the way my own work tended to, I started to have more hope that I might be able to create “serious” work of my own—an idea that was harder to believe in when I read works that were part of the “canon.”
A few years after graduating, when I was accepted into The New School’s M.F.A. program based on a portfolio of voice-driven flash fiction, I was further encouraged—maybe I could write less traditionally and still be considered a “real” writer. Maybe I didn’t ever have to learn, or master, the conventions I’d made an effort to avoid.
But when I submitted my first short story to workshop, what confidence I had begun to develop in my burgeoning artistry dwindled. Though my professor and classmates all praised the voice, most of the discussion was spent on breaking down—critiquing—all the ways my work had fallen short of meeting the traditional standards of backstory, conflict, and narrative arc. It was clear that language alone was not enough to sustain a reader’s interest, let alone be taken seriously, even though I was, first and foremost, a reader, and language alone had more than sustained my interest—it lit me up, made me believe in new forms of storytelling in the first place. When I left the classroom, I was both embarrassed and angry—this was not how I had expected my first workshop to go.
Before I went home that night, I ran into a few classmates smoking on the sidewalk. Kindly, they asked how I felt. After I expressed how frustrated I was that we couldn’t write more language-driven pieces, one woman shrugged and said something to the effect of, “We all wish that, but then we learn how it is,” a comment that only disheartened me further.
I wondered: Why did we have to follow the rules if none of us really wanted to? And in a creative writing workshop (creative writing workshop), why couldn’t a piece just be assessed for what it was trying to be, not for how closely it mimicked everything that came before? When literary history contained so much transcendent work that was, more often than not, an exception to the rule?
II. Inciting Incident
When I began to read Lena Valencia’s debut short story collection Mystery Lights (Tin House Books, 2024) I was thinking a lot about the necessity to write according to craft conventions or traditions—perhaps because Lena was in my M.F.A program.1 But I think rules, and structure, were also on my mind because Lena addresses the process of crafting directly in her collection.
In “Dogs,” the opening story of Mystery Lights, the protagonist, Ruth, a filmmaker of thrillers and slasher flicks, retreats to the desert outside of Joshua Tree to revise a script. Ruth’s producer has told her to “dial it up” (a phrase that I’d also heard used in my workshops) because he believes Ruth’s protagonist’s backstory isn’t traumatic enough to justify her murderous behavior.
While Valencia’s stories are filled with ample external threats of the supernatural variety, the deepest damage seems to be done by female characters who have internalized sexist ways of thinking.
To appease her producer, Ruth spends the first morning of her informal writing retreat making a list of all the horrendous things that could have befallen her protagonist in her youth. As she drinks her coffee, she scribbles her ideas on a notepad: “Was the protagonist abused as a child? Was she involved in a sex-trafficking ring? Or maybe kiddie porn? Parents who took cash and looked the other way? Was she held captive, shackled in a basement somewhere on a quiet tree-lined suburban street?” Once she reviews her list, Ruth feels sick—a bodily response that, to me, suggests the unnaturalness of this particular revision activity.
When I read this scene, I couldn’t help but think of revisions I’d done in response to workshop feedback—when I would mechanically incorporate new sentences and paragraphs that I imagined my professor and classmates wanted to see, but which I didn’t feel personally connected to. Like Ruth, I found that I, too, had a physical reaction to making these changes; though I never felt ill, my hands always seemed to be resisting what my mind was telling me I “had” to do.
That Ruth’s ideas for her protagonist are so grotesque—and also, that Ruth, in the moment of listing them, treats them so casually (jotting them down as easily as she might write down items for a grocery list)—highlights both the absurdity and perverseness of the act of “crafting.” That we mine what should be deeply personal or, at least, objectively emotional, and use it to tick off boxes of craft requirements seems almost exploitative. In Lena’s rendering of revision, art-making—for the artist—becomes a simultaneously dull and injurious chore we do to fulfill someone else’s desires, rather than an ecstatic expression of feeling.
I would say that Valencia is critiquing an industry that has such strict standards for what it considers “publishable” were she also not displaying such an expert command of her craft, and the traditional elements of suspense, throughout Mystery Lights. If anything, the scene in “Dogs” seems more like a wink than a call-out. Valencia is telling us that she gets it; she knows what she needs to do to please her publisher and her reader, and in each of these ten, elegantly written short stories, she delivers.
