Sometime in early January –– I don’t remember the date –– I stopped writing. It wasn’t too dramatic. I had been pretty frustrated for the entire month and really didn’t feel like it was going anywhere.
When I first started writing consistently in the summer of 2025, it felt as though I was on an exponential curve. I was writing a novel, and though the first draft — my first sustained effort at fiction — was quite poor, I felt like I had rocketed out of the gates, writing north of 85,000 words in a summer and feeling progressive growth while doing so.
I wasn’t entirely sure what to do when the growth stopped; it seemed as though I had plateaued, and my writing, though much better than its initial form, wasn’t going anywhere. My biggest concern was that I felt like I had to try incredibly hard to impress myself and write better.
Eventually, I realized I had gotten myself into a pickle. The harder I tried, the worse it actually got, and the more disenchanted I became. Writing is pretty counterintuitive; if you’re lazy and looking for a profession that requires you to try less, look no further.
Alas, I didn’t know this at the time. So, I did what most normal people would do. I guess you could call it quitting the day job.
It’s important to note that by this time, I was in a crisis. I had a first-person novel that yearned to be written in the third person, and my writing had become so sophisticated and complex that it had completely deviated from the simplistic minimalist prose I sought. It came to a head that January when I was slightly under the influence, had just finished writing, hadn’t enjoyed it and couldn’t even recognize my work.
For a while, I really, really hated writing. A couple of months later, I stumbled upon a short story that brought me back.
In 3,249 words, “Night Surf” follows six teenagers who believe they are immune to a virus that has wiped out the world. Their illusion of security collapses when it is revealed that one of them is infected. This short story is canon to Stephen King’s much lengthier work, “The Stand.” But I don’t really care about “The Stand.” I care about “Night Surf.” Take a look at this passage.
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The stairs went up the side of the building, but I paused for just a minute to look in the broken window at the dusty wares inside that no one had cared enough about to loot — stacks of sweatshirts (‘Anson Beach’ and a picture of sky and waves printed on the front), glittering bracelets that would green the wrist on the second day, bright junk earrings, beachballs, dirty greeting cards, badly painted ceramic madonnas, plastic vomit (So realistic! Try it on your wife!), Fourth of July sparklers for a Fourth that never was, beach towels with a voluptuous girl in a bikini standing amid the names of a hundred famous resort areas, pennants (Souvenir of Anson Beach and Park), balloons, bathing suits. There was a snack bar up front with a big sign saying
TRY OUR CLAM CAKE SPECIAL.
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It’s pretty simple, right?
The whole paragraph is fantastic. It’s a succinct portrayal of urban decay and melancholia, made even more ironic when you understand the virus that wiped out humanity as we know it was merely the flu. The storefront reads like a time capsule: stacks of sweatshirts; glittering bracelets; beachballs; fake vomit; Fourth of July sparklers.
The eerie thing is that everything is alive in this paragraph — except us. There’s no one left to buy any of it. The sign stands out most to me. The world has ended, but the advertisement hasn’t. Amid all the rot, that’s what we have left.
Reading this passage was so incredibly frightening because it was the antithesis of my work at the time. It is accessible. A second-grader could read this. There is nothing linguistically intimidating here; instead, we get plain sentences and ordinary vocabulary.
So what’s the point, Otto?
I read this passage a lot. In fact, it lives in my mind right next to “Ciro,” a novella that I started to write in August in a vain effort to escape the first-person nonsense I had somehow dragged myself into. “Ciro” had started incredibly strongly, but instantly dropped off after 1,000 words. Things started to make sense when I put the two side by side.
“Night Surf” made me realize I just wasn’t getting to the point quickly enough. I had been obsessed with the concept of sounding “good,” which entailed rewriting and polishing my sentences until each sparkled.
The problem is, not every sentence is allowed to sparkle. If every sentence becomes special, then no sentence is actually special. “Night Surf” works specifically because there is no place for winding prose. Instead, we get sentences that do manual, heavy lifting. They don’t look nice, sure, but they make for a better story.
What I’m trying to say is that complexity really doesn’t equate to quality. “Ciro” failed because it was comprised of maximalist junk that kept the story bolted in place.
It’s a nice life lesson. We should all get to the point quicker. Say what we mean.
Elmore Leonard sums it up pretty well: “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.” So, friends, don’t quit the day job. Maybe just take a vacation. I hear Tahiti’s nice.
Otto Fritton PZ ’27 –– unfortunately dubbed “OF” by his close friends –– is an avid Peanuts fan. He finds Charles M. Schulz’s portrayal of Charlie Brown and the Little Red-Haired Girl fantastic; the perfect example of unrequited love. He wonders if Charlie will ever truly succeed, and suspects that’s exactly the point.
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