In “You Can Never Be Too Sure,” a story about a college student named Lily who stays on campus during Thanksgiving break, Valencia employs setting to “dial it up”—a snowstorm builds, lights flicker, the power goes out, Lily’s phone dies, a candle sputters, all while Lily and her classmates down the hall exchange tales about a mysterious and perhaps supernatural Trapper who abducts women from their beds. Each of these details are signals—recognizable indicators that our protagonist is in danger—so we are primed (and perhaps, again, perversely, warmed up and eager) for the story’s disturbing climax.
Similarly, with “Trogloxene,” Valencia offers a perfect model of an “inevitable but surprising” ending. When, at the story’s conclusion, Max (the protagonist’s sister who has recently been rescued after spending ten days lost in a cavern) submits to a somewhat grotesque transformation, I believe it, and yet, even by the final sentences, I am holding out some hope that it can be avoided.
The ordering of the stories also displays Valencia’s command of narrative arc. While the first story, “Dogs,” whets our palates with a taste of violence, (the protagonist flirts with danger, but makes it out, unscathed), in the following two stories, the psychological threat becomes visceral—bloody in “You Can Never Be Too Sure,” messy and chaotic in “Mystery Lights.” Later, both “The White Place”—a slow, powerful account of a Georgia O’Keefe-like artist named “the painter” working through her lover’s betrayal—and “Bright Lights, Big Deal”—a snappy, voice-driven time capsule of early aughts Brooklyn (bedbugs and all)—offer a brief reprieve into more of-this-world conflicts before Valencia dials it up again, bringing us to truly horrific depiction of a wellness retreat gone wrong in “The Reclamation.”
To read Mystery Lights is to be in the hands of a true professional, and, despite my past predilections for more experimental writing, I found it quite pleasurable to let myself be worked by Valencia’s moves—to be drawn to the edge of my seat, disturbed and exhilarated.
III. Rising Action
Having had such a refreshing experience reading Valencia’s collection, I began to reflect on my own early relationship to conventions and traditionally-structured writing.
After recovering from my first workshop at The New School, I decided to make an effort to write more in line with the style that was expected of me, and, for the next year and a half of graduate school, I submitted stories that tried to pay better attention to character development and backstory. While I did not always follow Freytag’s pyramid to a tee, I attempted to incorporate more identifiable inciting incidents and turning points than I had in the flash pieces that I’d submitted for admission.
Still, at the start of my last semester—our thesis semester, when we were tasked with writing seventy pages of a cohesive project, more than I had ever written—I felt I owed it to myself to try one final time to write like the kind of writer I imagined I was.
To that end, I told my thesis advisor that I planned to create a work in fragments—a portrait of a woman on the verge of marriage, composed of a series of distinct yet related flash pieces, each centering around an object related to the relationship. There would be no narrative through-line—rather, the work was meant to be an exploration of feeling and memory, grounded in concrete details, at the edge of a turning point.
However, once I began drafting, I realized that a narrative—despite my best efforts to avoid it—was emerging. There was a central character with a driving desire, and unfortunately, the only way to play out her desire was to put her through a series of events that would lead to the apex. Within a matter of weeks, I capitulated. I would write a novel, in the traditional sense.
I completed the first seventy pages of that draft by our May graduation date, and then, over the next two years, I worked regularly—between adjuncting gigs, tutoring, and waitressing shifts—to complete a two-hundred-and-something-page manuscript.
When I was finished, my expectations for what should come next were high. In committing to a novel, I had committed to a new idea of myself—one in which I might end up not on the small press table, but in a bookstore’s front window display, among hardcover bestsellers. In order to realize this vision, I would first need to find an agent, and, so, after sharing my manuscript with a few trusted readers, I began my querying process.
While I imagined (extremely naively) that I would secure a well-known agent, receive thoughtful edits, and then sell my book, what happened instead was that I received a flurry of rejections. When agents were generous enough to offer feedback with their rejections, their comments were similar to those provided by Ruth’s producer in “Dogs”—their notes were full of phrases that sounded like they were taken from a handbook of what novels “had” to do.
I did not handle these rejections well. They sent me into crying spells, the weary, self-effacing after-effects of which lasted for days, weeks. When, a few months after my initial round of queries, I made a few revisions and tried again, and was, once again, rejected, I completely shut down, concluding that I was never meant to be a novelist after all. What followed was a two-year prose-free stretch, during which I focused on yoga, wrote only poetry, and told people I “used to” think I was a fiction writer, as if I were bitter and jaded after some great tragedy.
Nevertheless, in the eight years since that initial manuscript was rejected, the pull to create a novel eventually returned—not just once, but twice. Both times, I had intended to sit down for a writing session without aim, when a sentence arrived to me as if from the ether, and suddenly, I believed I had a new idea that I must (indeed, it truly felt like a compulsion) develop into a book.
Yet, however positively the crafting started, however convinced I was that I finally had a handle on the form, I never reached my ultimate goal of publication—or even securing representation.
When I look back on the notes from the agents on all three manuscripts, they sound, uncannily, like the feedback I received during graduate school. “I absolutely loved the voice” or “It was truly a joy to read, sentence by sentence” or “Your writing is just stunning on the sentence level, lyrical and magnetic and wonderfully fresh” are some of the positive opening lines before explanations of the ways my craft falls short—“Because so much of the story is not taking place in real time, I found myself losing interest in the central plot”; “I did wish for a clearer or maybe more conventional sense of narrative structure”; “I’m not always a hook-driven reader, but in this case…”
It was as though nothing had changed since that first day in workshop in 2012. Even though I had tried to play by the rules—even though I had spent years reading more “popular” narrative-driven books and trying to translate what I observed into my own writing—I had failed to deliver on anything but my language. Somehow, despite all my effort, I still couldn’t help but write like myself.
And, in the process, I had made myself miserable. While I typically enjoyed my writing sessions (when I fell into a flow state and could simply be), the time in between, when reality crept back in and I wondered if my work would be good enough this time, was full of anxiety. There were so many mornings when I woke up in tears—berating myself for still being unpublished at whatever age I was at the time, worrying obsessively over some particular aspect of the novel which I was certain would not meet industry standards, but which I did not know how to change.
In 2023, met with the most recent wave of rejections, I began to wonder—why did I keep trying? Why was I so determined to be “successful” at a form I didn’t like?
IV. Climax
As I continued my read of Mystery Lights, I began to grapple with the idea of internalization—a recurring theme throughout the collection. While Valencia’s stories are filled with ample external threats of the supernatural variety (the Trapper, mutants, floating white orbs, and ghosts, to name a few), the deepest damage seems to be done by female characters who have internalized sexist ways of thinking. Beneath its creeping terror and delicious suspense, the collection is, at its core, a thoughtful investigation of all the ways women hurt themselves, and each other.
In the eponymous story “Mystery Lights,” a producer named Wendy passes off her younger assistant Katie’s ideas for a TV marketing campaign as her own. Remembering how her former male boss would similarly take credit for her ideas when Wendy was younger, she reflects: “Wendy, too, had basked in the glow of his approval, until she’d wised up and realized that he was taking advantage of her. But this was different. She was protecting Katie.” The hypocrisy of Wendy’s actions is glaring, and yet Wendy is unable to admit to herself how she is perpetuating the same injustice she endured.
In “The White Place,” Valencia illustrates the all-too-common practice of women blaming other women for a man’s poor choices. When the painter discovers that her lover Mike has gotten Sandra, the teenage daughter of the painter’s cook, pregnant, the painter decides to punish not Mike, but Sandra, cultivating a plan to send her off to boarding school on the other side of the country. Of Mike’s behavior, the painter is more than forgiving: “She’s not angry. She knows Mike can’t help himself. He has a fervor for beauty, like her. [...] the painter didn’t care. He could have it. He could have whatever he wanted.” Mike’s desire is acceptable because, according to the painter, it is an inherent part of him. Sandra, however, is not allowed such grace. Despite being a decade younger than Mike, and clearly less powerful in the relationship, it’s Sandra’s engagement with the painter’s lover, rather than his infidelity and indiscretion, that is the root of the problem.
The female tendency to prioritize male pleasure is central, too, in “Clean Hunters,” a story about a newly married couple, Emily and Gabe, who initially bonded over their ability to see ghosts. Although Emily has recently lost her ability to detect spirits, she pretends she can see whatever Gabe can, rather than admitting she no longer possesses the Sense. Emily’s fear of how Gabe will feel if she reveals the truth, rather than her own desire to maintain their connection, is what keeps her pretending: “She hated the injured way Gabe looked at her when she said no, she didn’t feel it. She knew these denials made him lonely, led to the funks of self-doubt that plagued him from time to time. So Emily had started doing what she thought was the right thing to do as a wife, as a partner: she pretended.” The passage could just as easily be referring to a woman faking orgasms in order to buoy her husband’s ego, and I think that’s the point. Valencia shows us the everyday, insidious ways women have internalized the belief that it’s the man’s happiness, the man’s sense of security that comes first, and that it’s worth a woman’s energy and effort to continue to sustain them.
Viewed through a different lens, the scene between Gabe and Emily could also be a metaphor for a writer’s choice to “fake” adherence to convention in order to sustain a reader’s (or agent’s, or editor’s) interest. As I read Emily’s choice to pretend, I couldn’t help but think of my New School classmate, taking a long drag of her cigarette before shrugging and telling me that she had given in to the idea of plot and character over voice and language, not because she wanted to, but because that was simply what was expected.
Is this what I had done when I set out to write my first book during my thesis semester—internalized the idea that writing a traditional novel in graduate school was “what one did,” and so, what I must do? When I believed a narrative was emerging from what I’d intended to be fragmentary work, had the plot actually been surfacing on its own, or had I subconsciously inserted it because I’d been told so many times that my writing needed to have it? When, later on, I longed to post a Publishers Marketplace screenshot on Instagram, was it because I actually believed in the value of a sale—and the broadcasting of that sale—or was it because I’d been trained to view this image as one of a few markers of having “made it” as a writer?
Which aspects of who I am as a writer are inherent to me, and which have come from outside of me? And how could I do the work of peeling back the layers of what I’d internalized in order to discover a more authentic, creative self? These are the questions I considered as I delved deeper into Mystery Lights.
Indeed, while the majority of stories in Valencia’s collection do the work of pointing out the ways sexism has infiltrated women’s psyches, one story, “Bright Lights, Big Deal,” offers hope for how a woman might disentangle herself from misogynist ways of thinking, and return to herself.
Julia, the protagonist, is both a victim and perpetrator of sexism. During her first summer in New York, she endures such degradations as being hit on during an interview by her would-be male boss and having her appearance ranked with a number she must then wear on her chest by a male bouncer at a magazine launch party. Yet, Julia’s decision to write a blog post about her best friend’s experience with a predatory male supervisor, without asking her friend’s permission to tell the story, illustrates how willing Julia is to exploit another woman’s pain for her own gain. In the fallout from the post, Julia loses nearly all of her friends, and the blog does nothing to help Julia make a name for herself, as she’d hoped.
By the story’s near end, Julia is adrift, until a bicycle, handed down from her roommate, sparks something inside her. In the moving final pages, Julia weaves through New York City’s streets, across its bridges, past its public spaces, taking in the grit and the beauty, until “things come into focus in a way they never did before.” It is through solitude, movement, and taking the time to observe and interact with her environment that a woman can find peace, with herself and others. After these transcendent moments on her bike, Julia feels able to connect more deeply to a new set of friends, rather than view them as threats, as she might have before. The heroine of the story—who has spent so much of it worrying about how she is perceived, how she measures up, and how she can stand out—finally seems free.
V. Falling Action
This past spring and summer, I noticed, in myself, a similar sense of ease and contentment, which I attribute to a newfound ability to connect to my environment.
In May, thanks to the New York housing lottery, I was able to move, for the first time in twelve years, into an apartment of my own. Over the past decade, I have lived in partners’ apartments or in shares with roommates, and while I have found many things to appreciate about these spaces, I never quite felt fully at home. I also noticed that, during the stretches where I felt most disconnected from my immediate surroundings, I also experienced a detachment from the city at large—a sense that I didn’t belong. But, when I finally settled into my very own well-lit one-bedroom, I reawakened to New York, the way Julia seems to when she’s on her bike.
Once I moved, whenever I walked anywhere—to run errands, to go to and from work, or to simply walk for the sake of walking—everything around me felt precious. I was enchanted by the glowing yellow windows of the neighboring brownstones; by the curving, steep staircases I could glimpse through their front doors; by the red neons of my local wine bar; by the blinking Christmas lights that someone had wrapped around the thick truck of a tree; by the green globes of the subway station a few blocks from my building; by the flowers spilling through gates of local community gardens.
I was amazed by these details. Not so much because they were particularly special, but because I was able to truly let myself see them, to take them in fully. And through this new depth of attention, I felt rooted. I felt safe.
Around the time I was preparing to move, I’d hit a block in my writing. That winter, I had returned to my very first manuscript—the one I started in graduate school—and begun to rewrite it, extending the narrative timeline and introducing more dramatic events. However, about two-thirds of the way through this new draft, I became stuck on other craft aspects—my secondary characters needed further development; my protagonist needed a stronger “personal growth” narrative; I needed to offer more backstory, but not so much that it would overpower the front story; the story had a climax now, but after it, I needed to find a way to slow things down.
The further I got, the more difficult it was to keep going. I became so hyper-aware of all the things I “had” to do, the writing had begun to feel joyless. Not wanting (or, on certain days, unable) to force myself to write, I eventually stopped around the two-hundred page mark. Perhaps I needed a break. Or, perhaps I would never finish that manuscript. The project felt dead to me. Whether a transient feeling or a permanent one, I accepted this truth for what it was.
But then, almost exactly two weeks after I settled into my new apartment—and began my fresh witnessing of, and immersion into, the city—I had a revelation that completely shifted the way I viewed myself as a writer.
VI. Resolution
The story of my first novel was a fictionalized version of events of my own life. The protagonist on the verge of her wedding was me; the man who became her husband was the man who’d become my ex-husband. I had disguised us and the details of our lives, because I was afraid of being seen, and because I was scared of how a man with whom I no longer spoke might respond if I wrote about him. I had also lacked the confidence needed to believe that my experiences, and my perspective on them, were worthy enough subjects for a book-length work.
But, as I sat on my couch on a lazy June afternoon, finally fully unpacked, all of my reasons for turning to fiction suddenly seemed ridiculous. I realized that what I desperately wanted—and needed—was to tell the truth.
My problems with craft and storytelling, I realized, stemmed from the fact that I didn’t want to manipulate anything for effect. I wanted to say things how they happened. And it was for this reason that I had been so frustrated by convention—an obstacle that prevented me from getting as close to reality as I possibly could.
Reinvigorated, I opened my laptop, and began to write the story of my relationship with my now-ex-husband from the day we—the real we—first met. I wrote feverishly, typing out a thousand words in about an hour, and for the rest of the summer, I consistently knocked out close to 1,200 words a day, five days a week, every week.
Since that afternoon, my memoir has amassed two hundred and sixty pages. While I’ve had to take breaks as the demands of my day job picked up, I’m still excited about completing what remains. A dread like the one that overcame me when I hit the two-hundred page mark of my novel revision never surfaced when I reached that same milestone in this draft, and I have a feeling it won’t. Though I do experience fleeting anxieties about whether or not I will ever publish a book-length work, gone are the near-daily panic attacks between writing sessions about whether I’m “good enough” or far enough along in my writing “career.”
I am sure that once I begin the emotionally eviscerating process of querying agents and publishers again, some of my old negative feelings and insecurities will return. Rejection makes you doubt yourself, it’s part of it. However, this time around, I have a sense that I’ll rebound much faster, and the lows won’t be quite as low. Because I have something I didn’t have last time. A weapon—or rather, a shield.
For a long time, I had convinced myself that following certain rules—or, as a rule, eschewing them—would turn the key, add the secret ingredient to my talent and discipline that would finally make me into a serious artist. That if I could master the elements of craft like the authors of the hardcover bestsellers, readers (and agents, and editors) would think my work was good, and I’d get my seat at the table.
But I have never felt freer in my writing, never felt more honest. I have never felt like I was saying something to this urgent and devastating degree. The difference there is, I don’t need anyone else to think my work is good, to offer me that seat. Because this time, I know it’s good, and I take my own chair.
In a surprising way, reading Valencia reminded me of what I’d learned reading Hejinian, and Beckett, and Stein, and Smithson, what I’d always known to be true: the secret ingredient that makes a serious artist is not acceptance, but substance. The best writers are just those writers who write like themselves.
Emily Cementina is a writer and educator living in Brooklyn. She is the Assistant Director of ACES (Academic Center for English Language Studies) at St. Joseph's University and is currently at work on a memoir.
Lena Valencia is the author of the short story collection Mystery Lights. Her fiction has appeared in BOMB, Electric Literature, Ninth Letter, Epiphany, the anthology Tiny Nightmares, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a 2019 Elizabeth George Foundation grant and holds an MFA in fiction from The New School. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she is the managing editor and director of educational programming at One Story and the co-host of the reading series Ditmas Lit.
Though Lena was not in that fateful first workshop, we had a class together the following year, and I remember being struck by her distinctive voice and point of view.
I read this the moment I woke up this morning. I'm full of respect for Emily's moxie. Today's literary environment is brutal; if you let others guide and then herd you out of your own instinctive path, the joy and originality of your writing can dissolve, along with your confidence. It's happened to me; I got lost and nearly lost myself.